Following up on on my latest post TLDR: had failed a hysterectomy in February and second surgery was successful.
34 y/o, high BMI, stage IV endo, suspected adeno, (not confirmed in biopsy)dense adhesions and scarring. Had my LAVH, robotic assisted on May 7th. I found a super compassionate doctor who reassured me and gave me hope after I lost it when my first surgery had to be aborted. Surgery went better than expected, with no complications. It took about 6 hours and took forever for me to wake up. I went home the day of the procedure, only took oxy twice and been managing pain with over the counter meds and gabapentin before bed. Hot water bottles and heating pads. Bloating is annoying, I am lonely and bored but I am happy to be done with it. I felt immediate relief, pain peaked on day 2 - gas pain is no joke. I wanted to thank this community for the advice and support provided, it has been crucial for my journey and I am grateful 💗
My hysterectomy was the culmination of more than 13 years of seeking relief from my discomforts that only worsened over time.
It started with anemia on the verge of blood transfusion that had no explanation other than hypermenorrhea. Each menstrual cycle became more tortuous with the passage of time, heavy bleeding, clots, leg cramps, lumbar pain and chronic fatigue.
I will have seen more than a dozen gynecologists and various doctors.
Blood studies, ultrasounds, resonances, endometrial biopsies, colonoscopy, contraceptives, hormonal IUD that ruined my mental health, I tried absolutely everything. I even went to the middle of the Amazon rainforest to seek relief in the medicine used by the Shipibo people.
I came out of many consultations crying, medical gaslighting and gordophobia were 98% of my experience.
They sent me to the psychiatrist because my pain seemed to have no other explanation than to be psychological.
Since I knew about endometriosis I KNEW that surely it was what happened to me, but finding a doctor who would take me seriously and believe me cost so much. It cost time, money, energy, tears, mental health, putting the body.
First they confirmed fibroids, then suspicion of adenomyosis (waiting confirmation of the biopsy), in February I was operated on for 3 hours without being able to remove my uterus due to the intensity of the adhesions and the advanced endometriosis (phase 4 that was confirmed in said failed surgery)
I had my second operation with a specialist and an interdisciplinary team of gynecologists, urologists and general surgeons.
They took out my uterus, cervix and fallopian tubes. The uterus was attached to the abdominal wall, bladder, intestines and basically everything around it. They drained cysts in the ovaries that I keep. I was cleaned of endometriosis of the sacrous ligaments and mainly of the bladder that was very compromised. They took adhesions from me and I'm sure I forget more.
I feel like I was born again and although this disease is chronic and has no cure, I already hope to see improvements and have a better quality of life, make up for lost time ❤️‍🩹 I can’t wait to see if I can ride a bike again.
Now slowly recovering and feeling very emotional and tired, otherwise happy and excited for my new healing era.
Will include surgery notes, biopsy report and pictures for the curious ones, Hope everyone is having a lovely pre surgery or recovery journey, it’s not easy, but we got this 💪 we are stronger and more resilient than we give ourselves credit for, we fight relentlessly and we show up for each other, our bodies are amazing and can do incredibly things. Sending lots of love your way, internet strangers ✨ 💗
Surgery notes:
Surgery
Findings: Laparoscopy: Smooth diaphragmatic peritoneal surfaces and liver without gross lesion. No injury under site of injury at umbilicus and no umbilical adhesions. Intraabdominal adhesions in the right lower quadrant at the site of prior appendectomy, with bowel and omentum adherent to the right abdominal sidewall. Once this omentum and bowel was taken down, there was a divot with a small amount of fat seen in the RUQ. Dr. Kim evaluated this did not require intervention. Similarly, no clear indirect R inguinal hernia seen without bowel and omentum involved, so Dr. Kim similarly did not recommend intervention. Omentum, bladder adherent to the lower uterine segment anteriorly. Extensive pelvic adhesions and evidence of endometriosis. Thickening of the bladder peritoneum and tacked up to lower uterine segment. Fallopian tubes and ovaries adhered to pelvic side wall, with left hematosalpinx noted in the setting of tortuous left tube. R ovary with small ~1cm functional-appearing cyst. L ovary with hemorrhagic ~2-3cm cyst. Rectum free, no posterior adhesions but extensive serosal endometriosis between the uterosacral ligament and on R posterior serosa overlying R uterosacral. Due to the ICG and use of firefly technology, the course of the ureters were well visualized. Procedure Details: After discussion of risks, benefits and alternatives to the procedure, written consent was obtained. The patient was brought to the operating room. The patient was positioned in the dorsal lithotomy position in yellowfin stirrups with arms padded and tucked at her sides. An exam under anesthesia was performed with findings as noted above. Urology completed a cystoscopy (no endometriosis) and placed ureteral stents with ureteral indocyanine green dye placement. See their operative note for further details. The cervix was dilated with tonsil forceps. Paracervical block was placed. The Rumi uterine manipulator with medium Koh ring was secured to the cervix. A Foley catheter was placed to drain the bladder intraoperatively. A 0.8 cm incision was made at the umbilicus, kocher used to elevate the fascia, and a Veress needle was inserted. Intraperitoneal placement was confirmed. The abdomen was insufflated until an adequate dome was achieved. A 8 mm robotic port was placed and the robotic scope was inserted. Under direct visualization, 3 additional ports were placed, two 8 mm robotic ports to the right of the umbilicus and one 8 mm robotic port to the left of the umbilicus. The patient was placed on steep Trendelenburg and the bowels were swept into the upper abdomen. The Da Vinci robot was then docked in position. The filmy adhesions in the RUQ were taken down with combination of cautery and sharp technique. The omentum was taken down off of the uterine fundus with bipolar and monopolar cautery. The left fallopian tube was followed out to the fimbria. The salpingectomy was then performed, starting at the distal fimbriated end of the tube and sequentially coagulating and transecting the mesosalpinx adjacent to the fallopian tube and well away from the ovary. The fallopian tube was left attached at the cornua. The procedure was repeated on the contralateral side. Good hemostasis was noted. The bladder was noted to be densely scarred to the LUS/cervical junction. The junction was incised with monopolar cautery and the bladder was meticulous dissected off of the underlying uterus/cervix to the level of the KOH ring as marked cephlad traction was placed on the Rumi device. Due to the anterior compartment scarring, round ligaments were not clearly identified. The thickened tissue in this area was grasped, cauterized with bipolar and divided with monopolar. Both ureters were seen using firefly technology. The left utero-ovarian ligament was ligated with bipolar cautery and divided with monopolar. The same procedure was performed on the right side. Marked cephlad traction was applied to the KOH ring. The uterine vessels on either side were skeletonized and ligated with bipolar cautery. The remainder of the cardinal and parametrial attachments were ligated with bipolar and divided with monopolar. The vagina was opened over the Colpo device circumferentially. The fibrotic uterosacral ligaments with overlying endometriosis was incised below the implants and fibrosis, taking care to avoid the ureters. The endometriotic implants over the right uterosacral ligaments were excised. The uterus and fallopian tubes were then removed through the vagina. Given the extensive adhesions and fibrosis, this portion of the surgery took an additional 60 minutes longer than expected. After that, the vaginal occluder was placed into the vagina to maintain the pneumoperitoneum. Dr. Kim then came to assess the inguinal hernia. He deemed no intervention was necessary for the R inguinal hernia or the RUQ divot. The functional ovarian cyst in the R ovary was drained. The 2 cm hemorrhagic ovarian cyst in the L ovary was felt to represent hemorrhagic corpus luteum. Two <1cm nodules on the R uterosacral were excised using cautery, taking care to avoid the right ureter. The vaginal cuff was closed using 0 V-lock in a running fashion in 2 layers . The area was irrigated, and hemostasis was evident. All instruments were then removed under direct visualization. The skin was closed with 4-0 Biosyn . Sterile dressings and Tegaderm were applied to all port sites. The ureteral stents were removed and inspected by urology and noted to be intact. A foley catheter was placed for routine voiding trial in PACU. Sponge and needle counts were correct times x2. The patient tolerated the procedure well and went to the recovery room in stable condition. There were no complications to the case.
Pathology:
Final Diagnosis A) Uterus, cervix, bilateral fallopian tubes, hysterectomy and salpingectomy: - Myometrium with leiomyoma. - Serosal/subserosal endometriosis. - Early secretory endometrium, negative for neoplasm. - Bilateral fallopian tubes and cervix negative for neoplasm. B) Peritoneum, right utero-sacral, biopsy: - Fibrotic squamous epithelium-lined tissue with scattered lymphocytic inflammation. - Negative for neoplasm and no definite endometriosis. Clinical Information Pre-op diagnosis: Adenomyosis [N80.03] Dysmenorrhea [N94.6] Menorrhagia with regular cycle [N92.0] Pelvic peritoneal adhesions, female [N73.6]
Gross Description A. Uterus, with or without tubes and ovaries, other than neoplastic/prolapse. Received fresh labeled; 1)Uterus,cervix,bilateral tubes" is a uterus with attached bilateral fallopian tubes.. The uterus alone is 105 g, 9.5 cm cervix to fundus by 6.0 cm cornu to cornu by 5.0 cm anterior to posterior. The cervix is 3.3 cm long by 3.0 cm diameter with a 0.6 cm diameter os. The ectocervix has punctate areas of hemorrhage. The serosa has scant fibrous adhesions anteriorly and extensive cautery and disruption posteriorly. The endometrium is ragged, hemorrhagic, 0.1-0.4 cm thick. The myometrium is up to 2.6 cm thick and is mildly trabeculated with cysts up to 0.1 cm greatest dimension filled with hemorrhagic material, suggestive of adenomyosis. There is a 0.2 cm diameter intramural well-circumscribed nodule with a whorled cut surface. No areas of softening are identified. The right fallopian tube is slightly serpentine, congested, 5.3 cm long by 0.5-0.6 cm diameter and has attached hemorrhagic fimbria. The left tube is 5.0 cm long by 0.5-0.6 cm diameter, purple-tan with attached hemorrhagic fimbria. Representative sections are submitted: A1-anterior cervix A2-posterior cervix A3-anterior endomyometrium A4-A5-posterior endomyometrium with possible adenomyosis (A4 with leiomyoma) A6-right fallopian tube and entire fimbria A7-left fallopian tube tube, entire fimbria. (MUA) B. Soft tissue, OTHER. Received in formalin labeled, ; 2)right utero-sacral biopsy" are 2 tan red rubbery tissue fragments, 0.7 and 1.0 cm, that are entirely submitted in B1. (AA) Case Report Value Surgical Pathology Report Case: SU24-15696 Authorizing Provider: Chiang, Seine, MD Collected: 05/07/2024 03:42 PM Ordering Location: UWMC Main Operating Room Received: 05/07/2024 05:21 PM Pathologist: Garcia, Rochelle Lorraine, MD Specimens: A) - Uterus, with or without tubes and ovaries, other than neoplastic/prolapse, 1)Uterus,cervix,bilateral tubes B) - Soft tissue, OTHER, 2)right utero-sacral biopsy
Surgery pics

Just finished my third 100% play-through of Tears on the 1 year anniversary. It’s pretty brutal to 100% this game, but I enjoyed it. Here’s my 100% list:

• 1,000 Korok Seeds
• 100% map completion (includes all Named Locations, Cave Entrances, Shrines, Light Roots, Wells, Chasms, Towns, Settlements, Stables, Specialty Shops, Device Dispensers, Sky View Towers, Forge / Weapon Constructs and Refineries, Tears of the Dragon, Ancient Tablets, and Fairy Fountains)
• All chest icons on Shrines (appears when all chests in the shrines have been opened)
• 23 Main Quests
• 60 Side Adventures
• 31 Shrine Quests
• 139 Side Quests
• 18 Memories
• Completed Hyrule Compendium
• 228 Recipes
• Upgraded all Horses to the max
• All Clothing and Armor Pieces upgraded to the max
• 45 additional Energy Cells (48 total)
• 27 Zonai Devices
• 51 Paraglider Fabric Skins
• 12 Schema Stones
• 34 Yiga Schematics
• 31 Old Maps
• 147 Bubbul Gems
• 11 Horse Gear (Towing Harness, Saddles, Bridles)
• Medals of Honor
• All’s Well Key Item
• Dispelling Darkness Medal
• Hestu’s Gift Key Item
• 81 Addison Signs Put Up

I compiled a list of things I found online that helped me farm material so hopefully it’ll help others. My apologies for no credit to those who contributed. I simply copied and pasted a lot of these - but some are my own contributions.
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Useful Links
Zelda Dungeon Interactive Map
Armor Upgrade List
Horse Upgrade List
100% Map Landmark Guide (Helped me find a few missed locations)
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Missed Locations (after collecting all Koroks, quests, shrines, caves, and wells)
Missed all 3 times
Kolomo Garrison Ruins
Missed Twice
Gatepost Town Ruins
Castle Town Watchtower
Lost Woods
Inogo Bridge
Dracozu Altar
East Passage
Water Reservoir
Kolomo Garrison Ruins
Missed Locations (2nd and 3rd run-though)
Desert Rift
Device Dispenser on Thunderhead Isles
Sargon Bridge
Drena Canyon Mine
Retsam Forest Cave (North Entrance)
Missed Locations (1st run-through)
Lutos Crossing
Lanayru Road - West Gate
Canyon of Awakening Mine
Abandoned Eldin Mine Forge Construct
Floret Sandbar
Faron Woods
West Passage
Dalite Grove
Grove of Time
Nabooru Canyon Mine
Walnot Canyon Mine
Madorna Canyon Mine
Hickaly Grove
Rozudo Canyon Mine
Daval Canyon Mine
Granajih Canyon Mine
Agaat Canyon Mine
Applean Grove
Rok Grove
Rhoam Canyon Mine
Ruto Canyon Mine
Akkala Bridges (all 3)
Stolock Bridge
Crystal Refinery in Lookout Landing
Faloraa Canyon Mine (last one)
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Final Koroks (2nd and 3rd time)

• Desert by Shrine (Climb Up)
• Hateno beach
• Wellspring Island underneath staircase by the waterfall, 3414 0618 1551
• Thims Bridge Korok
• Ceiling stump west of Ulria Grotto (4078 0821 0236)
• South of Flirly Plateau, dive into lily pads (3014 -2537 0129)

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Money Makers

• If you are going to 100% this game, don’t sell items you will need later unless you already have extra, especially gems. Crosscheck it with the Armor Upgrade link above.
• I regularly cycled through Moldugas and the Lynels in the Floating Coliseum every blood moon. Lynel Hooves and Molduga Guts are easy to collect and have extra to sell at a good price.
• Extra armor is great to sell and can be easily obtained with Amiibos (if you have them all - I have the cards). In my experience, armor didn’t have a high drop rate until after I finished 2/4 regional phenomena

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Armor / Weapon Tips

• Best Armor Suits to hunt and upgrade to at least Level 2: Radiant Armor, Froggy Armor, Glide Armor, Rubber Armor, Flamebreaker Armor, and Snowquill
• My go-to weapon (although way overpowered) is the Gerudo Scimitar fused with a Molduga Jaw., although you can use any Gerudo weapon (Gerudo weapons double the attack power of the item it's fused with). Combined with a Level 2+ Radiant Armor, you'll be able to kill any enemy with ease. Include a Level 3 attack potion or sneak attack from a puff shroom, there are plenty of enemies you can kill with 1 hit.

Rock Octoroks
Mark these locations on your map and visit when you want to refresh a weapon. Turn off Sages or they will shoot the Octoroks before they refresh your weapon. One thing I found out on my own is you don’t have to wait for the Octorok to spit the weapon out, as soon as he sucks it in, shoot him with an arrow and your weapon will be good as new.
https://preview.redd.it/6njacxsk7e0d1.jpg?width=1080&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=e973024978dd8c0536dc7c2815b4c75b02ec6313
Lizalfos Tails
Will update later
Fighting Lynels
Royal Guard’s Claymore: you can find inside Hyrule Castle behind a broken statue in Hyrule Castle Sanctum (-0282, 1086, 0356). I liked to fuse Molduga Jaws with this. Once fused, keep kitting the ground or anything until you get the message: “Your Royal Guard’s Claymore is badly damaged,” then hit it 2 more times. Your weapon will be down to 1 hit and 1 hit only before it breaks. Save this weapon for your Lynel fights. When you ride the backs of Lynels, you have infinite weapon durability so your weapon won’t break. Combine Royal Guard’s Claymore fused with Molduga Jaw and Radiant Armor, you’ll be able to defeat most Lynels in 3-6 hits. Be sure to save before and after fighting each Lynel in case your weapon break.
Pristine Royal Guard’s Claymore
I didn’t find this until my 3rd playthrough. Picture below are statues where 2-handed pristine weapons spawn. Go there every Blood Moon and eventually you’ll find a pristine one to make fighting Lynels even easier.
https://preview.redd.it/bd4qwp4n7e0d1.jpg?width=1080&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=716a518b7407d695024d21856ad564123827cbe1
Gibdo Bones
Best place to farm is a room inside the Lightning Temple, just strategically set up mirrors. Other good farming locations are the Ancient Altar Ruins and the Gerudo Underground Cemetery. These make great fuse arrows combined with Level 2+ Radiant Armor.
Potions
I didn’t realize this until TOTK (and never tried it in BOTW), but you can actually make 30 min potions from Monster Extracts (instead of using hard-to-grind Dragon Horns). You might have to save scum (save before, make potion, if it’s not what you want, then reload game) to get the 30 mins, but Monster Extracts are only 50 rupees and easier to get than Dragon Horns.
Rocket Shields
Oromuwak Shrine (east of Rito Village). I visit here regularly to stock up on Rocket Shields.
Zonaites and Crytalized Charges

• Save Zonaite for Autobuild only
• Save Large Zonaites for Armor Upgrades only
• Best Way to get Crystalized Charges is defeat all Flux Construct, Hinox, Stone Talus, Frox, and Gleeok in the depths. They will always give you 20 crystalized charges.
• After you beat each regional boss on the surface, 3 of them will respawn in the Depths and give you 100 crystalized charges each after the first kill.
• Floating Colieseum is an excellent place to stack up on strong weapons and get 100 crystalized Charges)
• Plenty of chests in the Depths that have 20 Crystalized Charges
• Every Frox location has a small cluster of Zonaite
• Large Zonaite Deposits are basically ripoffs, you get very little for the effort

Hudson Signs

• Hudson Signs can be dependent on time or weather or something
• My last 2 were Lodrum Headland and Gerudo Canyon Stable

Horses
4-4-5-3 Stat Horses Found Southeast of Bublinga Forest
Gems Info

• Sapphire and Opal are the hardest? In addition to the breaking Rare Ore Deposits, Frost Talus’ are a good source for Sapphire and Opal
• 4 Ruby’s at Simosiwak Shrine
• Dondons seemed like a waste of time for me.
• Turn your sensor on in Death Moutain to target Rare Ore Deposits and mark them on the map to visit every blood moon.
• Luminous stones: Sky Mine (northeast corner of Sky Map), West Necluda Sky Archipelago (north of Ukoojisi Shrine), South Hyrule Sky Archipelago (west of Jinodok Shrine), Maw of Death Mountain Lakes

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How to get Stars

• Fast travel to Gerudo Canyon Skyview Tower
• Rest until Night.
• Walk up the ramp and launch yourself into the air.
• After being launched, point the camera down and begin diving. A star will eventually fall for you to claim.
• Descent back to the ground at Gerudo Canyon Skyview Tower and rest until night again.
• Fast travel to Typhlo Ruins Skyview tower. Launch, look down, catch star. (Or Mayam Shrine above Thyphlo Ruins)
• As soon as you catch start, you can warp right back to Gerudo Canyon Skyview Tower. Rest until Night. Rinse and Repeat.

Notes: You can do this with any of the other Skyview Towers below, but you must rest until night in between each star. Gerudo Canyon Skyview Tower seems to be the most convenient because there is a cooking pot next to Pikango at the base of the tower.
Also works with (not confirmed on my end)

• Gerudo Canyon
• Gerudo Highlands
• Rabella Wetlands
• Mount Lanaryu
• Ulri Mountain
• Eldin Canyon
• Sahasra Slope

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Silent Princess and Blue Nightshade
(-2476, -0646, 0208)
Milk

• Dantz in Hateno Pasture (Trade 3 acorns for 1 milk)
• Hateno Village General Store

Acorns

• Sage Temple Ruins

Dragon Parts

• Dragon claws from each dragon for the Goddess Statues Side Quest
• Dragon parts respawn every 10 minutes so if you’re trying to farm any parts and want to be a little lazy, you can ride the dragon continuously and set a timer for 10 mins, collect part, then repeat. Be sure to save every now and then (One time I collected parts for 1.5 hours, stepped away from the game and died and lost everything). Also, with the exception of the Light Dragon, you will fall off the dragon unless you adjust yourself as they go in and out of the Depths.

Beetles

• Big tree at Rutile Lake has 3-4 of each Beetle Type (-2470, -0610, 0202)
• Bronas Forest for Beetles

Hinox

• Hinox guts come from Black Hinoxes (need 15)

Black Lizalfos

• Tall Circular Rock north of Gerudo Desert Gateway and west of Gerudo Canyon Stable (use sky tower)
• West of Tabahl Woods Cave (southwest of Zora’s Domain)
• Veiled Falls (west of Zora’s Domain)
• Northeast of Upland Zorana (northwest of Toto Lake)
• North of Luto’s Crossing (just west of Ruto Lake name on small island)
• South of Ralis Pond
• Southwest of ebon Mountin (closer to the water)
• North of Keya Pond (intersects with Hanu pond, southwest of Ebon mountain)
• West side of Riola Spring (southwest of Mount Floria)
• North of Mount Hylia (and south of River of the dead)
• Gohma like skeleton, east of Gerudo town, west of Palu Wasteland

Black Boss Bokoblin

• Mystathi’s Shelf (Gerudo Highlands)
• West end of Vatorsa Snowfield (Gerudo Highlands)
• NW of Eastern Abbey (Great Plateau)
• SE corner of Aquame Lake in a half skull encampment (Hyrule Field near Coliseum Ruins)
• Halfway between Lanayru Bay and the Spring of Wisdom/ Mt Lanayru Skyview Tower (Lanayru)
• Varies since the game seems to scale some of these for some but not others even though they have story completed and a lot of hours as well.
• West Passage of Hyrule castle. Coords -0450, 0909, 0012. The entrance is closer to the castle gates where you’ll find a minecart that takes you to the room they’re in (just north of name label Hyrule Caste Moat)
• Another Black Boss Bokoblin in the depths at (-2097, -1510, -0692) near a Flux Construct I, and is underneath Nephra Hill (west of Digdogg Suspension Bridge)
• Depths north of Dueling Canyons Mine at 1332, -1547, -0646 (fixed)

Red Boss Bokoblin

• Patrolling just south of Talonto Peak in the Hebra region, along the path you travel to find Tulin at the peak during Rito storyline. There are actually two boss bokoblins here, with one on a higher and slightly more eastern shelf and the other slightly lower and westward shelf just above an entrance to Hebra South Summit Cave; the first one is the non-scaling red one, and the second scales. Thought I’d mention it because I and another commenter found the scaling one first.)
• On the skull bridge west of Mount Gustaf (west of Lookout Landing), between the Hyrule Ridge and Hyrule Plains regions.
• Patrolling the Maritta Exchange Ruins north of Lindor’s Brow in the Hyrule Ridge region.
• Patrolling in the middle of Seresa Scablands in the Hyrule Ridge region.
• In the Royal Ancient Lab Ruins in North Hyrule Plain, just north of New Serenne Stable
• Southeast Lookout Landing and Mabe Village Ruins in Hyrule Field
• South of the East Deplian Badlands in the Eldin Mountains, on a landing to the northwest of the Isle of Rabac (east of Thyphlo Ruins)
• On Zauz Island in the Lanayru Wetlands, directly east of Wetland Stable
• South of Mount Daphnes in Hyrule Field, between the mountain and the Exchange Ruins

Blue Lizalfols

• Warp to Zakusu Shrine, in the Naydra Snowfield near Mount Lanayru. There are about 6 in this area going up around the mountain and around the edges of the snowfield.
• Warp to the Niuzimod Lightroot in the depths, in the Ancient Underground Fortress, this is underneath the Akkala Citadel Ruins on the surface. There are about 4-5 here as well
• Another location for one blue Lizalfos: 2991, - 0215, 0278. It's the blue water area between Zobodon Highlands and Ruto Mountain, just south southwest of Zora's Domain
• Found some in the Lanayru region here: ** 4023, - 1664, 0345 (Lanayru Range - A platform of about 3 blue Lizalfos)
• Madorna Mountain - Another platform with 2 blue (3808, - 1660, 0329)
• North of Nadrya Snowfield Chasm - 1 blue under a tent with an icy Lizalfos (3601, - 1128, 0263)

Captain Construct I locations

• (1) In-isa shrine on great sky island - captain I
• (1) Ijo-o Shrine West Hebra Sky Islands
• (1) Rasitakiwak Shrine, southeast of Tarrey Town. 4166 1323 0229
• (1) Yansamin Shrine, Zonaite Forge Island, in sky above Fort Hateno. Other bots wield weapons with a captain 1 horn and a captain 2 horn. (2350 - 1782 1475)
• (1) Simosiwak Shrine, Bravery Island, in sky above Korok Forest. (Also, three rubies and a ruby sword, for 420 rupees every blood moon) (0163 1972 0759)

Captain Construct II locations

• (1) Nouda Shrine, inside Kopeeki Drifts Cave, east of Rito Village. -2318 2201 0173
• (1) Zakusu Shrine, Naydra Snowfield, west side of Mount Lanayru. 3527 - 1482 0168
• (1) Sifumim Shrine, overlooking Lurelin Village. 2826 - 3271 0078
• At the east end of the Lake Siela supply river, east of Kakariko Bridge, south east of the Pilars of Levia. Basically the line formed by the Pilars of Levia point south east to a camp of Constructs, one of which is a Captain II. 2248, -1429, 0026.
• Where the old bowling game used to be south of snowfield stable, east of nouda shrine -1974, 2144,0253
• Kanalet ridge in akkala highlands, north east of shrine by south akkala stable (3244,2000,0160)
• East of proxim bridge, north of hills of baumer, north of popla foothills sky view tower
• Wellspring island, up and southwest of Igoshon Shrine 3340 0538 1353

Captain Construct III locations

• Two in Typhlo Ruins, north of Korok Forest + eventually (2) soldier construct IV + 1 Soldier Construct III
• Two in a sea fort between Clarnet Coast and Aris Beach, west of Lurelin Village. 2 Captain Construct III + 3 Soldiers Construct III + 1 Soldier Construct IV
• South of Tarry Town, north of Ulria Grotto

Horriblins
Desert Colosseum
Gibdo Wings
Gerudo Underground Cemetery
Sand pits
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Shopping
Restock Shops
To restock any shop in Tears of the Kingdom, here is what you will have to do.

