Cigarettes and rebellion have always gone hand-in-hand, and in an age of cigarette packet-sized health warnings, now more than ever, smoking a fag says: 'I do not give a fuck.' But if Brandon Flowers is hoping to strike a seditious pose by sparking up at the start of the interview, it's not going according to plan. The Killers' frontman is on all fours rooting through the junk that carpets the anteroom at the band's rehearsal space. "Has anyone seen my lighter?" he asks, rocking back on his heels. The question hangs in the air while Brandon cocks his head, waiting for an answer like a meerkat listening for a predator. Twenty-five years old and with a delicate bone structure, there's something almost dainty about him. Receiving no response, he returns to his search. "Oh, Jeez," he sighs. "I had it just a minute ago."
It's a scene that emphatically does not suggest a rebel without a cause. The mess isn't helping. The Killers' HQ - an industrial unit sandwiched between a construction supplier and the offices of a housing development just off Dean Martin Drive in West Las Vegas - is ankle-deep in designer clothing. A Dior Homme suit lies crumpled by the door; there's a pile of shoes topped like a sundae by a pair of Marc Jacobs trainers; and anyone wishing to enter the shoebox room the band use as an office must negotiate a mountain of discarded jeans. Many items are identifiable as coming from the wardrobe of Hot Fuss, The Killers' hugely successful 2004 debut album - triple platinum in the UK with two weeks at Number One and five million sold worldwide. Look! There are the shirts, ties and suit jackets they wore when they thrilled Glastonbury 2005 with indie rock anthems Mr Brightside and Somebody Told Me. That was the crowning moment of a two-and-a-half year tour that finally concluded in October of last year. It seems that after playing that final date in Miami, they returned to Vegas and shrugged off their image onto the floor of this bland white box.
Now a fine layer of dust covers the dead clothes. The Killers have no further use for white tuxedos on their second album, Sam's Town. Today, Brandon wears a black polo shirt, black pin-stripe waistcoat, black jeans and black boots. Where there used to be a layer of foundation, there is now a beard - an untrimmed beard at that. Dave Keuning (30, guitar), Mark Stoermer (29, bass) and Ronnie Vannucci (29, drums) all echo Brandon's black ensemble. Ronnie has added Aviator shades and a handlebar moustache for a dash of motorcycle cop, Dave's frizzy bubble of hair gives him a Marc Bolan-ish air, and there's something very teenage about Mark's scuffed Vans.
Short of walking around wearing sandwich boards saying, "Our new record is a bit heavier than the last one," The Killers couldn't hope to communicate that message more effectively. And they have gained some musical girth on Sam's Town. The pop hooks that made Hot Fuss so irresistible survive intact - see the ringing guitar riffs on first single When You Were Young - but there's a newfound punchiness, coupled with an epic sweep. The minor-to-major uplifts on Bones are fabulously dramatic, the coda to Why Do I Keep Counting? thrillingly intense. Comparisons to Bruce Springsteen have been made. If they overstate the case a little, they are at leaset qualitatively accurate. The Killers are back and this time it's serious - they've got the bootlace ties to prove it.
"Hey, it says here that Springsteen's headlining Glastonbury next year," shouts Ronnie, who's flicking through the NME. He nods sagely at the page without looking up.
"Really?" asks Dave, nicknamed Crazy Dave on account of his alledgedly volatile nature.
"The Boss is headlining one night, we're playing second on the bill the next night and Kylie's headlining the Sunday," says Brandon, charging like a bull through Michael Eavis' as-yet-unannounced line-up with what subsequently proves to be a characteristic gaucheness.
But that lighter is proving elusive. This being America, none of the people hurrying to-and-fro prepping the world for the release of Sam's Town smokes. Manager Robert Reynolds - Bobby Rey to the band - barks into his mobile, booking his band onto eye-wateringly demanding tours. "We're going to make a lot of money," he cackles to himself before switching calls to make a series of stern pronouncements on legal matters. Dave, Mark and Ronnie disappear for a jam session. Artwork is approved, B-sides are decided on and schedules are hammered out.
"I can't find it," Brandon says, finally. But he's not going to be denied the opportunity to underline The Killers reinvention with a puff of smoke. "Let's go to the gas station. I'll have to buy one. It's too busy to talk here anyway."
+
Brandon's black (of course) Volkswagen Touraeg four-wheel drive is barrelling down West Flamingo Road into town. "I was a bell boy there," he says, pointing out of the driver's window at the stucco facade of the Gold Coast casino. "I was working there when we were signed."
Coming from Las Vegas, it is perhaps inevitable that casinos play a big part in The Killers' story; not only is Sam's Town named after one, it was recorded in one, too.
The band began writing songs while on the road with Hot Fuss, turning up early for soundchecks to run through new ideas. On a trip home to Vegas, George Maloof, a hotelier known for cultivating famous friends, invited them to record the album in the new studio he'd built at The Palms, his flagship hotel-cum-gambling den. When the tour finished in October 2005, they returned to Vegas and spent five month finessing the songs they'd sketched out on the road. Then, in February, they decampled to the third floor studio at The Palms and recorded Sam's Town over 11 weeks.
Producer Flood (U2, Depeche Mode) encouraged them to experiment. They overdubbed, fiddled with synthesizers and played with new equipment. It took them five weeks to get the backing vocals right. The band sang the harmonies, then double-tracked them four times. The end result recalls Queen wondering, "Is this is the real life? Is this just fantasy?" When Ronnie, a trained classical percussionist, brought some kettledrums down, eyebrows were raised; but the fabulously bombastic coda on Why Do I Keep Counting? vindicates his indulgence.
"That's kind of the Ben Hur of the album," he says. He's not wrong. Sam's Town is a record on an epic scale. "Yeah, it has drama," he continues. "But, at the same time, I think it's a little more exposed than Hot Fuss. It's a little more naked. Last time it was about a lot of fictional things." By "fictional", Ronnie means that Hot Fuss wore its predominantly British influences for all to see. Brandon's taste in music is rabidly Anglophile - he constantly references The Smiths, The Cure and Joy Division - and it showed. By contrast, Sam's Town is an unequivocally American record. The lyrical imagery is pure American dream - cars, girls, wide-open spaces and escaping to a better life. "We're burning down the highway skyline/On the back of a hurricane that started turning/When you were young," sings Brandon on When You Were Young. That's the basis of the Springsteen comparisons then, though the lack of pathos more closely recalls another blue-collar rocker from New Jersey - Jon Bon Jovi.
The phrase "this town" recurs throughout the album, and it's always receding into the distance as The Killers escape to a new life. "This town was made for passing through/I never did get along with everybody else," sings Brandon on This River Is Wild. On Read My Mind he "never really gave up on breaking out of this two-star town", while on the title track he offers something of an explanation: "Nobody ever had a dream round here."
"With the first record, there was this feeling that there was this world out there that we didn't know," says Mark later in the day. Before The Killers, he studied philosophy: now he's their quiet one. "We wanted to get out and away from this and be somewhere else. We hadn't had a lot of experience - hadn't travelled much - then we were gone for three years. We didn't sit down and say that we wanted to make a record about how we're glad to be home, but that's what happened naturally."
It's not an angsty record. The Killers have already escaped with Hot Fuss, and, having done so, they view the experience fondly now they're back. There's a mistiness to Brandon's eyes as he explains how the album got it's name.
"Sam's Town is a casino on the edge of Vegas," he says. "I grew up in Henderson, which is out on the way to the Hoover Dam. My mom and dad lived in a trailer park, and my dad used to hitchhike up and down Boulder Highway, which is the only way you could get to Vegas. Sam's Town was the first thing you saw on your way in to town. So, when you're driving down Boulder Highway from Henderson, I always thought you finally knew you were getting somewhere when you saw Sam's Town. It was kind of like a beacon."
"It's not a completely American album," contines Brandon. "We still have our English influence, but we're also from the Wild West. Somehow we've managed to unify all that on this album. it's just such a perfect resemblence of what we are."
At the petrol station, Brandon rummages through the glove box looking for change to buy a lighter. "This is a great album," he says, pointing at Highway Companion, the latest from iconic American rocker Tom Petty. "I've always been a big fan of his. He's such a great American artist."
Yes, Brandon: we get the point.
+
When Brandon finally lights his cigarette, he smokes it awkwardly, like a child mimicking something he's seen the grown-ups doing. However, when he cheerfully admits that, "I feel the same mentally as I did when I was 12," it's not a knowing nod to the fact that he sometimes behaves like a loveably precocious child, but a reference to an unusually comprehensive grounding in pop music at an early age.
When Brandon sings about "this town", he doesn't mean Las Vegas. He means Nephi, Utah or Henderson, Nevada, where he spent his childhood. His parents are Mormon and he is the youngest of six children. "I was a surprise," he says. "I've got a 42-year-old sister." If he was issues about his "surprise" status, he chooses to gloss over them. "It turned out perfect because my brother was a teenager when I was a kid," he says. "He would bring home things like Rattle And Hum by U2 and I would watch it. I remember he bought Live In Dallas by Morrissey. It was always him watching these things, or his door was shut and you'd hear The Head On The Door by The Cure blasting through the house and rattling the walls."
The Killers were formed when Brandon answered an advert Dave had placed in a local paper in late 2002. Dave cited Oasis as a big influence; Brandon had seen them play recently and responded; and, as Dave has said in previous interviews: "He was the only person to reply to my ad who wasn't a complete freak." However, the band was born in Brandon's brothers bedroom.
"His room was like a shrine," enthuses Brandon. "It was a holy place. I wish I could show you a picture of it. It was covered in posters. There'd be a big picture of Elvis wearing a bow tie that just said 'The Smiths' [the artwork for The Smiths 1987 single Shoplifters Of The World Unite]. You had The Cure wearing face paint [the artwork to The Cure's 1985 single In Between Days] - all that kind of stuff. I remember Morrissey being on the cover of the NME, with the halo [from 1985] - stuff like that. You just wanted to know about these people 'cause they were so cool. My brother seemed like such a cool person. But he was a teenager, so he wasn't going to be that nice to me, a kid."
Brandon was fascinated by his brother's collection of music, magazines and posters, but he was denied access to them - officially, at least. "I would sneak in," he says. "I knew he'd be angry if he found out, but I would go in as soon as he left the house." For a long time Brandon was too scared to actually play anything. "That didn't come 'til later. I just used to go in there because I liked it. Then I got to the point where I'd actually take a tape out and put it in. It took more guts to do that."
It was a life-changing moment. "I was ten and the first song I played was Sing Your Life by Morrissey. I remember dancing about to it."
The lyrics to Sing Your Life include the lines, "Sing your life/Just walk right up to the microphone/And name all the things that you love/All the things that you loathe." It's intriguing to wonder what Morrissey makes of the neophyte he inspired with these lines.
Eventually, Brandon inherited his brother's tape collection. "It was around the same time CDs started coming out in a big way. He started buying CDs and gave me his tapes. And that was it: it took off from there. I got a hundred of the best albums - all the New Order, all the Morrissey, all The Smiths, The Beatles. I started buying posters. I went to see The Cure in concert. It was just kind of a continuation of my brother. And it was nice because, though my parents were strict, they were already used to it from him. There was no, 'My dad doesn't understand me,' or any of that kind of stuff. My mum likes The Smiths."
Brandon was 13 and his favourite band was late-'70s/early-'80s American new wavers The Cars, and particularly their jaw-droppingly catchy 1979 single Just What I Needed.
"I wouldn't exist without that song," he says. "That was the one. I remember driving around with my mum when I was 13, and we're living in Nephi - a really small town - and I felt so cool when I put that song on. Like: 'I have something that none of these kids I'm going to middle school with tomorrow have.' That excitement is what music's about, isn't it? That's why I understand the mentality of people that don't like us because we've sold so many records. I used to like it when no one else knew about a band. So I get that - I do."
+
Brandon's first band was called Blush Response. It was never going to work out. Not because he refused to move to Los Angeles with them, but because he is utterly - comically - shameless. He's given to making outrageously boastful statements like: "It's not like the '60s, '70s and '80s now. There are only a few bands around that are really good, that just do it. I mean, there's what, five or six of us?"
For the record, in Brandon's estimation, those bands are Franz Ferdinand, Razorlight, The Strokes, The White Stripes, Yeah Yeah Yeahs and, of course, The Killers.
"I don't want people to think I'm lumping myself with other people just to make us sound cool," he says. Really? It sort of sounds like you are. But he just steamrolls through it. "Yeah, but you know what I mean," he says, grinning at his own cheekiness. He's so disgracefully forward you can't help but laugh along with him - Oh you are awful, Brandon! But joking aside, The Killers are the most commercially successful of all the bands he mentions.
Later, back at the rehearsal space, the band run through Sam's Town at deafening volume in preparation for the forthcoming tour - first the US, then the world. The infectious, almost contagious, chorus of When You Were Young sounds fabulous, as do the U2-like guitars and Twin Peaks synths of Read My Mind. Meanwhile, Smile Like You Mean It and Somebody Told Me benefit from the newfound harder edge.
They somewhat heavy-handedly underline the new direction by playing Paranoid by Black Sabbath and Get It On by T Rex. That's the thing: The Killers are not a subtle band. Their songs are like a wet kiss from a girl who's a bit too drunk. They are big and brash, and not everyone loves them for it. Mr Brightside and Somebody Told Me might go down as well at hip nightclubs as they do on the festival circuit, but the DJs play them with the same guilty look they wear when playing a pop record.
"I hate that," says Brandon. "Like writing a song you can hum somehow cheapens it? It makes me think of this quote by Morrissey. Everybody knows how he read Oscar Wilde, Keats and Yates when he was growing up and that he wanted to be a writer. He was talking to this journalist who asked why he hadn't become a writer, and Morrissey said: 'What I do is more powerful than what you do because I can write down these words and you get it to a melody. How can you beat that?' I'm of the same opinion. I don't understand why a good melody that's memorable is a bad thing."
Being dismissed as pop particular aggrieves Ronnie. "When we first came out we got compared to Duran Duran all the time. Jesus Christ! We got a keyboard player now all of a sudden he's Nick Rhodes! Come on!"
"The people who criticise us for being too poppy don't get it," agrees Mark. "I think that's the problem with a lot of rock music. People are afraid to write a song any more. Either that or they can't. And that attitude hurts music in general. The best bands ever have all written great songs. You can still do it and do it intelligently and it can be original. This isn't a studio creation with a producer writing these songs for us. We're not Avril Lavigne, or something like that. We're a real band writing real songs, just like a punk band would do, except that we write pop songs."
You get the impression that The Killers knack for showboating pop hooks that border on vulgar is inextricably tied up with the brazen side of Brandon's personality. But while his ebullient charisma, not to mention the songs themselves, mitigates his outrageousness, there is a less attractive side to his ego. He has a combative streak. He can't resist taking pot shots at emo bands, notably Fall Out Boy, whith whom The Killers share an A&R man.
Has he heard how many emo kids it takes to change a light bulb? "No." None. They just sit in the dark and cry. It's a full 30 seconds before he stops laughing. When he does he admits: "Yeah, we've had problems with other bands. You know, when you walk in the room it's like..." He whistles the theme to The Good, The Bad And The Ugly. "We're like gangs."
And while the other members of the band are diplomatic on the subject of Brandon, you don't have to read too deeply between the lines to conclude that there have been internal issues, too.
"Some people will think Brandon's the big genius," says Dave, visibly bridling. "There are songs, such as Why Do I Keep Counting?, where he's written every note. But there are others, like When You Were Young, that were more of a collaboration - like Mr Brightside, where I had some of the music and Brandon came up with the lyrics. We always have arguments about who wrote what. The truth is that we all help in that process."
When asked how success affected them, Ronnie says: "There were certain things that needed adjusting. When you're on tour for two years, people can get a little needy. It doesn't help that you're surrounded by yes men and everybody's working for you. At times we've had to say, 'Who do you think you are?' to people. No one wears the trousers, but some people would like to. I think if it wasn't for the people in the band kicking each other in the ass... Let's just say there was some ass-kickin'."
It doesn't take a genius to work out whose ass needed kicking most often.
+
It's the following day and The Killers are back at their rehearsal space. The topic of discussion is what to wear in the video for Bones, the second single. It's a big deal: the director is Tim Burton. "I feel like Frank Sinatra when I sing it," announces Brandon. "With maybe a little bit of Morrissey and a little bit of Elvis, too."
Of course he does. But if securing the services of Tim Burton tells you one thing, it's that The Killers are about to get even bigger, perhaps even make the leap to the same level as Coldplay et al. Already stars, they are about to become superstars. Brandon can hardly wait.
"Do you know that Rolling Stone didn't want to put us on the cover last time," he says indignantly. "They didn't think we were stars. We sold five million albums! What more do they want from a band?"
Whatever was required, Brandon would be happy to do most things. "I'll do stuff that some people don't want to do, 'cause I want people to hear the music," he says. However, even he has limits. "The Rolling Stone thing made the record label think: 'What can we do to make them stars?' If I go on vacation with my wife, do they have to send somebody to be there to take pictures of me? Is that how you become a star? I don't want that. I walked down the red carpet one time and I realised I don't like it. But you don't have to walk down the red carpet for people to hear your music. We do still have some of that indie blood running through our veins."
He heads off at a tangent: "When you walk around Liverpool, you think of The Beatles, or you go to Manchester and you think of The Smiths or Oasis. I want you to come to Las Vegas and think of Sam's Town. And I think we've started to capture that, which is a truer version of The Killers, 'cause that's where we're from."
He pauses.
"I used to live across the street from Sam's Town. Maybe it'll be like our Abbey Road where people go to take pictures."
Is that what he'd like?
"I wouldn't mind it," he says, desperately hoping it will come true.
He puts a cigarette between his lips, looks down at his trouser pockets and pats them in search of the lighter he bought yesterday.
"Hey, I don't suppose you've got one?"

