“The NICU’s where I feel most at home," Hayley Good tells PEOPLE
This summer, Hayley Good will start working as a nurse in the same NICU she spent time in as a micro-preemie.
“I grew up knowing how the nurses saved my life,” Good, 22, who graduated with a degree in nursing in May, tells PEOPLE. “I was told that they tirelessly worked and advocated for me, even though they weren't even sure if I was going to survive."
Now, she's looking forward to being able to share her unique perspective about what life can look like after the NICU with the parents of her patients.
“Being able to be that hope and light and just walk through the hardest part of their life with them is just very special,” she says.
....
For about four and a half months, Good was in the NICU at Ohio State University Medical Center and also at the NICU at Nationwide Children’s Hospital, where she had heart surgery shortly after she was born.
She grew up knowing about the loving NICU nurses who not only took care of her and saved her, but also comforted and supported her entire family.
“A lot of the nurses really tried to wrap my parents with just comfort and love and just caring for me to their best of their ability because they didn't know what was going to happen,” she says.
Another thing she grew up knowing? She wanted to become a nurse to pay it forward. “That's all I wanted to do,” she says.
On May 4, she graduated with a bachelor’s degree in nursing from Cedarville University. She starts work in the NICU at Nationwide Children’s in Columbus on July 7.
“The NICU’s where I feel most at home,” she says.
As she prepares to begin the next phase of her NICU journey, Good knows her own history has prepared her the wide range of emotions in store.
“I think the NICU, it can be very exciting and you just think of how exciting it is to care for babies, but also it is the difference between a baby thriving and a baby dying," she says. "And so I think you are that middle ground and you get to care for both the thriving child and the one that might pass away. And I think you have the opportunity to care for the whole entire family."
And as "hard" as it is for families navigating the NICU, Good hopes that she can be living proof that "there's hope."
"It happened to me, and my parents were in that spot and they didn't know what was going to happen," she says. "I think in the NICU it's really hard for them to grasp and imagine that their kid will be able to go to high school and college and graduate and be successful.”
She adds, "that's what I'm most excited for, to be able to share my story and show them that there is possibility, that it could be possible for their child too."
https://people.com/micro-preemie-born-weighing-less-than-2-lbs-soon-be-nurse-at-nicu-saved-life-8659239

I bought a pair of Vuori men's shorts at the mall last year, and I love them, but can't find the exact same pair online. They're 5 inch in-seam, unlined, with a tie in the front and a zip pocket in the back. Their logo looks the same as the "Kore" I found online but they don't have the same stud at the bottom of the pocket. Is this just an earlier model of the Kore? Is it another type of short I can't find online? Thanks for the help!

Hii! I'm looking for a close friend to either play games with or talk on the daily C:
I have a bf who I dearly love but I genuinely lack feminine energy in my life I want a girlie that I can talk to and gossip with and chat with! I miss having besties so so much I would really love to find one!
Shortly about me: I am an adhd autistic girlie, i study linguistics in uni and am omw to get my drivers license! I am from Europe and have had an awful emo phase (still love the music from that era and the style). was into kpop a few years ago but fell out of it as i got my life together (kinda) still enjoy the music tho. tend to get overwhelmed by having to message back, so if i sometimes take a day or two pls spare me it's not because i am not interested, i am just genuinely overwhelmed (either by having to respond to many messages to multiple people or by having a lot to do during the day)
My interests: I love playing videogames (currently addicted to League of Legends and TFT) but I also play CS:GO, eurotrucksim, sometimes do roblox when i am bored out of my mind etc. I love going outside in the nature, i used to make beats on FLstudio, i love learning new languages!!
if you're interested please hit me up in my DMs C:
from socials for communication i use mainly: discord, insta or twitter