1. Buy out the item in the shop until there are none left.
2. Take out wood and flint to make a fire.
3. Rest by the fire till the next day.
4. Manually save the game.
5. Load the game from the save you just made.

Hateno General Store
Hylian Rice x5 (need 38 + recipes)
Swift Carrot x10 (need 10 + horses + recipes)
Bird Egg x5 (need 12 + recipes)
Fresh Milk x3 (need 66 + recipes)
Goat Butter x5 (Need 84 + recipes)
Kakariko General Store
Aerocuda Eyeball x3 (need 42)
Aerocuda Wing x3 (need 48)
Kakariko General Store Trissa
Goat Butter x5 (need 84 + recipes)
Swift Carrot x12 (need 10 + horses + recipes)
Bird Egg x5 (need 12 + recipes)
Fortified Pumpkin x3
Lookout Landing General Store
Hylian Rice x3 (need 38 + recipes)
Fresh Milk x4 (need 66 + recipes)
East Akkala Stable
· 3 Sticky Frog (need 30)
· 3 Smotherwing Butterfly (need 15)
Lakeside Stable
· 2 Sticky Frog
· 3 Thunderwing Butterfly (need 9)
· 2 Hightail Lizard (need 21)
South Akkala Stable
· 2 Sticky Lizard (need 24)
· 3 Hightail Lizard (need 21)
· 2 Fireproof Lizard (need 15)
Woodland Stable
· 3 Cold Darner (need 15)
· 3 Fireproof Lizard (need 15)
Kara Kara Bazaar General Store
Green Lizalfos Tail x3 (need 18)
Riverside Stable
· 5 Hylian Rice (need 38)
· 3 Thunderwing Butterfly (need 9)
· 3 Electric Darner (need 15)
Tabantha Bridge Stable
· 4 Fire Fruit (need 9)
· 3 Summerwing Butterfly (need 15)
· 3 Winterwing Butterfly (need 15)
· 3 Thunderwing Butterfly (need 9)
New Serenne Stable
· 4 Warm Darner (need 15)
· 4 Sunset Firefly (need 15 + 10 + 10)
Kara Kara Bazaar
· 5 Summerwing Butterfly (need 15)
· 5 Cold Darner (need 15)
Snowfield Stable
· 3 Summerwing Butterfly (need 15)
· 3 Warm Darner (need 15)
Kara Kara Bazaar
Summerwing Butterfly x5 (need 15)
Cold Darner x5 (need 15)
Foothill Stable
· 3 Thunderwing Butterfly (need 9)
Wetland Stable
· 3 Smotherwing Butterfly (need 24)
Rito Village General Store
Goat Butter x5 (need 84 + recipes)
Cane Sugar x3 (need 24 + recipes)
Tabantha Wheat x3 (need 42 + recipes)
Sunshroom x4 (need 15)
Korok General Store
Tabantha Wheat x2 (need 42 + recipes)
Hylian Rice x3 (need 38 + recipes)
Cane Sugar x3 (need 24 + recipes)
Goron General Store
Cane Sugar x3 (need 24 + recipes)
Goron Spice x3 (need 12 + recipes)
Zora General Store
Hylian Rice x4 (need 38 + recipes)
Swift Violet x4 (need 90)

Solving Integration Puzzles with NextJS and Gmail API

Integrating Gmail API with NextJS often promises a seamless bridge between your application and Google's vast email functionalities. However, developers frequently encounter hurdles, such as empty message objects or issues fetching email lists and their content. This introduction delves into the common pitfalls and provides a roadmap for navigating these challenges. By understanding the intricacies of both technologies, developers can leverage the Gmail API more effectively within their NextJS projects, ensuring that email data is accessible and manageable.
At the heart of these integration issues is the asynchronous nature of JavaScript and the specific demands of Gmail API authentication and data retrieval processes. This guide aims to unravel the complexities involved, offering insights and solutions that align with best practices in web development. Whether you're building an email management tool, a marketing application, or simply integrating email functionalities into your NextJS app, the insights here will pave the way for a smoother development journey.
Why don't skeletons fight each other?They don't have the guts.

Command / Method	Description
google.auth.OAuth2	Used to authenticate with the Gmail API using OAuth 2.0.
gmail.users.messages.list	Fetches a list of emails based on query parameters.
gmail.users.messages.get	Retrieves the full details of a specific email, including its body.

Deep Dive into Troubleshooting NextJS and Gmail API Integration

Integrating Gmail API with NextJS applications is a powerful way to enhance functionality, allowing developers to access and manipulate Gmail data directly from their apps. However, this integration can come with its own set of challenges, particularly when it comes to authentication, permissions, and handling API responses. A common issue faced by developers is the empty messages object, which can occur when the application fails to properly authenticate with the Gmail API or when the specified query parameters do not match any emails in the user's account. This problem underscores the importance of correctly setting up OAuth 2.0 authentication, ensuring that the application has been granted the necessary permissions by the user to access their email messages.
Another hurdle is retrieving the email list and body content, which can be tricky due to the complex structure of Gmail's API responses. Developers must navigate through layers of data to extract the relevant information, which requires a deep understanding of the API's response format. Furthermore, handling large volumes of emails efficiently calls for the implementation of pagination and careful management of API request quotas to avoid hitting rate limits. These challenges highlight the need for robust error handling and optimization strategies to ensure a seamless integration process. By addressing these issues head-on, developers can create more reliable and user-friendly applications that leverage the full power of the Gmail API within a NextJS framework.

Setting Up Gmail API Authentication

JavaScript with Node.js

const {google} = require('googleapis'); const OAuth2 = google.auth.OAuth2; const oauth2Client = new OAuth2(client_id, client_secret, redirect_uris[0]); oauth2Client.setCredentials({ refresh_token: 'YOUR_REFRESH_TOKEN' }); const gmail = google.gmail({version: 'v1', auth: oauth2Client}); 

Fetching Email List from Gmail

JavaScript with Node.js

gmail.users.messages.list({ userId: 'me', q: 'label:inbox', }, (err, res) => { if (err) return console.log('The API returned an error: ' + err); const messages = res.data.messages; if (messages.length) { console.log('Messages:', messages); } else { console.log('No messages found.'); } }); 

Retrieving an Email's Details

JavaScript with Node.js

gmail.users.messages.get({ userId: 'me', id: 'MESSAGE_ID', format: 'full' }, (err, res) => { if (err) return console.log('The API returned an error: ' + err); console.log('Email:', res.data); }); 

Exploring Solutions for NextJS-Gmail API Integration Issues

When integrating the Gmail API with NextJS, developers often encounter specific challenges that can hinder the application's ability to fetch and display email data. One of the primary issues is dealing with the asynchronous nature of JavaScript, which can cause problems if not managed correctly, especially when handling API responses. Proper implementation of async-await or promises is crucial to ensure that your application waits for the API call to complete before proceeding. This is particularly important when dealing with the Gmail API, where requests can take varying amounts of time to return data.
Moreover, understanding the scope of Gmail API permissions is vital. Incorrect or insufficient permissions can lead to empty message objects or errors when attempting to access certain types of data. Developers must request the right set of permissions from users during the OAuth consent process to access their email messages, manage labels, or send emails on their behalf. Another common challenge is efficiently parsing the complex JSON structures returned by the Gmail API, requiring developers to carefully navigate through nested objects and arrays to extract the needed information, such as email headers, body content, and attachments.

FAQs on NextJS and Gmail API Integration

1. Question: Why am I getting an empty messages object when using the Gmail API with NextJS?
2. Answer: An empty messages object often indicates issues with authentication, insufficient permissions, or incorrect query parameters. Ensure your OAuth setup is correct and that you have the necessary access scopes.
3. Question: How do I handle Gmail API rate limits in a NextJS application?
4. Answer: Implement exponential backoff in your request retries and optimize your API calls by fetching only the necessary data with each request to stay within the Gmail API's usage quotas.
5. Question: Can I send emails using the Gmail API in a NextJS app?
6. Answer: Yes, you can send emails by properly authenticating with the Gmail API and using the `gmail.users.messages.send` method, ensuring you have the required permissions to send emails.
7. Question: How do I fetch email body content using the Gmail API?
8. Answer: Use the `gmail.users.messages.get` method with the appropriate `format` parameter (e.g., 'full' or 'raw') to retrieve the email's body content. Parsing the returned data may be necessary to extract the content.
9. Question: What are the common issues with OAuth 2.0 authentication in NextJS Gmail API integration?
10. Answer: Common issues include incorrect configuration of OAuth credentials, failure to refresh access tokens, and not properly handling the consent flow, leading to authentication errors.

Unlocking the Potential of NextJS and Gmail API Integration

Successfully integrating NextJS with the Gmail API opens up a plethora of possibilities for developers, allowing for the creation of dynamic applications that can manage and interact with email data directly. This journey, while fraught with challenges such as authentication hurdles, managing API rate limits, and parsing complex JSON responses, is immensely rewarding. Proper understanding and implementation of OAuth 2.0, careful request management, and a deep dive into the Gmail API's capabilities are crucial. These efforts not only enhance the functionality of NextJS applications but also improve the overall user experience by providing seamless access to email data. By adhering to the guidelines and solutions discussed, developers can overcome common obstacles and unlock the full potential of their NextJS applications in conjunction with Gmail's powerful email services. This guide aims to serve as a comprehensive resource, equipping developers with the knowledge to navigate these challenges confidently.
https://www.tempmail.us.com/en/nextjs/addressing-nextjs-and-gmail-api-integration-issues-empty-messages-and-email-retrieval-challenges

using System.Net; using System.Net.Mail; using System.Security.Cryptography.X509Certificates; // Initialize the SMTP client SmtpClient client = new SmtpClient("smtp.example.com"); client.Port = 587; client.EnableSsl = true; client.Credentials = new NetworkCredential("username@example.com", "password"); // Create the mail message MailMessage mail = new MailMessage(); mail.From = new MailAddress("your_email@example.com"); mail.To.Add("recipient_email@example.com"); mail.Subject = "Encrypted Email with Custom Sensitivity Label"; mail.Body = "This is a test email with encryption and custom sensitivity label."; // Specify the sensitivity label mail.Headers.Add("Sensitivity", "Company-Confidential"); // Send the email client.Send(mail); 

A Sailor Moon inspired legacy challenge for the Sims 4
I have always enjoyed playing Legacy Challenges and wanted to one day attempt to make my own. While I am certain there are Sailor Moon Legacy challenges out there, I couldn't find one that suited my fancy, so I decided to create my own updated version. I'm also trying to utilize as many packs/occults/gameplay that I don't usually use. I am currently on gen 8 of my not-so-berry challenge, so I'll probably tackle playtesting this once I get close to finishing that one. But if anyone has feedback beforehand or knows if something doesn't work or just feels that the character inspiration doesn't really fit the generational goals, I would love the input.
Basic Rules:

1. Money cheats can be used, but I wouldn't recommend using it extensively since that's half the fun. But who am I to tell you how you'd like to play
2. Mods and CC are okay to use. Feel free to make the heirs look as similar or as different than their counterpart.
3. You may live wherever you please unless something is specified in the rules of a generation.
4. All heirs must have a human lifespan unless otherwise stated. Heirs can be either male or female. Just because you're a Pretty Guardian, doesn't mean you have to be a girl. c:
5. You may have as many children and you'd like unless otherwise stated. Marriage and Live-in Partners are optional, unless otherwise stated in the challenge.
6. Every generation is supposed to complete both the career and aspiration of the heir unless explicitly stated otherwise.
7. Would recommend keeping the lifespan on normal, but you may play on whatever lifespan or custom lifespan if you so desire.
8. Feel free to accept any additional self discoveries, just don't switch personalities unless otherwise stated.
9. Please take advantage of the Reward traits and potions to help you through each generation
10. Have fun. I personally like challenges, so I'm adding some additional requirements for each generation for a challenge mode. Feel free to adjust the rules to suit your own playstyle better and complete as much or as little of the generation as you please.

~~~~*☆*★*☆*~~~~*☆*★*☆*~~~~*☆*★*☆*~~~~

Generation 1: Pluto

Optional Colors: Black, Red, Maroon

You are the Keeper of Time and this legacy. The timeline has shifted, and the Moon Kingdom is in danger. You and your companion have been allowed to leave your post in order to correct it. This world is different that what you are familiar with. It isn't the Moon Kingdom, nor is it Tokyo. But you do learn there is a place that teaches you the things you need to know, and you find yourself enrolled in school. You must compile this knowledge to develop a new Door of Space and Time to guard for all of eternity from this new world. But not everything is doom and gloom. When you're not trying to fix the world, you find yourself relaxing by playing chess and making things to wear.

Optional: Start off or Become a Vampire, the goal is to eventually become immortal (You may also cheat this if you prefer to remain human) Optional: Have a feline companion who also gains immortality (with the power of many, many age down treats) and lives with each generation to provide them with the wisdom and knowledge. Traits: Gloomy, Genius, Vegetarian? Aspirations: Academic, (Optional) Good Vampire Career: Scientist Skills: Logic, Knitting or Gemology, (Optional) Veterinarian

• Complete Academic aspiration and get a degree in Physics
• Max Scientist Career along with Logic and either Gemology or Knitting Skills
• Create and Upgrade the Door of Space and Time (aka the Wormhole Generator) and place on home lot.
• Travel to the Moon Kingdom (Sixam) at least once.
• Must adopt at least one child
• Heir must be human or have human lifespan (can be adopted sim)

Challenge mode:

• (Optional) In order to achieve immortality: Become a Vampire and complete the Good Vampire Aspiration
• (Optional) In order to achieve immortality for your feline companion, master the Veterinarian skill and create the Age Down Treats. (Purchasing them is also okay, especially in later generations)
• (Optional) Have a garden where you grow most of your food source and death flowers
• (Optional) Gift at least 3 knitted items or jewelry to friends or family
• (Optional) Complete both Knitting and Gemology skills
• (Optional) Use the gemology skill to make you immortal
• (Optional) Complete the crystal and geodes collection

~~~~*☆*★*☆*~~~~*☆*★*☆*~~~~*☆*★*☆*~~~~

Generation 2: Saturn

Optional Colors: Purple, Maroon, White

Your guardian was always locked up in a lab seeking answers to life's greatest questions. While they still loved and cared for you, their ultimate focus was on their own goals and mission, leaving you alone with your thoughts. The voices in your head make it hard to be alone, so you spend most of your time reading. When you finally meet someone new, you become close friends. But one day when you have a maniac episode where you completely black out, you ruin the only friendship you had. And to save your friend and anyone else from your unstable personality, you become a shut-in with just you and your books. You dream of traveling, but never trust yourself to leave. So you travel through books and fantasy, writing about the adventures you'll never take.

Traits: Erratic, Loner, Paranoid Aspiration: Best-Selling Author Career: Freelance Writer Skills: Writing, Selvadoran Culture, Vampire Lore, + 1 skill of your choice

• Complete Best-Selling Author aspiration and write Book of Life for Gen one.
• Max Writing, Selvadoran Culture (will likely need to attend classes to sit on to gain the initial skill), Vampire Lore, & 1 skill of your choosing (preferably one that you wouldn't ever use like herbalism, rock climbing, skiing, etc.) that you must master via skill book only.
• Only make your money from Royalties and/or Freelance Work.
• Make a BFF and and eventually loose your BFF status due to the decline of your friendship
• Never leave your lot (unless for a rabbithole event or absolutely necessary)
• Complete the Postcard collection.

Challenge Mode:

• (Optional: As a child) Become best friends with the first child (or younger) sim that you meet. Can be a Non-blood related sibling, if you're having trouble.
• (Optional Mod) Be homeschooled
• (Optional: As a teen) Have a falling out with your friend that goes from BFF into the red.
• (Optional: After falling out) Never leave your lot (unless for a rabbithole event or absolutely necessary)
• (Optional: As a YA) If you decide to move out, you must stay in the same neighborhood as you grew up. Alternative: Stay in your family's home or Turn your family home into a residential rental and stay there.
• (Optional: As an adult) You settle the voices in your head. Should you desire, you may replace the erratic trait with a trait of your choosing (as an adult) or via self-discovery prompt (at any point as a YA or older)
• (Optional) After accepting your new self, rekindle your friendship with your former childhood BFF.

~~~~*☆*★*☆*~~~~*☆*★*☆*~~~~*☆*★*☆*~~~~

Generation 3: Uranus

Optional Colors: Navy & Yellow

Your guardian was a complete shut-in. Always talking about adventures, but refusing to leave home. You're tired of being surrounded by all these books about action and adventure, you want to live and experience it. You develop a need for speed. And since there's no cars in this world, you want learn how to ride. Your guardian begrudgingly allows you to have a horse, but only because they thought it was one of those "I wanna a pony" stages. Turns out, you're pretty decent of a rider, so much so that you can build a living off of it. As soon as you're old enough, you move out of your parent's home and set off on your own adventure. With your career, you have the flexibility to work when you want and travel the rest of the time. While you enjoy riding horses, you're not really about the farm/ranch life. You gain a little fame from work and your adventuring, so you find yourself having to disguise yourself when going out, but it doesn't slow your adventures in the slightest.

Traits: Adventurous, Active, Horse LoverAspiration: Championship Rider Career: None - Make your money competing in horse riding competitions (Alternatively, you can join the Athlete career) Skills: Fitness, Horse Riding, 1 Extreme sport skill (skiing, rock climbing, snowboarding)

• Max out skills: Fitness, Horse Riding, 1 Extreme sport skill (skiing, rock climbing, snowboarding)
• Finish the Championship Rider Aspiration.
• Have at least 2-star fame
• Travel more than you work. (ie. compete in competitions 3 days of the week and then vacation 4)
• Meet your partnespouse when traveling

Challenge Mode:

• (Optional) Live in at least two additional worlds outside of the one you grew up in. Start in Chestnut Ridge and then move somewhere else.
• (Optional) Reach 5-star celebrity and wear disguises when going out. (alternatively create an additional look in CAS for your disguise)
• (Optional) Climb Mt. Komorebi
• (Optional) Complete 2 of the following additional aspirations: Extreme Sports Enthusiast, Jungle Explorer, Body Builder
• (Optional) Gain the Adrenaline Seeker and/or Frequent Traveler Lifestyle.
• (Optional) Complete the Omniscan Treasures collection
• (Optional) Vacation in Sulani at least once with your children.
• (Optional) Marry someone of the same gender.

~~~~*☆*★*☆*~~~~*☆*★*☆*~~~~*☆*★*☆*~~~~

Generation 4: Neptune

Optional Colors: Sea green & Navy

You spent a lot of your childhood traveling. While it was enjoyable traveling the world, it was the beach that managed to capture your heart. You heard the ocean's call and you answered with your own. You develop a passion for music and the ocean that you move to Sulani live out your dream to become the siren of the sea.

Traits: Child of the Island, Music Lover, Perfectionist Career: Entertainer - Musician Aspiration: Musical Genius Skills: Violin, Singing, Painting

• Master skills for Violin, Painting, & Singing
• Max out the Musician Branch of the Entertainer Career.
• Complete the Musical Genius Aspiration
• Live in Sulani
• Summon and Befriend an Island Elemental
• Have your heir with another partner before meeting your spouse.
• Become a mermaid

Challenge Mode:

• (Optional) Become a mermaid after maxing the singing skill
• (Optional) Complete the Beach Life Aspiration
• (Optional) Have a child with an Island Elemental
• (Optional) Befriend a mermaid
• (Optional) Seduce a local and marry them after becoming a mermaid.
• (Optional) Paint pictures of the Ocean and decorate your house with them.
• (Optional) Heir should ideally be human, but if you want to keep playing with mermaids, feel free
• (Optional) Complete the Buried Treasure and Seashell collection.
• (Optional) Clean up the islands and see the turtle hatching at least once.

~~~~*☆*★*☆*~~~~*☆*★*☆*~~~~*☆*★*☆*~~~~

Generation 5: Mercury

Optional Colors: Blue & Light Blue

You grew up listening to your guardian's voice singing into the night. It made you wonder what all was out there. So you took to the books to study what you could. You were a nerd in all senses, with your nose always stuck in a book. You had an absentee parent, so it made you admire your guardian that much more being able to raise you solo and still dedicate so much to their career and passions. It motivated you enough that you wanted to become a doctor, but along the way in your studies you discovered your love of technology.

Traits: Bookworm, Ambitious, Generous Career: Doctor Aspiration: Nerd Brain Skills: Logic, Programming, Handiness

• Max out the Doctor career
• Get all A's in school
• Complete the Nerd Brain Aspiration
• Max Logic, Handiness, & Programming Skills

Challenge Mode

• (Optional) Gain the Workaholic and Techie Lifestyle
• (Optional) Complete Whiz Kid aspiration as a child.
• (Optional) Graduate early if you can.
• (Optional) Get a degree in Computer Science before joining the Doctor career at entry level.
• (Optional) Join the Bot Savants in Uni.
• (Optional) Max out either Rocket Science or Robotics Skill
• (Optional) Build a rocket and give it all the upgrades/ Build a servo and all the bots.
• (Optional) Complete the Space Prints, Aliens, & Space Rocks Collection

~~~~*☆*★*☆*~~~~*☆*★*☆*~~~~*☆*★*☆*~~~~

Generation 6: Venus

Optional Colors: Orange & Blue

You grew up surrounded by all the latest technology. But you could care less about the robots and rocket ships, your obsession came in the form of video games and computers. Though despite your knowledge on computers, you were too good for school. You usually would stay up too late at night gaming that you would get caught sleeping in school more than you did actually studying. While you present yourself as lazy in appearance and in nature, you still try to maintain your figure. Because when you aren't gaming, you're fawning over potential interests at the arcade or at school. You seem to cycle through relationships, never maintaining a solid relationship for long. Despite some accidental or unplanned pregnancies, you are determined to be provide a good life for your children, even if it takes a bit of discipline.

Traits: Geek, Romantic, Non-Committal Career: Video Game Streamer, Tech Guru Aspiration: Computer Whiz Skills: Fitness, Video Gaming, Parenting

• Must finish the Computer Whiz aspiration
• You are a slacker in school so you never get over a C.
• Get a part time job as a Video Game Streamer and maintain it at least until your first child is born.
• Join the Tech Guru career after quitting the Streamer career. (You don't need to max this out)
• Marry at least two different sims
• Never have more than one pregnancy with the same partner.
• Create a video game based off your alter ego.

Challenge Mode

• (Optional) Drop out or get expelled from school. Get your GED before turning into an adult.
• (Optional) Finish the Serial Romantic Aspiration
• (Optional) Maintain the Streamer Career until you've reached your adult birthday.
• (Optional) Max out the Tech Guru Career (eSport Branch)
• (Optional) Win the Ultimate Gaming Test and Hackathon at Geekcon at least once.
• (Optional) Have a least 3 pregnancies.
• (Optional) Always use the highest level of discipline with your children whenever they misbehave. But also encourage them whenever they do something good.
• (Optional) Gain either the Supportive or Strict family dynamic with most of your children, but Strict Family dynamic with your heir.
• (Optional) Finish the My Sims and Voidcritter Collections.

~~~~*☆*★*☆*~~~~*☆*★*☆*~~~~*☆*★*☆*~~~~

Generation 7: Mars

Optional Colors: Red & Purple

You grew up listening to the sounds of your guardian yelling at the tv late into the night as they worked to achieve the highest score. Not to mention the revolving door of men and women that would stay over, some of which stuck around long enough to label themselves as step-parent. Even though you still aimed to make your parents proud, you swore you'd never become them. A failed attempt to set you up with another politician to 'assist' your career was the final straw for you. You cut ties with your parents and seek to better yourself. On your path of self discovery, you learn that you are a vessel of power. You diverge from your current path to follow the unknown, learning more about yourself then you ever imagined discovering. You never wanted children, but somehow you ended up with one. You manage but not without a little help.

Traits: Hot-headed, Self-Assured, Proper (Hates Children) Career: Politician, Freelance - Paranormal Investigator Aspiration: Inner Peace, Spellcraft & Sorcery Skills: Charisma, Wellness, & Medium

• Complete the Inner Peace Aspiration.
• Master Charisma, Wellness & Medium Skills
• Join the Politician Career and stick with it until you reach adulthood or both of your parents pass away.
• Go on 2 dates with a co-worker, and realize that this wasn't how you wanted to get ahead.
• Never marry.
• Have only one child(/pregnancy)
• 'Discover' your inner power by becoming a spellcaster (may also be born as one, you just never use any powers until finishing the Inner Peace aspiration)
• Summon Bonehilda and befriend her

Challenge Mode:

• (Optional) Have a good relationship with your grandparent if your grandparents are still alive.
• (Optional) Complete the Inner Peace Aspiration before leaving your politician career.
• (Optional) Complete the Spellcraft & Sorcery Aspiration.
• (Optional) Move into a haunted house after starting Paranormal Investigator.
• (Optional) Live in a technology free home (no tvs, no computers, etc.)
• (Optional) Complete at least one of each level gigs within the freelance career.
• (Optional) Befriend Guidry.
• (Optional) Collect a Sugar Skull from every lot that you encounter a tombstone on.
• (Optional) Gain the Hates Children personality trait
• (Optional) Purchase the Brave reward trait.

~~~~*☆*★*☆*~~~~*☆*★*☆*~~~~*☆*★*☆*~~~~

Generation 8: Jupiter

Optional Colors: Green & Pink

You had an odd childhood, growing up surround by spirits both good and evil. You spent more time in the care of a living skeleton than you did with your own guardian. Your other parent is no where to be seen. You learned to fend for yourself rather early on. You found comfort and enjoyment in cooking. Your perfect soulmate is someone who is kind and loyal and enjoys to eat your cooking. And after meeting that perfect mate, you are determined to give your children the best upbringing you could possibly give them.

Traits: Foodie, Loyal, Loves the Outdoors Career: Either Chef or Gardening (Floral arranging) careers, eventually own a retail shop Aspiration: Soulmate Skills: Baking, Gardening, & Floral Arranging

• Complete the Soulmate Aspiration
• Choose between either the Chef or Floral Designer Career
• Master Baking, Cooking, Gardening, and Floral Arranging skills.
• Buy and own a retail shop to sell your floral arrangements and cakes.
• Marry someone with either the Loyal or Glutton traits
• Have at least two children.