This is what I posted on the board game community in Korea, and I'm also translating and posting it on Reddit!
The translation and text inspection took a long time, but I'm posting it because I think croquinol gamers from other countries will enjoy reading it.
(I don't know how to put pictures in between when writing on Reddit. If you're curious about pictures while reading, please visit the link below. You may not understand Korean, but pictures are visual information so they can be understood universally)
https://boardlife.co.kbbs_detail.php?tb=community_post&bbs_num=26766
Not long ago in early May, I ran a croquinol booth for students and parents at a Children's Day event (it was held on the grounds of the University of Education)
The head of the school affairs department suggested, "I heard you like board games, do you want to run a booth?" so I thought very hard. Actually, it was bothersome.
In the end, I accepted because I wanted to make good memories with children as well as selling croquinol. At first, I thought it was easy to take a few croquinols and play a few rounds.
It wasn't long before I realized that the idea was very wrong. This is because there were so many things to consider operating the booth. The program should be organized in consideration of the number of users and the number of people visiting.
The arrangement of objects and the movement of people should also be considered. I shouldn't think, 'I'm done explaining the game to the students in moderation and watching them play.'
I have to think about the details. I thought about it until the day of operation and right before it started. Now that it's been decided so far, I'll have to recruit staff to run it together (this was the most difficult problem)
Finally, find out the products to give to the visiting children and purchase them, purchase notices to be installed in the booth, and other things necessary to proceed or make them
For two weeks, I spent a lot of time and energy thinking about and preparing for how to operate the booth. I thought a lot about what to give as the prize, but it was finally decided to go down
(1) Pokémon Key Chain Pokémon is definitely a successful IP!!
I decided it right away because it looked so pretty and the quality looked good. There were some that were really cheap, but the quality was really... It was a pity, so I put in more budget
(2) ritter sport chocolate It's economical because there are 200 in a pack I tried one to see if it's poisonous What????? This chocolate tastes pretty good...
(3) Crockinol Pencil (Steadler + Engrave) Originally, I didn't want to give pencils, but if I imprint them and give them to students, I thought they could remember croquinol for quite some time, so I made it meaningful.
If you look closely at the pencil, you can see the image of a disc bouncing with a finger. (○ ● ☜) I made it using the basic characters on the keyboard. Haha.)
It took a long time to think of the word 'dream tree' in the engraved phrase. (Offered words: rookie, genius, child, master, king, god, etc.) Since there are no other people to help me, I planned and produced a lot of things by myself.... lol
I recruited the operating personnel as follows
Head of the school affairs department -> Recruit me (one-person planner and business manager): Let's compare and analyze croquinol sales and rest at home and then experience it. Decided
Me-> First cast (S teacher): A versatile teacher who has been in the next class since we met in the 6th grade this year He became interested after being introduced to Crockinol by me. Enjoying Crockinol at home with his wife. Canadian style. (He said he was doing it without giving it away.) After receiving a proposal from me, "I'll do all the preparations, so please come and let the children know the games without any burden," he decided to participate after much consideration. I'm playing with my kids in the classroom, and my croquinol skills are increasing rapidly. I'm planning to promote the entire 6th grade croquinol competition later.
Second cast (Teacher C): My younger brother who met as a manager and a staff member at my last school and became very close. The same person who said in an old article that he helped move the classroom!
Together, we played about 400 rounds of croquinol 1:1 match. He made a lot of mistakes in his early days, but after hundreds of editions, he became enlightened at some point. He has become quite a master.
His powerful shots made a lot of crazy scenes. Among them, he sent five discs of his opponent to a ditch at the same time. When he was asked by me to help him, he accepted without hesitation. (He is expected to participate in the next event.)
Third cast (Teacher K): I am a teacher from another region, and I am close to him because I got to know him in a club. She was the last to be recruited, and she suggested liter port chocolate and keychain among the product ideas. Pencils were also highly recommended when I was thinking about it.
Lastly, he volunteered after seeing me thinking about recruiting one more person.
She's the only teacher who doesn't have a croquinol, and she doesn't usually have a chance to train, so she's still a beginner's skill.
Rather, a person who is expected to revitalize the booth operation because of that. (If teachers do too well, all students lose.) For the record, she has a board gamer gene that can also play Arcnova board games.
※ In addition, there is a sad history of rejection and subtly falling over during the recruitment process.
And I started setting it up on the day!! Visit early with teacher C and install one croquinol on three tables in the tent
At first, I was worried because the table was in the shape of a rectangle, but I could put things here and there. If you put the croquinol at an angle on the table, it was possible to conduct a 2:2 team, so there was no problem.
After I finished setting up, I sat down for a bit and tried a croquinol test. Played without any problems. The shot was even better because I told them to cut their nails, including myself.
However, there was a lot of dust on the tables and chairs provided by the company, so I hurriedly cleaned them. The remaining two operators also narrowly joined, and a total of four people were matched.
After that, I had time to start operating the booth as a whole They're here...!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! The name of the booth was 'Gather up here if you're confident in flicking', but I think I drew some aggro. Other places looked healthy like making animal bracelets, but our booth was like, "You! Come if you're confident!"
The booth was originally planned like this Planning the rules of the game: - If you feel uncomfortable, you can stand and shoot freely - In the case of 1:1, the original use of the 1/4 shooting line based on North America and Canada, rather than the use of the 1/2 shooting line that changed the rules in Korean company Korea Board Games. - A student who is too young is forced to shoot with a line forward. Two places are experience seats and listen to and experience the rules 1:1 or 2:2 (Parents and friends can participate together) - The experience gift is one litre pot chocolate - Rule Description -> Shot Practice -> consists of a two-game friendly
If you have learned the rules through the experience, go to the challenge seat of one place and challenge 1:1 or 2:2 (you can also participate together) - If you win, you'll get a Pokémon keychain, even if you lose, you'll get a 1/3 chance of a keychain and a 2/3 chance of a pencil through a lottery - Using one chance card, we will proceed with two sets, and if the student draws or wins even one set, it will be considered a victory. - Re-challenge possible when you line up again The booth gradually gathered and filled the corner, and the line got longer
I repeated the explanation and game so wildly!
The first episode : Even though it was in the shade of the tent, the temperature was high, so the chocolate melted. The student said it melted, so I touched it and it was liquid! Unfortunately, we can't give these defective products to students, so we decided to go to the challenge seat without giving them away in the experience seat.
The second episode : Our classmates are here! I heard a voice saying, "Teacher!" and I can see the 6th grade girls in my class
Of course, we played the game. I tried to lose, but I thought that if I lost too much, the student would notice, so I made mistakes from time to time, but these guys made more mistakes!
It ended with me winning or drawing (I should have made it more clear and lost... lol) I said, "This is just an experience seat, so it doesn't matter, show your real skills in the challenge seat," and sent the girl to another corner
The third episode : People were buzzing that a very famous politician visited the booth next door. (He was Korea's presidential candidate.) I looked up and saw the face that I saw on screen Although I was curious, I had my day job as a board gamer, so I welcomed students and focused on explaining the rules. Later, I found out that he talked to a student who experienced our booth and passed by
The 4th episode : The booth operators were not given a separate lunch break! It was announced that they would take turns eating lunch boxes. There were quite a few people... and I barely had time to eat. One person will be in charge of one booth, and one person will take turns eating I'm the type to eat slowly while tasting the taste, but I didn't have much time to relax on this day, so I sat on the stand and came back in a hurry that I couldn't even feel the taste
The fifth episode : There are so many people, and especially in the case of the challenge seat, the waiting line is longer, so to solve the bottleneck, we decided to take both the place and challenge as an experience seat It was the same with the booth I was in. I don't know what this day is... I made more mistakes than usual and often missed shots because I was nervous dealing with children. Hahaha
The 6th episode : The operations staff at the next table said, "A kid came up with a challenge and beat me." He got the prize, of course But after that, the student was still in the viewing room and gave advice to other participating children, saying, "I win all of them," showing a lot of confidence Then the child triumphantly challenged the management staff again! He must have wanted to win again. What was the result? According to him, he showed the dignity of an adult with his skills to children Of course, he gave away a croquinol pencil this time!!
The 7th episode : I explained the rules so much that the script was automatically made "This game is a 150-year-old game of Canada known to have started in 1876.... "In Canada, it's a daily sport that many families have and play throughout their lives, from childhood to grandmothers and grandparents. The rules are simple: if you put it in here, it's 20 points, this is 15 points....." I can't remember how many times I repeated the script above! The eighth episode : There are people who waited for an hour to listen to it while organizing it I've already experienced it and moved to the challenge seat, but the challenge seat lines are too long... Did they feel like they were waiting for a long line in the amusement park... ㅠㅠ Parents were tired of waiting, so they asked to go to another booth, but the child said, "Since I've experienced it, I really want to try it. I want to take a Pokémon keychain!" and waited a lot. It must have been very boring for parents, but there was no other way. I thought the quality of the operation would be very low to just experience/challenge one game at a time 2 play experience + 2 play challenge was the minimum number of plays to feel a little croquinol
The ninth episode : After eating, I heard parents and children talking "This is where we play Alkagi(flicking). Shall we play Alkagi?" "Let's do it!"
If you had written the booth title, "Who wants to play croquinol?" no one would know croquinol, so accessibility would have been low But when the title said "Alkkagi", I was proud of him coming in without any pressure
The 10th episode : The official closing time of the booth was 4 p.m At around 3:50 p.m., I took a breath and looked at other places, and some places had already withdrawn, and I was usually cleaning up, so the atmosphere was clear But our booth is still full It lasted beyond hours Is this the power of crocinol?
The 11th episode : Time has been deleted I was worried about what if time went by during that long time of operating the booth, but it was a mistake. We were so busy explaining and playing that we didn't have time to look at the clock, and when we came to our senses, it was a time when the end was imminent. I couldn't even go to the bathroom for five hours. Because it was hectic, the operation ended without a comparative analysis of 'Are many people visiting other booths? How popular is our booth?' (When I saw the photos and videos later, I could see that our booth was more crowded than other booths.)
The 12th episode : I tried a lot to react to it in my own way. I really complimented the kid every time he hit the disc. I exaggerated a little bit like I became a YouTuber and shouted a compliment chant out loud A young girl who looked like elementary 1 or 2 sat down (around 7-8 years old) I finished explaining the rules, and asked her to practice shooting a few times. After that, we started playing the game. The girl said she would do it first, and she took the first shot of her life's first game. It went straight into the center hole. There was applause from all around. I said, "Even I couldn't put it in at first. It's amazing." Congratulations on your best experience." She's made a lot of mistakes in play since then, but it doesn't matter at all! There's nothing more touching than the first shot of 20 The parents who were nearby filmed this scene and will cherish this meaningful moment for a long time
The 13th episode : There seemed to be something interesting to see other crocinol tables also clapping, wow, oh, oh From the perspective of planning, all these reactions are a gift
The 14th episode : There were a lot of spectators while explaining/playing There were a lot of comments about the rules of the game "You have to hit the disc when it's on the surface" "Oh!" A male parent was glad to hear that he knew croquinol "I knew this game since it came out last year. It was about 110 dollars, but I didn't buy it because it was expensive." (It's more expensive now. It's about $140)
The 15th episode : We allowed a re-challenge in the 'Beat the Teacher' section, caressing the hearts of children thirsty for crocinol Some students tried again 3 times (The challenge itself takes about 1 minute and 30 seconds for the first round, 3 minutes in total, so it doesn't take much.)
The 16th episode : After 4 p.m., I looked at the other booth thinking about when to organize it, and a boy who looked like a fourth grade in the challenge seat was doing very well Her parents were also amazed by it The accuracy of each step wasn't unusual He said he came back to try it out and do it again Looking at the game, he unfortunately lost to Teacher S by 5 points when he made a mistake of 2 turns in the second half Teacher S told the student. " Try it with that teacher. He's the best While sitting down, I asked, "Do you want me to do it with all my strength or not?" I laughed and asked At first, the student said, "Please be generous!" but later changed his words to "With full strength." "Haha, okay. I'll go with all my strength!" The student said he would attack first and tried an open shot and went straight into the center hole "Wow... does this make sense?" I also chased along the disc in the center hole. That's how I tried to hit my opponent's disc in Hogan's alley and accidentally wasted three turns. The result is that the student who leads by 15 points wins... The child liked it very much and came home with a light step with his parents "Thank you for your hard work. Bye!" When I looked at the playground with the back of my family leaving after saying hello, the sun was slowly heading down, scattering light everywhere and giving the lawn a cozy view What could be a more peaceful landscape. He must have felt really good on his way home. I thought he lost well
Finish writing : When I was in college, I ran a different kind of booth when I was the president of a club, but it was the first time I ran it this way in relation to board games.
At that time, there were a lot of club members and the space was very spacious, so the event was held comfortably, but the croquinol booth was operated in a very minimal condition: 1 tent, 3 tables, 3 croquinols, and 4 people in operation
Still, it ended successfully as it exceeded the time without an accident, so considering that it is the first operation under this condition, it should be considered a great success.
The operation of this croquinol booth was planned by myself and prepared for the program, so I have a lot of attachment.
I'm grateful to the three people who ran it together (they were dispatched from each elementary school publicly and privately). As expected, people are the most important.
I'm willing to do it again if I have to participate in the booth event another month this year or if I have to run it again next year. I think we can do it in a better way than now
For example, I dream of running a mini-contest by installing more tables. There's a mini trophy, and I think the kid who got it will really like it. (Of course we need a lot more people than we do now...!)

Hi all! This is a rather comprehensive guide for newcomers to PC gaming to help understand the relevant technologies when it comes to docks, peripherals, external storage and monitors. This should help navigate the sometimes conflicting and confusing advice online and enable you to make buying decisions based on your personal needs.

Cables, Power Delivery and 30W Turbo

(More info regarding cables under Data Transfer - Cables)
Cables and Power Delivery
All USB C to C cables built to spec are capable of providing 20V@3A for a maximum of 60W. For any higher power output, there are different protocols and the Ally uses the Power Delivery (PD) protocol which is common for laptops - If you already have a laptop with USB C charging, check to see if its charger supports PD charging since you could use its charger with the Ally and vice versa.
The PD protocol requires a handshake where the power source, whether it be a charger or power bank, communicates its different capabilities (eg. 15V @ 3A = 45W, 20V @ 3.25A = 65W, 20V @ 5A = 100W, etc.) and the device communicates what it can safely receive over the USB cable. This communication requires an E marker chip built into the USB C cable which allows the power source to deliver up to 48V @ 5A = 240W, although it is more common to find the older 20V @5 A = 100W cables. The E marker is also what allows you to plug in a high output PD charger to charge much lower powered devices without frying any components since the charger will keep to a safe/low power output until the E marker communicates the capabilities on both ends.
The Ally uses the 20V @ 3.25A (65W) PD power profile and any USB C to C cable with an E marker should work for the Ally as long as your charger or power bank can deliver the aforementioned 20V @ 3.25A.
Note: Sometimes cables just aren't built to spec and cheaper cables might not work as intended or fail quickly. The E marker chip malfunctioning is a primary reason why your charger and cable combination might suddenly stop working as intended and not deliver the 65W to the Ally even if it did earlier - in most situations, it might just drop to 20V @ 3A (60W).
30W Turbo requirements
As far as the ROG Ally is concerned,

• If a 20V @ 3.25A PD profile (or higher) is powering the device, the device will allow up to 30W to the GPU.
• If the Ally can't draw at least 20V @ 3.25A, it'll max out at 25W to the GPU.
• USB A to C cables simply cannot provide the higher output PD wattages. Some USB A to C cables (OnePlus/Oppo ones for instance) use proprietary pin layouts to achieve higher power output up to 100W but these are proprietary implementations and won't work with the Ally.
• PD charging requires a USB C to C cable (or PD chargers with attached cables like the original charger)

How to enable 30W Turbo
If you're connecting the power source directly to the Ally, i.e. not using a hub:

• The original charger works flawlessly as well as any similar ones from reputable laptop brands (HP, Lenovo, etc.) that use PD and have the 20V @ 3.25A profile as well.
• If you're using a power bank or charger with a removable cable, make sure it supports the same PD profile as mentioned above and use a USB C to C cable with an E marker. Any cable with an E marker should reliably provide at least 100W since the minimum spec is 20V @ 5A.