Just wondering if anyone takes any supplements to aid certain aspects of their POTs and if they see any difference from any..
For example in the morning the first thing I do is take 20mg of iron, I’m not deficient, but very low in it and I basically can’t eat without it so it definitely helps my symptoms so much, I would advise taking iron to anyone with low iron because it made the biggest difference before I knew I had POTs.
I also take a ginkgo biloba complex (in the photo) which has magnesium, calcium, ginger and lemon bioflavonoids in. Ginkgo helps blood flow to the brain and I think it makes a difference to me as I feel the benefit when I start taking it again having missed a couple days!
I’ve also started taking lions mane powder 2000mg to try to help with brain fog, I haven’t been taking it long at all so I can’t say if it makes a difference yet but would love to hear anyone else’s feedback on it who takes it!
I have taken reishi powder too but haven’t bought another tin lately as it’s £40 a tin but it really helped me with my HR, I started taking this shortly before I realised what I had was pots and I noticed that my HR wouldn’t sky rocket at random times as much when I took pure reishi, I would recommend this, tastes bitter but I like it with chai tea and honey!
And I guess it goes without saying but of course my raspberry salt LMNT is a life saver :)

I would love to get a tattoo in honor of my algerian mom. She always used to tell me “action conquers fear” when i was dreading doing something. and i’d like a tattoo in arabic that evokes this same meaning. I have begun to study arabic what i have so far is
العمل ينتصر على الخوف
Is this something that makes sense to an algerian? I know the dialects in arabic are vastly different depending on where you’re from. She grew up in Oran if that helps. Would there be anything you would change to make it seem more colloquial to the region? Unfortunately I am no longer able to ask her for advice on this. thanks!

I’m saving up currently so it is some time away but I’m currently researching to find my first bike and the best option I’ve found for my height is the grom. My inseam is 74cm/29” so just a little under the seat height for the grom and I weigh about 123lbs/56kg if that matters.
Is there any bikes smaller than the grom but just as good or should I go with the grom? I’m also only able to ride 125s and below to pace myself.
But if you have any short bike suggestions that are up to 600cc/47hp I’d love to know for when I upgrade.

What do you guys think? My hair is very thick and down to my upper back. It's the longest I've ever had my hair. I've been growing it for almost 4 years. I really love my long hair but I'm also In more pain then I've ever been and i don't know if it has something to do with my hair being long. I've always had short hair. I really don't want to cut it but I'm desperately trying to find a way to feel even a little bit better. Have anyone here cut their hair and found lasting relief of their pain? I have spine pain, neck pain, lower back pain, hips, legs, you name it.
I only ever used to have upper and neck pain.
I feel so heavy all the time and getting around is a huge struggle. I'm 26 years old lol

Hi,
I'm looking for some very very short novels/stories written in modern Hebrew. Ideally a few pages long or in other words something that a proficient speaker can read in 10 to 15 minutes max. Although I want it to be modern, I'd rather avoid stuff written in "slang" at the moment, I'd love to have some good literary basics.
The idea is to study it and read it several times while taking notes to learn some vocabulary and get a better sense of how sentences are constructed.
Does anyone have some suggestions ?
Thanks.