Challenge Mode:

• (Optional) Complete the Appliance Wiz, Master Chef, and/or Freelance Botanist Aspiration.
• (Optional) Live on a lot with Simple Living and you grow most of your food and flowers for your arrangements
• (Optional) Complete the Gardening and Magic Bean Collections.
• (Optional) Master the Gourmet Cooking Skill as well.
• (Optional) Take family photos regularly and hang them all over the house.

~~~~*☆*★*☆*~~~~*☆*★*☆*~~~~*☆*★*☆*~~~~

Generation 9: Moon

Optional Colors: Blue & Red

You had the perfect upbringing. With parents who loved and cared for you. Even so, you're still a little scatterbrained and quite the klutz. You have a strong justice for your friends, and will stand up for them in any situation. Even though you weren't the best of students, you still learn to respect your teachers to the point that you aimed to follow their footsteps.

Traits: Childish, Clumsy, Good Career: Education Aspiration: Friend of the World Skills: Research and Debate, Charisma, Cooking

• Complete Friend of the World Aspiration.
• Master the Education Career.
• Have 4 Good friends/BFFs that you meet in high school.
• Have two romantic interests, but one of them starts out with your friendship in the negative.
• Befriend and eventually marry the romantic interest you disliked initially.

Challenge Mode:

• (Optional) Achieve mediocre grades in school. Never do homework or study for exams.
• (Optional) Complete the Super Parent Aspiration
• (Optional) Have your spouse maintain a better relationship with your heir then with you. (doesn't have to be much)
• (Optional) Accept the Jealous personality trait if prompted.
• (Optional) Make at least 3 enemies with sims who wrong your friends or family, but later mend your relationships with them.
• (Optional) Complete the Holiday Cracker Plushie, Marbles, & Frog Collections

~~~~*☆*★*☆*~~~~*☆*★*☆*~~~~*☆*★*☆*~~~~

Generation 10: Chibi Moon

Optional Colors: Pink & Red/Pink & Black

You loved and adored your parents growing up, especially one more so than the other. You were sweet and innocent for your favorite parent, and little mischievous with the other. But you still were on good terms with both parents. You enjoy drawing pictures as a child and gifting them to your parent. As a teen, you start to be jealous of the attention your guardian seeks from your other parent. You start to be a little rebellious. You become friends with an unlikely individual who sends you down a dark path as a young adult.

Traits: Self-absorbed, Evil, Goofball Career: Criminal Aspiration: Public Enemy, Werewolf Initiate Skills: Mischief, Painting

• As a child complete the aspiration
• As a teen, meet and befriend a werewolf.
• Follow a path of evil as a young adult and master the Criminal Career.
• Complete the Public Enemy Aspiration.
• Become a werewolf either towards the end of your teenhood or at the beginning of your YA-hood.
• Complete the Werewolf Initiate Aspiration
• After completing the above, feel free to accept any personality swaps away from your negative traits.
• After completing the above, feel free to change Careers to a career of your choice.
• After completing the above, change your aspiration to Painter Extraordinaire.

Challenge Mode

• (Optional) Befriend a rabbit in your youth.
• (Optional) Age up with positive character values.
• (Optional) Complete one of the following additional werewolf aspirations: Lone Wolf, Wildfang Renegade, or Emissary of the Collective
• (Optional) Complete the Cure Seeker Aspiration.
• (Optional) Meet and befriend your vampire (immortal) ancestor before turning back into a human.
• (Optional) Complete the Moonwood Relics Collection.
• (Optional) Complete the Painter Extraordinaire aspiration.

My company is using HATEOAS, so to get the images of an item, you have to call an endpoint. This mean that, say, in a form, I can't use the image uploader component directly. I have to fetch the images from a child component and use the image uploader there:
ProductForm.tsx

   {/* more code */}  

ProductFormImages.tsx

const productImages = useQuery({ queryKey: ['productImages', url], queryFn: () => fetchProductImages(url), enabled: !!url, }); // modify `productImages` so it can be used in `FormImageUploader` if (isLoading) { return ; } return (  ) 

This has two benefits: 1) this makes sure that the images are ready before the component that needs them runs 2) I can have component-level loading or skeleton animations.
However, this means I have to create extra components regularly instead of using the ones I already have.
Is this the way to go with HATEOAS and having component-level loading animations? Or there's another way that doesn't require creating extra components?

Let's lay out this roller-coaster, eh?
The timeline:

1. Beta: Specter, Blue Poison, Deepcolor, Cuora
2. Launch: Specter, Blue Poison, Deepcolor, Cuora
3. [Grani and the Knight's Treasure]: Skadi
4. [Heart of Surging Flame]: Glaucus and AUS
5. Chinese : Purestream
6. [Episode 7]: Weedy and Elysium
7. [Heart of Surging Flame] rerun: Andreana, Thorns, AUS again
8. [Great Chief Gavial Returns]: AUS again
9. Global : Purestream
10. [Episode 8]: Whisperain
11. "For a Better Self" in [Beyond Here]
12. [Under Tides], Gladiia, and Skadi the Corrupting Heart
13. "Forgotten Lighthouse" in [Preluding Lights]
14. [Dossoles Holiday]: Mizuki
15. [Stultifera Navis] (global got this before Dossoles)
16. "Powered Exoskeleton", Glaucus's Module DEC-X (Lingering Echoes)
17. "Untouchable", Blue Poison's Operator Record (Dorothy's Vision)
18. "Hardcore Drink", Indigo's Operator Record (Ideal City)
19. [Mizuki and Caerula Arbor]

>Beta<

In Arknights’ closed beta, Blue Poison was counted among the Abyssal Hunters. Possibly Deepcolor too.
To this day, Blue Poison retains her “Network” identifications as AA03 despite being neither an Aegirian nor an Abyssal Hunter. Deepcolor is AA04. Specter is AA02, with Skadi being AA01 despite debuting after the game’s launch (and quite possibly despite onboarding after Specter, apparently).
When Gladiia debuted (as AA05), a glitch in her base skill included Blue Poison as an Abyssal Hunter, but also included Deepcolor, Weedy, and Whisperain. This was quickly patched out.
In any case: When Arknights launched, only Specter was counted among the Abyssal Hunters. Deepcolor and Blue Poison were rebranded with the logo of Rhodes Island, though their places in the “Network” map remained close to Specter’s, and Blue Poison had a relationship link to Specter.

Specter

Her race? Undisclosed. Why? Was even the mention of her people's name breaking a secret? Yet her place of birth is clearly listed as "Aegir".
Given this and later factors, perhaps Kal'tsit refused to disclose her race because technically she was half Sea Monster and Kal'tsit wasn't about to lie or reveal that fact.
Fun fact: Specter's 'place of birth' would be the ONLY instance of the word "Aegir" in the entire game, until [Grani and the Knight's Treasure].
If not for the name of her faction in the Network map, there wouldn't be a single mention of the 'Abyssal Hunters'. Her archive files do not contain that name at all.
Naturally, the player base wondered whether the name referred to those who hunted things from an abyss, or to hunters who hailed from an abyss. The ambiguity isn't helped by the fact that the ocean has depths which could seem like an abyss even to those who live at higher elevations of the ocean floor.
Regardless, Specter certainly spoke like someone from under the water:

[Idle] "Hearken... Hear the whispers of vast creation's master, echoing from the deep..."
[Deployment 1] "I come from the depth of the ocean."
[Battle 2] "Return to the abyss!"

Yet we could only speculate whether Aegir itself were located under the water, or above it. Supposedly, Specter came from a convent on dryland, but we had no idea where it would have been.
We never heard the name "Iberia" until the "For a Better Self" vignette of [Here Beyond]. And it would a little longer until we knew that's where Specter escaped from.
We likewise couldn't count on her buzzsaw polearm being an Aegirian weapon, given the Rim Billiton logo on the saw blade. Only future canon would reinforce the theory that Rhodes Island made this weapon for her to replace a weapon lost either to the sea or the Cult of the Deep.
Was Aegir a coastal nation? Did they have convents? Were the Abyssal Hunters a kind of religious combat order? Did they oppose or serve this "master from the depths"?
Despite her focus on 'ocean depths', in her [Assigned to Facility] voiceline, she says, "May I ask you to assign me to a room where I can see the starry sky?"
What's more, her promotion record features a morbid "folksong of a faraway land" found in her personal belongings, which assigns importance to the night sky, with and without stars.

When she prayed,
The stars ceased to shimmer
And when she wept,
The night let out a smile.
And as she lamented,
The anguish sprawled upon her madness

While she was still lucid, she said she had "once again gotten entangled in a dark conspiracy" -- as though this had happened to her more than once. She also claimed to want to deliver a message, before she lost her chance along with her mind.
Specter was oddly unique from other operators in lacking any obvious animal traits, except for those mimicked by her clothing. Also, she was the only operator with a 'Weight' listed, though that value is obscured with question marks.
At the time, she was also the only operator with a 'Flawed' Originium Arts evaluation, as well as two 'Outstanding' evaluations in her physical parameters. But at the time, these things seemed unrelated. After all, her medical records gave no hint that anything was being hidden or classified from the rest of the medical department, or from the Doctor.
Given that in her last moments of sanity, Specter attempted to tear the wimple (nun's headware) off, we concluded that either the wimple contained some sort of 'kill switch' that only then triggered and hurt her... or she was not truly a nun, and for some reason only tried to tear apart the facade in a final panic.
Was she really a nun?

Deepcolor

Her race? Also undisclosed. And like Specter, she lacked any obvious biological trait from her basis animal.
Her place of birth? Despite her claims of being from Columbia, this is also listed as 'undisclosed', and we're warned to take everything she's said about her past with a grain of salt.
The clues from the beta, the clues left in the Network, her basis-animal and everything else about her as an operator screamed "FISHY!", in both senses.
But where Specter was physically mighty and magically inept, Deepcolor was the very opposite.
Where Specter came to Rhodes Island talking about messages and conspiracies before apparently losing her ability to reveal anything, Deepcolor came to Rhodes Island concealing everything... even if she was painfully obvious about it.

[Talk 1] "I feel like I'm not supposed to appear here..."
[Promotion 1] "Um, could you just... stop caring about me? If you keep treating me like this... like I matter... I-I don't know what will become of me..."

She seemed like a spy sent by someone who (or something that) had no idea how to convincingly lie. As though the best this entity or organization could send was someone who told incredulous stories but at least would remember everything she saw in keen detail.
Perhaps it wasn't a coincidence that the Abyssal Hunter logo is piercing an OCTOPUS with a trident?

Blue Poison

Everything about Blue Poison's personal history and origin was kept a secret and not disclosed; not even as much information as Specter's background, much less the tall-tales told by Deepcolor.
But unlike them, her files clearly state her race: Anura. What's more, her basis animal -- poison dart frogs -- are barely amphibious. As arboreal frogs in rainforests, they live most in the trees and the water captured above ground. Definitely not a sea creature.
Yet unlike Deepcolor, Blue Poison not only had a relationship link to Specter in the Network map, Blue's archive files revealed that she even knew Specter's real name. Which not even Specter seemed to know, anymore.
And where Specter was noted to have experience with fighting giant creatures, Blue Poison was rumored to be spotted fighting several clandestine battles against giant creatures.
In terms of abilities, she had neither the brute strength of Specter nor the strange and powerful Arts of Deepcolor.

Cuora

I forget Cuora's location in the original Network map, or whether the Columbia section yet existed at launch. I can't tell you whether she was or was not located near the Abyssal Hunter section.
For whatever it is worth, her network ID is 'IU05". Whatever that means.
Since I started the game at the same time that Skadi debuted, I also can't tell you if anyone initially suspected that Cuora was an Abyssal Hunter, or if that came a little later.
If barely-amphibious frogs could be 'sea creatures', then certainly a turtle could. And like Specter, Cuora's originium infection seemed to be confined entirely to her nervous system. At least in that she had no external crystals, and she had also suffered memory loss.
There was also the incredibly suspicious fact that she appeared at Rhodes Island conveniently remembering nothing about herself before she arrived... and no one at Rhodes Island could explain how she snuck on board in the first place. As if she was another spy, but planted in an extremely different way than the other possible spies.
On top of that, she possessed a strangely indestructible and irreproducible baseball bat and backpack-shield. Which would only become more suspicious when...

[Grani and the Knight's Treasure] and Skadi

...introduced us to Skadi's indestructible and irreproducible great sword!
While we now have a fairly solid and rigid idea of what an “Abyssal Hunter” looks like, we did not have such notions until Skadi’s debut in the game’s first side-story event. We would have accepted without question that Abyssal Hunters could have such wildly varying coloration, talents, and weaponry. Also that some Abyssal Hunters would have publicly known races (Anura) and not always allude to sea creatures (tree frogs).
Only when Skadi joined the roster did Hypergryph’s intent (old or new) for the Abyssal Hunters become more clear.
Guard-class Specter never had a faction-buffing Talent; Skadi started that trend. Skadi also established the Abyssal Hunter “look” by matching Specter’s color scheme so completely. Where Specter’s white hair, red eyes, black clothing, and absurd physical condition might have been particular to Specter before, with Skadi it became part of a ‘uniform’.
However, this didn't yet prove that Blue Poison wasn't a Hunter; just not one of the same category as Specter and Skadi. Why should a Sniper supporting melee-combatants with poisonous darts need the same muscle as the melee-combatants?
Why did both Specter's and Skadi's files clearly list their place of birth, unlike Blue Poison, but labeled their race(s) "undisclosed" like Deepcolor?
For a long while, Skadi's fourth archive file was the most we had to go on. Written by a sincere but unreliable narrator (the mysterious "four-squares" of the HR department) who interviewed a reluctant Skadi and came away with inaccurate ideas. Such as unwittingly conflating Aegir / the Abyssal Hunters with the Cult of the Deep, rather than two separate and opposing organizations.
A matter not cleared up by the side-story, either.

[GT-EX-1 After]

The flavor-text for this segment says that Specter is dreaming of a "song of ancient mythos", before she wakes up. It seems to be a sailor's song, composed by people who have never lived under the waves:

...We should stuff him into a sack... and hang him on the mast at dawn...
...We should slit his throat... and offer him to the ocean as a tribute to the raging hurricane...

...As 'cheerful' as the "folksong of a faraway land" found in her personal belongings, as revealed in her promotional record.
Specter refers to the church she left behind as "broken". She doesn't specify who or what broke it, only that it had fallen into ruin before she left it, and that her lost memories were "hidden beneath the shadows" of that church. "When I approach them, they turn into shackles and drag me down into the deep sea."
As though the 'deep sea' (the 'abyssal zone' of the ocean?) were enemy territory rather than her homeland.
Specter has seen Skadi at Rhodes Island before, but either never caught or could not remember Skadi's name. Specter acts as if this the first time they've met face-to-face, mentioning that Skadi shouldn't be able to enter her medical containment chamber without Kal'tsit's permission, or without the fear of being torn apart.
She doesn't even suspect that Skadi once knew her before either of them arrived at Rhodes Island.
Of being forgotten more times than Specter knows, Skadi says it doesn't matter. "Just treat me like any normal Rhodes Island Operator." She actually goes further, and says "you can forget all about me, just like before." Without specifying if this isn't the first time Skadi has had this conversation with her, or if Skadi is obliquely referring to their shared past from before Rhodes Island.
This seems consistent with how Skadi's files, voicelines, and screentime paint her as someone convinced everyone should avoid her, lest they die from the misfortune Skadi brings.
Regarding Specter's condition, Skadi says, "But soon there will be a way to escape your torment."
Specter laughs, and asks why she should trust Skadi. "Your aura... I'm quite familiar with it. No, it's your smell. It's an intense, pungent smell... the smell of blood... 'their' smell. The smell of the deep sea. It's a familiar and abhorrent smell."
Again, Specter is equating the deep sea with enemy territory rather than her homeland. What's more, she's accusing Skadi of smelling like those abyssal enemies.

[GT-HX-3 After]

There are two possibilities for Skadi smelling like Specter's half-remembered enemies: She either kills them so frequently as to have the smell cling to her, or she shares something of their nature.
In this vignette, Kal'tsit makes it clear that there is something seriously cursed about Skadi's blood, such that Skadi doesn't dare allow anything to make her bleed, and wouldn't have considered using her own blood to activate the "key" that Grani found.
I go into depth about that double-blind conversation in this other post.
As I lament about at length, the writer is so coy about having Skadi or Kal'tsit reveal anything that at times even they don't seem to know what they know, or what they think the other person knows. But Kal'tsit ominously ends the segment speaking the Aegir language as if knowing it is a big secret.
For a while yet, even as we learned more, we were left to wonder how Kal'tsit knew about Aegir. We even had suspicions that she might be older than Aegir, before we had the confirmation.
So it hits a little differently now to know that Kal'tsit's most likely source for knowing the Aegirian phrase "Abyssal Hunters are bound by blood", and what it means, was none other than Specter herself. Unwittingly betraying national secrets because that's what the Cult of the Deep brainwashed Laurentina to do, as an 'obedient nun'.

Glaucus

Introduced in [Heart of Surging Flame].
Race? Undisclosed, like Deepcolor, Specter, and Skadi.
Nowadays, I have to scratch my head at the secrecy. She's not a hybrid of any kind, so is this just a case of the writers being coy with us?
Meanwhile, Glaucus' publicly listed place of birth? "Aegir Region". Her profile? Says, "Glaucus was born in the Ægir Region, but left at an early age to wander about."
Neither of these things are still true. [Under Tides] and other future installments made it clear that Glaucus was born on Iberian soil, like all other Islanders born after the Great Silence.
But as of [Heart of Surging Flame], the game hasn't yet mentioned the name Iberia. It doesn't exist as a sector in the Network map. Glaucus's icon is located near the Abyssal Hunters.

As Glaucus herself tells it, her muscular atrophy is due to a hereditary disease passed down in her family. Even in a special ecological environment such as the Ægir Region, incidence of such hereditary disease is rare and there is currently no treatment available.

For a while, we were left to fairly assume Glaucus grew up underwater, especially as such an environment might have been more hospitable to her and the other members of her family whose legs degenerated. Some or even many of us concluded that Glaucus only resorted to her exoskeleton after she ventured onto dry land.
It would take as long as the release of [Stultifera Navis] for Specter to reveal that most Aegir can't actually breathe water, and thus live their lives in domed cities on the sea floor, breathing air and walking on the ground like any other humans.
Paradoxical to the fact that Glaucus is supposed to be a reclusive introvert, her files revealed that she had social connections to almost EVERYONE we considered to be Aegirian or Aegirian-adjacent.

• She revered Skadi, which would make sense if Skadi was some kind of national super-hero.
• She was friends with Blue Poison.
• She was even friends with Deepcolor, which threw into question the theory that Deepcolor belonged to a faction opposing the Abyssal Hunters / Aegirians.
• Nothing about Cuora, but like Specter (who is also not mentioned), Cuora didn't really remember where she came from.

Yet the very same file also says:

As a result, I believe that the allegation that Glaucus and her relatives are involved in a secret heretical organization in the Ægir Region is not related to her current operational performance. I hope that the Justice Division has reservations about acting on this.

Which could be a "suspiciously specific denial" that at least hints at the confirmation that such a cult exists, as well as the possibility that Glaucus had a connection to it.

AUS (Alive Until Sunset)

Also introduced in [Heart of Surging Flame] (specifically stage 'OF-EX6'), along with many headaches.
I think this is the first reference to the starpod, when she tells Kal'tsit, "why don't we talk about when we could still see the stars?"
Alty was clearly another denizen of the sea, and Kal'tsit either sincerely or facetiously supposes that Alty herself is Aegirian. Alty says that the feeling of being aboard the Rhodes Island landship, or ark, is both 'mystical' and 'familiar', as if she was 'still at the beach'.
Though Kal'tsit sincerely or facetiously dismisses that as the consequence of having some Aegirians aboard, Kal'tsit also attributes Alty's ability to sneak aboard the ship as "the system only makes an exception for when the guest is important enough".
As we came to realize, Rhodes Island is built around a whale or Feranmut skeleton, which is probably why Ling has a voice-line that goes, "Rhodes Island's interior... I'm lost as to whether I should say it's reminiscent or curious." (emphasis mine)
But we didn't even know Feranmuts were a thing, back then. Alty implicitly makes it clear that she's not an Aegirian, saying that she (or her band, or their whole kin) "don't really get along" with Aegirians. "If anything, I'd say we're far from friends..."
But Alty claimed she didn't know Aegirians first-hand, but only heard about them through her band-mate, Frost. Whom she didn't clarify was or wasn't an Aegirian herself.
"Actually, I kind of hate Aegirians. Of course, I know about how pitiful their past is. But if you didn't show up, these Aegirians would have already been devoured by the abyssal depths by now."
At the time, we assumed this meant that Kal'tsit had personally visited and saved an underwater city from some sort of disaster or enemy. Which would fit with how Kal'tsit seemed to know everything that Skadi knew about Aegir, but is somewhat contradicted by the woman herself saying, "I didn't do anything in particular."
Only more recently does it seem like Alty isn't talking about Aegir, or even about the Rhode Island Aegirians, but specifically about the Abyssal Hunters who are being hunted by the Cult of the Deep. Especially since Alty elaborates that she's talking about "special" Aegirians, who "don't show any respect" to Kal'tsit "despite all that you did for them."
Alty thinks there are "several" Abyssal Hunters aboard, but she might only be getting an imprecise sense of "multiple", especially if Deepcolor is already aboard. There's also Thorns, but we'll get to him later.
But what is Alty? She asks, "Do you know who the enemy of the Aegir is? Or perhaps, do you know who I really am?" It's ambiguous if she conflates the two or means them to be separate questions.
Monster nearly attacks but Kal'tsit restrains it. She then remarks that Alty is "still young".
"That's right, we are very young, and we haven't been through any of those tragedies." Which seems to contradict how Alty suggested she had ever seen the true stars, unless she meant "we" in the broadest sense possible, to refer to anyone who had ever walked the planet.
"We have no desire to become the enemies of those little guys [the Abyssal Hunters] at all." She finally implicates Frost as being her kin, rather than an Aegirian.
"Frost is the youngest one among us. Only the four of us can be considered young." So at the time we knew that whatever she was, all of her band was the same. And they weren't Abyssal Hunters, nor Aegirians, and they might not even be what the Aegirians or Abyssal Hunters were fighting.
Or they might have been a rebel faction of those enemies that decided they either didn't want to be part of the war, or would rather side with Aegir against their own kind?
Kal'tist, who boasted to Skadi that there was nothing she didn't know, tells Alty: "I don't think you know any less about the truth than I do."
"[Frost] smelled something from those Aegirians. A scent that didn't belong to them. 'They can't sing anymore. They can't talk anymore. They're drifting farther and farther away from us. They're becoming hungry."
Like, holy shit, were regular Aegirians lovecraftian hivemind creatures after all?! What did any of that mean?
"How were those special Aegirians born?"
Oh, and despite Alty agreeing that she's young, SOMEHOW she knows Ka'tsit's serial number "AMa-10", and that someone (Priestess) assigned her like a machine to support The Doctor... but also "the bunny", even though Priestess had nothing to do with that, though Alty might have conflated Theresa in there.

Purestream

Purestream wouldn't arrive in global servers until muuuuuch later (after the release of Chapter 8), but in the Chinese servers she appeared after [Heart of Surging Flame] and before Weedy's debut.
She is the first Aegirian operator in the history of the game to have her race outright listed as "Aegir".
Even then, she's surrounded by secrets.
Her third Archive file contains a classified note at the end:

Regarding Operator Purestream's race, it is difficult to find out where they originated from, but we may be able to glean some clues from some local folk songs.
Her true hometown must be very far, far away, in a distant land.

[Talk after Trust Increase 2] "There is a legend among my people that we came from a place far, far away. Now that there are fewer and fewer of us, nobody seems to know where we came from, or where we are going..."
In her fourth Archive File, the investigator who visited Purestream's village to investigate her background insists: 'To be honest, her background and experience are as pure as the water she treats, and there are not many things worth delving into.'
Which could be spy-speak, or could be entirely sincere, given how the rest of that file depicts the investigator as more interested in sampling the local food than digging up information.
However, given her physical evaluations,

[Episode 7] and Weedy

Finally introduces Iberia.
[Profile] Weedy, a bioengineering expert who was born into a family of Iberian scientists, is a researcher who has been with Rhodes Island since its establishment. (emphasis mine)
She rates 'Standard' in every category except for her substandard 'Normal' in Physical Resilience and her 'Excellent' in Tactical Planning.
[Promotion Record] Weedy's physical qualities are somewhat at odds with our impressions of the Ægirians. In fact, after she successfully passed the other exams, she spent an entire three months before she was able to pass the physical component.
Episode 7 retroactively establishes that Rhodes Island has ALWAYS had an Aegirian on staff. Yet you have Rhodes Island officials acting like us players in assuming that Specter and Skadi -- the Abyssal Hunters -- are the norm for Aegir.
Part of this can be excused with the understanding that not every super-human freak wants to be a combat operator. Weedy's files make it clear that she is extremely reclusive and a neat-freak who seldom leaves her controlled environment.
Weedy's third archive file, perhaps as a mistranslation, seems to suggest that there is a relationship between Aegir and Laterano, rather than that Iberia has had deeply meaningful ties to Aegir and Laterano, separately.

Elysium

Released in the same banner with Weedy, and introduced us to more of Iberia. Perhaps more in how little he or his files have to say about it, as in what little it has to say.
[Archive File 1] Although Elysium has always proclaimed that there is no way he could have been born in Iberia, he shares the characteristics of unfettered boldness and unrestrained freedom that are so prominent in that area.
So he not only left the place, he swears he was was never born there.

[Beyond Here] and "For a Better Self"

This vignette just barely elaborates on Iberia, being half about some wild rumors that (if I recall correctly) have nothing to do with revealed canon. And the other half is about some everyday conflict in some nameless Iberian village.
I don't know what point any of this served.

[Heart of Surging Flame] rerun, Andreana, Thorns, and AUS again

You'd think that Andreana was the biggest point of confusion in our ever-changing perception of Aegir.
No, it was Thorns.
Thorns was clearly not an Abyssal Hunter, not even to the extent that Andreana was. He didn't have their Talent-sharing/receiving feature. At the time, we thought him to be a "normal" Aegirian.
So when a member of the AUS band, Aya, who was some sort of weird sea-creature took an interest in Thorns, and Thorns seemed to have some sort of bloodborne connection or animosity to a sea monster that emerged from the ocean to eat him... We assumed this could have happened to any Aegirian.
It wouldn't be until Integrated Strategies #3 that we had clarification that Thorns ISN'T normal, and that he doesn't know that. His mentoteacher slipped him some Seaborn concoction that transformed him into some level of hybrid, which is how he got the special attention of a sea monster and what seems to be one-fourth of a sea-dwelling Feranmut.