If you're connecting the Ally through a dock/hub:
This is where things get interesting. Without getting very technical, USB specifications are set by the USB Implementers Forum (USB IF). For docks and hubs, the specification states that USB devices should be able to draw power at the port with max power draw specified. For USB 3 devices, this max power draw is 5V @ 900 mA (4.5W at the port) and for USB 2 devices, this max draw is 5V @ 500 mA (2.5W). This is why most docks and hubs have their own power requirement, around 15W usually but may vary, so that power is reserved for the USB ports. Depending on the device connected, this power draw can vary - a portable spinning hard disk drive will draw more power than a dongle for a wireless mouse for instance. Insufficient power to the ports can manifest in many ways such as USB devices disconnecting and reconnecting, HDMI intermittently disconnecting, etc.
I haven't been able to test this so please take this section with a grain of salt - docks that support 30W Turbo with the original charger don't seem to meet the official USB IF specs since the dock must be exposing the Ally to the 20V @ 3.25A PD profile without reserving any power to the USB ports. I haven't been able to confirm this myself as all the docks and hubs I use reserve around 15W for the ports and require at least 80W+ PD to allow the 30W Turbo mode. Based on my digging online, it seems like some people have no issues using these docks while others have reliability issues such as the ones I described earlier.
To summarise, enabling 30W Turbo mode reliably on the Ally when connected to a dock or hub requires (should require?) the following:

• A charger or power bank capable of 80W or higher PD profiles since the hub should ideally be reserving power for itself to prevent issues on the ports (usually around 15W but can vary).
• Like earlier, if you're using a removable cable with a charger or power bank, make sure to use a USB C to C cable with an E marker chip.
• Potential option if you have a 100W power bank that supports PD passthrough - in this scenario you can plug in your original ROG Ally charger to the power bank (65W input to the power bank) and then connect your dock to the power bank (up to 100W to the dock). I can confirm it works with this power bank: https://www.amazon.ca/imuto-26800mAh-Portable-Charger-Charging/dp/B0BC7NJHCW

If you don't care about playing on 30W Turbo mode,
As mentioned earlier, all USB C to C cables should be capable of at least 60W. Using a charger with any lower PD profiles such as a 45W charger will not cause any damage or harm, you might just lose battery even with a charger connected but that's about it. I often use my 25W phone charger or even Nintendo Switch charger - reliable chargers will not damage your device.

Data Transfer

General info
Mbps, MB/s, Gbps and GB/s - there's a difference.
You'll often see the terms Mbps or MB/s (alternatively Gbps or GB/s) used to refer to USB speed, storage speed, internet speeds, etc. but it's important to note the difference.
Mbps = Megabits per second, MB/s = Megabytes per second
Gbps = Gigabits per second, GB/s = Gigabytes per second
Data transfer is usually measured in Megabits per second, Mbps (or Gigabits per second, Gbps). Your internet speed is a great example of this. Files and any storage in general is measured as Megabytes or Gigabytes. To work out file transfers in Megabytes or Gigabytes per second use the following:
8 bits make up 1 byte and 1 Gigabit = 1000 Megabits. To keep things confusing, 1 Gigabyte = 1024 Megabytes.
If your internet service provider is providing a 1 Gigabit connection it works out to 1000/8= 125 Megabytes per second, i.e. a file that is 250 Megabytes will take 2 seconds to download. (Note: real speeds will always be lower due to network overhead, congestion, distance to servers and a bunch of other factors.)
A breakdown for the things most relevant to the ROG Ally:

• USB 2 ports, cables and devices max out at 480 Mbps, ie 480/8 = 60 Megabytes per second. These shouldn't be used for file transfer since they're slow but work great for peripherals such as keyboards, mice, webcams, wireless dongles, etc. These devices tend to use very little bandwidth and won't saturate a USB 2 port.
• USB 3.0 ports, cables and devices max out at 5 Gbps (5000 Mbps), ie. 5000/8 = 625 Megabytes per second. Ports on most docks max out at these speeds.
• USB 3.1 (also known as 3.1 Gen 2 because USB naming convention is a hot mess...) ports, cables and devices max out at 10 Gbps (10000 Mbps), ie. 10000/8 =1250 Megabytes per second.

The Ally's USB C port is USB 3.1 Gen 2 with DP Alt mode so the max transfer speed you can get from the Ally is 10 Gbps. Ideally you should look for docks and cables that are capable of 10 Gbps.

• USB 3.1 Gen 2x2: 20 Gbps, ie. 2500 Megabytes per second. Although the Ally can't achieve these speeds, you might find enclosures or portable SSD's operating at these speed at comparable prices to 10 Gbps ones when on sale. Just worth keeping an eye out for.
• USB 4/Thunderbolt: up to 40 Gbps, ie. 5000 Megabytes per second. if you have a device capable of USB 4/Thunderbolt I would recommend looking into a Thunderbolt dock/hub but otherwise they are overkill for the Ally since the dock will operate at lower speeds and some USB 4/TB features in the dock won't work at all. These hubs and cables require in depth certification making them very reliable but also very expensive.

Other notable mentions:

• A functioning SD card slot in the Ally (UHS-II): maxes out at 312 Megabytes per second
• LAN (1 gigabit): 125 Megabytes per second
• LAN (2.5 gigabit): 312.5 Megabytes per second
• WiFi 5: Typically 866Mbps, ie. 108.25 Megabytes per second
• WiFi 6 (80 Mhz channels): Typically 1201 Mbps, ie. 150.125 Megabytes per second
• WiFi 6 (160 Mhz channels): Typically 2402 Mbps, ie. 300.25 Megabytes per second

WiFi 5 and 6 speeds are theoretically MUCH higher but this is what most people can expect from their routers to their device - including crappy ISP provided routers.
For LAN and WiFI, these are the speeds you can expect on your local network and NOT the speed your ISP provides to the internet. Your local network is what you are using when you stream in home from a PC or console to the Ally using something like Steam Link or Sunshine. Or if you access storage on your network (NAS, Plex server, Jellyfin, etc.)
Real speeds will always be lower across the board when you account for any overhead such as the Windows File system, background tasks, network overhead etc.
Data Transfer - Cables
Make sure you're using a cable that can match the speed of the device, ie. if you're connecting a USB 3.0 device, make sure the cable also supports USB 3.0 at least. Similarly, you need to use a 10Gbps USB cable to achieve 10Gbps data transfer speeds. Using higher spec cables should always work reliably with lower spec devices too, such as using a 10Gbps cable with a USB 2 device will just operate at USB 2 speeds.
NOTE: A cable containing an E marker chip does not necessarily mean it can do video or even USB 3.0 file speeds. The E marker chip is unrelated to data transfer capabilities. In general, most 100W E marker cables only work at USB 2 speeds if used for file transfer, unless they explicitly state other capabilities.
I've personally had great reliability with 240W E marker cables though and it's been much easier to find reliable cables that provide 10Gbps data transfer, 4K 60Hz video output and any level of PD required all through one cable. I suspect the reliability mainly comes from the more stringent certification process required for 240W PD. These cables can be chonky though.
Can games run from an SD card, external hard drive, external SSD or USB flash drive?
Short answer, yes.
Longer answer, yes, but keep the following in mind:

• For most games, you will see a difference in terms of load times taking longer when running from external storage - the game performance should be identical though. Games which explicitly state they need internal SSDs can also work from removable storage but your mileage may vary. Forza Motorsport for instance throws a warning message upon launch but you can safely ignore it without issue.
• Some launchers work better with removable storage for games. Steam, Epic Games and Ubisoft have all worked great for me but games from XBox have had issues with updates breaking game files. Most launchers will allow you to select removable media for storage though.
• The Ally might not recognize games that are installed on removable storage if the storage isn't plugged in when you turn the Ally on. Basically, if you're not seeing a game you have installed, shut down the Ally, connect the storage device to the Ally directly or through a dock and then turn the Ally back on. The games should reappear and be playable.

My advice would be to install any game you intend to play only while the Ally is connected to a dock on external storage devices, otherwise install them internally. For instance, I only play Ace Combat when I'm connected to my TV so it made sense to install it on external storage that is always connected to my dock and TV.
External storage - What should I use?

• Cheap option - If you have an old laptop, PC or console that you no longer use, consider reusing the internal HDD or SSD from those devices in an enclosure. The form factor and connectors vary so make sure to buy the correct one. Spinning hard drives will be slower and depending on age, might not be the most reliable so keep that in mind.
• Using an M.2 SSD in a 10Gbps enclosure. I personally prefer this method since you can find M.2 SSDs frequently going on sale and it allows you to reuse the drive internally in a future PC build. If you don't want to go this route though, you can look into external SSDs from the likes of reliable brands like SanDisk, Samsung, Western Digital, etc. which offer comparable speeds to M.2 SSDs in an enclosure.
• USB/USB C flash drives (thumb drives) - I personally only recommend using flash drives to move data rather than for storing data but no harm if you want to install games on them.
• SD/Micro SD Cards - I wouldn't recommend buying one given the Ally's SD slot issues BUT if you already bought one or have any cards laying around, consider using an external card reader to plug into your dock/hub or to the Ally directly. Read/write speeds vary based on the card and reader but keep in mind that the Steam Deck runs games off its SD card slot (UHS I) which only has a max speed of 104 Megabytes per second.

What's the best keyboard, mouse, controller for the Ally?
This will entirely depend on you - There are three main ways to connect and each has its pros and cons. The way you personally see these pros and cons will help you pick.
Wired devices:
Pros - lowest latency in most cases, no need to recharge devices.
Cons - need a dock to connect more than one device and you'll need to manage cables.
Bluetooth:
Pros - cable free, no need for a dock to connect to your devices.
Cons - some latency, need recharging/batteries, connectivity issues are common.
Wireless dongles:
Pros - cable free, lower latency than Bluetooth and some devices have latency comparable to wired performance.
Cons - still need a dock if you require more than one dongle, dongles often use 2.4Ghz protocols and might have crazy interference with poorly shielded devices around them.
Some devices will offer more than one way to connect - I've found them ideal for the Ally.
My peripherals (not recommendations per se, rather my use case since all were bought for an existing work from home/gaming PC setup)
Keyboards:

• Keychron K4 (V2): 3 devices over Bluetooth or wired. The Bluetooth has always been slow to connect with any device so I use it wired with my gaming PC. Otherwise, excellent mechanical keyboard.
• MX Keys Mini: 3 devices total over Bluetooth or Logi Bolt dongle. Very little input latency with the dongle but I stick to Bluetooth personally for the convenience. Much smaller than the Keychron K4 too and quicker to connect on BT so my go to for the Ally.

Mice:

• Logi M720 Triathlon - 3 devices total over Bluetooth or Logi Unifying receiver - Works perfectly regardless of using Bluetooth or the dongle. My go to for the Ally on Bluetooth for the convenience.
• Surface Arc Mouse - 1 device, Bluetooth. Overpriced and uncomfortable to use for long periods of time but it folds flat so I use it if I'm travelling with my Ally.
• Logi G502 SE - 1 device, Wired. Often regarded as one of the best wired gaming mice. I've used it with my gaming PC for about 4 - 5 years and have no complaints.

Controller:

• XBox Controller - Wired, Bluetooth or XBox USB adapter - pretty standard. The AUX port on the controller works if you're using the XBox USB adapter which is great.
• 8BitDo SN30 Pro - Wired, bluetooth. I believe the newer version has hall effect sticks. Triggers aren't analogue though - they are buttons.
• GameSir T4 Cyclone Pro - Wired, Bluetooth or Dongle. Hall effect sticks and triggers, lots of customizability, haptic triggers (only on Bluetooth mode though), gyro support - my go to for the Ally.

Displays

HDMI vs DisplayPort
Like any data cable, HDMI and DisplayPort carry data but in the form of audio/video data. DisplayPort can carry more of this information based on the most common version available, ie. DisplayPort 1.4 which supports up to 32.4Gbps. The most common version for HDMI is 2.0 which supports up to 18Gbps.
DisplayPort is preferred for gaming PCs generally since they are better at communicating capabilities such as FreeSync capabilities, HDR capabilities, etc. which is why most monitors use DisplayPort, especially modern ones.

• For TVs - Use HDMI
• For Monitors - Use DisplayPort if your monitor and dock both support it

DP Alt mode and USB C monitors
The Ally along with numerous phones and laptops support video out over USB C using what is known as DisplayPort Alt Mode (DP Alt Mode). This only works over USB C to USB C.
Some newer monitors support this and can be driven by just one USB C to USB C cable. They might also provide USB PD power.
Portable monitors also use DP Alt Mode to work over USB C. For HDMI, they use a standard HDMI to mini HDM and you need to plug in power when using HDMI. I haven't come across a dock that supports DP-Alt mode on its USB C ports making it impossible to drive a portable monitor over USB C with a dock (HDMI obviously will still work.)
Thunderbolt hubs may have USB C ports which allow DP Alt mode but in my experience they downgrade these ports to only USB 3 (without DP ALT mode) when connected to something that isn't Thunderbolt.
I only have experience with the Arzopa A1C (1920x1080, 60hz, 15.6 inch display) but here is my takeaway:

• Decent picture quality - think iPad level screen, better than what I was expecting frankly and same resolution as the Ally so I don't even change my settings.
• It was not mentioned anywhere in the manual/online but this does 50W PD passthrough. I plug in my charger to the monitor and use a USB C cable from the Ally and everything else I use is wireless. Pretty portable.
• Has an aux port if you want to plug in headphones/speakers to it directly.

Common misconceptions for anyone used to console gaming or new to PC gaming
(Note: The section below is only relevant to native resolution output without any frame gen or upscaling such as RSR, FSR, AFMF, etc.)
I've seen numerous posts asking "will this __inch monitor work?". Your physical screen size does not matter. The pixel count does. A 24inch 4K 60hz monitor will be just as hard for the Ally to run as a 60inch 4k 60hz TV.
For the Ally at its native 1920x1080 resolution at 120 frames per second, the GPU has to render 2,073,600 pixels, 120 times per second.
When you connect your Ally to a 4K 60Hz TV and try to output at your TVs native resolution of 3840x2160, the Ally has to process 8,294,400 pixels, 60 times per second.
Essentially, you will never get the same performance hooked up to a 4K TV at native resolution compared to running a game at the Ally's native 1080p resolution.
The same goes if you're looking at 3440x1440, 2560x1440 or any resolution when considering a monitor. In terms of "will it work with the Ally?" The answer is always "yes it will work" since the Ally is a PC, but adjust your game settings or your resolution accordingly.
Simply put, the higher the resolution (and frame rate), the more pixels the GPU needs to render, the bigger the performance hit.
I can put together a detailed AMD Adrenaline and general game settings guide if there's interest.

Things to keep in mind while buying a dock or hub:

• Form factor - If you want to use it with other devices consider getting a different form factor than the standard dock shape (the classic Steam Deck and ROG Ally dock where it sits with a non removable right angled USB C connector).
• Will my case work with it? Personal example - I put a JSAUX case on my Ally and it doesn't fit in my dock anymore. The case has a stand though so still fully functional but just doesn't look as "clean".
• Should ideally reserve power for the USB ports to avoid random issues.
• Be capable of 65W passthrough after reserving power to the dock.
• USB ports speed - ideally you should aim for a dock or hub featuring 10Gbps ports to use the max bandwidth of the Ally's port. Most docks and hubs max out at 5 Gbps however which is also adequate.
• Monitor support - consider if you would prefer one with DisplayPort or HDMI - few will have both. If you're mostly connecting to TVs, HDMI will be fine. If you have a monitor with FreeSync, ideally look for a dock with DisplayPort.
• Multi monitor - If you want to connect to multiple displays, you need one with multiple outputs since you will not be able to daisy chain docks. Keep an eye out to avoid DisplayLink however. It is NOT the same as DisplayPort - it drives video over USB 3 (USB 2 even) but involves compression and some other proprietary work happening on the dock - absolute non issue for productivity/office work but just not for gaming with its own overhead.
• Consider one that has a removable cable to host - being able to use your own cable length can be great but just make sure it meets specifications (E marker, video and USB 3.0 at least for it to be usable with a dock and the Ally)
• LAN port speed - most cap out at 1 gigabit but you might come across some with 2.5 gigabit ports.
• Consider if having an SD card slot or M.2 enclosure built into the dock/hub is something that you need.

My thoughts on the docks/hubs I own
All of them work pretty identically and offer 4K HDR, 30W Turbo, etc. when connected to a 100W PD charger. The ports are all USB 3.0 so max speed of 5Gbps. I’ve mentioned anything of note

• Aceele - https://www.amazon.ca/Docking-Compatible-Ethernet-1000Mbps-Charging/dp/B0CF57SZY5 - Has an On/Off button on the front for HDMI which can be handy. Works with the Nintendo Switch too surprisingly.
  
• Dockteck - https://www.dockteck.com/collections/usb-c-hub/products/usb-c-hub-ethernet-hdmi-6-in-1-usb-c-to-4k-60hz - Some strain on the USB port due to the form factor.
  
• Lionwei - https://lionweitech.com/products/usb-c-docking-station-dual-4k-hdmi-8-in-1 - Separate USB 2.0 port, dual HDMI and a removable cable. The cable out of the box stopped working after a month but the hub itself works great.
  

Other handy accessories

• Jsaux 90 degree USB C to C adapter - they come in a 2 pack and can be used at the same time to form a 180 degree adapter - https://jsaux.com/products/90-degree-right-angle-usb-c-male-to-usb-c-female-adapter
• Pluggable USB C extension cable with multimeter - reliably extend any USB C cable and check power draw - https://plugable.com/en-ca/products/usbc-meter3-1mf

Thanks for reading and hope it helps!