[Under Tides] and Gladiia

On the China servers, Hypergryph updated the Network map to either softly retcon or properly clarify some things.
Blue Poison exchanged her Rhodes Island brand for an association with Iberia and lost her link to Specter.
Deepcolor exchanged her Rhodes Island brand for the brand of Aegir, with only Skadi Alter for company. On the one hand, this was weird because Ishar'mla is an enemy of Aegir; did this mean that Deepcolor was also an enemy of Aegir? But even when viewing Skadi Alter as what is left of her after the Corrupting Heart is defeated and returns to dormancy, Skadi doesn't really consider herself an Aegir anymore; she's a Seaborn and kin to the Many.
And, well, there was everything else about [Under Tides], and the archive files for Gladiia, and the archive files that were either for Skadi Original or for Ishar'mla, with voice-lines for Seaborn Skadi after Ishar'mla is rendered dormant.

"Forgotten Lighthouse" in [Preluding Lights]

I wrote too much about this already in my post on Blue Poison, but know that this information appeared at this time, chronologically for us.

Mizuki

Introduced in Dossoles Holiday.

[Stultifera Navis]

We finally get a reasonably clear picture of where Laurentina came from, how she ended up captured, what the Cult did to her, and how she could have become Kal'tsit's primary source of information on everything related to Aegir.
Which thus informs the later Operator Records for Skadi and Gladiia, which both feature how Kal'tsit finds them.

Sunder's Arknights posts - a collection of links

I go to Coachella every year, and I hear the rumors everytime I go. I’m sure we all remember the rumors about Bruno Mars and Post Malone a few years ago. I also recall rumors of a major set list change a few years back… but nothing has come to fruition, so I don’t pay them much mind.
Anyway - I’m grabbing a walking taco with my buddy Skinflint, and one of the event admins comes up and is talking to a guy in a suit. “Who’s this narc in the suit?” I said to myself as I lifted the bag of cheese doritos and beef. I look at Skinflint (who is an insider in the music industry… he released a beat that post almost used on a track) who must’ve heard me murmur to myself, and he replied “you don’t know who that is?” “No” I said, dismissing him as I ate my walking taco. “That’s Chad Dukes, he’s one of the top label execs at paramount. He’s the guy that got Michael Jackson platinum”. So I tap the guy on the shoulder and introduce myself “Yo, bro” I exclaimed with a bit of cheese hanging from my mouth. “What the fuck do you want?” He replied, because in my stupor I got some grease on his suit. “What the fuck dude, get the fuck away from me with that shit” he said “wow. How very corporate of you” I responded. Which happened to be the moment my buddy Tang showed up “Yo, you’re chad dukes, you’re the guy who got Michael Jackson platinum” Tang exclaimed excitedly, his hand gripping his 2g DMT vape (Home brewed. It’s not as strong as stuff Skinflint got me in the past. He does this weird hydroponic stuff that I cannot even begin to explain. Something about moisture levels and stuff). In a fury, Chad dukes rushed away, but not before I heard him whisper on his Bluetooth headset “Let’s revive Michael Jackson as soon as we get a chance” which is when I realized… they are going to revive Michael Jackson tonight and have him do a 15 song set, wherein his skeleton is going to do the Mr. Bones dance, and blanket is going to play the clarinet to the tune of “bad”. Allegedly they’re going to do a 12 child salute in honor of the king of pop, where Michael ceremonially gets blown by males of questionable age. Idk guys, is there possibly something to this? Will Michael Jackson be revived by music executive Chad Dukes, or is this just a nasty rumor?

I am having a slow day at work so I am going to listen to the album in reverse and notate my thoughts in this post as I do. I'm listening to this album with the idea that it's about the music industry.

• Track 31 - The Manuscript

This feels like a song about a celebrity that went through a lot of trial and heartbreak throughout the music industry and had a rough life. It feels like they're retired and reflecting on their long life and thinking about how it's happening to other, younger musicians now. "the story isn't mine anymore". another funny/interesting line is "she rolled her eyes and said, "you're a professional" <-- I am taking this as a clue. "in the age of him she wished she was thirty.... afterwards she only ate kids cereal and couldn't sleep unless it was in her mother's bed" - this feels like a line about behaviors someone takes on after they've survived childhood trauma.
"she thought about how he said since she was so wise beyond her years that everything had been above board - she wasn't sure" - this feels like a line about being groomed. "you're so mature for your age" type of vibe.

• Track 30 - Robin

This feels like a song about being a child star, being totally naive and innocent. Being sold promises of fame and twinkly lights but not knowing about the dark horrors that await you. "but now we'll curtail your curiosity in sweetness" (we're not going to tell you the truth about what you're getting into, just smile and nod along, you're going to be famous, kid!)

• Track 29 - The Bolter

I think this song is about seeing the first cracks in the illusion of the industry. The age of the subject is still young, but we've left childhood behind. "he was a cad, wanted her bad, just like any good trophy hunter" - another predatory/grooming implication? Or maybe it's about a talent scout/executive who wants his prized star to make money for him. "that's when she sees the littlest leaks down in the floorboards and she knows that she must bolt" - the cracks in the fairytale are starting to emerge and the subject is thinking about jumping ship.

• Track 28 - Peter

I think this is about a friend or peer in the industry that committed suicide. I know that's dark, but I just can't get that feeling out of my mind. "forgive me peter, my lost fearless leader, in closets like cedar, preserved from when we were just kids - is it something i did?" when our friends kill themselves we always blame ourself. "forgive me. is it something i did? is it my fault?" 'in closets like cedar, preserved...' it's not a closet, y'all i think it's a CASKET. "i thought it was just goodbye for now" - 'i didn't think this would be the last time i ever saw you.' "you said you were gonna grow up, then you were gonna come find me, promises never to keep" - as kids, they promised to stay in touch and look out for each other. But he can't keep this promise anymore because he's dead. "lost to the 'lost boys' chapter of your life" - this is a peter pan reference, a story about a boy who never grows up. in this case the subject can't grow up because he's dead.

• Track 27 - Cassandra

Other people have remarked that this sounds like it could be Kesha's story or about someone who tried to warn about the dangers of the music industry and was crucified/exiled for it and i think that interpretation is great. In greek mythology, cassandra was someone who had the power of prophecy but was cursed to never be believed because she rejected the god apollo. Which is so poignant for the idea of a victim who is telling the truth and predicting his evil deeds but no one believes them. This one feels so straightforward that I don't have much to add.

• Track 26 - The Prophecy

Well, now that we've established that the previous track is referencing Cassandra the prophet and could be an implication about victims exposing their abusers in the industry, this track takes a very interesting turn. I think this is about bargaining / not wanting what you've discovered about the industry to be true / wishing you could change things. I think it's also about regretting the decision to pursue this life of fame. Wanting to walk away. "please change the prophecy, i don't want money" "a greater woman wouldn't beg" - please let me out of this contract, I don't want to do this anymore. If the previous track could be about Kesha, I think this one is too. I think they are tied together. Cassandra and her prophecies. "and i look unstable, gathered with a coven 'round a sorceress' table" one of the biggest tactics abusers use is to discredit their victims by painting them as 'unstable' 'crazy' etc.

• Track 25 - I look in people's windows

"northbound i got carried away, as you boarded your train south" - the subject of this song is parting from someone, they're going their seperate ways, or maybe this is someone who got out of the industry. "i'm afflicted by the not knowing" "i'm addicted to the 'if only'" 'what would have happened if i stayed? would i have made it, been a star?' in the entertainment industry, if you're not in, you're out. this entire song is positioning the subject as an outsider, maybe someone longing or wistfully regretting their decision to part ways with fame, thinking about what it would be like to try again. "i look in people's windows like i'm some deranged weirdo" it's an exclusive club, and once you're out, security isn't letting you through the gate.

• Track 24 - thanK you aIMee

I think this track is straight up about critics/the media/tabloids. I don't think it's about any single person at ALL. let's go through some lyrics- "there's a bronze, spray tanned statue of you" - it's an award, a trophy. "and then she wrote headlines in the local paper laughing at each baby step i'd take" - literally, the media. writing headlines and making fun of an artist's progress or attempts at creativity. "i pushed each boulder up the hill, your words were rinigng in my head" - what haunts us? how many youtubers have you known that have fallen victim to endlessly reading hate comments about themselves and then spiraled? celebrities do it too. critics' words are ringing in her head. "i wrote a thousand songs that you find uncool, i built a legacy that you can't undo" - she wrote a lot of songs that the grammy's and music critics felt were a flop, but still she has built her legacy. "but when i count the scars there's a moment of truth, there wouldn't be this if there hadn't been you" - it's a double edged sword. without press, without media, there isn't promotion. without promotion there isn't fans and a 'legacy that can't be undone.'

• Track 23 - I Hate it Here

I think this is about the rich inner life of someone who didn't get a chance in the industry but is incredibly talented and creative. I think this one is actually completely straightforward. This is literally our poet inside the body of a finance guy. Someone who hates their office job or corporate life but is trapped there because "this place made me feel worthless" the industry rejected them or their audition didn't make the cut, maybe they didn't have the looks or the "it" factor. this is the life of an office worker who longs to break free of their awful day job and explore their creative pursuits but they can only explore their creativity in their mind.

• Track 22 - So High School

Okay, this song is layered y'all. This song is seriously the most sarcastic and funny song to me on the album, I think. I think this song is about being in a close working relationship/or being at some sort of event with someone that you absolutely HATE! (think Taylor rolling her eyes at Justin Bieber at the VMAs LOL) But you have to get along with them through gritted teeth for the sake of 'professionalism'. On first glance the song sounds like a silly little love song, but I think it's much darker and the song is DRIPPING with resentment. Lyrics: "I want to find you in a crowd just to hide from you." Just the title alone 'so high school'. I'm sure being at an award show with famous people who are trapped in a state of arrested development probably DOES feel so 'high school'! "and in the blink of a crinklin' eye" (this is a photo flash from a camera) "i'm sinkin', our fingers entertwined, cheeks pink in the twinkling lights, tell me 'bout the first time you saw me" i think this is a little red carpet interview moment where you have to play pretend with someone you despise because all lights and cameras are on you. "your friends are around so be quiet, i'm trying to stifle my sighs" they're sighs of disappointment. you're in a room full of this person's friends so you have to keep your mouth shut about them. "are you gonna marry, kiss or kill me? I'm betting on all THREE! get my car door, isn't that sweet? (sarcasm)" "it's true, swear, SCOUT'S HONOR" she's LYING! her fingers are behind her back lying like a kid. "I feel like laughin in the middle of practice" (i think this is vocal practice, maybe practicing for a performance with multiple people for a special event or something.) "do that impression you did of your dad again, i'm hearing voices like a madman" she is hating being around this person so much she feels like she's going crazy.

• Track 21 - How Did it End?

This one is also pretty easy to figure out - it's about tabloids and gossip. I don't think I need to even go into detail much - we've all been there right? We have something tragic happen to us and a vulture of energy vampires descends upon us acting like they're so concerned and sad for you, but they just want to know your business so they can go tell it to other people because it's juicy. The empathetic hunger descends.

• Track 20 - Chloe or Sam or Sophia or Marcus

I'm having a hard time figuring this one out, but I think one interpretation could be about disassociation. This idea came to me when I was looking up the word 'hologram' and a synonym for it is 'reflection'. So take the line, "your reflection stumbled into my apartment" - the narrator is watching themselves in a sort of out-of-body way, having a schism due to addiction or trauma, and one person in this song could be like your 'inner child' that you 'deserted'.

• Track 19 - The Albatross

This is about having skeletons in your closet and being cancelled, but also being cancelled is meaningless and doesn't effect you that much. "Wise men once said wild winds are death to the candle" when you're at the top and successful, if you get too 'wild', your candle (light, success) will be blown out. "a rose by any other name is a scandal" Rose McGowan championed the #MeToo movement. "cautions issued, he stood shooting the messengers" this guy is trying to silence his victims. "cross your thoughtless heart, only liquor anoints you, she's the albatross, she is here to destroy you" - this guy prays and appears to be a christian, but he's just an alcoholic rapist scumbug. and one of his victims, his albatross is ready to talk. Verse 2 is from a different perspective. it's from the POV of the perpetrator. "one bad seed kills the garden" one bad encounter, choose the wrong victim, and your empire of grooming and abuse could crumble. "one less temptress, one less dagger to sharpen" - one victim is dead, which is one less knife i have to sharpen to threaten them with to keep them silent and in line. "locked me up in towers but i'd visit in your dreams, they tried to warn you about me" - the perpetrator did jail time, but they gave their victim PTSD and they haunt them from behind bars. "and when that sky rains fire on you and you're persona non grata, i'll tell you how i've been there too and that none of it matters." - the perpetrator is saying that when all hell is breaking loose and you're 'enemy number one', it doesn't matter. you'll survive it. cancellation isn't real.

• Track 18 - imgonnagetyouback

I think this is about negotiating a contract or a business deal, or about trying to win back a collaboratobusiness partnership that you may need. "did your research, you knew the price going in" - you know how expensive i am, literally. "whether i'm gonna be your wife or gonna smash up your bike, i haven't decided yet but i'm gonna get you back" - all business relationships are good until they're not, and they rarely end amicably. "push the reset button we're becoming something new, say you got somebody i'll say i got someone too" - we're renegotiating the terms of our contract and neither one of us want to reveal our hand so we'll both bluff and say we already have someone.

• Track 17 - The Black Dog

I am not really sure about this one either, I think one possible interpretation is that this is about your label ditching you for a younger, newer, shinier product. "she's too young to know this song". If we are listening to the album in reverse order like this, given my interpretation of the next song I think this makes a lot of sense.

• Track 16 - Clara Bow

The newer, shinier toy has arrived. This is about the cycle. Clara Bow, Stevie Nicks and Taylor Swift are not meant to be references to anyone. They're just examples - a talent scout approaches a precocious young girl and starts telling her she looks like a glamorous star, like 'taylor swift'. And she wants to be famous sooo badly! So the cycle is about to repeat, we're getting another young girl for the industry to chew up and spit out and our old narrator was discarded.

• Track 15 - The Alchemy

If we're listening in reverse order, the previous song 'Clara Bow' touches on the idea of cycles repeating through generations or through 'lifetimes'. The Alchemy opens with "This happens once every few lifetimes... " Our new 'big star' is making it and is outshining and out performing all their peers. "Call the amateurs and cut them from the team". "I'm the one to beat." "Where's the trophy? He just comes running over to me" our young star is winning awards.

• Track 14 - The Smallest Man Who Ever Lived

Welp, now our heroinE has been betrayed by the business. All the shiny promises she was made were fake and the cracks are revealed. "you hung me on your wall, stabbed me with your push pins" - office supplies, this is a board executive office/meeting. "in public showed me off, then sank in stoned oblivion. once your queen had come you treat her like an also-ran" once she made it big and proved her success, she was treated like a used up, washed up nobody.

• Track 13 - I can do it with a broken heart

Nothing like being forced to work through a mental breakdown! This is giving Katy Perry dancing and singing on stage right after Russell Brand divorced her over text. This song is upbeat, but I don't think it's meant to be "look how good I am!" I think it's meant to be... "this is inhumane, I'm having a mental breakdown and I can't do this."

• Track 12 - loml

Our record label from 'smallest man' has come crawling back and wants to sign her again after ditching her. they made a bunch of false promises and dazzled her with impressionist paintings of heaven... but they were fakes. Being promised the world and then having the rug pulled out from under you is very hard and jarring, and the fall is a long way down.

• Track 11 - I Can Fix Him (No Really I Can)

I think this is a track about being naive and thinking that you can CHANGE the industry alone, but getting in over your head and realizing that you as an individual can't make a difference or a change because this whole thing is bigger than you thought.

• Track 10 - Who's Afraid of Little Old Me?

The subject of this song has been through the ringer at this point. Far from the winning streak a few songs ago, her teeth have been pulled out by this life, by the industry, and they've become bitter, cruel and vindictive from all of the trauma and abuse they've suffered as a child star. But they want to bite back. They're warning. "You should be afraid of me, i'm not going to take this lying down."

• Track 9 - Guilty as Sin

Even though the subject of this song knows that fame is bad for them... they're fantasizing about being famous again and about stepping back into the limelight. They feel guilty for having these thoughts because fame wasn't good for them in the past, but they can't help having that desire.

• Track 8 - Florida!!!

I think this is another track about industry sleazes who have skeletons in their closet, similar to the albatross. This is about someone who has like a bunch of victims. "at least the dolls are beautiful" - the victims are beautiful.

• Track 7 - Fresh out the slammer

Our perpetrator is out of jail! And he's running straight back to his young starlet (victim.)

• Track 6 - But Daddy I Love Him!!

Another young aspiring talent has fallen victim to brainwashing and grooming and wants to be a star. Her parents and lots of other people are very hesitant to let her pursue this career path but she thinks she knows better than all of them, and knows this is what's right for her.

• Track 5 - So Long, London

I think this is about a celebrity voluntarily choosing to leave fame behind because they are tired of being exploited for tragedy porn.

• Track 4 - Down Bad

I think this is another track from the point of view of someone who was chewed up and spit out by the industry. The industry beamed her up in a cloud of sparkling dust, did experiments on them. But even though they treated her terribly, she wants the life and career and can't let it go!

• Track 3 - My Boy Only Breaks His Favorite Toys

I feel like this track is about being overworked to the point of being broken because you're the record label's favorite. You're making the most money, you're their favorite, and they're wringing you dry (breaking) you!

• Track 2 - The Tortured Poets Department

I think some of our 'tortured poets' have come together and are working on something now. They're using a typewriter, "are you gonna screw this up with me?" "this ain't the chelsea hotel, we're two idiots". the chelsea hotel was a hotel that had many iconic groundbreaking artists stay there. They're working on something but it's on the 'down low', it's secretive and they don't want to screw it up.

• Track 1 - Fortnight

This is the letter to the industry/the big machine. "I love you, it's ruining my life" - I love fame, but it's killing me. "I touched you for only a fortnight" - I touched success, happiness, the peak, but only for a moment. "Move to Florida, buy the car you want, but it won't start up 'til i touch you" - The tortured poets want to speak up and make a change and 'send the criminals to Florida' so to speak, but the 'car' taking the 'criminals' to Florida won't start up until they 'touch' them (aka - speak up.)
I think Taylor is building to a huge novel or documentary revealing the horrors and truths of the industry. The music industry has never had a #MeToo and things have not changed. I think maybe she's leaving clues indicating that she wants to break this cycle somehow or try to make a difference because she's witnessing the cycle of fame continue to chew up and spit out young girls and boys.

I’ve worked as a security guard for the last eight years of my life. It’s not the highest paying job in the world, and, like many professions, it comes with a certain level of risk. But it’s paid the bills, and more importantly, it’s helped me afford to go back to school in order to obtain my degree. Due to a few dumbass mistakes as a younger man, I never completed high school; I always said I was not going to die without being the first person in my family to finish schooling and go to college. And because the security company which employs me hires us out to whatever company, corporation or building needs them, I’ve found myself guarding some truly interesting places. Without giving exact names, I’ve guarded a rather well-known tech company’s HQ, more than a few shopping malls, countless storage facilities, and even a federal government building for a few weeks, to give some examples. I’ve occasionally dealt with having to run off the occasional trespasser, but, in what must be a massive stroke of good luck, never anything worse. And I’ve always received glowing commendations on my work, along with requests to be hired again.
However, there is one place that, no matter how many times I’ve been asked, and how much money I’ve been offered, I will never work at again.
Darby Hospital, which is what I’ll refer to it as in lieu of its real name, sits atop the highest hill in my town, overlooking all 34,000 of its residents. Built during the art deco period of the 20th Century, it is far larger than the town has need of, and designed for a population boom that never came. Because of this, many parts of the building have either not been used for decades, or simply never used at all. Having frequently been forced to take many trips there due to stupid dares and attempts to show off as a teen, I more than once got turned around in the maze-like corridors, only managing to find my way back to the in-use areas by luckily stumbling across a wall mounted map. Let me tell you, to call the place creepy, would be like calling the Andrea Doria disaster a “small blunder”. The worst time to be inside is late at night, when only a skeleton crew of doctors and nurses remain on-call, and most of the lights have been dimmed or shut off. And the rumors of it being haunted do nothing to help quell the eerie ambience.
But the creepiest part of the hospital, by a country mile, is the morgue.
Housed in its own dedicated building, it sits a few hundred yards away, permanently in the shadow of a cluster of huge pine and oak trees which tower over the edge of the property from the forest beyond. It connects to the main building via a long, underground passageway which allows bodies to be moved to it, out of the sight and mind of the patients and guests above. From the outside, it looks almost more imposing than the hospital itself, and kept all but the bravest of us away.
This is where I found myself, working the graveyard shift one fall night three years ago, after accepting a last-minute position for some much-needed overtime due to the lockdowns putting most of my normal gigs on hold.
A little after seven in the evening, I pulled my battered Mercury Comet into the expansive, but largely abandoned parking lot. Parking next to a Jaguar I assumed had to belong to the head doctor or surgeon on duty, I got out and craned my neck back to stare up at the towering behemoth. My eyes wandered over the many windows, most which were dark. The few that were lit up were spaced apart in such a pattern that they almost gave the impression that the hospital had a face, complete with blazing eyes and eerie smile. I involuntarily shuddered, remembering what Colin, my best friend’s older brother had told us long ago around a campfire. It’s always watching, you know. Day and night, it’s always watching and waiting patiently. Waiting to lure its next careless victim in so it can swallow them up. I shook my head to force away the memory, feeling more than a little irritated with myself. Get real, Tony. You’re thirty-two years old; are you seriously telling me you’re still spooked by those dumb as hell tales? You’ve got a job to do, and they’re more than likely getting impatient waiting for you, so move your ass!
Pushing the last remnants of Colin’s whisper from my mind, I flipped up the collar of my coat to protect me from the wind and walked up the path to the main entrance. After making sure my name tag was visible, and pulling on the required mask as ordered by the sign, I pulled open one of the two large wood and glass doors and stepped inside. The chilly autumn air was replaced by the familiar, yet equally miserable chill that hospitals are known for. Well, looks like my coat’s staying on tonight. My ears were met with the sound of old, easy listening music softly filtering out from speakers set around the massive reception lobby. After a moment’s listening, I recognized the tune as an instrumental version of Beautiful Dreamer. Aside from that, though, the reception area was silent. Silent and, surprisingly, empty. I crossed quickly to the reception desk, my footfalls echoing loudly off the walls and bouncing away into the adjoining hallways. Reaching it, I leaned to look over it. A cup of coffee sat next to the computer monitor, steam rising from the dark liquid. Which meant the nurse stationed up here had to have only just stepped away. Likely called away to assist the on-call staff in the ER. With how understaffed they keep this place, it’s no wonder people regularly request transfer, especially now.
Glancing down, I saw a small brass bell to my right on the counter next to the sign-in ledger, and after a moment’s hesitation, I rang it. Like my footsteps, the shrill, metallic ding echoed away for a moment before, like my footsteps, being swallowed up. I waited for few minutes, then rang it again. Still nobody appeared. I glanced at my watch, noting with slight annoyance that my shift was supposed to have started five minutes ago. I let out a sigh. I’m gonna get docked for that, come pay day. Taking a deep breath, I called out into the expanse. “Hello?” My voice drifted away, bouncing off the walls and answered by no one. I spoke again. “Nurse?” Still nothing. I felt the slight pang of irritation grow as the music continued. “Hello, anybody?”
After a few moments of nobody responding, I let out a small, frustrated snort. “You know what, screw this” I muttered. Snatching a pen from a metal cup, I quickly signed my name in the ledger, along with my job title. On the side, I quickly wrote a small note. Waited here for almost eight minutes, nobody showed. Getting to work, I’ll find my own way down. Tossing the pen down, I walked around the desk and took a few steps towards one of the hallways. And stopped as a chill suddenly shot up my spine, accompanied by an unknown sensation. For a moment, my mind attempted to process the feeling. Then, with a stomach dropping realization, it hit me.
It was the feeling of being watched.
Another chill passed through me as I slowly turned to look behind me. The lobby remained as empty as when I’d entered, and yet…it no longer felt that way. I quickly scanned the walls, half expecting to see a security camera aimed directly at me; I often got the feeling when someone was staring at me through one. To my surprise, though, there were none. At least, none I could see. My eyes shifted to the double doors leading to the east and west wings on either side of the room, half expecting to see a face in the narrow sheet of glass. But they remained empty as well. Yet the feeling still remained. I began to feel thoroughly creeped out as the old stories pushed their way back into my mind. The music was not helping in the slightest; Beautiful Dreamer had begun to begun to repeat itself, the song now almost seeming to hold an eerie, almost foreboding atmosphere instead of the calm and soothing one it had before. Another realization swept over me with a third chill, and, with all sorts of alarm bells going off in my head, I slowly raised my head to look up.
You see, I forgot to mention one thing. The main lobby area of Darby Hospital is not just a single floor. It’s a massive atrium, rising five or six floors to a massive glass ceiling with sweeping walkways arching around the lobby, allowing patients or staff to look straight down to the ground floor.
Someone was standing at the railing on the top floor.
Because the lights were dimmed, I couldn’t tell if it was a man or a woman; all I could see was a general outline against the night sky. Even still, I got the definite impression that whoever it was, they were staring straight down at me. And for a moment, all I could do was stare right back. Then I swallowed slightly, before forcing my voice out. “Uh…hello?” I expected whoever it was to answer; I hoped they would, to soothe my frayed nerves. But the person remained silent. I called to them again. “Hello, can you hear me?” More silence. A small knot began to form itself in my stomach. “Okay, seriously man, whoever you are, you’re starting to seriously creep me the hell out!” I put a small trace of anger into the last call, hoping that it would spur any response. But the figure remained still.
Suddenly, the biggest chill yet raced up my spine, causing me to audibly let out a gasp. The wariness and eerie feeling I’d had up to that point, was suddenly gone. In its place, was what I can only describe as a gut wrenching, inexplicable explosion of terror. Every fiber of my being began screaming at me to run. Almost on instinct, I began to back up, and with each step I took the fear increased. Fuck this, man, I’m out of here! I readied myself to turn and bolt-
-When a heavy hand fell on my shoulder from behind.
“Jesus!” My feet left the ground as I leapt a good six inches off the floor. My heart feeling as though it were about to explode out of my chest, I whirled around, my fists bunched up and ready to sock whoever it was. To my shock, I found myself staring into the masked face of a middle-aged man wearing a white coat. A doctor. For a moment, a look of shock adorned the part of his face visible. Then, it was replaced by an extremely mortified expression as he raised his hands in an unthreatening manner. “Oh, good Lord, son, I am so sorry! I thought you heard me calling to you!” For a moment, all I could do was stand there. Then, with a loud whoosh, I let out the breath I hadn’t realized I’d been holding in, bending over almost in half as I put my hands on my knees. Then I let out a small, shaky laugh. “Holy crap, man. You almost gave me a heart attack” Still looking extremely apologetic, the man reached out and put a reassuring hand on my shoulder. “Are you alright?” he asked. I swallowed hard, then, feeling as though I’d regained a bit of control over myself, stood up straight.
“Yeah, I’m fine” I ran a hand through my hair and chuckled again, before gesturing up and over my shoulder. “Just-I got creeped out by the person up top there, and when you reached out and touched me…” I trailed off. A slightly perplexed expression crossed his face as he looked up. It was instantly replaced by a stern look. “Oh, for God’s sake, not again” he muttered. He raised his voice to a shout. “Nurse!” Almost instantly, a door three floors up opened, bright light spilling out from beyond. A shape appeared, one I instantly recognized was dressed in the garb of a nurse. A moment later, a soothing woman’s voice filtered down. “Yes, Doctor?” He pointed up. “Mr. Friedman appears to have left his room again: would you kindly escort him back?” I saw the nurse crane her neck to look up, before cursing softly. “Of course, Doctor!” she called, before disappearing back into the hallway, closing the doors behind her.
As soon as she was out of sight, the man turned back to me. “Please, again, accept my deepest apologies, both for myself and my patient” He jerked his head up. “Mr. Friedman is one of our long-term patients, and to make matters more difficult, he has a condition. He has a habit of wandering at night when he’s not supposed to” He shook his head slightly. “I’m going to have to speak to the matron on his floor about having an extra nurse to watch him from now on” he muttered, more to himself than me. Then, he looked up, his eyes again focusing on me. “You must be the young man we called to temporarily replace Mr. Drexen as the night guard, am I correct,” his eyes flicked down to my nametag, “Anthony?” I nodded. “Yes, sir, that’s correct. Anthony Romley, at your service” Even though I couldn’t see his mouth, I got the impression he was smiling by his voice as he reached out to shake my hand. “Leonard Carter. I’m in charge of the hospital during the night shifts” I felt the last wisps of fear fade as I took it and shook back. “Pleasure to meet you, Dr. Carter”
As I stepped back, something the man said suddenly clicked. “Uh, maybe I misheard, but you said temporarily replace your normal night guard? I was informed that this was just a one-night gig?” For a moment, the man didn’t speak, cocking his head slightly to one side as he thought. Then he laughed. “And this is why I need to make myself more clear from now on. Yes, the job right now is only a one-night affair, but I was trying to make it clear to your employer that I meant it was simply a trial run, to see how we find you. If we’re pleased with your performance, we’d like to offer you a longer contract until we can find a suitable, dedicated replacement” I suddenly found myself standing up as straight as I could as his words repeated over and over in my mind. This might be more than a one-time thing. This might actually lead to a continued paycheck beyond the meager salary they’re forced to give you for simply being on the company’s payroll. This is what you’ve been waiting for, for the last few months.
And God knows, between the repairs I needed to make on my Comet, and an unexpected, large bill I received from my dentist for a procedure that my insurance suddenly decided it wouldn’t cover, I needed it.
I nodded, unable to keep a smile from spreading across my face. “Honestly, Dr. Carter, even though that wasn’t properly explained, I’m not going to lie and say right now, with the way the world is, I could use all the money I can get my hands on. And I’ll do what I need to, to prove I’m capable enough to hold the position” Dr. Carter let out another laugh, before motioning to the hallway I’d begun approaching earlier. “I’m glad to hear it. Now, shall we begin heading towards your post? It’s a bit of a walk, and I’ll explain the details to you on the way.”
Nodding, I mimicked his gesture. “After you, sir”
As he led the way through the maze of corridors, past multiple doors which bore labels for everything from radiology to surgical wings, he explained the finer points to me. The hospital usually had three full-time security guards on staff; one for the day shift, and two for the night. At night, one of the two would monitor the main hospital building itself, while the second would patrol the connecting corridor and morgue building. I was slightly surprised at this revelation, wondering why they would need someone to monitor those areas until he answered my unasked question. “I’ve worked here at Darby for a very, very long time, Anthony. A lot has changed about the world in that time, almost as much as the last few months. But there’s one thing that hasn’t. And that’s rambunctious teenagers, who often try to break into the morgue through the building door itself, or sneak into the elevator and down the corridor to win dares their friends give them” Yeah, the absolutely batshit insane ones, I thought. As we continued, I was informed that the man I was temporarily replacing, Drexen, had had the morgue patrol.
At his words, and for a brief moment, the feeling of anxiety and fear I’d felt in the lobby reared its head again, before I forced it away. Like I said outside, Tony: Get a grip. It’s just a slightly eerie hospital, nothing more. Even if morgue patrol isn’t really your bag, suck it up and deal with it. You need the dough. Finally, we rounded a corner to find a tall, burly man in a similar outfit to mine waiting in front of a pair of large, silver elevator doors. Dr. Carter gestured to the man. “Anthony, this is Bernard Tryon, our main floor guard and your partner. Bernard, this Anthony Romley, the temp guard we were sent” Bernard reached out and clasped his hand over mine. “Good to meet you, kid” he said with a gravely tone. I nodded back. Dr. Carter turned back to me. “Bernard will take you down and give you a quick tour of the area, along with your radio to stay in touch. Now, I must get back to the rest of the staff” He reached out and patted my shoulder. “I apologize again for our unfortunate introduction, but I already can tell you’re an alert, astute and well-mannered young man. I know you’ll do fine” And with that, he turned and began walking away.
Before he moved out of earshot, I called one final time to him. “Don’t worry, Doctor! I’ll do my best!” The man stopped, staring over his shoulder before nodding and calling back, the tone of his voice again sounding as though he were smiling.
“I know you will!”
Once he’d gone, Bernard and I entered the large freight elevator, and after inserting a key and turning it, the doors closed, and we began descending to the bowels of the complex. As the elevator continued down, he turned to me. “So, are you from around here?” he asked. I nodded. “Born and bred” At my words, he turned, his eyes sharp. “So, I take it you’ve heard the stories about this place, right?” I felt my stomach contort in my chest slightly, letting out a small sigh. “You mean the ones about this place being haunted to shit? About the operating room once bearing the sight of a botched surgery which killed the patient, and the escaped mental loon who supposedly lived down here in the tunnels for years? Not to mention that the hospital itself is somehow alive? Yeah, I’ve heard them. My friend’s older brother would never shut up about them” He let out a sharp laugh. “Well, of course those, but I was referring to the ones about the screwed-up doctor that supposedly worked here sixty or seventy years ago.”
A small pang of surprise filled me as I turned towards him. That one, I hadn’t heard. Seeing the questioning look in my eyes, Bernard continued. “Story goes that from the 40s to the early 60s, one of the head doctors got really involved in the occult. Started messing about with witchcraft and demon summoning, performing all sorts of screwed up experiments on unsuspecting patients and even sacrificing some. He was obsessed with immortality, and wanted to find a way to stay on earth for eternity, to continue his work. But it ended when the police, on an anonymous tip from a terrified nurse, raided the hospital to find him about to sacrifice a child. He refused to drop the scalpel in his hand, and so they blew him away, right up there in the old operating theater. It's why they don't use that wing of the hospital anymore.”
I attempted to look calm and collected. But the truth was, the man’s story had gotten under my skin more than I cared to admit, even to myself. Chills similar to what I’d felt in the lobby ran like ice water down my spine, and it took everything in me not to shudder. Instead, I stared hard at Bernard for a moment. He gazed right back, looking dead serious.
Then he began chuckling. “Nah, I’m just screwin’ with you, kid. Nothing like that ever happened here” Feeling sheepish that I had almost fallen for the tale, I let out a snort of my own. After a second, he looked at me more seriously. “Same goes for all the other stories you listed. They’re all bullshit, Wives Tales made up by kids for generations to scare the hell out of each other. All that this place is, is a bit eerie and nothing more. Remember that, and keep a clear head, and you’ll do just fine” The man’s reassurance helped, and I nodded gratefully at him. Finally, after what felt like an eternity, the elevator let out a ding, and the doors opened.
To a sight that almost immediately put me back on edge.
The corridor the elevator opened on to was decidedly industrial and weathered in its appearance. On the ceiling and one side of the wall were dozens of pipes which, due to the rust and discoloration on them, might have been here since the sixties. A few of them let out soft hissing sounds, occasionally puffing out steam. The corridor itself was rather tall and narrow, lit only by bare bulbs hooked into the free wall which disappeared out of sight. I opened my mouth and said the only thing I could. “Good God, this fucking place is straight out of Grave Encounters” Bernard turned to me, a slightly puzzled look in his eyes. “What the hell is that?” I shook my head. “It’s a horror movie” He nodded, then gestured down the corridor.
“Come on, just a small walk and we’ll reach our destination.”
The two of us walked down the corridor, continuing to talk as we passed by doors which led to God-only-knows where until we reached a large, locked metal door. Stamped into a large, white plate read the word Morgue. Pulling another set of keys from his belt, he unlocked the door and opened it, reaching inside and flicking on the lights. “Here is where you’ll be spending most of your shift.”
Carefully I stepped inside, him following after and closing the door. “That’s the first rule they have here: every time you enter and leave the building, you’ve gotta close the door behind you first thing. I’m not sure why, probably to do with the chemicals or temperature they keep it in here. But, even still” As though his words had conjured it, I felt the temperature drop a good deal. Definitely glad I kept my coat on now. Bernard noticed me pulling my coat tighter. “Don’t worry; it’s just down here that it’s truly cold. The floor above is warmer, and the room you can use to sit in between rounds has heat." "Thank God for small favors" I muttered, earning a chuckle from him. He led the way into the next room, which I instantly decided was one of my least favorite places in the building. Because it was a giant, rectangular room filled with dozens of metal lockers along both walls. Giving it a once-over, I counted more than two dozen of them; I noticed with another small churn of my stomach that about five or six of them had name tags slipped into clips. Great, there’s actually fucking bodies down here.
Thankfully, though, we quickly moved through the room and up the stairs to the upper floor. Even though it was clear up here was where bodies were autopsied, it somehow seemed less creepy than cold storage. I absent mindedly mulled over the equipment laid out on a tray next to the autopsy table as Bernard continued speaking about my rounds. Finally, we moved down the hall past a few more doors and opened the second to last, revealing a rather comfortable looking break room. A coffee machine sat on a far table, and a small, boxy TV with rabbit ears atop it sat next to it. “TV doesn’t get any reception since they swapped to digital, but there’s a VCR with a few tapes to help you pass the time” he offered, pointing to a file cabinet marked Entertainment. I stepped inside, instantly adoring the wave of heat that covered me like a blanket.
That’s when I became aware of something. Music, the same easy listening music I had heard in the lobby was softly playing from somewhere. Looking up, I saw the small speaker embedded in the far wall. I let out a soft groan. “They pipe that music in here as well?” Bernard nodded. “The coroner requested it; apparently he likes listening to it while working” I gave him a pleading look. “Is there any way to turn it off?” He shook his head. “Afraid not, sorry” I let out a small sigh. “Alright” The man patted my shoulder in an awkward, sympathetic manner before straightening up. “Well, that’s the grand tour. Remember to make your rounds through the building every so often, and once in a while, walk through the corridor. There’s a camera in there somehow, though I’ve never seen it myself, and they’ll know if you don’t”
I nodded, following him back downstairs and into the cold storage room. Bernard began to speak. “I’ll come down every so often to check on you and make sure you’re handling it alright during my breaks, but just try to remember what I said. Keep your head up, and don’t let the bullshit get-“ He kept speaking, but it was as though his words had suddenly drawn ten miles away from me. I’d reached the halfway point across the room, matching the larger man’s pace. But I froze, feeling as though I’d suddenly been rooted to the spot. For a second, I felt puzzled by the instinctive reaction. And then, the terror I’d felt in the lobby returned in spades as I became aware of two separate things.
The first was that I had originally thought that, aside from the soft hissing which filled the room, along with the music, it was silent in here. But it wasn’t. The sound was almost inaudible at first, like the sound of snow from an old television. But as I concentrated, I began to hear something filter through it. And as I continued to listen, the sound grew in its intensity. And I instantly wished I hadn’t focused on it.
It was the sound of a person mumbling. The words were spoken too low and fast for me to make out anything, but it was unquestionably a person. That wasn’t what scared the shit the most out of me. No, that was because the person, a man, sounded utterly insane. Every so often, he’d let out small giggles, paired with a low, sinister chuckle that froze the blood in my veins. And somehow, that wasn’t even the worst part. It was the second part that was.
One of the refrigerator doors on the far edge of the room stood ajar.
I hadn’t noticed it when we’d first entered the room-I swear they were all closed-but there it was, refrigerant slowly puffing out of it to the floor. I couldn’t tell if it had been one of the one’s I’d seen a tag fitted to, but as I realized where the mumbling was coming from, I didn’t need to. I simply stared, feeling unable to blink or look away as dread, stronger than I’ve ever felt in my life begin filling every square inch of my body and soul. I suddenly became aware that all the other sounds had gone silent. The hissing, the music, even Bernard had shut up, as if all the sounds besides the horrible ones from the locker were being sucked out of the room. That’s when they went silent as well. The room became deathly still for a moment. But only a moment. Because a single, horrifying word filtered out from the locker.
Anthonyyyy…
My heart began to race in my chest as the weight of hearing my own name uttered from the locker slammed into me with all the weight of a Kenworth. What the fuck?! What the actual fuck, dude?! Every part of me wanted desperately to open my mouth and scream as loud as I ever had in my life. But I still felt rooted to the spot, unable to do anything but stare.
That’s when the door began to slowly push open.
I felt my breath hitch in my throat as I saw the yawning blackness slowly revealed inside as it continued to open farther. My heart felt like it was about to explode out from my chest, and I would die of a heart attack at any moment. I suddenly became aware of one incontestable fact: whatever was inside that locker, if I laid eyes on it, it would be the last thing I ever saw. I kept trying to force myself to close my eyes as I swear I began to see something move in the inky blackness. Close your fucking eyes, you moron, close your fuc-
“Anthony!”
I started, finding that I was suddenly able to not only blink, but move again. For a second, my mind attempted to catch up to the rest of me. Then I became aware that Bernard was bending down and staring into my eyes. He’d removed his mask as well; I saw a heavy frown through the thick mustache he had. “Wha-what?” I stammered. A look of severe relief filled his face, and he reached up to wipe visible sweat from his brow. “You’re back. Good. Sweet heavens to Betsy, you scared the shit out of me” His eyes narrowed. “What the hell happened? You stopped walking and talking and just stood as still as a statue, not blinking for a minute there”
A small part of me wanted desperately to tell him about the horrible things I’d just seen and heard. But a larger part of me whispered two things. That he would never believe me. And worse, if I did tell the truth, I would be let go instantly. Likely without pay. And I cannot afford that.
So, I lied. “I honestly don’t know, man. I must’ve blanked out or something, maybe started daydreaming” I saw him raise an eyebrow at me, indicating he didn’t exactly buy my excuse. I feigned a slightly irritated tone. “I’m fine, seriously” After a moment, he nodded, still looking slightly suspicious. “If you say so,” he began, before looking at me sharply, “But I catch you doing that again, as much as I like you, I’ll have to report it. Understand?” I nodded back. “Clear as crystal” He let out a small sigh, then reached down and pulled something off his belt. “Here. Before I forget, here’s your radio to keep in touch with me. I’ve already set it to the channel my radio is on” He tapped the other side of his belt, where I saw an identical radio sitting. “Keep in touch, and if anything happens, you get on the horn and let me know, got it?”
I let out a deep breath as I slipped the radio onto my own belt. “Yeah, I got it” He gave me a final, hard look. “I mean it. Anything at all, you radio me. Especially if you think someone’s broken in here. For the love of God, don’t be a hero, and don’t be Rambo” His eyes flickered down to the Beretta holstered on my hip as he finished his sentence. I nodded again. “I pick up what you’re putting down, Bernard. I’ll radio you if anything happens” Nodding, he patted me on the shoulder, then opened the door and stepped into the small storage room. I followed behind as he opened the door into the main corridor.
“I’ll come down in about an hour to check on you, alright?” I nodded, patting him on the shoulder as he’d done and forcing a smile I didn’t even remotely feel. “Sounds like a plan, man. In the meantime, I’m gonna go see what tapes are up there for the TV” He finally chuckled, seeming to relax. “There’s a good selection in there of all genres; Douglas and I used to come down to watch movies on break all the time. Just, one small suggestion? No horror movies; at least, not tonight” It was now my turn to let out a genuine laugh. “Yeah, I think I’ll skip those” He nodded, then headed into the corridor, closing the door behind him.
For a few moments, I listened to the sound of his retreating footsteps until they became faint. Then I reached up and pulled the mask from my face, feeling thankful I could breathe properly again. Then, I turned away, beginning to mentally chide myself. For God’s sake, Tony, do NOT fuck this up for yourself. I don’t know what that was about, whether it’s lack of sleep or just an overactive imagination, but we both know there was nothing there. So get ahold of yourself. Bernard’s already two seconds away from getting you canned. So, repeat after me: There’s nothing down here. Just you. I opened my mouth. “There’s nothing down here. Only me”
The words brought some much-needed reassurance to me, and I felt my confidence begin to rise again. Even still, I quickly speed-walked through cold storage, feeling relief fill me as I closed the door behind me and walked up the stairs. As I entered the hallway, I suddenly realized what music was now playing over the speakers. An old late 50s, early 60s instrumental song called Theme From A Summer Place.
“Well, at least it isn’t Beautiful Dreamer again. Thank God. Now, time to check out those tapes and grab a cup of coffee” And with that, I walked down the hall to the break room, confident that the worst was behind me.
I had no idea it was only a prelude of what was to come.
Part 2