LAPTOP QUESTIONNAIRE

• Total budget (in local currency) and country of purchase. Please do not use USD unless purchasing in the US: up to 1,000 USD
• Are you open to refurbs/used? No
• How would you prioritize form factor (ultrabook, 2-in-1, etc.), build quality, performance, and battery life? Build quality (assuming it translates to durability), performance, battery life, form factor (I'd prefer a standard laptop, NOT an ultrabook/2-in-1/tablet-esque thing)
• How important is weight and thinness to you? Thinness- 1/10. Weight 6/10
• Do you have a preferred screen size? If indifferent, put N/A. N/A
• Are you doing any CAD/video editing/photo editing/gaming? List which programs/games you desire to run. Gaming, mostly on Steam.
• If you're gaming, do you have certain games you want to play? At what settings and FPS do you want? Stardew Valley, Sims, Against The Storm, Zoo Tycoon 2. I usually put the fps and general settings at the lowest or second-lowest quality option.
• Any specific requirements such as good keyboard, reliable build quality, touch-screen, finger-print reader, optical drive or good input devices (keyboard/touchpad)? At least 1 USB port, ideally more. Durability is a must!
• Leave any finishing thoughts here that you may feel are necessary and beneficial to the discussion. I'm pretty clumsy and I've got 2 cats who tend to knock things over and sit on keyboards. My computer needs to be able to handle minor falls and drops, small spills, crumbs, and being sat on by a cat. In terms of performance, if I weren't writing this post, I would probably be playing Stardew Valley on the lowest graphics quality setting while a picture-in-picture plays an episode of Monk via Netflix. As long as a computer can comfortably handle that, I'll be happy with the level of performance!

Hello, I'm planning on retiring my almost 6 year old keyboard this week. After looking for keyboards all over, I found that the Akko 5075B Plus suits my taste and my needs (75% layout, knob feature, and has a wired option). The problem is, I have no idea if the keyboard has backlighting (correct me if im wrong, but backlighting to me means that the light from the keyboard lights up the keycaps, if the keycaps support it). I have a pretty dark room setup, and I rarely turn the lights on, so a backlit keyboard is pretty mandatory for me.
Can anyone send a picture of their Akko5075B Plus in a dark space with the RGB on so I have an idea on how it might look like? Would also greatly appreciate your thoughts or some pros and cons for the keyboard itself.
Thank you in advance.

Wow. So much has changed...
Long story short, I got my start in roleplaying back during the golden age of AOL and Yahoo (anyone else remember the Red Dragon Inn back in the late 90s and early 2000s?). Ah, those were the days, right? When the biggest worry was your dial-up connection, haha.
As I'm sure you'd all agree—finding long-term, advanced/literate writers is much more challenging these days. I have fond memories of when the process of coming up with a plot was an organic process; where you'd genuinely take the time to get to know the other person, build rapport, and allow a plot to form naturally.
That's what I'm hoping to find. With that said, I put a lot of effort into this post, so hopefully there's someone else out there who values the same things in a writing partner!
First of all, here's a bit about me as a person:

• I'm 30+, male, and I've written several novels and a bunch of articles, mostly in historical fiction and contemporary stories. Writing isn't just my job; it's pretty much a part of who I am.
• I'm always trying to learn something new, whether it's from books, documentaries, or just good old chatting. History and cultures fascinate me the most.
• When I'm not buried in books or work, I love to hike and take photos. There’s something about being out in nature that just clears my head.
• I love to read (especially non-fiction and historical fiction). I'm always down for swapping book recommendations, if you're also a reader!
• I love peanut butter (crunchy over smooth any day – fight me).
• On that note, if I'm being honest, coffee isn't just a drink for me; it's a ritual!
• I'm a big fan of the simple things in life. Give me a sunset, a good laugh, or a perfect slice of pizza, and I’m set.
• I love diving into those deep, meandering conversations that start with "what if" and end somewhere between "the meaning of life" and "why can’t we tickle ourselves?"
• Fun fact: I used to be able to recite all 50 states in alphabetical order — a party trick born out of a grade school challenge, haha.

Here's what I'm looking for in a writer:

• Writing Style - I'm looking for a partner who has a strong command of the English language. I'm talking about descriptive passages that paint clear pictures, dialogue that is crisp, concise, and not overly flowery. I prefer to write in the 3rd person, past tense. I prefer modern fiction and historical fiction stories.
• Communication - Life's unpredictable! What’s important is keeping each other in the loop about our schedules and any changes in the story or our approach. A quick heads-up can make a huge difference. It's all about being honest and direct with our feedback and thoughts.
• Long-Term Plots - I'm really looking for a writing partner who's in it for the long haul and is passionate about crafting intricate, plot-driven stories. For me, the joy of roleplaying lies in developing a story that evolves over time, with twists and turns that keep us both engaged and inspired.
• Sense of Humor - Writing together should be fun and relaxed, not just a serious crafting of narratives. It’s important to me that we can both throw in a bit of humor now and then, not only in our stories but in our interactions too.

And there you have it! If you're a detail-oriented, communicative, mature, and long-term story lover, you might just be the writing partner I'm looking for.
We should totally write such a good story that our keyboards will need a vacation after we're done, haha. I hope to hear from you!

Compromise
First Prev
“Alright, so uh...” Alex picked the last larva out of the bowl and ate it. A burst of umami and the unexpected taste of alcohol. Now that it had soaked up some of the spice from the broth, it was pretty good. Not particularly flavorful, but a better eating experience than he would expect from a grub. “Why did Eleya put two towns into a warship?”
“I do not know.” Carbon was less fussy about the variety of ingredients presented, eating without playing favorites. It was what she’d picked out when pressed to recommend something for him, and the speed of the devastation she was enacting on what had been a bowl nearly filled to the brim said that it was actually a personal favorite. “I had heard some suggesting converting retired Naval ships into housing, using a decommissioned carrier as a space station once it could be towed into a proper location. Swapping out launch bays for community towers is not a long bridge.”
“That seems...” It seemed desperate. But given what he’d seen, desperate was where they had been in the weeks following the disaster. Where they still were, even if things were improving.
Were things improving?
“Born out of desperation, yes.” She closed her eyes for a moment. “We did not have many colonies, we had not built so many stations. We only kept old ships for parts as another means of efficiency in our fleets. There had been hundreds of thousands in transit all over the Empire at the time. On their way home, on their way to relieve others who now no longer had a home to return to.”
“Yeah, that-” He shifted some of the shredded cabbage-potato around his bowl, trying to figure out what to say. The ‘that sucks’ he had stopped himself from blurting out felt offensively inadequate. “That does present a huge challenge. Did they end up bringing ships online for that?”
“Oh, we did everything. Any idea that was not completely untenable got the blue light. Repurposing ships, building sealed micro-arcologies on less habitable planets, mining out sufficiently large asteroids, asking the Confederation for help. I saw one proposal that suggested an inflatable space station. I thought it was a completely deranged idea.” She paused and picked up the bowl, slurping out some of the broth. “Then Humans arrive to bring aid, and do you know what the first structure they brought with them was?”
“An inflatable space station.” He saw that coming. Everyone - well, everyone who was sufficiently interested in space ships - would recognize the Redoubt class from that description alone. The very definition of form following function, each ship was little more than a central cylinder with hard points for a dozen habitat modules, and engines bolted to one end. Light, fast, cheap. Once deployed, you had a small space station that could be packed up when you were done. Old technology, sure, but they were everywhere, and the configuration options were extensive.
“Exactly. Forgive me, but I laughed. I knew the intent was to help, but having seen that proposal just weeks before...” She smiled and laughed despite having just apologized for such a thing.
“No I get it, it’s a goofy looking ship.” He could see the humor in the situation as well. Having gone from ‘this is too dangerous’ to ‘of course the Humans brought one’ was pretty funny. It put a smirk on his face and got him close to laughing along with her. “Probably used it as a command post until something heavier arrived. Kind of the primary use case for those in Search and Rescue, which is what I think the aid mission was first considered.”
“I was not involved with that aspect of recovery operations, but it stands to reason.” She set her utensils aside in a very specific way, sliding the bowl towards the end of the table. “I cannot tell you why they put all these people here. My first guess would be that it was a somewhat straightforward swap. The bays are very securely attached to the structure, but they are intended to be removed and replaced. It would be important that Eleya use her ship as a proof of concept.”
“Royals lead?” Seemed the logical jump.
Carbon nodded. “The Sword is recognized as her flagship. It is named after her. The Stronghold is based heavily on the Imperial Palace in Ama’o - may it rest. Taking in civilians, thousands of them, is hard proof that she is not simply hiding in here. Having the senate on board also brings with it the need for support staff, creating a symbiotic relationship. It is... a good compromise.”
“Okay, wait. How is The Sword of the Morning Light named after Eleya?” That legitimately confused him. “All I know is the -ya suffix is feminine.”
“Another name mauled by your automatic translation, though this time it is a portion of the Empress’ full formal titles.” She gave him a pointed look, a little smirk hiding on the side of her muzzle. “The strictest translation would be ‘the sword that is used to cut back the night,’ but that is even worse. If I were doing translations and feeling poetic, perhaps I would call it Dawnsword. It would convey the meaning of the name well enough, I think, without being verbose.”
“Then why do you call it the Sword like we do?” He figured just using the actual Tsla name would be easy enough if Dawnsword was a better translation.
“When in Rome.” Carbon snickered. “The Confederate systems I was working with before leaving for the Haultain were not set up to handle Tsla, and none of the Humans I spoke to recognized the name when I said it, so it became a force of habit.”
“Ah, that’d do it.” He’d ask about the actual name another time - it being one of Eleya’s titles felt like a natural transition to learning the rest of her titles, and he didn’t give a single damn about doing that right now.
“Alright, Eleya needs places to put people, and a place to put a temporary capital until the new location can be properly sorted. Two birds with one stone, I suppose. Wouldn’t staying at Schoen be more of the... leader thing to do?”
“If she were to stay here beyond the end of this endeavor, perhaps so. For now, having this ship - and its civilians - as a base of operations, in what even we consider to be one of the most secure solar systems, is reasonable. Most governing at that level has been done remotely since before the disaster, so it doesn’t impede anything.” She paused to sip her tea. “No one needs a senator to be on site anyway. Their presence traditionally just interferes with real work.”
That did get a laugh out of Alex. “The more things change.”
“The more they stay the same, yes?” She said with a grin.
“It is so. All right, mystery of the Dawnsword’s surprise towns is put to rest.” He stopped talking as Haraya came out of the woodwork to remove Carbon’s dishes, bustling away with even less stiffness than before. Why did he feel like he was forgetting something? “Heck. Did... Did anyone tell you we have an appointment to see a designer about our uh, our insignia?”
“No, but my communicator has been going off like I am being told something like that.” Carbon laughed and leaned back into her chair, fishing the slim black device from her jacket, the screen coming on.
Alex was not intentionally staring at his wife’s abdomen as he pushed the bowl away and set his chopsticks out like she had done. “Zenshen said it was this afternoon.”
“Mmh, afternoon. Another curious translation.” She teased him gently, flicking items off her screen one by one. “Neya says it is with Aetena Lyshen, at three. He has stated that his schedule is open today, and we may come in earlier if we so desire. Oh. How unexpected.”
Three o'clock, Tsla’o time, was probably like a solid five or six hours away. Plenty of time to have a deeply personal conversation about what Neya had told him. Or, perhaps, just go talk to the guy sooner. It wasn’t like he was putting it off... but he was putting it off for now. “What’s up?”
“Neya contacted the Colonel to make sure that Zenshen was attached to your detail properly - it turns out she was. You are both already on the artifact project, so it was just a slight shift of duties. The Empress went through appropriate channels, and Lehnan agrees with her decision.” She glanced up at him as she processed that. “I did not expect it to be so proper.”
“She is trying to turn over a new leaf, at least as far as you are concerned. Ensuring I have the help to not fuck things up, and doing it properly, could be a part of that.” He managed to make it sound like a statement, even though it was very much a question. Did his insistence that Eleya needed to start following through on her words actually sink in?
“It is possible. She will need to do more than fill out a little paperwork to prove herself.”
“Yeah, obviously. It’s just that you seemed surprised, so I was left with the impression that was unusual.”
Carbon stared down at the phone in her hands. “I do not know. From what I have seen, she will normally adhere to formal channels. But in the past, when it has come to dealings with me, she has not. Relied on her word being law to make things happen.”
Like making it legal to marry a Human. Changed who knows how much legal history with a stroke of a pen, to unfold some new machinations. “Zenshen made it sound like she was mostly there to act as a buffer between me and the military, keep me from offending anyone. Which strikes me as Eleya looking after her investment.”
“That is a reasonable assumption. I fear she has more intent sunk into you than we can see, so...” She also stopped talking when their waitress returned for Alex’s dishes, giving the young woman a warm smile. “Perhaps it really is.”
Alex, being privy to at least one plan that Carbon was unaware of, instantly did not want to comment on that. “Like you say, it lies with her to prove... herself good.”
“So it does.” Carbon smiled at his butchering of their turn of phrase before glancing down at her communicator again. “All right. Do you have any further plans for this morning?”
“Not a one. Want to push up the meeting with Lyshen? For that matter, do we have any plans tonight?”
“I do want to get that done. Designers can be particular. Best to get started sooner, and also have a meal that we can excuse ourselves for without appearing rude.” She smirked, displaying a little bit of the knowledge she had accumulated growing up in an elevated class, and started tapping away at the screen with both thumbs. “As for this evening, nothing that Neya has made me aware of.”
“Sounds good to me.” Left the evening open to actually have a sit down with Neya, perfect. “Oh shit, that reminds me. Neya wants us to bring her breakfast.”
“Does she. Very upset about not being able to come along?” The tone she had said that Carbon was familiar with Neya pretending to be put out by that, as did the barely hidden smile and tiny little snort of a laugh.
“Absolutely heartbroken.” He played along. “I had to promise that we’d get her something this morning and that you’d make breakfast again tomorrow.”
“Mh. We will see who is making breakfast when the time comes, but I will have something sent to her and we will proceed to our appointment.” She flipped through the applications on her phone and started typing something else out. “There.”
Carbon slipped the slim black screen back into her jacket and stood, stretching a little bit before walking over to the end of the bar, Haraya hustling out to meet them with a small device like the one Carbon had used to pay in the other little restaurant. She set her palm down on it, it processed for a moment and played a happy little tune.
“Thank you both, it was an honor to serve you.” Haraya bowed again now that the transaction was done.
“You did well, thank you.” Carbon said it in Tsla as she returned the bow, glancing over at Alex to ensure he was doing the same thing.
“Sa meha.” He was. Paying attention to what Carbon was doing was getting him pretty far, as was having memorized how to say ‘thank you’ in Tsla.
They turned to leave, but Haraya spoke again before they could take a step. Quiet, and very timid. “May I ask you a question?”
Carbon didn’t even think about it as she looked back. “Of course.”
“I was mostly asking the prince, I am very sorry.” She looked just this side of terrified to be correcting a Royal.
“Oh yeah, shoot.” Alex caught himself speaking in English way too late. He pursed his lips and inhaled, just barely preventing himself from rolling his eyes at that little faux pas. Based on what Carbon had said about Haraya getting her information about how nobles work from movies, she would have interpreted that as aimed at her. He queued up a very quick reply. “Please do.”
“After you left, last night.” She glanced over at the bartender, who was not paying them any attention at all. “Adana kept saying a strange word, I assume it to be Human - untranslatable.”
The irony of the translator not being able to digest something in English was not lost on Alex. What had he said to the kid?
Carbon, meanwhile, thought it was hilarious. “It is actually two words, a phrase. Oh, busted. In this case I believe it means that he got caught doing something he should not have been doing.” She laughed, looking up at Alex with a grin.
Haraya’s relief at how this turned out was immediately visible. She was still tense, but didn’t look like she might have just caught an execution. “Adana likes to play with the door controls. They beep and flash, and he can activate the viewscreen... And open the door. That is what he was doing when he found the prince in the hallway, when he should have been in bed. It is not an offensive term?”
“Et.” Alex shook his head no. Score another point for knowing the basics.
“It is as he says. A harmless statement.” Carbon picked up the slack from Alex trying not to advertise that he spoke their language yet. She looked over to him again. “Perhaps used to tease a friend when they get caught out?”
He nodded as sagely as he could, a smirk barely suppressed as he caught that shade she was directing at him.
“His mother will be so glad. She has been concerned it was some kind of swearing, or something worse. I told her that the prince had been kind in my interaction with him, but she was-” Haraya exhaled sharply, wide brown eyes darting between them with a hint of that fear creeping back in. “She was afraid despite that.”
“Ah. If that does not settle her, please get in contact with me.” She pulled her communicator out, swiping along the screen for a moment and holding it out to the young woman. “We can arrange a meeting to clear anything up.”
She looked down at a swirling orange circle on Carbon’s phone, “I am not allowed to carry my- May I get it?”
“Of course.” Carbon smiled.
Alex lowered his voice as Haraya hustled away. “You sure giving her your number is a good idea?”
“No. But she is earnest and correct in her assessment of you.” She shook her head, her words quiet and sharp. “That boy learned a simple phrase, and his mother thinks it is a curse? I know why she did. I have met my own people. I think a gentle nudge may be in order to prevent it from being passed along.”
“When you say gentle nudge...”
She held a hand out to ease his concern. “I was thinking tea.”
Haraya returned, phone in hand and followed by an older, grumpy looking male dressed in the same natural fiber clothes save for a vibrant red scarf around his neck, voice raised as he tried to keep up with the excited teen. “You may not use your-”
“Akai.” Alex gave what he assumed was a manager a needlessly cheery greeting with a little wave of his fingers. Oh man, he had loved being a shit to managers when he was younger, particularly if they were on a power trip. The opportunity hadn’t presented itself recently, and the urge to abuse the power that he allegedly had now was so tempting.
“Floor boss!” Carbon was a step ahead of him, greeting the gray male in their own language loud enough to draw his attention away from their waitress. “What is it that I may not use?”
Alex’s translator sat unused for several seconds as the sounds that guy made never made it past shocked guttural noises, the realization of who he’d been yelling in the general direction of sinking in. Haraya was too busy getting Carbon’s contact information to notice, or might have just been ignoring this exchange as hard as the bartender was.
“It was- My words- Did not for you.” He held up his hands and backed away.
“Ah, a simple misunderstanding?” Carbon offered him as the phone dinged complete, and she slipped it back into her jacket.
“Yes, of course.” Couldn’t get out of there fast enough.
Haraya bowed again as she hid her communicator, the same black rectangle that Carbon and Alex appeared to have. “Thank you. I hope I will not have to contact you, but that you have offered...”
“The prince has shown me who he is, what is in his heart... It will not do to have anyone doubting his character.” Carbon smiled and returned the bow.
Alex followed suit.
The fear in her eyes was gone, and if anything there was a little bit of admiration in there now as she thanked them again, quietly, before running off to whatever her next duty was.
They left the same way they had come in, through the main dining area. The crowd had shifted, some groups gone, new ones in their place. Conversations to fill boredom, meals he didn’t recognize being consumed at every pace conceivable. Once again, he was pretty sure this was his kind of joint.
It only took the gentlest of questions to get Carbon talking about what she’d been doing all morning as they walked back to the tram, riding all the way to the stop closest to the bow this time. Alex was only slightly familiar about what she was talking about - had something to do with preventative maintenance checks on one of the shuttles. It was interesting to find out they had developed a very similar system to what he was used to, checking in on functionality after so many hours of use.
He didn’t understand the majority of what she was describing, but he enjoyed listening to her talk about things with such enthusiasm.
Lyshen’s office was easily the furthest forward he had been on the ship yet. Took the elevator up to deck 20 and then just walked towards the bow for another five minutes. He must have been as close as one could get to the plate armor and whatever buffer they put between it and the habitable areas. It seemed almost entirely unused - he was sure some of the bulkheads had dust on them.
For Alex, there were two potential reasons for this. Aetena Lyshen preferred the solitude of the area. It was actually very quiet, even compared to the hall in front of their cabin. Or, he had pissed someone off and gotten banished to a spot as far away as possible.
Whichever option, Lyshen had put some work into his workspace. The door was ringed in a delicate gold filigree, a lacework of glittering geometric shapes with his name and title contained in a small banner above the door. They were meeting with a Royal Artisan.
Carbon tapped the door controls and it slides open almost instantly. The young woman with light red fur inside is dressed nearly as formally as they had been last night, though in muted grays. She bows. Not too deep. “Welcome, the Chief Artisan is preparing for your arrival. It should be just a few minutes.”
Chief Artisan. Well. Alex shot Carbon a sidelong glance as the receptionist turned and they followed her through a waiting room. A simple rectangular area, with a few upholstered chairs and benches scattered around. It was the most Human looking area he’d been in so far.
The far wall caught his eye as they walked through, windows looking into a workshop. Alex walked over, the large floor beyond housing a dozen or so Tsla’o, all seated at desks or workbenches, engrossed in whatever they were working on. Almost to the last, they were using hand tools.
Alex had never really seen craftsmen up close, doing their thing. In movies, or videos, sure. But not right here a few steps away, carefully engraving some sort of... Breastplate? Cuirass? Big chunk of metal that looked like it went over the chest.
“I believe that is yours.” Carbon stepped up next to him, a smirk in her voice as she leaned against his shoulder. “To go with your gauntlets, and the rest of the armor that is no doubt being fabricated.”
“What makes you say that?” How could she pick that up from looking at it for, what, three or four seconds?
“Consider the size.” She nodded at it, the artist working on it laying out a star near the shoulder. “Who else would wear such a piece?”
“Huh.” Compared to the guy who was doing the work, it wasn’t exactly massive, but he would need a lot of padding to wear that. This raised a few questions for him about the ethics of receiving such gifts. But he wasn’t a politician... Not as far as the Confederation was concerned. “I guess it is.”
They stood in silence and watched work progress. A woman in the back was carving something, perhaps a chair leg. One guy in the corner making hinges with an induction forge and a tiny, specialized anvil.
Before long, the secretary approached them again. “The Chief Artisan is prepared for you now. Please.” She gestured to the only door that went somewhere other than the corridor.
The Chief Artisan was sitting behind his desk, wearing an outfit similar to his receptionist, pale green eyes switching back and forth between two screens. The primary one was built into the desk, and had been jury rigged to a Human made laptop that sat on top of it, a rat’s nest of cables connecting the two. There was a holoprojector built into the desk, a jumble of images floating over it. He waved them in and gestured to the chairs across from him, “Please, sit.”
Alex was quick to oblige, glad to be just some guy for the moment. Carbon didn’t seem to mind either, taking the seat beside him without a word. Aetena was the first green Tsla’o Alex had seen, sort of a dark forest green with jade stripes visible on his neck. Apparently a bit of a rarity given how often he saw the other colors on the ship.
“I am sorry to keep you waiting, the connection to your Solanet has gone down. Despite that, I believe I have enough saved locally to begin the process.” Lyshen trailed off, lost between the two displays before closing a dozen images from the holo. He picked a pen up from the table and arranged the remaining pictures neatly, four different coats of arms that claimed to belong to a Sorenson. The red enamel barrel blurred into an arc as he spun the pen in his fingers, voice picking up speed as he locked on to Alex. “There is a large amount of heraldry available for your surname, do you know which coat of arms belongs to your particular family?”
There was a deer, a deer head, a rearing horse and a weird shaped star. Maybe it was a flower, or a drip of paint. They were all surrounded by leaves and the occasional knight’s helmet. Alex wasn’t sure what any of it meant and up until now, he’d never even thought about it. Knights and damsels in distress had never really been his thing. “Uh, can’t say that I do, no.”
“Mmh. What geographic region does your lineage trace back to? I could find no significant references to the Berkley Soresons on your Solanet.” He leaned back and the pen continued to trace crimson circles in his hand.
“The name comes from Europe, but the last couple of generations have lived in California, and America before that for who knows how long... We’re from a little bit of everywhere.” It was an inside joke with the family, which had ties back into nearly every corner of the globe at this point. Now they had a relative from somewhere way off the globe as well.
That puzzled Aetena, ears flicking as he turned back to the Human screen and picked over the keyboard slowly. He didn’t like what he found. “All of these originate from the continent of Europe. Do you happen to know which country?”
“No, I’m not sure. Had an uncle do the family tree thing once, but between the civil wars and The Collapse, the lineage got spotty about a hundred years ago.” Alex wasn’t really into the whole ancestry thing once you got outside of living relatives. It was novel, sure, but right now all he really wanted to do was ask if he could borrow that Solanet access when it came back up. The rest of the ship had access to the Confed’s milnet, which tightly restricted what he could be sending across it - he just wanted to download a couple of movies and some music, but milnet barely overlapped with the wider public network.
Lyshen set his hand down and the pen switched back and forth like a metronome, clicking on his desk at the end of each arc. He closed his eyes for a moment, jaw working silently before he closed the images and started pulling up new ones. “Perhaps we should move on to other aspects of this endeavor. As I have been told that you wish to integrate Tsla’o and Human cultures in your marriage, I had intended to blend the existing Tshalan sigil with some of the Sorenson family heraldry. I thought it would be best to use the gear-star surround from the Princess’ family crest as a base to build from. Something that is immediately familiar to Tsla’o, to put the viewer at ease. As it is indicative of starship commands, exploration and the outer colonies, it will solidly represent both of you and the way you met.”
Alex raised an eyebrow at Carbon, “sound reasonable?” He had no idea if it was or not, but it did sound like it. Also, if they were serious about integrating parts of Tsla’o and Human cultures, they needed to actually get on that.
“Yes. I agree, that would be a good place to start.”
“Thank you.” He busied himself bringing up a few more pictures, rough combinations of the ten point gear-star and the various items from the Sorenson crests, bits of decoration and detail work.
The door chimed behind them and Lyshen stopped with a sharp glare. He eyed the clock and sighed, a whispered curse under his breath before he set his pen down and straightened up. “Come.”
There was a soldier partially concealed behind the door, the rank plate on his uniform loaded with details, not that Alex could read them yet. He swept the room with a rifle as he entered, the short barrel ending up pointed just a hair under Alex’s sternum. A pair of soldiers took up positions on either side of the door and covered him, a few more lined up in the waiting room.
When he spoke, it was crisp and authoritative. “Please back away from the Human.”
 
First Prev
*****
Never a dull moment on that ship.
Art pile: Carbon reference sheet. Art by Tyo_Dem

In case anyone else is curious, I downloaded the Windows application, figured out how it fetches updated firmware for Aurga Viewer, downloaded it and did some analysis.
Firstly, download the Windows 8+ app from https://www.aurga.com/pages/download.
If you don't want to install it, you can extract the installer using 7Zip:
7z e AURGAViewer_Installer_x64_v1.1.0.2.exe
Searching for strings in AURGAViewer.exe gives /fw/latest.img. Then you can fetch that from https://www.aurga.com/fw/latest.img, which is a redirect to https://cdn.shopify.com/s/files/1/0627/4659/1401/files/240427225356.img
Running binwalk on that shows:
binwalk 240427225356.img DECIMAL HEXADECIMAL DESCRIPTION -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- 49152 0xC000 JFFS2 filesystem, little endian 212992 0x34000 Flattened device tree, size: 14249 bytes, version: 17 229376 0x38000 Linux kernel ARM boot executable zImage (little-endian) 254904 0x3E3B8 xz compressed data 255325 0x3E55D xz compressed data 2994176 0x2DB000 Squashfs filesystem, little endian, version 4.0, compression:xz, size: 5222500 bytes, 670 inodes, blocksize: 1048576 bytes, created: 2024-04-27 14:53:58
You can then slice and dice the JFFS2 and squashfs filesystems from the image:
dd if=240427225356.img bs=1 skip=49152 count=$((0x34000-0xc000)) of=jffs dd if=240427225356.img bs=1 skip=$((0x2DB000)) of=squashfs
The squashfs image is easy to examine, just mount it using the loopback:
sudo mount -o loop squashfs /mnt
The JFFS2 filesystem is a little more complicated to unpack, because it expects to be on a MTD device. Fortunately, there is a Python program that will unpack them for you - Jefferson:
pip3 install jefferson
jefferson jffs
writing S_ISDIR etc writing S_ISDIR work writing S_ISDIR etc/config writing S_ISREG etc/config/dnsmasq1.conf writing S_ISREG etc/config/dnsmasq2.conf writing S_ISREG etc/config/dnsmasq_p2p.conf writing S_ISREG etc/config/nvram_ap6256.txt writing S_ISREG etc/config/start_p2p writing S_ISREG etc/config/start_wifi writing S_ISREG etc/config/wpa_supplicant.conf
And there you go. I still need to do a bit more digging, but it appears that the root account has no password (shadow entry is empty), and there should be a serial console active if you crack it open and find the right pins to connect to.
/usbin/setup_gadgets has code for setting up the USB keyboard, mouse and touch interfaces, but I have not yet found the code that actually calls that binary. I have found details of the WiFi card (SDIO BCM4345C5) and the HDMI-CSI2 bridge (Toshiba tc35874x). I have not found out how the firmware can be updated over USB, perhaps there are more apps that set up the UDC. I guess it could be done over bluetooth (i.e. reconfigure the USB device if it sees a poke). I suppose digging further into the Windows executable would provide that detail.
If anyone who actually has an Aurga Viewer would like to crack it open and post high res pictures of the board, that would be amazing.
EDIT: for those that wonder why this might be useful, I have seen folks looking for a way to include the video stream in OBS. This could allow you to add an RTSP stream server to the firmware, that OBS could consume. Have the AURGA present a USB Mass Storage device to the target, backed by a Network Block Device (nbd), which could be used to boot a new/unresponsive device. Replace the vendor's remote desktop interface with VNC. Or possibly make the hardware do other interesting things, limited only by your imagination (and the capabilities of the hardware, of course!)

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An old desk phone stands on a marble pedestal, lost in the middle of a dark room. A perfectly circular, dark room, dug deeply into the bedrock of a city far, far away from anywhere important to our story. Silence reigns in this room… until the phone starts ringing. It rings for such a long time, uninterrupted, insistent, inconsiderate even! It rings for longer than any person should be willing to wait, longer than anyone would stomach. A sane person would simply give up and call later… But this caller? No. This caller refuses to be ignored.

So it rings, even while a set of long, skeletal fingers stretch from the shadows. Knuckles and joints crack as the hand does a few stretches, taking the time to caress the nasty, annoying phone for a moment without picking it up.

“Oh bother… I wonder who that could be…?”

The voice was raspy, nasal and grumbly. It loved to complain, and it had done so for so long that even when it wasn’t complaining, it sounded annoyed and legitimately upset. The hand stopped uncomfortably caressing the vibrating phone for a moment to grab the caller ID. Its dim green light was perfectly reflected on the hand’s glossy white skin.

“Ah… G again, huh…?”

Understanding that it couldn’t simply ignore this annoying sound forever, and that the call may actually mean something important (and lucrative), the hand returned to the phone and finally picked it up.

“You interrupted my nap.” The raspy voice said.

“You shouldn’t sleep for so long. It’s bad for you.” The young boy’s voice answered, legitimately concerned.

“Oh yeah? You suggest I should go out instead? Take a shower, get dolled up, and then bask under the full concentrated power of the Sun?”

“Come on now, don’t be like that. You know what I mean.”

“You better mean something important, to interrupt my nap like that, you old bastard.”

The white, skeletal hand made a few sassy snaps, loud enough to be heard over the phone.

“Alright alright, I am done beating around the bush. Sorry.” The calm, youthful voice sighed over the phone, these conversations were enough to exhaust him.

“Yeah that’s right, bitch.”

“It’s just… we have a new visitor in The Forum, and I’d like you to give us a little check on who or what.”

“What, are you afraid of a few gremlins and jinxes finally finding their way over your precious forum? Or is this a troll hunt?” The raspy voice finally got up from the sea of cushions and empty bags, and with another snapping of his fingers, he activated the widescreens that covered every single spot of his walls with the exception of a single metal door. The lights were warm and orangey, designed to avoid straining the eyes.

The room had returned to life! It was an absolute disaster, pillows and empty bloodbags laid scattered around without a care, and the whole place had a disgusting aura of filth to it.

Blanco was fully illuminated now. His figure was enough to cause nightmares to a few children: a tall, lanky and wide-shouldered man, skin white as marble and cracked as an old dry cookie, full of darker spots and nasty scars. His arms were long enough for the knuckles of his free hand to feel the floor.

But what was worst of all was his face: a perfectly round, perfectly smooth face, lacking hair, eyes and ears, only showing a few dark veins underneath the glossy skin. His mouth was another crack in this otherwise flawless surface, showing myriads of sharp, black teeth.

“Now let’s see…”

The screens all showed the same picture of Blanco’s face, a toothy smile covering his visage. With a mere gesture of his hand, a wireless keyboard came floating to the creature, big and wide enough for his disproportionate hands. The keys were shining in beautiful purple, producing a hypnotic wave effect across its length.

After cracking his knuckles, the creature began typing and accessing one of the many screens, the one permanently connected to Dejima 08. Blanco stretched again, sitting in the air and crossing his lanky legs as he checked the analytics.

“Yep. You have a new visitor, and they immediately registered. ‘Tav’, huh? Too generic.”

“Can you give me a bit more info on them?” The young man asked.

“Are you officially commissioning me now? Because this is as far as our friendship will get me without pay.” Blanco smirked, a purple tongue licking his nonexistent lips.

“...I’ll have the payment sent immediately. I want an hour of your time.” There was hesitation on the old voice. He clearly didn’t feel good about this, but one could never be too careful.

“Oh boy!” The creature clapped rapidly, and before he knew it, there was a notification on another screen. Ka-ching! The sound of money going straight into his PayBud. “Ohhh Giovanni, you gotta be my best client, really. Most people whine about my prices.”

“You probably tell that to every client you get.” G chuckled, taking it like a good sport.

“I do!” Blanco admitted with a bright, big smile, and then slid over to face a cluster of 9 screens on a wall. “This will take just a moment…”

The screens would go to black at the same time, before glyphs of many sizes, shapes and forms began flooding them, spiraling to the center of each display. The lines that draw them were a pale, regular blue at first, before suddenly taking a bright octarine hue. Blanco’s fingers tapped wildly on his keyboard, while his mind focused on the seeking runes that took him straight into the second layer of reality.