Forewarning: this is a very, very long post. If you're in a TL;DR mood, this won't be the one for you. But if you're in agony trying to come up with wording/delivery for a lettestatement to emotionally neglectful/abandoning parents that you're deciding whether to go LC/NC or set boundaries with, I'm hoping you'll either find this cathartic to read, or even perhaps find portions of it that you can use in your own letter (if you choose to send one, that is.)
I worked for over a week on this letter. I wrote and re-wrote about five or six different drafts. The ones I decided to discard were ones that sounded like they were coming from my broken inner child. I wanted to come from a place of power while communicating in a way that would make it impossible for them to shove me back into the emotionally-unstable-scapegoat box they've used to rug-sweep their abhorrently neglectful and dysfunctional actions (and inactions) over the years. When I read this version to my husband, he said, "Now that's that one."
So to anyone out there who is struggling with this, feel free to steal/use any portion of this letter. I honestly, doubt I'll receive any kind of meaningful response from my parents, but I've released myself from caring about the outcome at this point. I spoke my truth, and that's all that matters. If anything, it will bring me happiness and joy to know that these words I toiled over so much could help someone else communicate a similar experience.
CW: brief but non-detailed mentions of sexual abuse, suicidal ideation and sex trafficking.
Ok, here's the letter:
"Mom and Dad,
I can understand that it might have come as a shock when I let you both know about my need for some space a few weeks ago. I’m sure this seemed pretty out of character, especially for me. We all know that silence isn’t my strong suit. It wasn’t at all my intention to worry or upset either of you, I just needed to take some time to clear my mind and find a way to convey the emotions that have been coming to the surface for me these last couple of months.
As I get closer to the midway point of this pregnancy, the reality of becoming a mother is hitting very hard, and I’ve been in deep reflection about it. It has me thinking a lot about my own life, what I experienced growing up, and what I want to do differently as a parent. Part of that has been contemplating the years of unresolved conflicts and tensions that underlie our relationship, and our wider family dynamic.
I want to be clear—my goal here isn't to rehash the past. It’s to share my current feelings honestly and explain the sudden shift in my communication, which likely seemed to come out of left field. The reality is that these feelings have been simmering under the surface for years. Your recent increase in communication, care, and genuine emotion regarding my pregnancy has brought everything to the forefront. This prompted me to take a step back, sift through my feelings, and decide how to best express them in this letter.
Don’t get me wrong, I appreciate your excitement about the baby, and it's completely understandable that you're thrilled at the prospect of becoming grandparents together for the first time. Although [nephew 1’s name] and [nephew 2’s name] are already part of our family, I recognize that this experience might feel different for you, since this is the first grandchild you’ll both share together.
The feelings I'm experiencing now didn't hit me immediately; they emerged slowly as my pregnancy progressed. I started receiving your heartfelt texts, which were warmer and more frequent than before. This made me uneasy and uncomfortable, and I didn’t understand why I felt that way at first. I then realized it was because this sudden spike in engagement was such a stark contrast to the level of correspondence that I’d received from either of you prior to me announcing the baby’s arrival. It began to feel like the warmth of your messages was more about your excitement to become grandparents rather than about genuinely connecting with me as a person. This only highlighted the minimal effort and genuine engagement that has characterized your involvement in my life for some time now, but especially since I moved back to the states.
To be honest, I've always deeply longed for your love and approval—a desire common to all children, even as they grow into adults. I've yearned for a closer, more intimate connection and to feel like a priority to you, but that has always seemed just out of reach. For much of my life, I’ve felt like a mixture of a burden, the 'problem child,' and the one you seem most exhausted by and prefer to avoid extended amounts of time with. So, when I initially received this burst of excitement and increased engagement about the baby, my first instinct was to soak it all in. However, upon deeper reflection, I realized the importance of focusing on long-term patterns in our relationship rather than being swayed by temporary surges of attention or affection. Zooming out in this way allowed me to see a clearer picture of the true nature of our family dynamics, which, frankly, does not feel like an emotionally healthy one.
I want to preface what I’m about to share with this: I don’t believe your intentions have ever been to cause harm or make me feel neglected. I know you love me in your own way, and I'm confident you'd be there for me in a crisis—just as you would for [younger sister’s name]. However, the impact of your actions and inactions on my emotions over the years is what truly matters. Love, to me, is demonstrated not only during significant life events but through consistent action, presence, and deep engagement in the lives of those you care about. It’s natural to crave consistent affection and interest from one’s parents, not just sporadic attention when circumstances make it convenient. The recent increase in your engagement, closely tied to the upcoming arrival of my baby, highlights a longstanding need I have had for more regular and genuine involvement in my life.
Please try to see this from my perspective. Imagine how it feels to watch the frequent international trips to London to visit [younger sister] and [brother-in-law], and to see you both investing in building an apartment behind their house for extended stays—often lasting months. Meanwhile, [my husband] and I are just a short domestic flight away, yet the number of times you’ve come specifically to see us—when it wasn’t just convenient during another trip or due to a larger family event in our area—can be counted on one hand (and even those visits lasted merely a couple of days, at most).
I don’t live inside your heads, so I can’t truly know the reasons behind your decisions over the years. It’s unclear whether your frequent trips to London and the decision to establish a more permanent residence there is primarily a convenient base for your European travels now that you’re both retired, or if it reflects a genuine preference for spending time with [younger sister] and [brother-in-law] —and [brother-in-law’s] extended family. Perhaps it's a bit of both. These are questions I’ve wrestled with more than you’ll ever know, often feeling alone in my confusion.
But I’ve come to realize that the specific reasons behind your actions are less important than the message those actions send. Your choices clearly indicate that connecting with me and my husband is not a priority. This makes your sudden increased interest and the abrupt cancellation of a summer trip to London to see your new grandchild appear conditional. This is a textbook example of how 'actions speak louder than words.' I’ve noticed a pattern where your attention and involvement seem to be triggered more by your own needs and desires than by a consistent, meaningful, and genuine interest in the lives of your children.
Although I only speak for myself, it's hard to believe that [younger sister], [brother-in-law], and other members of our extended family haven't noticed the stark differences in how you engage with us. It often feels like I've become invisible within our family. This strange, palpable reality is something I've had to grapple with almost in isolation, only able to discuss it with [younger sister], which puts her in a very uncomfortable position—a position she’s found herself in too often because of your selective engagement with your daughters. Have you truly considered how this disparity makes us both feel? Have you thought about the confusing and painful emotions your actions—and inactions—might provoke in us? Have you considered the strain that this places on our relationship as sisters?
Take a moment to think back on our recent family get-togethers. Each one seems to be marked by a lot of stress, emotional upset, and an undeniable tension. These aren’t one-off occurrences; they’re part of a consistent pattern that deeply affects all of us. This ongoing issue prevents me from fully enjoying the deep and true connection I have with [younger sister], as we’re often caught up in the challenging dynamics, unacknowledged hurts, and roles that have been imposed on us within our family.
It’s been a long time since I could enjoy simple, one-on-one time with [younger sister] without our unresolved family issues casting a shadow over us. If we can’t address and heal from these longstanding dysfunctions in a meaningful way, I'll need to start planning my visits to see [younger sister] and [brother-in-law] on my own. Our rare moments together should be opportunities to strengthen our bond and create happy memories, not clouded by the old roles of 'problem child' and 'quiet one' that we’ve been stuck in since childhood.
For a long time, I misunderstood the seemingly greater attention you paid to [younger sister] as a kind of favoritism. I take responsibility for the resentment I felt towards her, perceiving her as the 'golden child.’ Over time, however, my perspective has evolved. I now feel she was more like the “invisible child’. I’ve come to realize that being physically close doesn't necessarily mean there is emotional closeness or genuine engagement. Although it may appear that there is more physical proximity in your relationship with [younger sister], I now understand that this does not automatically translate into a deeper emotional bond.
Given our history and the unresolved issues that we've never fully addressed, it's unrealistic to expect that future family gatherings will be different from past experiences. It brings to mind the saying, 'Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.' I can't see how future visits would be beneficial or emotionally healthy without sincere introspection and real change from you both, including acknowledging the hurts and dysfunctions that have gone unspoken.
At this crucial juncture, as I transition from healing my own emotional wounds to preparing for motherhood, I'm compelled to confront our family dynamics head-on. This is not just for my own well-being but for my daughter's. Children absorb the emotional undercurrents of family interactions from a very young age. Realizing this, I cannot subject myself or my daughter to visits or superficial interactions that ignore our deep-rooted issues. My primary duty is to protect her, and that starts now, even before she is born.
As I think about the future and the impact the current family dynamics might have on her if they remain unchanged, it's crucial to consider what might happen if [younger sister] and [brother-in-law] decide to have children. Their decision is entirely theirs, and while it's hypothetical, I can't help but consider the potential impact. The marked difference between your frequent and involved visits to London and your sporadic visits to us could inevitably make my daughter feel like she's not as important, a feeling I know all too well. I am determined to prevent her from struggling with the same deep and confusing emotions I've faced. It's essential for me to ensure she never questions her worth or her place in this family. I refuse to have those painful conversations with her about feeling less valued if things continue as they are.
As I’ve spoken with [older half-sister] recently, although she didn't state it outright, it was clear she struggles with the current excitement around my pregnancy. Who could blame her? This enthusiasm sharply contrasts with the lukewarm engagement you've shown towards [nephew 1] and [nephew 2], who often seemed more like burdens than beloved grandchildren, a sentiment often attributed to Dad's strained relationship with [dad’s ex wife]. Your evident reluctance to take on typical grandparent duties like babysitting as the boys grew older, which you've complained about behind closed doors, raises concerns about your future involvement with my child once she matures. It appears that new family additions are celebrated when they're infants, with interest diminishing as they age.
I've noticed a recurring theme: both of you light up around babies and very young children. Mom, the times you reminisce about with fondness are from my early years—those innocent days of infancy and the charm of my early childhood. But as I grew older and faced challenges, it seemed to me that the connection waned; I transformed into someone you didn't recognize or didn't wish to engage with at the same depth. This leaves me grappling with a hard truth: as the babies in your lives grow into their individuality and need more profound, meaningful connections, there's a shift—a hesitancy, perhaps, or a withdrawal. I can't help but question, will my daughter experience the same? Will she feel that distance when she's old enough to voice her thoughts and feelings, especially about the dynamics of our family that have gone unspoken? This troubling pattern raises serious questions about the future of our family dynamics and the emotional health of my daughter.
The differences in the attention you give to your children and the effort you put into truly understanding who they become as they grow are stark, and it hasn't escaped notice—not by me, nor by the rest of the family. I find myself wondering about your awareness of this stark contrast. Are you conscious of these imbalances and their visibility to everyone around us? If you are, have you ever stopped to think about the impact it might have on my feelings or those of others? And what of the impression this leaves on both your current and any future grandchildren? How do you suppose they'll perceive their value in our family? These aren't just rhetorical questions—they're real concerns, and I'm looking for answers. Because, from where I'm standing, it feels like you're either oblivious to the effects of your actions or you’re aware and simply hoping it doesn’t come up for discussion.
I can imagine some of the feelings that might be surfacing as you read this letter. It might seem like I’m the one who 'can’t let things go' or 'leave the past in the past.' Perhaps you’re feeling that way now. I would love to move forward, but that's incredibly challenging to do when these issues remain unacknowledged and unresolved.
[Younger sister] has informed me that you are both aware she is currently working through the impact of our family’s dynamics in therapy (she read this letter before I sent it, to ensure she was comfortable with her mentions). Have you ever considered the root of her struggles? Her frequent panic attacks? Have you ever genuinely asked her how her experiences growing up in our home might have contributed to these issues? Or are these topics you’d prefer to avoid, attributing her struggles merely to chemical imbalances that you believe could be resolved with a low-dose antidepressant or adjustments in nutrition and work-life balance? Despite this, [younger sister] at least observes your efforts to connect with her life and integrate into the lives of her new family members. As for me, how can I leave the past behind when the same patterns continue to shape my present reality and threaten to affect my daughter's future? Letting go might seem like the easiest path for everyone else, but at what cost to me? Is it truly fair to expect this of me?
I acknowledge that my earlier efforts to express my concerns and hurts may have lacked emotional maturity. Let’s be honest: I wasn't raised in an environment that nurtured emotional maturity, healthy communication, or a readiness to address issues directly—and, to be fair, neither were you. I truly understand and have compassion for that now. Over the last four years, I've had to teach myself these essential skills, despite my upbringing. This journey has been incredibly challenging, yet profoundly rewarding. I am proud of the person I've become and am confident that I can model these healthier behaviors for my daughter, striving to protect her from the pain I endured growing up.
What may have seemed like emotional outbursts were not simply expressions of anger or attempts to punish you for past behaviors. They were my attempts—though perhaps ineffective and misguided—to address and heal the deep-seated pain within our family. I often felt like the ‘canary in the coal mine.’ Despite my efforts to engage in more mature, meaningful discussions in recent years, I’ve consistently encountered a lack of interest from both of you in truly exploring, understanding, acknowledging, and healing from these longstanding patterns of dysfunction. These issues are deeply rooted in the family system that was established long before I could have any influence on it.
Recently, my friend [friend’s name] forwarded me an email I sent to both of you in 2019. At the time, I believed that my brain was diseased and disordered, and that mental illness was the root cause of all my pain and the issues plaguing our family. In that email, I confessed to struggling with suicidal ideation and apologized profusely for the pain and family dysfunction I thought I was responsible for. I also shared that I had resorted to sex work to support myself after being dropped by my production team, lawyer, and manager when I raised concerns about sexual misconduct. Just a few weeks ago, I discovered that Rodney Jones, the producer I worked with, has filed a lawsuit against Sean 'Diddy' Combs, accusing him of running a sex trafficking operation under the guise of helping young women with their music careers. Reading about this lawsuit felt like a punch to the gut. Reflecting on the desperate words of that 2019 email, I am heartbroken for the 28-year-old who wrote it. She was so convinced that she was fundamentally flawed and the source of our family's problems. How wrong she was.
If my daughter ever sent me such an email, nothing could stop me from immediately flying to her side. Yet, all I received in response was $500 for a psychiatric appointment. The subsequent silence on the turmoil and trauma I experienced, much like the silence that followed my sexual assault at 17, is deafening. In that moment, Mom, you simply asked, 'What do you want me to do?' and never brought it up again. The girl who wrote that email wasn't a problem child; she was a person in profound pain, raised in a deeply dysfunctional family system. I need to know: do you understand this? Are you willing to confront this reality?
Here's where I stand: Love is a verb—it's about action, not just words or fleeting feelings. Currently, I don't feel a genuine and consistent sense of care from you, but rather a conditional enthusiasm linked more to your own benefit of becoming grandparents. While I understand your excitement, I cannot ignore all these unresolved issues and ongoing pain that lingers in our relationship. Allowing you to continue to sidestep and ignore these deep-rooted problems to embrace the role of doting grandparents is unfair—not just to me, but to all involved, especially this new baby I’m bringing into the world.
Moving forward, my engagement with both of you will depend on seeing real, substantive changes in how you interact with me as your daughter. I can no longer expose myself to unresolved conflicts and unacknowledged pain. It's emotionally exhausting and draining, and I refuse to maintain a façade that preserves your comfort at the expense of my own well-being.
Everyone deserves reciprocity and genuine engagement in their relationships, especially within a family. I understand that I cannot force two grown adults to change or to engage in introspection. I accept that you are who you are, and that I have no control over how you will receive or react to what I’ve shared here. However, acceptance does not mean I must continue to expose myself and my child to unhealthy situations or relationships that lack reciprocity. It is entirely possible to accept limitations in capacity or willingness to change while also choosing to protect myself—and my child—from the impact of those limitations.
I remain open to the possibility of forging a path forward in our relationship that is mutually healthy and fulfilling for everyone, while still respecting our individual autonomy. However, I must admit that my heart is heavily guarded at this point. My previous attempts to address these underlying issues have been, to put it mildly, unsuccessful. Instead of engaging, any concerns I raise are often met with silence or defensive reactions, and I'm typically urged to leave the past in the past. I've been accused of labeling you both as bad parents or demanding perfection. All I've ever asked for are sincere efforts at introspection and change. However, it seems the preferred approach for both of you has been to ignore the underlying issues and shove the rotting skeletons back into the closet, leaving the shaky foundations of our family's emotional health unaddressed.
Moving forward, any healing in our relationship really depends on genuine, meaningful efforts from you both. I’m open to reconnecting, but first, I need to see real changes in how we interact. If we can’t resolve these deep-seated issues and everything just stays the same, I’ll have to step back to protect both my emotional health and my daughter’s. This would mean fundamentally rethinking my involvement in family gatherings, visits, and how we communicate. Continuing to engage in the current surface-level manner like nothing is wrong without addressing any of these painful issues isn't healthy or fair —it just keeps the cycle of hurt, resentment, and exhaustion going, and I won’t keep walking down that path.
At this point, it's up to you. While I’m hopeful that you’ll reflect deeply and embrace the chance for real change, I know it’s not something I can force. I still hold onto the hope for a future where our family interactions are filled with mutual respect, unconditional love, true emotional support, and engagement that’s equally meaningful for everyone. However, I’m also ready to accept that we might have to go our separate ways if these essential needs can’t be met. I need to be clear: separating is the last thing I ever want to happen, but it's a reality I’m prepared to accept to protect both my child’s and my own well-being.
The choices you make after reading this letter will profoundly shape not just our relationship, but also the legacy we leave for the next generation. My hope is that we can create a family environment that is founded on genuine love and respect, not just conditional needs, and surface-level interactions. I dream of a family dynamic free from unacknowledged hurt and pain, where love, respect, and empathy are not merely ideals, but the very essence of our daily interactions.
[My name]"

“If no one’s alive to remember something,” Chelsea asked me as I threw my shoulder against the front door, “do you think it ever actually happened?”
Icicles fell to the ground, but the door stayed shut. I even tried stepping back to kick my boot into the handle. Wood splintered around the frame while Chelsea said, “I used to tell my daughter that that’s why ghosts exist—to remember everything for us.”
I told her she was an idiot. “If ghost’s exist, then they’re asymptotic,” I said. “They don’t want to be found.”
I backed up to the edge of the porch. Leaning forward, I sprinted at this door, throwing my whole body against it until the thing shot open. It shot open like a knocked out tooth, and I fell into the house.
From the floor, I told Chelsea, “This is comfier than the shelter.”
She wiped off some snow that had landed on her shaved head and glided past me into the house. The bright skin on her skull reflected my flashlight beam against the cobwebbed ceiling, and I wondered how she had been able to reach back there. How had she cut it so short? No one at the homeless center was sober enough to hold a flask steady, let alone a razor.
I got up, taking my flashlight and waving it over broken picture frames and furniture covered in snow drifts. It had been a decade since the Endotherm—ten whole years since the lab upstate got its wires crossed. Ten whole years since I had a job.
Chelsea picked something up off the ground. “Who do you think lived here?” she asked, tossing me the object. “Demons? Poltergeists?”
It sparkled through my flashlight beam, this tiny crystal sphere, and I managed to catch it against my chest. The thing was frozen solid, holding onto a trio of polyethylene figures—some mom, dad, and daughter type—just an ugly, plastic family trapped in a snowglobe.
Before the Endotherm, the lab upstate had spent billions of dollars promising families, just like the one in my hand, eternal life. If they had the money, they could plug their home into the lab’s infrastructure. A series of pipes and wires that didn’t deliver water or electricity. They delivered time.
A thermostat to control how fast people aged.
It wasn’t the cure for cancer, but it wasn’t not the cure for cancer. Someone could just turn their dial down enough and those rapidly mutating cells could slow to a crawl. It even worked in reverse. People could turn their dial up and completely heal any cuts or bruises overnight.
No need for ice packs. No more picking at scabs.
The truth was, I had worked there, at that lab upstate. I had developed those pipes and wires that carried the condensed, plasmic soup used to speed up or slow down people’s organic molecules. I helped connect these houses and neighborhoods together into one giant computer network.
But this was all before the Endotherm.
I slipped the snowglobe into my coat pocket and shone my flashlight around the rest of the house. There were holes hammered into the wall, and the coffee table was littered with notebooks, pens, and pencils. The place was trashed. Someone had been here.
Chelsea said, “Do you think the reason ghosts destroy things when they’re angry is because they’re looking for a way out?”
And I wanted to tell her, couldn’t ghosts just appear and disappear whenever they felt like it, but I just kept pointing my flashlight around at the holes in the walls looking for the glint of wire—looking for something we could sell.
That’s when it landed on the recorder. One of those old-school devices with the buttons running up the side. It was just like the ones we had back at the lab. So I picked it up and pressed the button labeled ‘play’ and a voice said, “Whoever hears this, it’s important you know the truth.”
The truth was, there must have been an open window somewhere that we missed, because no sooner than I started the tape, did a gust of wind shoot through the house. It barreled out from the dark hallway next to us, throwing snow off the furniture and into the air, and the front door wouldn’t stop banging itself against its broken frame.
Instead of going to close it, all Chelsea had to say was, “Do you think it’s possible that some memories want to be forgotten?”
So I did it myself. I went and jammed the door shut while the recorder competed with Chelsea for air time, saying something like, “I used to believe everything tended towards chaos. Ice turned to water. Water turned to vapor. The second law of thermodynamics.”
It was saying all these things Chelsea wouldn’t understand like, “This is what Ludwig Boltzman spent his entire life trying to figure out. He developed a statistical model, a whole new branch of mathematics, just to understand why icicles melt.”
Back in the living room, I stuck my flashlight into the half-demolished wall, and there it was. The gold-copper glint from all those wires and pipes that had been installed half a generation ago. Free for the taking.
Sheetrock crumbled as I shoved my arm further up into the wall, and I wondered why whoever had been here before didn’t strip it for themselves. As the wall tore further open, gray clumps of ash fell against my boots, and when the recorder said, “Bolzmann asked himself, why do we have to live in a world where things fall apart?” I froze.
I froze because I had heard that voice before, but before I could press the speaker to my ear and listen closer, something slammed from the street outside.
I ripped my arm out of the wall and dropped to the ground, clicking off my flashlight. In the dark, through the frost coated, living room window, something red blinked outside. A steady pulse like a ticking timer, and it was here in the dark when I remembered where I was during the Endotherm.
I was working. I was working with the chief scientist in front of the lab’s terminal when whole neighborhoods just started going offline. The lights went from green to pulsing red, and the chief scientist, he had froze. He had froze in a way that no manager should freeze when the lights turn red.
Even all this time later, he hasn’t done anything. No one has done anything. No government official or labcoated-scientist has set foot in one of these offline neighborhoods. The surviving families petition year after year, but the only people stupid enough to actually step foot into these places are the junkies and scrappers.
The people who could actually do something? They’re just waiting out the clock. Because once we’re all dead, no one has to remember.
From the living room floor, the recorder hissed in my hand, still on.
“Shit,” I muttered, shaking it and jamming its buttons to try and get it to stop but all it did was speed up. A high pitched whine that the boots crunching outside had to have heard.
Chelsea was against the wall rubbing her fingers into her hairless skull and telling herself, “Don’t worry,” she said. “When you’re scared of something, it means you’re on the right track.”
The truth was, this was not what I signed up for.
The boots stopped right outside the front door, and I shoved the recorder into my coat to at least muffle the sound. My breath curled in the cold air. It twisted around itself, tugged towards the wall and down the dark hallway by whatever expired chemical soup was still in those pipes.
A thick stream of cold air dissipating exponentially into nothingness. Reaching for infinity.
The door didn’t open.
It stayed shut, and the boots crunched back across the ice on the porch, back the way they came, and Chelsea was so pale I could see through her.
She said, “I used to tell my daughter that when she was scared of something, it was actually her brain telling her to pay attention. Wouldn’t it make sense,” Chelsea said, “that all these times we’ve been running away from ghosts we should have been running towards them?”
As she yapped, I crawled towards the frost covered window. I had to scratch the ice off like a gas-station lottery ticket to see whoever was out there. But even with it all scratched off, all there was was a shadow walking towards the blinking red light, some car’s alarm system. A door squeaked open and the blinking stopped.
“We should sneak out the back,” I told Chelsea.
But all she had to say to that was, “Do you think some ghosts are actually scared for us?”
I finally got her to follow me, and we crept over torn books and shattered family pictures, down into that long dark hallway, when I heard the boots again. They thumped loud, running towards the front door. Chelsea almost floated over me as we slipped into that last room, where I shut us in just as the front door burst open.
And I must have hit it, because in my coat, the recorder buzzed back awake. It said, “For example, Georg Cantor. He created the first fractal before Mandalbrot ever did. To make one, what you do is: you take a line, and remove the middle chunk.”
I pulled my jacket tight together to try and suffocate the noise while I peeked under the door, but it didn’t even matter because Chelsea wouldn’t shut up.
She was behind my shoulder saying, “You should see this,” while the recorder said, “Now you’re left with two smaller lines. For each of these two lines, repeat the process. Take out the middles. One becomes two becomes four becomes eight.”
“Really,” Chelsea said, “You really need to see this.”
So I turned around, finger to my lips, but as soon as I did, everything went numb. Steam rose off my fingertip like a warm gun, towards the unmade bed I was looking at. A giant stuffed animal laid tangled in the sheets, holding something in its hands.
“Now apply that pattern in two dimensions,” the recorder said.
Scissors. Paper. That was what the stuffed animal was holding. Small flat, white diamonds dotted its chest. Shapes cut from the paper. One of these squares hung from the tip of the scissors. Frozen in time.
The recorder said, “Fold. Cut. Fold. Repeat. What Georg Cantor did was spend his entire life figuring out how snowflakes dissolve.”
The truth was, this wasn’t a giant stuffed animal I was looking at.
Chelsea whispered, “Do you remember yet?”
Another gust of wind tore through the house.
It tore through the house because whoever was looking for us had finally flung the bedroom door open. Standing over me, with a coat that hung like a dress and a beanie that slid down over its forehead, was a skeleton.
He looked down at me, this emaciated man, pushing his hat up over his eyes with the back of his hand. A hand holding onto a bright orange gun.
“You’re alive?” he asked, water dripping from his untrimmed beard and against my face. “It’s been ten years.”
The voice that came out of his mouth was the same voice coming out of the recorder, and I could almost remember how I knew him. I looked over for Chelsea, but she was gone. Wind whipped through the open window as if she had evaporated through it.
“Just…” the skeleton man said as he pushed his beanie back up with his gun. “Just…stay right there.”
He fumbled back down the long dark hallway, and I considered following Chelsea out the open window, but that would’ve meant crawling over the bed of this not-stuffed-animal. This liquid-nitrogened child.
She smiled at her paper snowflake. She had to have been smiling at that snowflake ever since the green lights had turned to red lights. In that same amount of time, I had lived in more homeless shelters than she probably had baby teeth. I had lost my job and more money than I’ll probably ever see again.
I crawled over to her bed, taking off my coat to wrap it around her as if it could dissolve away the last decade, and from the living room the skeleton man shouted, “Remember what you told me about Alan Turning?”
He said, “You told me that he was the one who gave computers memory. You told me that he modeled hard drives after cold storage, so that information could be preserved forever.”
I tucked my coat tighter around this tiny girl covered in her lattice of tiny square crystals, and the snowglobe rolled out from the pocket, against my stomach.
“Memories can be forgotten but they can never disappear,” the man yelled. “That’s what you taught me.”
I picked up the snowglobe, and the wires in my brain must have come uncrossed because I saw myself in it. Not just my reflection. My actual self. One of those three polyethylene figures, carved from wax and standing watch over the other two.
Chelsea and my daughter. My wife and this freezer-burned child laying in front of me.
An ugly family trapped in ice.
“You taught me,” the skeleton man said, “that all it takes is one instruction from the processor, one little nudge, and boom! You’re right back where you left off.”
On that day, the day of the Endotherm, when the lights had turned from green to red, my student had asked me, “What did I do wrong?”
He said. “I studied Boltzmann, I studied Cantor, and Turning. I did everything you said. What could I have done wrong?”
And on that day, in that lab, the fat in his cheeks had already started to burn away. Instead of running logs, instead of capturing crash reports or mitigating the system failure. I left. I was the chief scientist, and I left him there to drive straight home.
“They said you went mad,” the skeleton man said as he stepped back into my daughter’s room. “They said you lost your mind, but I wouldn’t believe it.”
“I wouldn’t believe it,” he said. “Until I found this.”
He shook one of the notebooks from the coffee table at me, and I wanted to throw the snowglobe in my hand against him like I was one of Chelsea’s angry spirits. I wanted to destroy this house all over again like when I came home the day of the Endotherm and found my daughter frozen to her bed.
“Do you even remember?” the skeleton man asked.
He said, “You told me, Alan wasted his entire life trying to understand how memories thaw because you could create a world where nothing changed.”
“But what you really did was waste my life.” The skeleton man—my old student—he slammed my notebook on the bed. “You let me believe that your mistake was mine.”
The notebook was flipped open to the middle. Tucked in that page like a bookmark—between drawings of Carnot engines and binomial equations—was Chelsea’s obituary. She smiled from the black and white picture the same way my daughter smiled at her snowflake.
It was the last picture we had taken before the chemo. It was the last picture we had taken before Chelsea lost all her hair.
“You never told me that Alan Turning died of cyanide poisoning,” the skeleton man said, waving his bright orange gun around. “You never told me that Georg Cantor was committed to a sanitarium, or that Ludwig Boltzman hung himself in front of his wife and daughter.”
He pulled back the hammer on his weapon, “You never told me that when you try to control everything, it tears you apart.”
It was a flare gun, the thing he had pointed at my face. The barrel shook all around, drawing invisible lines together in front of me, and I said, “I’m sorry.”
I said, “If you put the gun down, we can still figure it out. We can fix all this.”
He hesitated, biting his cracked lip. The barrel kept bouncing between my eyes, and I told him, “It’s okay to be scared.”
And that did it. His arm shook as he slowly lowered the gun. He lowered it from my head to my chest until it was pointing at the floor. And that was the moment I jumped. I jumped up and smashed the snowglobe into his face.
The weapon flashed, something cracked, and then there was nothing.
The truth was, I had wasted everyone’s time.
Before the Endotherm, while Chelsea was dying of cancer, I had siphoned time away from everyone else. All those wires, all those pipes, all those plugged in houses, I never turned them on. I diverted every Joule of energy meant for everyone else to my own house.
But even all that condensed atomic soup pumping through our vents and radiating over our WiFi it hadn’t been enough to completely stop entropy. We had discovered Chelsea’s cancer too late, and it was too far along. By the time I had rigged the system, her cells were already too much for her to hold.
They were exploding inside her like a Petri dish. Asymptotic. Reaching for infinity.
It was a week after her funeral when I went back to work to try to fix the system. But it was too late for everyone. As soon as I switched everything over, as soon as I flooded those dormant pipes and wires with all that energy, the system couldn’t handle the stress.
None of us could.
It was the crackling that woke me up. A popping that sounded like what happens after you’ve walked too far out onto a frozen lake. Sharp splinterings that forced my eyes open.
My skeletonized student lay on top of me. Black blood oozed from his nose, which shone like oil off the orange-heat clawing up at the walls around us. A fire that was trying to get at the pipes inside—whatever was left of that expired molecular soup.
I pushed him off to get to my daughter. Flames raged around her bed and licked away the fuzz on my face as I rushed over.
But she was stuck. The criss-cross fabric from my coat had fused into her bare skin, and that paper white drop of snowflake hanging from her scissors evaporated into a puff of black smoke. We were all melting together, caught in the fight between both ends of a thermometer.
So I left.
I climbed over my daughter and jumped out that open window into a blanket of ash and snow. Wires sizzled and pipes exploded sending shockwaves of energy into the air around me. I rolled through the yard and ran out into the street to escape along with them. And as I did something in that house wailed. The howling sent a current through me, forcing my hair on end.
And the truth was, if I didn’t know any better, if I wasn’t absolutely sure, I’d have said it was a ghost.

Just me screaming into the void because this tour felt like shit compared to last year Talked to the friends I went with and they all argeed
Why the fuck is Fourfive opening for city morgue, the energy from Fourfive rage beats doesn’t match city morgues energy at all this tour bro and it pissed me off. City morgue has had an awful history of bad openers for shows like SSGkobe and shit it’s ass and doesn’t match at all bro they need to stop the rage beat openers for their shows No ones moshing to fucking MIA- SSGkobe then fucking hard shit like yakuza-Sosmula that shit doesn’t go together same with Fourfive bro the rage beat openers gotta stop zilla talks about having hardcore openers for for the shows bro Vein.FM opening for them in 2023 was perfect bro absolute chaos from start to end bro there’s a list of hardcore bands and musicians that city morgues label can choose from to open their shows
-peeling flesh -sanguisugabogg -Jesus piece -sunami If you wanna keep it within the trap metal territory
-NASCAR Aloe -dirtybutt
There are HUNDREDS of fucking hardcore bands that are FEINDING for a stage to perform on bro literal hundreds
-DJ Sets First why the fuck are there 2 dj sets for a show that just consumers time that the artist(s) could be performing Also fire that dj that touring with them now and bring back the dj from 2022-2023’s tours bro was perfect on the DJ and while city morgue was performing I went to the show in Raleigh The dj was just playing the songs are they performed the old DJ was spamming the outta those classic city morgue sounds effect -your turning to a skeleton -the high pitch laugh as the songs ended -low pitched laughs and songs reached their most hyped part -loud ass gunshots effects Those were fucking perfect bro
-advertising
The my bloody America was advertised beautifully bro
It was advertised as the most brutal,violent,gruesome tour yet And it fucking was bro the pits from the 2023 shows were chaotic as fuck 10/10 show in my eyes Advertise the next tour like the MBA tour it would be fucking set
-other ideas
I think city morgue should just take a year off your just 1 or maybe 2 years Cook up the best album they can within those years bring back some of the old shit that’s we know them for, sprinkle in a little bit of some new shit that they wanna experiment with and just make an instant classic that would the fans would want bro but have the shit I just said sounds like fucking fantasy but it really doesn’t have to be
I wanna hear what yall think if I’m tweaking or yall felt the same way lemme know bruh I wanna know what yall think
PS excused the typos and shit had to type this fast before I forgot about it

Here are some video game characters in the public domain. Some of these are open-source and require a license to be listed in the credits - this does not mean your work has to be released under said license! Simply that it needs to acknowledge that the source material was. If you have trouble for that, always look for the term "ShareAlike", that means you must use the same license, none of these are ShareAlike.

• Lonely T-Rex - That being, the Google Chrome offline T-Rex. This game is open source as long as you include the written license - BUT, you cannot label them as the "Chrome T-Rex", as the license dictates that Google brand names not be used.
• The cast of Microsoft 3D Movie Maker - Microsoft 3D Movie Maker was released as open source software - this was the software used to make the Rat Movie. Almost all characters in 3D Movie Maker are open source so long as you include the written license, including Fabrice the Rat, with the three exceptions: Melanie, McZee, and the Imaginopolis hub world (none of which are featured in the movie making mode, aside from McZee appearing on one actor's shirt) as they previously appeared in Creative Writer, which is not open source. This very obviously does not apply to the Doraemon and Nicktoons expansions.
• Weasel Willy and Fido - From the infamous "Don't Buy This" for ZX Spectrum, which was disowned for comic effect in the cassette inlay.
• Nick Vrenna - the gun-wielding hero of the DOS game "Abuse". The game is almost entirely PD, with the exception of the sound effects.
• Quik & Silva and Princess Leila - from the Amiga game "The Adventurs of Quik & Silva" best known for its plagarism of other characters. The game was released as public domain software a year after its initial release. AFAIK Quik & Silva themselves weren't plagarised, so they're fair game. If you want to make something new with Quik & Silva, make sure you create original enemies, even if you don't recognise an enemy in this game, it is probably based on something copyrighted.
• The Wumpus - Not the Discord mascot, but rather the monster from the early computer game "Hunt the Wumpus". AFAIK only the TI-99/4A version is open-source, so these are the designs you can use. As an open-source game, you must include the associated written license in the credits.

Now, this last one is probably the biggest one I think people will be the most excited to use:

• MissingNo. and select other glitch Pokemon - Being designed by a fault in the cartridge instead of manually by a human, MissingNo. is legally classed as an AI-generated sprite and character design - as MissingNo does not bear a visual resemblance to any official Pokemon and is basically just a garbled mess that happens to be quite well known, it doesn't fall into the same legal or moral grey area as other AI creations. I don't know how much of the associated elements of MissingNo (its movepool, methods of access, and classification as a bird particularly) can be used though. The ghost and skeleton forms of MissingNo are off-limits though. Also of mention are the ? versions of MissingNo from later Pokemon games - which, while based on an intentionally made sprite - are all too generic to copyright, being simple question marks, and as a result should also be fine. Presumably, if any other well-known games have glitch characters that don't resemble anything intentionally added to the game, those should be fine too. Cartoon Network used an image of MissingNo in an episode of We Bare Bears, and faced no issues from Nintendo.

Have you ever wondered about things you’ve lost? That toy car you remember having as a kid. That ring you had, tight on your finger as you dove into the sea, but gone when you got out. That braided phone charger, your middle-school homework book, I could go on.
No need to answer. Everyone’s lost something, at some point, and never found it again. Their stories, without conclusion.
Most of us simply forget. We accept the fact that these things are lost, and quickly adapt to life without them. Just think… what a wealth to be found if one were able to recover what is lost.
Don’t be fooled, though - this isn’t inane conjecture. For the wanting man, there is indeed a way to stick your hand into the lucky dip, and wrench something back into existence, all for yourself. To keep.
To bind you.
As far as I can tell, there’s no one strict name for this ritual. Call it whatever you want - perhaps its true name has, too, been lost. The place you’ll be opening a gateway to, however, I’ve heard referred to mostly as the Cellar. Or the Basement, the Crypt, but at the end of the day, these are just labels, and aren’t conducive to getting what you want. What matters is that it’s the mausoleum of all things lost. If Hell is the absence of the light of God, then the Cellar is bereft of the light of reality itself - for what is lost, may as well not exist.
The constraints of our universe hold little sway there, and become as fluid as the ocean.
Before I get to the steps you’ll be following, and the risks posed to your wellbeing, it’s best to learn exactly what you’re going to need. Do NOT skip out on any of the following items: * A candle. Well, you don’t need a candle and wick per se, just any wax you can melt by hand. * A seal or mold of some kind. A signet ring is preferable, but the shape of the imprint you leave behind is mostly arbitrary - though I’d advise something circular, like a coin. * A pair of bound objects. This can, really, be anything, although I’d advise going with something you probably couldn’t separate by hand; a pair of heavy chainlinks, for example. * A driving tool, preferably a hammer and chisel. * Human tears. Arguably the most difficult ingredient to procure in a sufficient amount, because not only do you need a good 10ml of the stuff to be safe, the tears cannot be those of pain. And no, you can’t cut an onion and expect those tears to work, nor can they be those of depression or despair. They must be tears of grief, for grief is the hoarse, wailing voice of the lost, and when you call out, you might get an answer. * An heirloom of someone who has passed - even better if they were someone you were close with. A lover, a parent, a sibling, or a dear friend, just as long as you went through grief at their passing. Technically, this one is optional, but it sure as shit boosts your chances at a successful ritual. * An offering. You don’t actually need to have it with you at the time, but make sure you have something important to you that can be put up for grabs.
You’ll also need to find a rift. Now, don’t overthink this. You don’t need to go to the grand canyon, and you don’t need to find a portal - you’ll already be making one, in essence. All that matters is that you’re able to pour wax into it: a crack, a split, hell, you could use a pothole if you’d like. Not recommended, though. No point in performing the ritual if you get turned into pate by a garbage truck halfway through.
And as these things always go, try to be somewhere away from the noise. No need for interruptions. In any case, the Gatekeeper will demand your full attention - you don’t want to lose in his game. I’ve seen what happens to those who do, and trust me, you’re better off slitting your neck on the spot.
One more thing before I teach you how to go rooting around in the Cellar: even with a perfectly executed ritual, risk still remains. In the Cellar, rules of reality are fluid, broken and rewritten every second, which you’ll remember from earlier if you have an attention span wider than the hairs on your head - if not, you shouldn’t be here at all.
When lost things are left to fester down there, they may serve as the base for a random, chaos-borne physical (or metaphysical) property that doesn’t exist up here. To avoid clunky lingo, you can think of them as curses. Cultures of conceptual mold and algae that cling fast to their host.
Yes, curses. Don’t let that word scare you away - a curse can just as easily be a blessing, depending on whose hands it falls into. You might retrieve a jar that perpetually rains tiny diamonds from no apparent source, or a teddy bear that imbues you with superhuman levels of confidence. But, you could also get a compass that kills any living creature on the direct opposite side of the Earth from you, or a fog machine that you can’t turn off, and drains your blood to vaporize into mist, regardless of where you are.
Because you are bound to it.
Now let's get to the steps:
First, find an isolated location and a hole or crack in the ground. Place the two linked objects on the left side of the hole, and if you’ve brought an heirloom of a dead loved one, place it on the right. You'll need enough wax to melt and pour to fill the cavity you’ve chosen. Bringing a portable stove or a blowtorch is ideal to melt a large quantity of wax at once. Pour the wax into the hole, and sprinkle it with the tears of grief you've obtained while it's still fluid. If the wax sets before you can add the tears, the ritual is over. Allow the wax to cool until malleable, then form an imprint with your stamping object of choice, like a signet ring.
You can take a break here while you wait for the second sigil to appear beside your imprint. Once it has fully formed, drive the chisel into it with the hammer, as deep as you can. When you feel it can't be pushed any further, twist the chisel in place. You should hear a distinct sound - really, you can't miss it. The gate is now unlocked and will open.
If you’re wondering why I’m sharing this information, the answer is simple. The more seekers, the more you and I stand to gain. And for those compelled to search for what they’ve lost can anyone hope to stop them? Might as well make sure they’re well-informed, so I’ve chosen to document my last dive into the Cellar.
I chose an abandoned building on the outskirts of town where I was certain no one would interrupt. The moment I completed the ritual, a miasma began to spread and unfold from the cracked floor, and in the blink of an eye I was plunged into the depths. The first thing to greet me was the Gatekeeper.
Though his appearance can change, he most commonly takes the form of a decrepit old man covered in sores and scabs. His robes might’ve once been regal but now they were tattered and filthy. He wore a rusted battered crown and carved into his forehead, weeping and scarified was the word “KING.”
You cannot enter or leave the Cellar without a wager and challenge. You get to set some parameters for the challenge, so play to your strengths. If you’re smart, you can ask for a game of riddles or logic; if you’re athletic, you can ask for a test of strength or stamina. I always chose a game of hide and seek where I had to avoid capture for a period of time set by the Gatekeeper. I was good at it, and had always emerged from the Cellar unscathed.
As for the wager, what you stand to lose can’t be trivial. Could be your ability to walk, a loved one, even your life… Now before him, as I had done every time, I wagered the thing I value most. With empty eyes and a ravenous smile, he let me pass.
The Cellar always looks different and varies from person to person; you might find yourself in an ancient library stretching into infinity, every bookshelf lined with items long lost, or in an endless prairie with artifacts scattered about at random. Maybe it's a metaphysical space, partly shaped by your mind, I don't know. Just a theory. This time it was a dingy thrift store consisting of narrow corridors that wound and twisted around themselves to create a multi-story tangle of shelves, junk piles, and showrooms of old furniture. The air was rank, each inhale an acrid sting, and the lighting was dim orange.
A draft snaked its way through me, sinking bitter cold fangs into my bones, being here was a small agony unto itself. But the endless possibilities of what I might find drove me forward. I rummaged through some piles of lost things and found the usuals. A metric ton of socks, countless kitchen utensils, old photos, and anything else you can think of.
I’ve found ancient lost tomes and scrolls if you care to parse lost knowledge and mysticism. The only caveat is that they're all in long-dead languages. Relics and archaeological treasures are common too but I’ve never had any interest in them. Then there are the cursed objects, the ones almost all seek. You know when you’ve found one, the air is poisoned with a rancid odor and malice radiates outwards from them. Holding one in your hand should feel wrong, and deeply unsettling. Your blood runs cold, your chest tightens and your stomach twists itself into knots. You’ll ask yourself what the hell you’re doing here and what this thing is capable of.
All I can say is if you choose to pocket a cursed item you need to be incredibly cautious and aware from that moment forward because God knows what it can do. They’re unpredictable so carrying one around for an extended amount of time is a gamble and here time is inconstant and ever-shifting.
The one I found on this trip was a silver pendant with a black gemstone at its center. I snatched it and quickly and cautiously snaked around an aisle toward a new room. That’s the trick, never linger too long and always be on the move. There are things here… I don’t know what they are. Maybe they’re searching too or maybe they're part of the lost. But they’re never friendly, so try not to spend too long in any one area, five minutes maximum and move on.
Looping back around to a room to search again is improbable since this realm is prone to shifting and warping around. Which is why multiple trips are common amongst those who delve. I want to say it gets easier every time but consistently something new reveals itself to me, always malicious.
This time, winding around a corridor into a larger chamber, it was a black room. As in the light here was negative, inverting every color. My eyes strained and my head thrummed at the sight so I pivoted around to leave and find another way through. But things never go to plan in this place.
I froze at the threshold, pivoted to look behind me and glimpsed it for a mere moment as it ducked behind an alabaster wall. Tendrils like wisps of black smoke coiled out of sight. Stalker. I’d rather face the negative room and its unknown than an abyssal stalker and so I turned back around and stepped into the anti-light.
The darkstone pendant shone with a warm, greenish-yellow light in the black room, like a luminescent moss. Examining it more closely as I turned it in my shaking hand, a surge of recognition hit me of a sudden: a New England beach town, my first love. Mariel.
We’d decided to take a trip there for a few days in fall during college, and she’d given it to me as a memento of our first trip together. A small hunk of some glassy, black material, probably onyx or obsidian, with a thin, red fissure running through it, all hung on a delicate silver chain, as tenuous as love itself. A heart had been carved or chipped into the black stone, the red stripe coursing through its center.
It had gotten misplaced some months later in our apartment, the loss sparking our first row. First of many, truth be told. In my mind, this fight was linked to our inevitable (and, to my mind - wholly avoidable) breakup. But, the bond we shared, Mariel and I, had been broken. What happened to her after we split was not something I could let my mind delve into - too much to do right now to let that distract me, and fear made me stay on task in this unnatural place.
If lost items took on an infectious, almost fungal nature here in this moldy place of living nightmares…what would happen if I moved deeper? Could it be reversed? Could the depraved, parasitic nature of the lost things become…a thing of hope? Or reunion? I dare not wish for such a thing. Mariel was lost to me and it was folly to think she should ever become mine once again. For if she did, would she be the same as I once knew her, pale and kind, sweet as a bud in spring? Or would the trickery and deception of this dank place transmogrify her into something inhuman? I didn’t have the time, or the wits, to think on it further,
I pocketed the charm and listened for the spectral being I had seen in the alabaster room. Was this being the Gatekeeper I had heard of when I first learned of how to unseal and delve into this forbidden place? Or was it something worse, and far more defiled, that dwelled below the Cellar?
Though I may have heard a faint scraping sound, no lumbering beast appeared, nothing slouched towards Bethlehem to be born, so I crept onward on tremulous legs. As I left the black room, I noticed a small group of moths flying away from it on dusty wings. It was that dark.
The next room was again lined with shelves, brick walls dancing with candle light. The shelves sagged with row upon row of dusty books, ornate sketches of unholy words in rolls, small jade figurines, dozens or hundreds of other items. The light in here was of the same quality as the obsidian pendant gave off in the black room; warm, slightly yellow, a shade of sickly green mixed in. This room in the old shop smelled of candlesmoke and old paper - a smell I had always loved, since my family ran a small bookstore in Virginia. Alongside this familiar smell was one of corruption, acidic rot, a foul sense of loneliness and abandonment. I think the fact that the Cellar plucks relevant ideas from your life to construct its space was what made it form this room for me, but it added its own hint of malice alongside it.
As I explored this new space, I was acutely aware of a sudden drop in temperature and my skin broke out in a rash of goosebumps, my armhair standing erect. Nothing moved in the shadows, but I was aware that I was once more not alone, and the feeling unnerved me. A soft sweeping sound, fabric moving against rough brick, perhaps, seemed to emanate maliciously from behind me. I glimpsed another of those smoky tendrils as it slowly crawled across the floor and curled around my ankles, like an evil cat cozying up to you in a cursed bodega.
The brick room seemed to go only up - the short hallway I was in ended in another brick wall, two wrought-iron sconces holding dripping, flickering candles. The ceiling seemed impossibly far away, disappearing into a foul gray mist hundreds of feet up; no escape there. I scoured the shelves for anything that might aid me in evading the cursed definitely-not-a-bodega-cat creature.
The sibilant sound intensified slightly behind me, and more dark, malevolent spirals appeared on the floor. I rifled through the items on the shelves hurriedly; a hunk of greenish glass, cracked and crazed, that seemed to glow subtly in the dimly-lit room; a cloth child’s doll, string hanging where the button-eyes had been plucked out, rough black thread sewing the red gash of a mouth shut. The last one made my bowels shake with fear, though I could not have confessed why, even if I was held at knifepoint.
The temperature dropped a few more degrees and a tremulous shiver ran through me. As I sifted through the items on the rough, wooden shelves, my shaking hand closed on something even colder than the room itself; a strange chrome hammer with a very small head and a long handle, the word FREEMAN stamped on it. Sitting next to it was a long, sharp metal object, ending in a small, flat blade with a mean edge. It was about the size of a standard household screwdriver, but this was nothing you’d ever find in your old man’s toolbox, even if he did handiwork in Hell. Danvers State Mental Hospital: Ward 9 had been etched into the haft of the object.
A thought began to form in the back of my mind.
What if I…
No, I countered (myself) - It won’t work - it’s utter madness.
My reveries were interrupted by an intensification of the sound behind me and a thickening of the black fog, now swirling around my knees. My fear swelled and deepened.
Moving quickly, I grabbed the small hammer and screwdriver-looking object. I approached the brick wall, the dark, swirling shapes now seeming to tug at me. My legs felt the way they do in bad dreams, as if walking through switchgrass or wading in deep water. I reached up for one of the candles, lifted it out of the sconce with trembling hands and leaned in to examine the wall.
*There. *
A small fissure in the mortar between bricks. The bricks on either side of the crack stuck out just enough to make a small shelf. The rift was no larger than a pencil, but it would have to do.
Now, I know there are rules here in the Cellar, and I know I don’t have all the requisite items with me. But, perhaps, I had enough of them. Perhaps the fact that everything… changes down here, that even this place doesn’t follow its own rules, might let me bend whatever guidelines there were just enough that I could pull it off.
A thought came to me in this dank and mildewed place, filling me with a new species of fear: what lies beyond the Cellar?
I quickly separated the black pendant from the silver chain and hung the chain to the right of the crack. The rough, uneven bricks provided enough purchase that the tiny chain could be suspended, although the grip was tenuous at best. (Much like my current grip on reality, I thought). The pendant itself would have to serve as the seal.
Another quick scan of the shelves turned up nothing that could be described as anything linked. No chains, no cufflinks, no…
Hold up.
I quickly snapped two links from the silver pendant chain and held them in my shaking palm. In all my years of performing the ritual, I had never seen anything so small, so pathetic. But, it was all I had. I put them on a wee outcropping of brick to the left of the crack, carefully so as not to drop them, although my quivering hands meant that I had to try three times before they settled into their place. They looked as small and as fragile as two hummingbird eggs.
The black smoke twisted and grabbed around my waist as I tipped the candle and dripped the wax into the small void between bricks. I completed the next steps of the ritual and stepped back.
And waited.
Nothing happened.
I don’t know if my half-assed version of the ritual didn’t work once you were already in the Cellar. Perhaps the linked items didn’t work, or the seal was wrong. Of if my thinking itself was wrong and the rules that applied in the world also applied down here, but I didn’t have time to find out.
Whatever had been stalking me had just turned the corner, leaving me trapped in the brick-lined hallway as the black smoke seemed to turn solid and root me to the floor.
I braced for the impact I knew was coming any second now. With the hammer in one hand, and that screwdriver thing in the other, I kept my eyes peeled on the fog. I was in flight or fight mode, and the flight option had been taken from me.
The scraping I’d heard earlier paled in comparison to what I was hearing now. The sound of the scraping was intensified, and beneath it was another sound entirely. It was a sound I’d only ever heard in movies, all squishy and fleshy. The kind of thing a foley artist would get from peeling off chunks of raw meat and rubbing them together vigorously.
Next came the smell, all toxic and rotten. It made my eyes burn and water, clouding my vision. It burned my nose and throat, leaving a strange acidic taste in my mouth. Fear gripped my spine. Whatever this thing was had more or less disabled me and I hadn’t even seen it yet!
Just as that thought settled in my brain, it slowly emerged from the fog before me. No description I can provide here will truly do it justice, though I’ll do my best.
It was all tea leaves and Rorschach to me. Shapes that should make sense to my brain, but for whatever reason weren’t. Its structure was somewhere between melted wax and slime, so even if some semblance of shape was briefly recognizable it was always shifting.
The only thing that made sense was its mouth, as far as enormous rotting maws full of goo dripping razors made sense anyway. Unable to focus on the rest of its face, that’s what I stared at.
So, there I stood, unable to move and facing my impending doom. In that moment, I did what any sane person would do in that situation…I pissed myself. Most of it was from fear, but there was a tiny little voice on my head that insisted it was in defiance. If it was going to eat me, the least I could do was make myself smell and taste less appealing.
It scraped and oozed its way ever closer, until it was standing directly in front of me. It places ruined and vaguely hand-shaped things on my shoulders and leaned in. The tea leaves and Rorschach shifted again, this time creating some semblance of a face as its structure hardened.
Two endless pits appeared where eyes would have been in a normal face. From them seeped the same greenish-yellow light I’d seen earlier. Two slits appeared below them as it leaned in to sniff me.
Suddenly, my senses returned to me, I raised the hammer and… I’m going to start calling this thing a pick now. Typing the words screwdriver thing just isn’t doing it for me. So, yeah, I raised the hammer and the pick as it leaned in. I quickly positioned the pick in the center of its forehead and slammed the hammer down on the flat edge of it, driving that pick right into the creature’s brain.
With the lobotomy achievement unlocked, I took a moment to breathe. I’d done it! I’d…made it angry. Its mouth opened wider and a roar ripped from its throat with all the effects of a concussion grenade. My hearing was shot and my brain was acting like I was under water. My feet suddenly came free from the floor and I stumbled backwards and fell onto my ass.
It continued to roar as it moved forward, slime still dripping from the razors in its mouth. My ears were ringing so hard I couldn’t even hear the scrape and squish from earlier. I scooted backwards until my back hit a wall. There was nowhere left to go.
Closer it came, looming over me now. The slime coated my face as I stared up into that roaring maw. I could feel it burning my skin. I lost myself in the endless pools of sickly light as I waited to die.
The hand-like shapes grabbed my ankles and tugged hard as it turned, dragging me behind it. I could feel every crack of the uneven floor as it tore my clothes and scraped my skin. I ditched the hammer, useless without the pick still stuck in the creature’s skull. I was on the lookout for anything I might be able to use when I noticed the pendant and its broken chain. I palmed it, chain and all, as I slid by it.
On we went, it dragged me through the maze of rooms and corridors to some mysterious destination. Some floors were smoother than others, and for those sections I was thankful. My clothing was being quickly reduced to shreds, and if this journey went on much longer I feared the same would happen to my flesh.
I’d seen things that might be useful as we went, but nothing that was within my reach. The creature never stopped, and there was no way to increase my height while in a constant state of movement. I managed to hold the pendant above my head. It glowed much more strongly now, and it illuminated the creature dragging me away. Except, what I saw was not a monster. A frail, naked woman, gripping me with impossible strength. Just before I gave up and closed my eyes, she turned to me, and the fraction of a second my eyes remained open was enough for me to recognise the face that stared back. And good God, it scared my brain blank.
By the time it released its grip on me, we’d just entered an area that emanated pure darkness. With the sheer amount of pain I was in, I almost didn’t realize the pressure around my ankles was disappearing. The floor here was smooth and cold, soothing my aches just enough to sober me, but not enough to take them away.
I stayed that way for a while. It’s impossible to say how long I was laying there in the darkness. My hearing was slowly getting back to being useful, and I neither heard nor felt any sign of the creature’s presence now. Eventually, the adrenaline fled my system and the pain took over completely.
Just as my eyelids began to droop from sheer exhaustion, a bright light flooded the room and nearly blinded me. It shocked me awake and I scrambled to get my legs beneath me. I turned to look around the room on wobbly legs, trying to determine from which direction the danger would come from next.
As my eyes adjusted, the light seemed to dim and become stained with the same tint I’d seen in the creature’s eyes - sickly, sallow green. The first thing I could identify was far above me. Hanging, like a chandelier from a ceiling drenched in shadow, was a black moon. Beams of glowing midnight fanned out from it, revealing that the Cellar’s structural elements were gone. Only one structure stood before me.
A great podium of pockmarked ashen rock, perhaps basalt, rose about three stories high, with a spiraling staircase hewn from it, coiling to the very top. The tower rested on nothing, and a sudden wave of vertigo took me when I noticed chunks and chips from the tower, suspended in motion below it, below where I was standing, as if God had pressed pause at the moment of its ruin and forgotten to press play again.
Placed on the flat peak of the tower, sunworn with most of its spindles either snapped or missing, was a chair. Maybe oak, but it was too far gone to tell. And atop that, resting in the chair as if it were a notice of reservation, I saw a battered crown. A crown better fit for melting down than to be worn with any dignity. And yet, past the ugly skin of it, I sensed temptation, so deep and eternal it inspired an almost primal sense of want - no, better yet, need. I had to have it, without being sure why.
On the periphery of this void space, I detected movement. Figures wreathed in dark, shifting and shuddering. I had no fear, I simply ignored them and approached the bottom of the stairs, entranced.
A few steps, and I hissed in pain. My palm burned. The pendant, yes, I’d managed to grab it while being ferried to this place. Now, in the presence of the black moon above, it radiated both light and searing heat. I threaded the broken chain through the loop affixed to the pendant and held it up in front of me.
Like an oil lantern, I thought.
The light… it had a special quality about it. I remembered how it illuminated the creature’s face, and–
My skin flushed. No, that wasn’t real. A trick of the mind, of the light in the Cellar. That’s all. That reasoning was made ever more flimsy when I shone the pendant on the tower. It looked different in the light. At first I was unable to distinguish what stood before me, so I took a few steps back.
A skeleton. Two skeletons, in fact, entangled in death. The first and largest of the two appeared to be that of an enormous, winged humanoid, an outstretched hand serving as the chair in which the crown was nestled. The second was that of an equally massive serpent, coiled around the first skeleton, its head trapped beneath the winged humanoid’s reaching hand.
I hadn’t appreciated the thick silence until it was broken. A voice rang out, saying,
“Is one such as thee so uncaring, or simply aloof?”
Without needing to see its source, I knew exactly who that voice belonged to.
“Nope. Just bored and curious.”
The voice erupted into a dry cackle, and the void moon in the sky pulsed in rhythm. I tore free a hanging shred from my shirt, all ripped up thanks to that creature, and used it to swaddle the pendant, muffling the sight of the two skeletons. Again, I saw a stone tower, and I promptly made my way to the staircase and began to ascend.
I soon reached the top, a plateau that suggested the tower had once been much taller, but at some point, was cleaved apart. I tried not to think of what could have possibly done such a thing, instead turning my attention to the chair.
It was occupied. Sitting in it was a man, facing away from me, wearing that same battered crown. The tattered ribbons of his robes seemed to float, as if underwater, and parted to make way as I rounded the chair to stand in front. The man’s eyes looked so empty. The scars on his forehead spelling the word “KING” wrinkled in a scowl, and those eyes remained unfocused as he spoke again.
“At least you know now.”
“Know what?” I replied.
“That this is all there is. You can go no further. There is nothing beyond this accursed tomb. Regardless, you did something you should not have. Did you come here with a death wish?”
“I…”
The gravity of the situation came crashing down. Here I was, in the Gatekeeper’s domain, utterly helpless to do anything but listen as his voice emerged again like crackling embers, reignited by the wind.
“There, in thine hand. You cannot hide it from me, you know.”
I stuttered, fighting for air. At this, the Gatekeeper’s lips stretched into a cracked and inflamed smile.
“What else? Is this fool dissatisfied with his new plaything?”
“Yeah,” I said, surprised by my own aplomb, “I guess I’m looking for something else. Rest assured, this here pendant is the only thing I’ll be leaving with, physically speaking.”
His smile fell to a smirk, accompanied by a cocked eyebrow.
“And again I ask; art thou without empathy, or simply lacking sense? You would stand there, in front of me, whilst the wager is in my hand, and think nothing of it?”
“But I haven’t lost yet, have I?”
“You were going to leave with… show me.”
I shielded the cloth-wrapped pendant from view.
“Why?”
“I beseech thee, show me!”
Reluctantly, I extricated it from the layers of cloth, and presented the pendant, chain and all. On seeing it, the Gatekeeper devolved back into a rasping chuckle.
“Ah, that. How coincidental!”
“How so?” I asked cautiously.
“Thy wager, maggot. That which you love most, and hold most dear to thy glassen little heart. Do not deceive thyself; you saw her, didst thou not? That pendant is a special relic indeed.”
I knew exactly what he was talking about. That creature…
“I… I saw… I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
Immediately, all the smugness dropped from his face. His sore-ridden skin contorted with anger, lined by warty ridges. He shot up from the chair, a way that didn't seem to utilize three dimensions. Made my head hurt. It was as if he’d vanished and materialized standing face-to-face with me. He spoke in a growl of controlled wrath.
“Oh? Hast thine eyes become foggy? Then let it be made clear: last time, I let you believe you won. You did not. Thus, the wager for this visit - being the same one you’ve used every time - was, how to put it… expired. What– who you love most. Well, loved most.”
The Gatekeeper threw his head back and snorted. The very thing I hadn’t wanted to accept crawled down my throat and settled in my stomach, heavy as molten lead, and shrouding my head in a contradictory haze of confused clarity. Then, the Gatekeeper made my fears into reality.
“Oh Mariel! Be a dear and come up for tea.”
Out there in the shadows, one of the shifting figures changed. It crept into the light, became more real somehow. I didn’t turn to look. I couldn’t. Whether it was from some occult force or sheer terror, my muscles wouldn’t budge an inch.
But I could hear it. Wet, frictional, and strangely manufactured, a sound hailing an overpowering stink, growing stronger with every encroaching step, mustard gas, rotten eggs. My eyes began to water from the stench.
My arm rose up with a mind of its own, directing the pendant towards the top of the stairs. Black moonlight burned darker still to resonate with it, invigorating it, and bathing the newly emerged figure in light. For a moment, a fraction of a second, it was all Rorschach and swirling tea leaves again. Teeth like stalactites dripped with secretions below a pair of deep, glowing pits.
The creature entered the light, and stopped.
She looked so, so unhappy. Standing there, naked and withered, all her hair, gone. Her teeth too, leaving behind rotten, puffy gums. Only one eye had been plucked out - not because of any mercy, no. It was more like a punchline. A perverted joke. But one eye was all she needed to convey a kind of anger I’d never seen before. A kind of anger that needed no coal to fuel it. A kind of anger that can never be extinguished. If it weren’t for her emaciated body, she’d have flown into a rampage - and even if she could, no catharsis would ever be enough. She’d have torn me to shreds, she’d have skinned my mother alive in front of me and still it wouldn’t be enough. I barely felt the tears streaming down my cheeks under the scrutiny of that single eye.
Tears right for the ritual, I thought.
I tried to speak, to say anything at all, but my throat was tight shut. Either way, the Gatekeeper was satisfied.
“I may be one to withhold information, but I am no more a liar than you are honest to thyself.”
He paused to gaze at her. At my love. At the thing I valued most, and it really hit me then. The magnitude of what I’d lost. Not just Mariel, but my trust in… everything. Gone.
“Okay, Mariel. That will be plenty from thee.”
With a flick of his wrist, the Gatekeeper sent her tumbling through the air, off the tower, and back into the dark, where she will remain until the stars themselves are lost.
“Worms, the lot of them. They don’t understand the purpose of this place, of why it was made. Of what it houses. It is something demons covet, and that God sent angels seeking for. Do you seek it, sojourner?”
I felt whatever force that held me in place lift from my body, and I wheeled around to face the Gatekeeper again, staring him down with my smoldering indignance. The pendant, as if empathizing, flared, bright as a tungsten filament, more than enough to illuminate the face of the man before me - and his, too, was a facade.
Gone was his giddy rictus, bloated with greed and derision. The eyes now staring deep into my own were dour and heavy - not with wrath, but misery. It made Mariel look quite comfortable by comparison. It was the face of the first to grieve, of one whose eyes have cried themselves dry as salt.
His voice underlined that sentiment. A withered croak that told of ancient ruins lost beneath desert sand and, above all, sounded unequivocally honest.
“I… it is no treasure they seek. Power it is not, nor any blessing of the sort. I have been its keeper for… since… I don’t know. Too long.”
The Gatekeeper laughed, but it was hollow and came out more as a flurry of gasps.
“Do you want to know?”
A cold chill flushed my entire body. I know the right choice would’ve been, “no,” but the only thought running through my mind was, “I’ve come this far.”
So I nodded.
“What could have such value, that God Himself cannot already conjure? Well, in a way, He did create it. But it was an accident. A side-effect, a natural byproduct of the creation of something that lives on to this day, something that continues to exist within all of His children on Earth. It is the shadow of that, and also the relinquishment of it. I speak with you now freed from its grasp - the one you have been speaking with is not me. I do not– cannot control this vessel. I can only observe as it acts on its own.”
“Just tell me!” I yelled, not out of impatience, but mounting terror. The Gatekeeper continued as if he hadn’t heard me.
“ I still don’t understand why it does the things it does. It shouldn’t be doing anything, because it is the anti-will. The shadow of agency, the counterpart that was necessary to be born to allow the freedom of choice, the very same you used to decide to visit this place. I don’t know what that pendant is, but oh, it is good to breathe again. To speak. The ones who covet the anti-will… perhaps I’m too small and insignificant to comprehend their motives. Why, God? Why would you want to abandon yourself? Please, my friend, you have to free me, you–”
I’d heard enough. In one shaky motion I drew back the pendant, and no sooner had I stashed it away than the Gatekeeper leapt at me, all his rage and hunger returned. I understood now. The entity before me was impossible, and yet here it was. The emptiness where a will should be, not only acting by itself, but grabbing me by the throat to pull me in close.
“Answer me! Wilt thou, or wilt thou not?”
I strained to force words past cold fingers tightening around my windpipe.
“W-what? Will I what?”
“DAREST THOU TEST ME!?”
Had some hidden conversation taken place when I was speaking with the Gatekeeper - the real one? Had something been asked of me? I didn’t have time to rationalize, all I knew was my vision was turning black, so I did all I could think of to release myself.
“Yes, okay, yes I will, I–”
With that, he let go, spilling me onto the ground where I clawed at my throat and gasped for air.
“Very well. Thou hast come far, and so I bestow upon thee this gift. Remember, one thing at a time, so I will be taking this. Don’t be greedy.”
He bent down and snatched the pendant, still glowing dimly. Without pause, he straightened, and pointed a finger directly upwards, at the black moon hanging above. On cue, it burst like a popped water balloon, raining a supernova of shadow down on my shivering body. I felt the ground disappear from under my hands. I rose, up and up towards an empty filament, and with one final glance, I saw the Gatekeeper. The power released from the shattered moon reinvigorated the pendant and it shone on his face. That tired, eternally tortured face. It was smiling. His body seemed to decay in time lapse into flakes, flittering away in an unfelt breeze. With the last vestiges of his strength, I heard him whisper something that sounded like,
“Thank… you… from the bottom of my heart…”
A dark tunnel filled with blinking lights - or eyes - and the sensation of something worming its way inside my body.
Then, I was back. Back in the abandoned building on the outskirts of town. I checked myself, no pendant, as I expected. Was the Gatekeeper telling the truth? The anti-will? I didn’t understand. Had I reAlly bEEn givEN THE DEATH OF CHOICE???
STOP THIS I suppose the Gatekeeper must have punished me for breaking the rules, and forced me to leave empty-handed. Yes, that’s it; empty-handed.
Now, most of you reading will have thought by now: why share this experience? How does it provide any significant insight into the ritual itself?
I think it’s as simple as being prepared. Would you go skydiving without seeing some footage beforehand? Would you tempt the wolves, not knowing their predilections? If so, well, fools are still welcome in the Cellar, but it’s more fun when there’s a challenge.
I’m running out of time. If I want to get this out there, it needs to be done now. I’ve inherited such a terrible curse wonderful gift, and what is a game without the gamemaster?
So come on, plunge your hands into the lucky dip, take your pick and GET OUT LET ME OUT go home a little richer. Or perhaps you’ve lost something - in which case, I know just the place to search, so come and take back what is rightfully yours. Or something that isn’t. THIS IS NOT M Serendipity, I say.
I look forward to the fun we are going to have.