Mages didn’t usually deal with the technology of the Sleepers. Not because they felt it was below them (even though many of them would certainly take that posture to protect their fragile egos), but for protection: Technology born out of the mundane rules of the natural world did not meddle well with magic, and even in a world that had lost 95% of its magical population, infusing magic on mechanisms and electrical circuits was a great way to attract pesky fairies.

Blanco, however, was not just any mage. After several lifetimes of work and study, he had mastered the art of using magic in conjunction with the power of the Internet itself, turning him into one of the most prolific hackers and trackers in the whole world of Jericho. Perhaps even the single most requested man in the business!

He, of course, didn’t accept just any job. He only took the work that interested him, that made him think outside of the box, or that paid particularly well. But Giovanni here? The old man was an exception. Giovanni had been good to Blanco in a time where no one else would even look at the creature, and as much as he hated showing gratitude for things, Blanco was a man of honor… to a certain extent.

He at least appreciated a friend when he had one.

The screens began changing one by one as the creature found information. A national registry page, a Vapor gaming profile, a VirtualZone profile…

“This one’s not dumb. They keep good opsec, rarely sharing personal information. That’s good.” Blanco smirked. “Sadly, that’s not enough to stop me.”

Soon a picture appeared on one of the screens, the face of a smiling, bright child. An honor student with many dreams and possibilities in the future.

Then, on a fifth screen, a grainy image stolen from an unsecured webcam. A burnout stares at the screen with dead eyes and no spirit in their posture.

“Oof. Growth has been rough on this one.” The creature commented sarcastically, taking a moment to stop and crack their knuckles. “This is your guy, G. Real name: Santino Belnades. A random kid from Wohl.”

“Wohl?” Giovanni was beyond surprised.

“Yeah, you know. The country in the north. The one that looks like a pen–”

“Yes yes, I know Wohl. I just… didn’t expect to hear from the mages of the north. It’s been a while.”

“Ah, no this is not a born mage. This is a sleeper.”

“Impossible. They passed the Le Guin test and made an account in the Forum.”

“Alright then, a Bastard Mage for sure.”

There was a moment of silence as Giovanni meditated on the implications of this… only broken by the camera feed’s catching Tav screaming.

“Spy Medic, Spy Medic! Kill that motherfucker!”

“Ahhh… TS2. I really should get back into it one of these days.” Blanco commented with a bit of nostalgia. “So? What do we do? You still have some minutes of my time, G! I could scare them real good if you want them out of the forum.”

“No, that won’t be necessary. It’s just another mage in the world…they’ll probably benefit from learning a few things.”

“Eighty Two will get really, really mad if she finds out you allowed a Bastard Mage in her precious project.”

“Mustafá will get angry no matter what, but she rarely shows up in the Forum anyways.”

“Hah. Old bastard.”

There was another moment of silence, interrupted by the heavy clicking and intense gaming from the webcam feed.

“... So.” Blanco finally spoke up. “What now?”

“I’ll just say hi to them and let them be.” Giovanni said, probably smiling. “They are probably scared and insecure, after all.”

“Are you serious? I mean, this is a Bastard Mage. They shouldn’t have had the means to find your forum and yet, here they are. Don’t you find that suspicious in the slightest?”

“Hmmmn…”

“And this is happening just as we had that Temporal Displacement alarm, remember? I really doubt that’s a coincidence.”

“Keep an eye on them, please. Just to make sure they don’t get in trouble.”

“That will cost you extra.”

“Fiiiine.”

“Yes, excellent.” Blanco rubbed his hands together, before stretching lazily and tapping a few keys. He would start a file on this ‘Tav’ person now.

“Whatever the case may be… I really hope this doesn’t get them in trouble. I mean, more trouble than they already are in.” With a heavy sigh, Giovanni finally decided that enough was enough. “I’ll leave you to it. I trust that you’ll inform me if anything happens.”

“If I can trust you to keep paying me, of course!”

Giovanni sighed again before finally hanging up. Blanco, now with something to do with his day, stretched in his invisible chair and looked at the webcam feed for another moment before turning it off. If he kept it on for too long, he risked Tav realizing that the webcam was suddenly on, and he really didn’t want to scare them.

For now, at least.

He wanted to pretend he wasn’t interested, and that this would just be another boring, fruitless job with nothing to show for it but a few factoids about a random mage’s life… but he had a strange feeling about this one. There was an odd trinkle in the dead, depressed eyes of that bastard.

“Let’s hope you know what you’re doing, kid…”

Good evening. I just got home from a fun day of a baby shower that turned into a cook out. Its been an action packed week with a rewarding weekend that I will NEVER forget, even if the lights only visited me one night but no graphs or imagery tonight. I have pondered the events of the last 10 days and as I look back, it was a dream come true. Not just seeing something I have always wanted to see in the AB, but meeting all of you, and sharing this experience. Building the foundations of a community here on Reddit where we can share, learn, discuss, and explore free from any restraint or encumbrance in an inclusive setting where there are only two rules. Respect one other along the lines of the golden rule, treat as you would like to be treated and no politics. Remember the sun gives light and warmth to all regardless of what party you are with or what church or place of worship you attend or dont attend. I will emulate that and I encourage you to as well.
With all of that being said, I took my own advice today, and I went about my day, kept my eyes on things, and had zero expectations. I wanted to see the lights tonight and I was with a group of people who would have loved to as well. It has not happened as of yet, and to be clear, while the chances are shrinking, but they are not dead, at least for those more northerly. I personally will not be staying up tonight, but would it surprise me if we had a brief stretch of more intense activity than we are seeing? Not at all, but at the same time we have to go back to the night of the X5.98 before any models had run. If you recall, I was concerned about the NW trajectory of the last CME owing to its location and LASCO coronagraphs, but I was swayed by the SWPC going G5 in their warning and the possibility of cannibalization. Gosh I wanted it to be true, but I just could not commit. I thought it would be more intense than it is but I never wavered in my uncertainty. Uncertainty can be a cop out, but truly I was uncertain and I tried to manage all of your expectations appropriately.
A spike or two cannot be ruled out and the Kp index forecast is elevated for the next several days, but I think we can all safely conclude that another Friday night is not in the cards here in the lower 48. Unfortunately alot of folks in Canada who would still be able to get a glimpse or two are dealing with wildfire smoke which not only makes viewing difficult, but makes breathing difficult. Here is hoping that gets better soon. If you decide to be a die hard tonight against the odds, I wish you luck, and you are not exactly crazy for trying, but the odds are long at this point. If there was a big CME in the pipe moving faster than the others, it would have likely been here by now but some fluctuation is expected at lower or even moderate levels for the next few days. All in all, I got some things right this week and I got some things wrong. The one thing I did not get wrong, is this stuff is difficult to predict, and the models struggled with timing and severity. I was impressed with DONKI Scorecard though, I think it is a heck of a tool. I love how it takes all of the models into consideration and will be consulting it always going forward. It was definitely the most accurate of the model systems in my view, but you may feel differently. This can get subjective and with so many readings from so many places, locations, levels, etc, its a data mess right now and I see the high end numbers quoted quite a bit but its important we wait for all of the data to be parsed and analyzed. I expect some revisions and we will see what it looks like when the smoke clears on this storm.
As far as any and all tools go, I will never hold them back from you. I am not here to gatekeep or play man behind the curtain. I have no degrees. I am a self proclaimed armchair analyst and while I take the moniker seriously and credibility is important to me as silly as that may sound, I want you to know that I am very much a student still. Several years ago, I was right where most of you are. My appetite for knowledge of all things has always been voracious and I have had various passions at times, but never one that I just had to share with somebody, anybody. My 9 year old loves this stuff, and I am working on my wife, but YOU are who shared my passion the most, and that is what it is all about to me. Sharing. Learning. Teaching. Growing. I feel good that I do not have to make any significant retractions or revisions and that I gave you the best advice I could and I am happy with the result. And you know what, even though there were no aurora overhead tonight at the get together I was at, it still ended up with the group marveling at the stars and objects in our sky, as we went through and identified each one and its characteristics. Saw a shooting star and starlink go by. My sister who lives in Tampa called me very excited and said that she saw a meteor overhead in the area around 830 EST. Like everyone, she is awed by beautiful and rare occurences, but is not what I would consider an enthusiast, but boy there sure was enthusiam in her voice when she called. I just smiled to myself, and thought about how grateful I am for how this all played out and I think we have set a pretty high bar here, but I will try my best to meet it for you each and every time. This sub is called SolarMax and that is our primary focus, but as my day 1's are aware, we get into alot more than just the sun. There are more spectacles yet to come this year, dare I say the chances exist for something just as special and just as rare, maybe more. Topic for another day.
I have just a few more housekeeping items to discuss and then I will be signing off for the night. I have alot to catch up on this week in my real job. I neglected it this past week with no regrets, but its time to pay the piper and get caught up. I do my best work back against the wall anyway and am no stranger to pressure. As a result though, I may not be as engaged or engaging, but I will keep you apprised. Whatever I know, you will know.
SHOULD I BE WORRIED?
No. Not just about the storm we had, but the next storm, or the mag field. I need to make something abundantly and unequivocally clear. We are in NO immediate danger, nor are we in danger in the forseeable future. We have new sunspots coming around and the growth curve on them may be ramping up. Again, I am excited. Its solar maximum. This is a natural process. Could a CE happen? NOAA just told you this weekend there is a 2 to 10% chance in the decades to come. You dont need me to tell you that its possible, but again, all manner of things are possible and COULD happen. You can't get yourself worked up about something that COULD happen, when there is no signs it is imminent. Look, there is some confusion about the mag field and its ramifications. Its a complicated topic, truly it is, but the concerns are not immediate. Our mag field has been weakening for over 150 years, yet here we are. You probably did not even know that, yet life has gone on still.
The other thing you need to take away from that is this other than its not an immediate concern you should suffer anxiety from, its a long term issue, just like climate, that is of course assuming that they are not sort of one in the same. If you are not losing sleep and fretting about our oceans literally trying to boil right now, then you are practicing some cognitive dissonance around the topic of existential dread. One fear is not greater than the other, and all fear is the enemy. We are just fine. We are safe. Our magnetic field does its job. It IS weakening, but its weakening slowly. Official estimates are at 5% per decade currently. That is not overnight. Its not next week. Its not even certain we should be concerned about it, there are two sides to the coin after all. For all of these reasons, you cannot get yourself worked up about it. Besides you know what else above all? Worrying your ass off about the world ending will not buy you a single minute more of time living your life and doing what you love with the people you love, so get busy living, or you'll stay busy dying from being eaten alive from stress and worry. Should you be prepared? Yes. Whether its a tornado, flood, EQ, war, hurricane, mega super duper extreme solar storm, its never a bad idea to have some supplies and most importantly a plan. This will calm you, and if you ever have to need it, youll be glad of it, and youll have something to anchor to when your anxiety and shock make it difficult to just get to the next moment. More than that, build a community, because in a really tough situation, a community gets through. Certainly some of you remember GoT. In the long night, the lone wolf dies but the pack survives. If you really are so worried about something so big and so totally out of your control, do that.
So people, take care of your mental health. If this stuff stresses you out, take a step back because it aint worth it. Can you imagine how silly the people on X who thought the world was ending this weekend feel right now? Most of them will never mention they were scared, or that they were panicking about nothing, they will never speak of it, and they will look for the next scare. I just hope they at least got to see the lights. Look, I will be real with you. When all of this started unfolding in earnest, and I knew the chances were there for a big storm, I posted my work in 2 places. Here and prepperintel. I met many of you from there. I posted it there because I respect the hell out of the suns power and I know that in the very very very rare event a CE or something of that nature unfolds, a few precious hours may mean everything. I am true to what I say. I do understand the risks, and I treat them appropriately, but I can only do so from a place of understanding and that takes time. Right now, what you NEED to know, is that we are safe, this was a great experience, the next sunspots may be more active, less active, the same as the departing regions, but there is a reason why the auroras have not dipped that far south in 20 years. So many things have to line up juuuust right for what we saw on Friday let alone a grid frying event. You would need a HUGE flare, and I do mean huge, no X5.98 or a twin peaked X1/M9 will suffice. Not only do you need a rediculously large flare, you need it to produce an earth directed CME, and while AR3664 seemingly did it at will, its not usually the case, but the times when its most likely to happen are during solar maximum. So many solar max have came and went and you never even knew it and you are still here on your tech.
I would like to think I know my stuff pretty well for an armchair expert, but I understand my limitations. There are people who are much more experienced, educated, and knowledgeable about the finer finer details and components of the space weather game that I am just barely beginning to grasp. Do you know that when I was first learning space weather that I used to get caught up in the same hype? I see that we had an X-Class flare, and Newsweek tells me that they can destroy powergrids, which is technically true, but damn if it doesnt leave out alot of nuance and fine details which are absolutely critical to understand in depth. So I get on Prepperintel and I make a post about it and I am ran off the damn sub because the people in there who knew more than I did knew it was nothing to be scared of. I was that person guys. If you felt that way this weekend, just know that I am you. But here we are, and now if I post something in there, those folks know its at least worth knowing about. Its a process. Its a complicated and nuanced topic, but its not inaccessible. I bet many of you had no idea that you could be a space weather observer like the folks at the alphabet agencies looking at the same data they do, but I hope you do now.
When I sat down to write this "small" update and goodnight, I did not expect to fill a page. I will tell you one thing about me. I have been called many many things in my life, but inarticulate is NOT one of them. I have more than a few video or YT live requests and maybe we get there eventually because I do think it will be cool and interactive. I may still cherish the written word but I am no dummy, I realize that is analog thinking in a digital world. However, here we are and I like the readers, because they are careful and considerate. They usually ave the attention span to get into complex subjects and are able to orchestrate exquisite theater of the mind.
This has been one of the most exciting and gratifying weeks of my life. I tried my best to keep up with the comments but I know I failed. Esp last night and today, I had to stop and smell the roses and its always family first in my world. Even if I had all day, I could not have kept up. These are human limitations of course, but I want you to know that I saw 99% of the comments, the posts, the messages, the pictures. I am deeply moved and I really appreciate everyone who took the time just to tell me their story, their experience, how this experience touched them, how they learned something new, how they werent scared anymore, who just appreciated the fact that Reddit now has a thriving dedicated solarmax community. I wish there was a way I could let you all know just exactly how much it all means, but these words will have to do. Thank you friends. We are only getting started. If you find yourself needing a fix though, check out the rest of the sub. Solarmax blew up this weekend, but we have been trying to get established for a bit and I say we, because it is not just me. Others have contributed, even when it was just a handful of people. I just can't say it enough, thank you thank you thank you. Every writer just wants someone to read their stuff. That is why they do it. If you can make a living at it, cool, but every writer started for free, and just wanted an audience, any audience, let alone one as awesome as you all.
And one final shoutout to Mrs AA for putting up with me absolutely glued to my phone, computer, and keyboard for the last 14 days and yes 14 days, because before AR3664 stole the show, lil ol AR3663 was trying so hard to make a name for itself, but just did not have the juice, but did depart with an X4.5 IIRC offhand. Solar max continues everyone, we got new sunspot groups to analyze, a few more mild impacts to come, and a ton of stuff to break down on the May 2024 Storms as well as the other topics I promised we would get into. We are only getting started and I look forward to sharing all of it with you.
For all of you who asked about whether you should chase your dream of astronomy or something space related, I have one final piece of advice this weekend. It does not matter if its space related, it just matters that you have a dream. If you have the ability and circumstance to chase or still chase your dream, you need to do it, whatever it is. The lucky(wise) people are not the ones who make millions on millions in a 80 hr work week where seeing their kids ball game is not even possible. The wise people are the ones who never work a day in their life because they love what they do and make a living that suits them and their family.
Good night everyone, and may you have clear skies.
AA

My keyboard PB on the TOTD of May 9th mixing rally and snow car. (Also my very first CM)
I know it's not really the hot topic anymore but I think there is something important to say. While it's true that with snow/rally it's virtually impossible to get WR on kb against the top wheel (or analog devices in general) players, you can still get really good PB on kb if you're you just willing to learn the cars and use action keys a little. So unless you're a top player, saying you can't play the new cars on keyboard makes no sense, some people just expect their 4 years experience of stadium car to instantly translate to any new cars and also assume that if they had a wheel they'd be as good as Granady or Sanders.
This picture is then here to illustrate what I'm saying (and to boast a little ngl), I've been playing TM seriously for a bit more than a year always on keyboard and I'm like usually around div10, yet every time a TOTD is rally/snow I always end up div5 or below. So if ppl could just put their copium away for some time and train they would see the result

You’ve finally beat procrastination and forced yourself to sit down at your desk to do the important work you’ve been putting off that requires your full concentration.
You begin—and within seconds you’re distracted with something. Your mind wanders. You just can’t focus. Again.
You’re so discouraged and assume you have some sort of attention deficit issue.
But in truth you probably just keep putting yourself in a compromised work environment.

"Even when you realize how much your environment is shaping you, it's still shaping you more than you realize." - Nick Milo

Your environment has a big impact on your thoughts, mood, decisions, actions and behaviours. It's why restaurants and retailers spend massive amounts of money creating the right vibe to alter how their customers feel (and hopefully spend).
What’s great about engineering your environment for improved concentration is you don’t need to develop any new skills. In fact, you don't need to do anything better; you’re just setting up guardrails that prevent you from doing dumb stuff like checking your phone in the middle of working. By taking these simple steps, you'll feel like you're on a powerful nootropic. Like you’ve been granted a superpower.

Your environments

Note that I talk mainly about doing deeply focused work (aka deep work) in this post, but the advice applies to school studies just as well.
When discussing environment, I like to break it down into three kinds: physical space, workspace, and work device.
There are a lot of variables at play in your overall environment. Are you working from home or an office? Is the environment noisy (coffee shop chatter; your kids running around at home) or quiet? What kind of work or studies are you doing? What space and resources do you have access to around you? Essentially it all comes down to how much control you have over your environment. For this discussion, I'm going to assume you're working from home and can control your environment to a large degree.
Two important things to note before we begin: when doing deep work, give yourself a start time and plan out your environment so that everything’s ready in advance of that start time. Don't just gradually start your morning and begin working whenever you’re all set up and feeling ready (because you’ll find ways to stall and procrastinate). Set a time in your calendar and commit to starting on time. Treat it like an important meeting you’re leading. You wouldn't begin prepping for the meeting once it starts; you'd have everything ready to go prior to its start.
Alright, let’s get going.

Physical space

Your physical space is the room you're working in. This could be in your home, your office, coffee shop, library, or outside.
Different space for deep work
Ideally, you'd do your deeply focused work in a space different from your regular work or where you do more administrative tasks. Doing this will provide cues to your mind that this work is important and needs special attention. So, if possible, try a different room or area of your home to do this work. It doesn’t have to be a permanent setup; it could be as simple as using the kitchen table for your deep work session if you normally work from a cluttered desk in the bedroom.
Walls not windows
It's better to have your desk face a wall than a window. You might think looking out a bright window at some nature is calming and provides inspiration, but it's really just a distraction when working deeply. I know, staring at a wall sounds painfully boring—and that’s the point.
Temperature
If you're able to control the temperature of your environment, consider how it feels. Are you too hot? Too cold? What can you do to adjust the temperature (or your clothes) before you start working so that it doesn't become a distraction after you start?
Tip: Wear layers so it’s easy to take something off or throw something on without having to do a whole wardrobe change. Just make sure these layers are either on you or nearby.
Music
If planning to listen to music, have your headphones ready and the music selected before your start time. It’s recommended to listen to music without vocals, as studies show hearing music with a voice distracts us more than music without. Research also suggests that the most productive type of music to listen to while focusing is music that sounds familiar and is relatively simple. Note that 'familiar' is relative.
Tip: Use 40hz binaural beats to prime your brain leading up to your session but not throughout the entirety of your session.
Take stock of objects in your environment
Environmental cues—seemingly innocuous things in our space, like books or pictures hanging on the wall—don't actively disrupt us like notifications do, but they can still pull us away from what we intend to accomplish. So it's best to remove as many visual cues as you can in advance before doing deep work.
Take stock of the objects in your environment and identify which ones may attract your attention. Then clear these. Note that there are some objects which can be beneficial, like plants. But generally, the more complex the object, the more it will pull you into distraction. This is another reason to have your desk face the wall rather than a window or overlooking your physical space.
Remember: It's significantly easier to deal with distractions in advance. Once they appear, it's often too late to stop them.

Workspace

Your workspace includes the surface you’re working on (desk, table) and what you’re sitting in (or standing on if you’re a fellow stander).
Clear clutter
The more clutter on your workspace, the more clutter in your mind. A clear desk to do deep work from will ensure there’s nothing waiting to pull at your attention.
Remove everything from your desk that you don't need for this specific session. Books, notes, YOUR PHONE, everything. Question everything.
De-device yourself
Take off your smartwatch and turn it and your phone off. Seriously, don’t just put things on silent. Turn them off. Your mind will know the difference.
Now put both devices (as well as tablets and any other devices you have) in another room, if possible. Or at least put them in a purse or bag. They need to be both out of sight and out of reach. We're more likely to check our phone more frequently when we can see it—even if it isn't buzzing or ringing. Research also shows that merely having your phone in your visual field interferes with concentration; it subtly, almost imperceptibly, pulls at your attention—and you’re then forced to expend mental resources to fight this.
Don't work with food on your desk
Do you snack while you work? It can be comforting, but it’s also habit-forming. And you might think it’s not distracting, but it usually is. Maybe you spill something on your keyboard, or your fingers get sticky and you need to wipe them, or you get a piece of food stuck in your teeth that you’re now wrestling with. All these things happen and we barely notice them, but they add up to the enemy: distraction.
Do work with drinks on your desk
Before you start, make sure you've prepared fluids to stay hydrated. Definitely have water, but you may also want coffee or tea. Whatever it is, just have it ready on your desk so it doesn’t become an excuse to take an unscheduled break to go get something.
Comfort
Ensure you’re comfortable, whether sitting or standing. Ask yourself, Is there anything I can do right now to be more physically comfortable? How’s your chair height? Your footwear? Physical discomfort can quickly turn into distraction.
Use a distraction catcher
Keep a pen and piece of paper on your desk and within reach so you can jot down anything that pops into your head that’s unrelated to the task at hand. Maybe you just remembered you have yoga class after work and you forgot to add it to your calendar. Quickly capture it on paper instead of opening up your calendar or, worse, trying to keep it in your head until you’re done (which will take up cognitive resources and prove very distracting). Once you write it down, you’ll be free to keep working without worry that it’ll get missed.
Tip: also jot down things that distracted you during the session (whether from your external environment or your internal one) so you can think about how to improve next time.

Work device

So far, you've attentioneered your physical space and your workspace. Turn now to your work device. This could be a desktop, laptop, tablet or a notebook and pencil (it could also be your phone but this should be avoided at all costs. Please please try to find another way to do your work than from your phone).
I'm going to assume you're working on a computer.
Gather resources
Download things you need to do your work from apps like Slack, Drive, or email so you’re not opening them in the middle of your session to get something only to get distracted by something else.
Do this well in advance of your session. Like, the day before, if possible. Doing it in advance is important for two reasons: (1) if you notice there’s something you can’t find or your colleague sent you the wrong file, it gives you time to track it down; (2) you don’t spend the minutes leading up to your work session frantically jumping from app to app and putting your mind in a frenzied state.
Shut it all down
Shut down all apps and tabs that you won’t be using during the session. If you think you may use an app, better to shut it down ahead of time and open it later if needed.
If you do open an app or website to work on, immediately close it once you're done. Don't leave it open (Closing apps and tabs right after use is a great habit in general that I recently developed; it really helps keep me on task throughout the day).
All messaging apps on your work device need to be fully shut down, not just have notifications turned off.
Tip: Have your tasks listed out on paper ahead of time and beside you so you don't even need to keep your task manager app open.

A word of warning

That was a lot to cover. And you might be thinking, This is a lot to do! Is it really all necessary? How will I ever focus at a coffee shop or the office where I have less control over the environment?
Two things come to mind: (1) a lot of what I’ve covered will become second nature once you do it a few times. Personally, I have a simple checklist I use to keep the process quick; (2) this guide is for those who have trouble focusing under any circumstances. The purpose of setting up an ideal environment is so you can first learn how to concentrate with as little friction as possible.
Once you develop this skill in an ideal environment (and you also master internal distractions, which I'll talk about more another time), you can slowly start to introduce some distractions back in.
The ultimate goal is not to have your concentration hinge on having a perfectly meditative space and be unable to work if there's the slightest distraction. That makes you fragile. You want to become antifragile. You want the ability to maintain laser-sharp focus for several hours in a bustling cafe without headphones. That’s the goal.
So, at the beginning you'll want to be kind to yourself and make it easier by eliminating as many distractions as possible. And this will take some time to get right.
But eventually, with practice, you'll become less worried about distractions. They'll simply have less hold on you. They'll be less enticing. And you'll be unstoppable.

I am sharing this as an emotional outlet among other siblings in christ 

My Experience It was January 10, 2011. I’ll never forget that date. It was the day my life changed. Also it was the day of the college football national championship. I was and still am a big college football fan (Go Cal Bears!). Oregon was set to play auburn and i was going to watch it with my neighbor two doors down. I had been doing poorly in school, and yeah was a big pot head, still am, but am much more responsible. Anyways i told myself this semester i was going to actually try in school. I woke up at six am to get ready for my day, something that i never do. I went to put on my shoes and i noticed the laces were missing. Immediately i went to my mom and asked where are my laces? She wouldn’t give me an answer and was just acting so strange. Eventually she left the house and as she was leaving two men were walking up our walkway. I figured they were plumbers considering we had plumbing issues recently. They walked in and before I knew it they walked up to me on either side and slammed me to the ground and handcuffed me. I didn’t react as it was, I didn’t expect it for one, and for two when it began I froze, I didn’t know what to do. Once on the ground I started to squirm, I screamed “Please Help me help me I’m being kidnapped! Please!” They responded No use in screaming no one can hear you. I kept screaming. One of them said go ahead get it over with when your quiet it’ll be over sooner. After probably about ten minutes, I realized no use in fighting, they helped me up and walked me to a small suv and put me in the back and put the seat belt on me. This was the beginning. I remember on the way up to Yoncalla Oregon from Sacramento California we stopped at a burger king. They offered to get me some but food was the last thing on my mind. Looking back I wish I had taken up the offer. I remember being by the ashtray seeing a half smoked cigarette and asking to smoke it, they said I couldn’t. After a long drive we got there they walked me in. The whole way I talked about how I’d get away and run away. Well of course they told the staff at Scott Valley. By the way this is the perfect point to say I was sent to Scott Valley School in Yoncalla, Oregon. One of the many so called trouble teen schools. So being told I had threatened to run away I was put on runaway watch. For about two weeks I was forced to sleep under a light. I obviously didn’t get much sleep. Also I always had two higher phase watchers who would stand on each side of me. They had phases there was like five or six I believe. Most were 2 and 1. There were like 3 phase 3’s and 1 phase 5. There was like 20-30 of us at a time. Anyway where do I start. As I write this, with the emotions and ptsd it comes in full force and yet hazy at the same time. Maybe my head trying to protect me? So I was there seven months, thank god thats it. There were people that had been there years. Some of the people there, my god, I don’t know what to say. From a 12 year old who molested his 1 year old brother and put fish hooks in his carpet so his parents would step on it, to kids that were in there later teens who had used hard drugs, kids that had been molested and acted out as a result, kids that just were wilding out period, a lot of different walks. After I got off of runaway watch I got back on it within two weeks. I was in trouble sitting at the essay table while pe was going on. So one of the punishments was writing essays. But anyway there were two other kids at the table, the twelve year old i mentioned above and the only black kid there on the boys side. I looked at them and said if we worked together we could escape this place. They both just dead stared at me. When it was time to line up, the 12 year old went away first, the other kid looked at me and said were gonna get in trouble, that kid is a snitch and is going to tell on you. He was right. I got put on the “wall” because of that. For two weeks when not eating, sleeping, or using the bathroom, I was staring at a wall were a dot was drawn with a piece of paper on it. I would just let my imagination run wild while this happened thinking about home, friends, family, make believe countries governments politics, anything to keep the mind entertained or semi at peace! There was a green jacket my parents sent up for me that was my grandpa on my mothers side. Grandpa Applegate. It was a super cool green jacket with fake fure on the color, it looked like something you’d wear in the winter in Moscow. They said it had too many pockets and I could hide things in it. So they took it away. They put it in the Pod where all of our extra stuff was stored. Well one pod day where we could exchange stuff, there was a different staff member on duty then the one who said I couldn’t wear it. So i got it out and he didn’t know so i got to wear it for a bit. So when the other staff member got back on shift, he saw the jacket. I was banned from wearing a sweatshirt of any kind for a month. When we had outside pe everyday in Febuary to March I would get so cold. When I would put my hands in my shirt I would get another essay. This is Central Oregon, it gets cold that time of year! So some facts about the living situation, you had three minutes for showers and bathroom. You go over that you get an essay. You get more time the higher phase you get. You ever take a shit in three minutes? If done successfully I commend you. I would go five days without shitting because one of the night workers a guy named Johnny would not keep track of time when I’d get up to ask the restroom in the early morning. Johnny was an angel in a sense. Taking an uninterrupted shit was some of the most bliss I could get. Not trying to be gross but when using the restroom even was so restricted, being able to use the restroom not timed felt like hitting the lotto. When we’d wake up at seven am we only had 1 min to get up and make our bed, timed, if we didn’t make it wed get an essay. I’m naming these things as I remember different events, not necessarily in chronological order, but different events that happened. I had a peach fuzz mustache i was so proud of and long curly hair. They gave me a buzz cut and forced me to shave. My dad sent my grandpa Andrews old electric razor. That’s my dads dad. My biggest hero in my life. His name I got tatted on me at 19. I write this at 29. He died when I was 9. Most of the other kids had razors you could charge, mine needed to be plugged in to work, I didn’t understand that. I had never shaved to begin with, so I thought it was broken. I threw it away and put in a request for a new one. My father told them it was a plug in, but it was already to late so he needed to order me a new one. At a group therapy session thing, yeah we did that every day, and none of the people working there had any degrees that could go to the field they were working in. Anyway my writing is not perfect so as I was saying, at a group therapy thing, Jad one of the main guys working there brought up the razor, he said I knew it wasn’t broken, but I just wanted a new one. You don’t love your grandpa youre just a selfish little bitch. Those words still are ingrained in my mind. I know they are false but god damn they hurt. I cried. As I cried he just continued to tell me how selfish I am and im a bitch a pussy etc. William Frederick Andrews was my grandfathers name, as said I got it tatted on me at 19. He was born 1924, in 2024, my first child, a son, was born, William Frederick Andrews II. I call that a moral victory. Crazy how it worked out to be a 100 year difference. Another time it was 420, I cried because I wanted to smoke and he called me out on it in group therapy. He called me a bitch, a pussy, the usual. Weird things happened there, like one time they did a “fire drill” in the middle of the night, we had to go out into the cold in our underwear for five minutes until it was over. There were girls there but they were in a separate area. When they walked by or vice versa we had to look the other way. One of the many reasons it got shut down is there was a case of a student raping another. Apparently the girl who reported it got hounded in group therapy to the point she recanted. Now I could be wrong, but I think I know the person who did it, only one guy from the male side reached level five to the point where he became staff and could go to the girl side for group therapy. I don’t know for sure but that’s what i assume. At one point they were building a new building and they had us digging the ground around it for construction. Yeah they had us do all the cleaning indoors and out doors. If you were bad you could have your school privileges taken away. I had one kid who was a phase above me copy my work. He got caught. He got demoted, and got repromoted before I left. I never got past phase 1. So phase 1 red shirt. Phase 2 green shirt. Phase 3 Blue shirt. Phase 4 and above whatever you want. Like I said a lot of this is not in order. I am writing this in one go after years of talking about it to my loved ones. Put my thoughts to the pen, or keyboard in this case. So they did this thing were it was like a week, where it was the program or some weird name. They would break you down and “build you up” you would get a demeaning name for a week and then get an empowering name. I got the picture that if you were just a weed smoking low grade getting teen, you wouldn’t be ever seen as getting progress, you had to have “admitting to a bad act” of some sort. I made a story about how I let a girl cut me and drink my blood and how I thought about killing my dad. I know, like why would one lie and say that?!, well I figured if I had said I had done that and then shown to be turned good, it would reward me as changed and out that place. Looking back im like what the fuck. But I just wanted out and I was sure as hell willing to lie my way out. So yeah i went by like blood sucker or something like that for a week, but thats not bad. I remember so well one girl who was adopted and had relations with several boys back where she was from, she got sent there for that, and her name for the week was “Orphan Whore”. Also there were other students who weren’t going through the program that were involved with the process. Elon school or something like that where students yell at other students all sorts of insulting shit The end of it I reclaimed my name or whatever and they had me do like a ballet dance kind of weird thing to show rebirth, not that ballets weird, but in this scenario, yeah. I remember there was a day they said the world was going to end, someday in May 2011 some random wacko said, it made headlines as a joke more than anything, but i remember hearing it and hoping it happens because I wanted out. There was a gym there with rafters. I used to dream of hanging myself from them to get out. I dreamed about a car driving into the school and opening a wall up so we could run away. They used to tell us if we ran away there is bear and cougars out there, if they dont get us the cops will, and theyll put us in juvi just to have us sent back when out. They had these things called group essays. If someone did something and it no one admitted to it wed all have to write an essay about how we could have prevented it. One time a kid wiped shit on all the walls in the bathroom, the kid never admitted to it so we all had to write an essay on how we could have prevented it. I remember one time going to use the bathroom there was semen on the toilet seat, lol teen boys sex drive. I just wiped it off before I sat down. One time late at night I was masterbating in my bed. There was 20 of us sleeping in bunks in the same room, the kid who ended up copying my work i mentioned, saw me making some um, sheet movements, and looked my way giving me a dirty look, i just rolled over pretending like i was scratching, oh snap, almost caught. Not trying to be disgusting, teenage boys, find one that doesn’t masterbate, and i’ll give you some ocean beach front property in Kansas. You got weekly phone calls with your parents, you never dared to say what was going on because they were always listening. Letters same, they read them, so no use in saying something, they’ll just read it and throw it away, later my father asked me why didn’t you tell me what was going on? Well… My gf at the time ended up getting a bf after 6 months of waiting, i don’t blame her. Hey it was teenage love so im not hurt, but at the time it hurt because neither of us willingly ended it. She sent me a bookmark to have up there, it had us kissing on it, they took it from me for it being sexually explicit. They banned me from sitting up in bed and praying. I was atheist from 12 to 27 except for that time, i came back to my faith, praying for my exodus. I’m a christian again now, but only after I found a denomination that was open and affirming because I’m bisexual. Thinking about this, my mind can’t explain the pain, the rain of emotional trauma that falls in my cranium. Many times I’ve turned to cocaine, liquor, and suicidal thoughts because of the pain. It fucked my whole concept of everything in life. My emotions, my understanding of control of my own life, my ability to have healthy relationships, just so much. I still have dreams of being back there and wake up with nightmares, I was sixteen then, i turn 30 this year thirty, i have a beautiful amazing wife, a son who is the biggest blessing in my life, like i got it together now, but I don’t still, obvious by writing this. I remember one time getting to get my glasses prescription. They had to take me to town, the eye doctor, i thought about coming to him for help, but I thought if he works with these people, hell just report me to them, not them to authorities. My grandpa applegate, my moms dad, he died of suicide while I was gone, diagnosed with a terminal cancer he took it into his own hands. I never got to say good bye. When his funeral happened I wasn’t brought home for it, no, I was allowed to “write a letter to be read”. I wrote a letter, and it got read and a lot of family members said how deep it was and mature, I till this day have never watched the funeral video, I can’t. Because I should have been there. When I was on the wall, lookin towards the window could get me in trouble, because it was considered plotting an escape. I read in an english class I know where the caged bird sings, it became my favorite poem because I would watch the birds on the outside of the window and see how free they were. The joy of that. I was a juggalo, they banned me of talking anything icp related. I’d hum icp songs in protest, not like they knew them, also still a juggalo, two scoops of whoop. They day my dad came to get me, well I was peeing, and when I got out I saw him by the front door which was not far from the restroom, I ran up and hugged him saying oh my god dad! I love you! I started crying. He took to the place I always heard the workers there talk about a place called the Sugar Shack, a donut shop. Gosh dang good donuts! Then he took me to some cousins on the coast of oregon. Two days being out I was running on the beaches of the oregon coast. The sand in my feet, the breeze, the feeling of freedom. Scotts Valley School was shut down i think in 2016 for child abuse, i will link articles, but damn that place will forever haunt my head. The bats of the cave of my mind. I am married now with a family. I do my best to be a strong individual and provide, but this place has forever scared me and left me feeling weak. I couldn’t protect myself, so now I want to do everything to protect my family and be there for them. Scotts Valley school, I now live in a place called Scott Valley, the geographic area name, all come full circle? There is probably a lot more I could add to this, but for now, I just wanted to write down the bare minimum. If you have read this, thank you. I have found peace in my mind, heart, and soul as much as I can, and I hope those who have gone through similar ordeals can find some semblance of peace in their existence as well. I thank Jesus for keeping me hopeful in times I wanted to die. God bless you all.
https://www.statesmanjournal.com/story/news/politics/2015/12/14/lack-food-among-abuse-and-neglect-complaints-boarding-school/77246394/
https://www.oregonlive.com/politics/2015/12/hunger_vulgar_names_oregon_air.html
https://www.columbian.com/news/2016/jan/07/oregon-threatens-license-of-teen-boarding-school/
https://www.facebook.com/anorexicchild/posts/scotts-valley-boarding-school-in-yoncalla-oregon-scotts-valley-school-starved-th/368786460137878/
https://media.oregonlive.com/politics_impact/otheScotts%20Valley%20Notice%20of%20Intent%20to%20Revoke%20December%2011%202015.pdf
Ps the starved kid in the please eat post is not me