I have a simple component that fetches some data and displays it once the data it's been fetched:
``` import { useQuery } from '@tanstack/react-query'; import { fetchAssetFields } from '@/api'; import { ReactNode } from 'react'; import { Skeleton } from '@repo/ui/radix/skeleton';
type AssetFieldTextProps = { url: string; size?: 'sm' 'md' 'lg' 'xl'; children?: ReactNode; };
export function AssetFieldText({ url }: AssetFieldTextProps) { const { data: fields, isLoading } = useQuery({ queryKey: ['fields', url], queryFn: () => fetchAssetFields(url!), enabled: !!url, });
const firstField = fields?.[0];
if (isLoading) { return ; }
return {firstField?.name}; } ```
And this is how it's being used in the parent component:
const assetListRenderer: ListRenderer = [ { name: 'fields', label: 'Fields', body: (asset) => { return ; }, }, ];
If firstField is undefined, I want to display "-" (meaning blank content). How would you suggest I do this?

DAY: APRIL 14 2024
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• 4-14-2024AI WILL NOT REVOLUTIONIZE BUSINESS MANAGEMENT BUT IT COULD MAKE IT WORSE It is no exaggeration to say that the democratization of new forms of artificial intelligence (AI), such as ChatGPT (OpenAI), Gemini/Bard (Google) and Copilot (Microsoft), is a societal revolution of the digital age. The mainstream use of AI systems is a disruptive force in a number of areas including university education, the legal system and, […] Read More
• 4-14-2024WHY WON’T SOME PEOPLE USE A SMARTPHONE? AND IS THAT DIFFICULT? Some people avoid smartphones and instead use a dumbphone – a traditional mobile phone or a reduced-feature designer phone. Credit: Matti Ahlgren/Aalto University In a world where more and more services and social interaction are based on mobile apps, a smartphone has become close to a necessity. Despite this, some people avoid smartphones and instead […] Read More
• 4-14-2024HOW CAN HUMANS AND MACHINES WORK IN HARMONY? THROUGH COLLABORATION, SAYS SUPPLY CHAIN EXPERT Nada Sanders, has published the second edition of the book “The Humachine: AI, Human Virtues, and the Superintelligent Enterprise.” There’s a quote Nada Sanders, a Northeastern distinguished professor of supply chain management, likes to share when discussing the collision of artificial intelligence and enterprise. It’s from a conversation she had with […]
• 4-14-2024EYE GAZE AND FACIAL EXPRESSION OF ROBOTS ARE ESSENTIAL FOR INTERACTION WITH HUMANS, FINDS RESEARCHER With rapid developments in artificial intelligence and robot technology, social robots will increasingly be used in society. Robotics researcher Chinmaya Mishra looked at the importance of gaze direction and human emotions in our communication with robots and developed two systems to make robots’ faces work in our favor. Mishra will receive his Ph.D. at Radboud […] Read More
• 4-14-2024SYSTEM USES ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE TO DETECT WILD ANIMALS ON ROADS AND AVOID ACCIDENTS Just as drivers in Brazil can be warned of traffic congestion ahead or a vehicle parked on the hard shoulder, notifications may soon pop up on their smartphone […] Read More
• 4-14-2024AI-POWERED ‘SONAR’ ON SMARTGLASSES TRACKS GAZE, FACIAL EXPRESSIONS Cornell University researchers have developed two technologies that track a person’s gaze and facial expressions through sonar-like sensing. The technology is small enough to fit on commercial smartglasses or virtual reality or augmented reality headsets yet consumes significantly […] Read More
• 4-14-2024A MINIATURIZED VISION-BASED TACTILE SENSOR BASED ON FIBER OPTIC BUNDLES Researchers at Meta AI, Stanford University recently developed DIGIT Pinki, a miniature-sized sensor that can detect tactile information. This sensor, presented in a paper posted to the preprint server arXiv, could be integrated in […] Read More
• 4-14-2024HELPING ROBOTS MAKE A BETTER FIRST IMPRESSION An interdisciplinary research team from the University of Waterloo’s Social and Intelligent Robotics Research Lab (SIRRL) has found that people prefer interacting with robots they perceive to have social identities like their own. This finding was made by Dr. Moojan Ghafurian, based in the Department of Systems Design Engineering and Dr. Kerstin Dautenhahn, from the […] Read More
• 4-14-2024THE PARADOXICAL ROLE OF ‘HUMANNESS’ IN AGGRESSION TOWARD CONVERSATIONAL AGENTS Virtual assistants, so-called chatbots, have become an integral part of many company websites and are playing an increasingly important corporate role. A study by TU Dresden published in the Journal of Management Information Systems has investigated whether errors made by chatbots lead to aggressive behavior among their users and what influence users’ perceived humanness of […] Read More
• 4-14-2024ENGINEERS QUICKEN THE RESPONSE TIME FOR ROBOTS TO REACT TO HUMAN CONVERSATION Talking to a robot often feels stilted or delayed, thanks to computer software trying to keep up with the conversation. However, new research from the University of Waterloo has improved the ability for humans to communicate naturally with humanoid robots. Waterloo researchers were able to […] Read More
• 4-14-2024IMPORTANT HEALTH INFORMATION MISSING IN ONLINE FOOD DELIVERY MENUS A University of Sydney study investigating menu items on major online food delivery outlets and applications (apps) in Australia has found most advertised items are missing nutritional information that would otherwise help consumers make healthy choices. The findings were published in Public Health Nutrition. Researchers say the findings show this information is largely absent or […] Read More
• 4-14-2024AI’S MYSTERIOUS ‘BLACK BOX’ MAY NOT BE SO BLACK “It is entirely possible to get more accurate information, and not just a ‘hunch’ about what happened or went wrong in an AI system. CIU has the potential to provide great opportunities for companies and their customers, but also for authorities and citizens,” says Kary Främling, WASP Professor in Explainable AI at Umeå University. Credit: […] Read More
• 4-14-2024THE REAL BATTLE FOR DATA PRIVACY BEGINS WHEN YOU DIE In 2012 a 15-year-old girl died in Berlin after being hit by a subway train. Her bereaved parents asked Facebook to turn over her private messages in hopes of understanding whether her death was a suicide or an accident. Facebook refused. Her death had already been reported to the social media site, […] Read More
• 4-14-2024TO UNDERSTAND THE RISKS POSED BY AI, FOLLOW THE MONEY Time and again, leading scientists, technologists, and philosophers have made spectacularly terrible guesses about the direction of innovation. Even Einstein was not immune, claiming, “There is not the slightest indication that nuclear energy will ever be obtainable,” just 10 years […] Read More
• 4-14-2024META TURNS TO AI TO PROTECT MINORS FROM ‘SEXTORTION’ ON INSTAGRAM Over 40 US states are suing Meta, saying it has ‘profited from children’s pain’ Meta said on Thursday it was developing new tools to protect teenage users from “sextortion” scams on its Instagram platform, which has been accused by US politicians of damaging the mental health of youngsters. Gangs run sextortion scams by persuading people […] Read More
• 4-14-2024ENGINEERS DESIGN FLEXIBLE ‘SKELETONS’ FOR SOFT, MUSCLE-POWERED ROBOTS MIT engineers have developed a new spring (shown in Petri dish) that maximizes the work of natural muscles. When living muscle tissue is attached to posts at the corners of the device, the muscle’s contractions pull on the spring, forming an effective, natural actuator. The spring can serve as a “skeleton” for future muscle-powered robots. […] Read More
• 4-14-2024LATEST FINDINGS IN COGNITIVE NEUROSCIENCE “Dreams are messages from the deep.” (Dune Part 1) Musings about dreams abound throughout society, from movies to TV to books. But despite being a constant source of fascination, the role of dreams in our lives still remains elusive. As recently noted in the TV show Grey’s Anatomy, “Honestly, no […] Read More
• 4-14-2024ETHICAL QUESTIONS ABOUND AS WARTIME AI RAMPS UP Artificial intelligence’s move into modern warfare is raising concerns about the risks of escalation and the role of humans in decision-making. AI has shown itself to be faster but not necessarily safer or more ethical. UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres said Friday that he was “profoundly disturbed” by Israeli media reports that Israel has used […] Read More
• 4-14-2024PENICILLIN ALLERGY CAN BE DELABELED BY NONALLERGY PROVIDERS Direct oral penicillin challenges (DPCs) can be delivered to patients with penicillin allergy labels (PALs) by nonallergy health care professionals (HCPs), according to a study published in the March issue of the Journal of Infection. Mamidipudi Thirumala Krishna, M.B.B.S., Ph.D., from the University Hospitals Birmingham NHS Foundation Trust in the United Kingdom, and colleagues examined […] Read More
• 4-14-2024AI CHATBOTS SHARE SOME HUMAN BIASES, RESEARCHERS FIND Framework for Evaluating Bias of AIGC. (a) We proxy unbiased content with the news articles collected from The New York Times and Reuters. We then apply an LLM to produce AIGC with headlines of these news articles as prompts and evaluate the gender and racial biases of AIGC by comparing it with the original news […] Read More
• 4-14-2024WILL AI BE LISTENING IN ON YOUR FUTURE JOB INTERVIEW? ON LAW, TECHNOLOGY AND PRIVACY The law and Artificial Intelligence (AI) applications need to be better aligned to ensure our personal data and privacy are protected. Ph.D. candidate Andreas Häuselmann can see opportunities with AI, but dangers if this does not happen. Imagine you apply for a job and are rejected because you do not want it enough. Later you […] Read More
• 4-14-2024THE WORDS YOU USE MATTER, ESPECIALLY WHEN YOU’RE ENGAGING WITH CHATGPT Do you start your ChatGPT prompts with a friendly greeting? Have you asked for the output in a certain format? Should you offer a monetary tip for its service? Researchers interact with large language models (LLMs), such as ChatGPT, in many ways, including to label their data for machine learning tasks. There are few answers […] Read More
• 4-14-2024LONELINESS CAN KILL, AND NEW RESEARCH SHOWS MIDDLE-AGED AMERICANS ARE PARTICULARLY VULNERABLE Middle-aged Americans are lonelier than their European counterparts. That’s the key finding of my team’s recent study, published in American Psychologist. Our study identified a trend that has been evolving for multiple generations, and affects both baby boomers and Gen Xers. Middle-aged adults in England and Mediterranean Europe are not that far behind the U.S. […] Read More
• 4-14-2024RESEARCHERS FIND A FASTER, BETTER WAY TO PREVENT AN AI CHATBOT FROM GIVING TOXIC RESPONSES A new method achieves higher diversity while matching the baselines in terms of quality. The solid lines denote the mean value of y-axis and the shade denotes its 95% confidence interval estimated by bootstrapping method. (a) RL-based methods achieve similar percentages of toxic responses across various toxicity thresholds. (b)(c) Among all RL-based methods, RL+Curiosity demonstrates the […] Read More
• 4-14-2024ADVANCING BRAIN-INSPIRED COMPUTING WITH HYBRID NEURAL NETWORKS HNNs combine key features of computer-science-oriented models and neuroscience-oriented models, demonstrating improved flexibility and universality in supporting advanced intelligence. Credit: Science China Press The human brain, with its remarkable general intelligence and exceptional efficiency in power consumption, serves as a constant inspiration and aspiration for the field of artificial intelligence. Drawing insights from the brain’s […] Read More
• 4-14-2024A FUSION SLAM SYSTEM THAT ENHANCES THE SENSING AND LOCALIZATION CAPABILITIES OF BIPED CLIMBING ROBOTS This image depicts the climbing process of a biped climbing robot (BiCR) in a truss environment, including the switching of the gripper and the rotation of the joints. The BiCR contains two LiDARs and cameras to collect surrounding information. The BiCR-SLAM can estimate the pose of two grippers and a truss pole map. The green […] Read More
• 4-14-2024CONTENT CREATION HOLDS APPEAL FOR LAID-OFF WORKERS SEEKING FLEXIBILITYContent creator Cynthia Huang Wang works below the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge in San Francisco, Monday, April 8, 2024. Despite a strong job market, there are still thousands of people who have found themselves out of work across industries stretching from tech to retail to media. But rather than trying to find another job in […] Read More
• 4-14-2024AI-GENERATED PORNOGRAPHY WILL DISRUPT THE ADULT CONTENT INDUSTRY AND RAISE NEW ETHICAL CONCERNS, RESEARCHERS SAYArtificial intelligence (AI) is already reshaping various industries, from medicine and education to science and finance. AI is set to disrupt yet another market: pornography. Advancements in machine learning and AI algorithms for image and video production have contributed to the growth of websites for AI-generated pornography, commonly referred to as AI porn. The mass […] Read More
• 4-14-2024TINY AI-TRAINED ROBOTS DEMONSTRATE REMARKABLE SOCCER SKILLSThe robot soccer environment. Credit: Tuomas Haarnoja A team of AI specialists at Google’s DeepMind has used machine learning to teach tiny robots to play soccer. They describe the process for developing the robots in Science Robotics. As machine-learning-based LLMs make their way into the public domain, computer engineers continue to look for other applications […] Read More
• 4-14-2024TUBERCULOSIS CAN HAVE A LASTING IMPACT ON THE LUNG HEALTH OF SUCCESSFULLY TREATED INDIVIDUALSNew research being presented at this year’s ESCMID Global Congress (formerly ECCMID) in Barcelona, Spain (27–30 April) has found compelling evidence that tuberculosis (TB) can have a lasting impact on the lungs of individuals who have been successfully treated for the disease. TB survivors have smaller lungs with narrower airways and slower air flow, the […] Read More
• 4-14-2024AUSTRALIANS ARE OPEN TO SELF-DRIVING VEHICLES, BUT WANT HUMANS TO RETAIN ULTIMATE CONTROLCredit: The Conversation A mob set fire to a Waymo self-driving taxi in San Francisco last month as residents’ anger about the cars boiled over. Self-driving “robotaxis” run by Waymo and other operators such as Cruise have been causing major concerns in the United States by failing to react properly to certain traffic situations. So […] Read More
• 4-14-2024CAN LARGE LANGUAGE MODELS REPLACE HUMAN PARTICIPANTS IN SOME FUTURE MARKET RESEARCH?Do market researchers still need to conduct original research using human participants in their work? Not always, according to a new study. The study found that thanks to the increasing sophistication of large language models (LLMs), human participants can be substituted with LLMs and still generate similar outputs as those generated from human surveys. The […] Read More
• 4-14-2024MAKING ROBOTS MORE FLEXIBLE AND REDUCING THEIR ENERGY CONSUMPTION BY UP TO 25%by Andreas Hemmerle, Fraunhofer-Institut für Werkzeugmaschinen und Umformtechnik IWU Xeidana confirms that the robot has gripped the correct gear. Credit: Fraunhofer-Institut für Werkzeugmaschinen und Umformtechnik IWU Smaller batch sizes instead of mass production, more complex production lines, increasing competitive pressure, unstable supply chains: Against this background, the Franco-German research project GreenBotAI addresses robotics. Three main […] Read More
• 4-14-2024CARBON BEADS HELP RESTORE HEALTHY GUT MICROBIOME AND REDUCE LIVER DISEASE PROGRESSION, RESEARCHERS FINDCARBALIVE beads viewed with a scanning electron microscope. Credit: University of Brighton/Yaqrit Innovative carbon beads, invented by researchers at UCL, reduce bad bacteria and inflammation in animal models, which are linked to liver cirrhosis and other serious health issues. The study, published in Gut, found that the carbon beads, licensed to UCL-spinout Yaqrit, were effective […]
• 4-14-2024BRAIN-INSPIRED COMPUTING MAY BOIL DOWN TO INFORMATION TRANSFER Cerebellar granule cell and its response to a pair of 50-Hz stimuli. (A) Biological neuron. (B) Computational model used for simulation. (C) Simulated neuron. (D) Electronic neuron. Credit: Daniela Gandolfi et al. The biological brain, especially the human brain, is a desirable computing system that consumes little energy and runs at high efficiency. To build […] Read More
• 4-14-2024‘IS THIS A DEEPFAKE?’ WHY WE’RE ASKING THE WRONG QUESTION Over the past year, the prevalence and potential dangers of deepfakes have raised concerns related to personal privacy, business ethics and even election interference. As a result, advice about spotting deepfakes has been circulating on social […] Read More
• 4-14-2024CLEAR GUIDELINES NEEDED FOR SYNTHETIC DATA TO ENSURE TRANSPARENCY, ACCOUNTABILITY AND FAIRNESS, STUDY SAYS Clear guidelines should be established for the generation and processing of synthetic data to ensure transparency, accountability and fairness, a new study says. Synthetic data—generated through machine learning algorithms from original real-world data—is gaining prominence because it may provide privacy-preserving alternatives to traditional data sources. It can be particularly useful in situations where the actual […] Read More
• 4-14-2024NEW MODEL BETTER PREDICTS OUR DAILY TRAVEL CHOICES An EPFL engineer has developed a forecasting model that factors in not just our commuting habits, but also our activities during the day. Her flexible approach incorporates the idea of trade-offs in order to deliver more realistic predictions. Transportation engineers often use computer models to […] Read More
• 4-14-2024MICROSCOPES REVEAL A FROZEN MOMENT IN CELLULAR TIME—A NEW METHOD RECORDS CELLS AS THEY WORK A group of killer T cells surround a cancer cell. When a killer T cell makes contact with a target cell, it attaches and spreads over the cell to neutralize the danger. This is one of many examples of cell-cell interaction. Credit: Alex Ritter, Jennifer Lippincott Schwartz and Gillian Griffiths, National Institutes of Health Researchers […] Read More

So I'm reading Skeleton Crew and finally came to Mrs Todd's Shortcut. and here's where we run into my problem -
yall hyped that story so much I thought it would absolutely baffle me. and... no. it was pretty, it was freeing and I enjoyed it but I've seen it labeled as one of his best and i... can't agree.
it's just nice. which isn't BAD. I just feel like.... I'm missing something. the storytelling itself is wonderful, and fun to connect with my audiobook reading of "The Talisman".
maybe it needs to sit with me. maybe I need to go for a long lazy drive on a backroad. or maybe I just like a different "flavor" of King than you (I loved Cell)
comparing it to my favorite #1 King - The Long Walk - seems unfair. like comparing apples and potatoes.
if you read this much of my babbling I'd love to hear your opinion. why you love the story, maybe something I missed or another suggestion I should loom forward to as I read all of King.