My Experience 

It was January 10, 2011. I’ll never forget that date. It was the day my life changed. Also it was the day of the college football national championship. I was and still am a big college football fan (Go Cal Bears!). Oregon was set to play auburn and i was going to watch it with my neighbor two doors down. I had been doing poorly in school, and yeah was a big pot head, still am, but am much more responsible. Anyways i told myself this semester i was going to actually try in school. I woke up at six am to get ready for my day, something that i never do. I went to put on my shoes and i noticed the laces were missing. Immediately i went to my mom and asked where are my laces? She wouldn’t give me an answer and was just acting so strange. Eventually she left the house and as she was leaving two men were walking up our walkway. I figured they were plumbers considering we had plumbing issues recently. They walked in and before I knew it they walked up to me on either side and slammed me to the ground and handcuffed me. I didn’t react as it was, I didn’t expect it for one, and for two when it began I froze, I didn’t know what to do. Once on the ground I started to squirm, I screamed “Please Help me help me I’m being kidnapped! Please!” They responded No use in screaming no one can hear you. I kept screaming. One of them said go ahead get it over with when your quiet it’ll be over sooner. After probably about ten minutes, I realized no use in fighting, they helped me up and walked me to a small suv and put me in the back and put the seat belt on me. This was the beginning. I remember on the way up to Yoncalla Oregon from Sacramento California we stopped at a burger king. They offered to get me some but food was the last thing on my mind. Looking back I wish I had taken up the offer. I remember being by the ashtray seeing a half smoked cigarette and asking to smoke it, they said I couldn’t. After a long drive we got there they walked me in. The whole way I talked about how I’d get away and run away. Well of course they told the staff at Scott Valley. By the way this is the perfect point to say I was sent to Scott Valley School in Yoncalla, Oregon. One of the many so called trouble teen schools. So being told I had threatened to run away I was put on runaway watch. For about two weeks I was forced to sleep under a light. I obviously didn’t get much sleep. Also I always had two higher phase watchers who would stand on each side of me. They had phases there was like five or six I believe. Most were 2 and 1. There were like 3 phase 3’s and 1 phase 5. There was like 20-30 of us at a time. Anyway where do I start. As I write this, with the emotions and ptsd it comes in full force and yet hazy at the same time. Maybe my head trying to protect me? So I was there seven months, thank god thats it. There were people that had been there years. Some of the people there, my god, I don’t know what to say. From a 12 year old who molested his 1 year old brother and put fish hooks in his carpet so his parents would step on it, to kids that were in there later teens who had used hard drugs, kids that had been molested and acted out as a result, kids that just were wilding out period, a lot of different walks. After I got off of runaway watch I got back on it within two weeks. I was in trouble sitting at the essay table while pe was going on. So one of the punishments was writing essays. But anyway there were two other kids at the table, the twelve year old i mentioned above and the only black kid there on the boys side. I looked at them and said if we worked together we could escape this place. They both just dead stared at me. When it was time to line up, the 12 year old went away first, the other kid looked at me and said were gonna get in trouble, that kid is a snitch and is going to tell on you. He was right. I got put on the “wall” because of that. For two weeks when not eating, sleeping, or using the bathroom, I was staring at a wall were a dot was drawn with a piece of paper on it. I would just let my imagination run wild while this happened thinking about home, friends, family, make believe countries governments politics, anything to keep the mind entertained or semi at peace! There was a green jacket my parents sent up for me that was my grandpa on my mothers side. Grandpa Applegate. It was a super cool green jacket with fake fure on the color, it looked like something you’d wear in the winter in Moscow. They said it had too many pockets and I could hide things in it. So they took it away. They put it in the Pod where all of our extra stuff was stored. Well one pod day where we could exchange stuff, there was a different staff member on duty then the one who said I couldn’t wear it. So i got it out and he didn’t know so i got to wear it for a bit. So when the other staff member got back on shift, he saw the jacket. I was banned from wearing a sweatshirt of any kind for a month. When we had outside pe everyday in Febuary to March I would get so cold. When I would put my hands in my shirt I would get another essay. This is Central Oregon, it gets cold that time of year! So some facts about the living situation, you had three minutes for showers and bathroom. You go over that you get an essay. You get more time the higher phase you get. You ever take a shit in three minutes? If done successfully I commend you. I would go five days without shitting because one of the night workers a guy named Johnny would not keep track of time when I’d get up to ask the restroom in the early morning. Johnny was an angel in a sense. Taking an uninterrupted shit was some of the most bliss I could get. Not trying to be gross but when using the restroom even was so restricted, being able to use the restroom not timed felt like hitting the lotto. When we’d wake up at seven am we only had 1 min to get up and make our bed, timed, if we didn’t make it wed get an essay. I’m naming these things as I remember different events, not necessarily in chronological order, but different events that happened. I had a peach fuzz mustache i was so proud of and long curly hair. They gave me a buzz cut and forced me to shave. My dad sent my grandpa Andrews old electric razor. That’s my dads dad. My biggest hero in my life. His name I got tatted on me at 19. I write this at 29. He died when I was 9. Most of the other kids had razors you could charge, mine needed to be plugged in to work, I didn’t understand that. I had never shaved to begin with, so I thought it was broken. I threw it away and put in a request for a new one. My father told them it was a plug in, but it was already to late so he needed to order me a new one. At a group therapy session thing, yeah we did that every day, and none of the people working there had any degrees that could go to the field they were working in. Anyway my writing is not perfect so as I was saying, at a group therapy thing, Jad one of the main guys working there brought up the razor, he said I knew it wasn’t broken, but I just wanted a new one. You don’t love your grandpa youre just a selfish little bitch. Those words still are ingrained in my mind. I know they are false but god damn they hurt. I cried. As I cried he just continued to tell me how selfish I am and im a bitch a pussy etc. William Frederick Andrews was my grandfathers name, as said I got it tatted on me at 19. He was born 1924, in 2024, my first child, a son, was born, William Frederick Andrews II. I call that a moral victory. Crazy how it worked out to be a 100 year difference. Another time it was 420, I cried because I wanted to smoke and he called me out on it in group therapy. He called me a bitch, a pussy, the usual. Weird things happened there, like one time they did a “fire drill” in the middle of the night, we had to go out into the cold in our underwear for five minutes until it was over. There were girls there but they were in a separate area. When they walked by or vice versa we had to look the other way. One of the many reasons it got shut down is there was a case of a student raping another. Apparently the girl who reported it got hounded in group therapy to the point she recanted. Now I could be wrong, but I think I know the person who did it, only one guy from the male side reached level five to the point where he became staff and could go to the girl side for group therapy. I don’t know for sure but that’s what i assume. At one point they were building a new building and they had us digging the ground around it for construction. Yeah they had us do all the cleaning indoors and out doors. If you were bad you could have your school privileges taken away. I had one kid who was a phase above me copy my work. He got caught. He got demoted, and got repromoted before I left. I never got past phase 1. So phase 1 red shirt. Phase 2 green shirt. Phase 3 Blue shirt. Phase 4 and above whatever you want. Like I said a lot of this is not in order. I am writing this in one go after years of talking about it to my loved ones. Put my thoughts to the pen, or keyboard in this case. So they did this thing were it was like a week, where it was the program or some weird name. They would break you down and “build you up” you would get a demeaning name for a week and then get an empowering name. I got the picture that if you were just a weed smoking low grade getting teen, you wouldn’t be ever seen as getting progress, you had to have “admitting to a bad act” of some sort. I made a story about how I let a girl cut me and drink my blood and how I thought about killing my dad. I know, like why would one lie and say that?!, well I figured if I had said I had done that and then shown to be turned good, it would reward me as changed and out that place. Looking back im like what the fuck. But I just wanted out and I was sure as hell willing to lie my way out. So yeah i went by like blood sucker or something like that for a week, but thats not bad. I remember so well one girl who was adopted and had relations with several boys back where she was from, she got sent there for that, and her name for the week was “Orphan Whore”. Also there were other students who weren’t going through the program that were involved with the process. Elon school or something like that where students yell at other students all sorts of insulting shit The end of it I reclaimed my name or whatever and they had me do like a ballet dance kind of weird thing to show rebirth, not that ballets weird, but in this scenario, yeah. I remember there was a day they said the world was going to end, someday in May 2011 some random wacko said, it made headlines as a joke more than anything, but i remember hearing it and hoping it happens because I wanted out. There was a gym there with rafters. I used to dream of hanging myself from them to get out. I dreamed about a car driving into the school and opening a wall up so we could run away. They used to tell us if we ran away there is bear and cougars out there, if they dont get us the cops will, and theyll put us in juvi just to have us sent back when out. They had these things called group essays. If someone did something and it no one admitted to it wed all have to write an essay about how we could have prevented it. One time a kid wiped shit on all the walls in the bathroom, the kid never admitted to it so we all had to write an essay on how we could have prevented it. I remember one time going to use the bathroom there was semen on the toilet seat, lol teen boys sex drive. I just wiped it off before I sat down. One time late at night I was masterbating in my bed. There was 20 of us sleeping in bunks in the same room, the kid who ended up copying my work i mentioned, saw me making some um, sheet movements, and looked my way giving me a dirty look, i just rolled over pretending like i was scratching, oh snap, almost caught. Not trying to be disgusting, teenage boys, find one that doesn’t masterbate, and i’ll give you some ocean beach front property in Kansas. You got weekly phone calls with your parents, you never dared to say what was going on because they were always listening. Letters same, they read them, so no use in saying something, they’ll just read it and throw it away, later my father asked me why didn’t you tell me what was going on? Well… My gf at the time ended up getting a bf after 6 months of waiting, i don’t blame her. Hey it was teenage love so im not hurt, but at the time it hurt because neither of us willingly ended it. She sent me a bookmark to have up there, it had us kissing on it, they took it from me for it being sexually explicit. They banned me from sitting up in bed and praying. I was atheist from 12 to 27 except for that time, i came back to my faith, praying for my exodus. I’m a christian again now, but only after I found a denomination that was open and affirming because I’m bisexual. Thinking about this, my mind can’t explain the pain, the rain of emotional trauma that falls in my cranium. Many times I’ve turned to cocaine, liquor, and suicidal thoughts because of the pain. It fucked my whole concept of everything in life. My emotions, my understanding of control of my own life, my ability to have healthy relationships, just so much. I still have dreams of being back there and wake up with nightmares, I was sixteen then, i turn 30 this year thirty, i have a beautiful amazing wife, a son who is the biggest blessing in my life, like i got it together now, but I don’t still, obvious by writing this. I remember one time getting to get my glasses prescription. They had to take me to town, the eye doctor, i thought about coming to him for help, but I thought if he works with these people, hell just report me to them, not them to authorities. My grandpa applegate, my moms dad, he died of suicide while I was gone, diagnosed with a terminal cancer he took it into his own hands. I never got to say good bye. When his funeral happened I wasn’t brought home for it, no, I was allowed to “write a letter to be read”. I wrote a letter, and it got read and a lot of family members said how deep it was and mature, I till this day have never watched the funeral video, I can’t. Because I should have been there. When I was on the wall, lookin towards the window could get me in trouble, because it was considered plotting an escape. I read in an english class I know where the caged bird sings, it became my favorite poem because I would watch the birds on the outside of the window and see how free they were. The joy of that. I was a juggalo, they banned me of talking anything icp related. I’d hum icp songs in protest, not like they knew them, also still a juggalo, two scoops of whoop. They day my dad came to get me, well I was peeing, and when I got out I saw him by the front door which was not far from the restroom, I ran up and hugged him saying oh my god dad! I love you! I started crying. He took to the place I always heard the workers there talk about a place called the Sugar Shack, a donut shop. Gosh dang good donuts! Then he took me to some cousins on the coast of oregon. Two days being out I was running on the beaches of the oregon coast. The sand in my feet, the breeze, the feeling of freedom. Scotts Valley School was shut down i think in 2016 for child abuse, i will link articles, but damn that place will forever haunt my head. The bats of the cave of my mind. I am married now with a family. I do my best to be a strong individual and provide, but this place has forever scared me and left me feeling weak. I couldn’t protect myself, so now I want to do everything to protect my family and be there for them. Scotts Valley school, I now live in a place called Scott Valley, the geographic area name, all come full circle? There is probably a lot more I could add to this, but for now, I just wanted to write down the bare minimum. If you have read this, thank you. I have found peace in my mind, heart, and soul as much as I can, and I hope those who have gone through similar ordeals can find some semblance of peace in their existence as well. I thank Jesus for keeping me hopeful in times I wanted to die. God bless you all.
https://www.statesmanjournal.com/story/news/politics/2015/12/14/lack-food-among-abuse-and-neglect-complaints-boarding-school/77246394/
https://www.oregonlive.com/politics/2015/12/hunger_vulgar_names_oregon_air.html
https://www.columbian.com/news/2016/jan/07/oregon-threatens-license-of-teen-boarding-school/
https://www.facebook.com/anorexicchild/posts/scotts-valley-boarding-school-in-yoncalla-oregon-scotts-valley-school-starved-th/368786460137878/
https://media.oregonlive.com/politics_impact/otheScotts%20Valley%20Notice%20of%20Intent%20to%20Revoke%20December%2011%202015.pdf
Ps the starved kid in the please eat post is not me