Rage. Sing the rage of Dammekos’ daughter Petra. Murderous, doomed, that cost the iron warriors countless lives. Hurling down to the house of death so many sturdy souls, great fighter souls, but made their bodies carrion. Not but dust before the enemy, the will of the Emperor was moving towards its end. Begin, when the two broke and clashed, with Strange Hrud and Brilliant Aristides.
Petra stood over her injured love, the arm he used to extend an olive branch to the xenos was reduced to dust. And the Iron Warriors look to their gene-mother in fear. Was decimation upon them again? Petra turns to her sons, the rage that radiated off of her made them kneel. As if the gesture would inspire some mercy in her heart, but they all knew her mercy was Aristides.
Petra: My sons…the xenos have given their answer. They have shown that peace was never an option. And we shall respond accordingly.
Iron Warriors: YES MA’AM!
Petra: Aristides has been good to you has he not?! Is he not worthy of vengeance?!
Iron Warriors: HE SHALL HAVE HIS POUND OF FLESH!
Petra: Then mobilize, We shall grind them to DUST and salt the planet with it! They will beg for mercy and all they shall be met with is sundering fire and the treads of our transports!
Iron Warriors: IRON WITHIN! IRON WITHOUT!
As her troops mobilize she begins to craft a prosthetic for her beloved trinket. She goes to the medicae bay to present it to him, he’s awake and a little groggy but aware.
Aristides: Beloved?
Petra: How are you feeling my trinket?
Aristides: I’ve seen better days agápi mou (my love)… I’m sorry my love, I had hoped to help you avoid this.
Petra: You did all you could agápi mou. (My love)
Petra placed a hand on Aristides cheek, Aristides looked to her clenched fist and noticed the prosthesis. Normally such a thing would crumple in her furious grip.
Aristides: A new masterwork?
Petra: Hm? Oh…yes. I made it to last since your last one could not.
The Apothecary helped attach the arm, he moved the fingers individually, then bent the arm, and rolled the shoulder. It felt strange but he will have to get used to it.A battle brother enters the room.
Battle Brother: Mother, we are ready. At your command we shall deploy.
Petra: Join them, I will be there shortly.
He looks to Aristides.
Battle Brother: Are you well father?
Aristides: It could be worse my son.
He nods and leaves the room.
Aristides: My rock, please-
Petra: I will be fine trinket, you needn’t worry.
Aristides: And yet my love, I shall still worry. I care for you too much not to.
Aristides could see it in her eyes, the rage and exhaustion that had always weighed down her soul.
Aristides: Kneel for me psychí mou. (My soul)
Petra knelt so they were at eye level with each other. Aristides kissed her forehead before giving her a peck on the lips.
Petra: S’agapó. (I love you)
Aristides: Ki ego se agapó, kardiá mou. (I love you too, my heart)
Thus Petra left on her campaign of vengeance, with all the fury that could be afforded to her soul. This campaign would have ruined her had it not been for Aristides. Though she did not come out the other side unscathed. No matter how much iron exists within her heart there is a fundamental truth that all can attest to: Steel bends, Iron breaks. If not for Aristides, she would have broken long ago.

So me (21M) and my girlfriend (23F) just broke up. Long story short, we both work together, so we're forced to see each other frequently. We've only been dating for 2 years, but she's the only girl that i've been able to connect with and be myself around. Unfortunately she has some mental health issues that she feels like she needs to figure out by herself. She thinks that she would be a burden to me if she let me be with her while she figures this out.I disagree with this, but I'll obviously respect her decision. She said that she needs a friend while she gets through this, and she wants me to be that friend. She told me that once she figures this out, we can talk about getting back together. My issue is that i don't know if i can be a friend to her when i still love her and want to be with her. I know it's kind of selfish of me to think about not doing what she needs me to do while she gets through this, but i honestly don't know if i can. Each time i see her or talk to her i keep thinking that maybe she'll change her mind and get back with me. Should i just completely remove myself from her life(outside of work, obviously), or keep being a friend?

Salutations everyone ! How are we all ? We better be good !!
I’m here today on the look for friends! (short term / long term) Here’s some interesting stuff about me !
Well I’m from Ireland and I’m in uni ! And I’m 23 I’m nerdy, heavily enjoy fantasy and grimdark settings, so massive LOTR, elder scrolls, GOT/HOTD and Warhammer fan. I play on PC (total war, arma 3, Hoi4, stellaris and many more ) and ps5 (Elden ring, battlefield) Im also big into history, specifically military history!! I’m a pagan
My fav food is a toastie and I love coffee n tea!
I hope to hear from someone soon and if you have read this far, no hey, hi or hellos, write a introduction!!

Disclaimer: this is mostly rambling about spirituality, but I know that what I'm feeling is autistic joy which is rare for me, so I wanted to share it here.
My mom, sister, and I have always been a little bit psychic. I think of it as magical realism 😆 lots of crazy coincidences, intuitions that predict the future, etc. This stuff doesn't happen all the time, but I think it's cool and see those gifts in myself sometimes. It happens most when I'm in a good place and connecting with the world more. It's like important things are drawn to me. Synchronicity.
For context, I've been fascinated by Buddhism for the last week or so. Reading, contemplating, learning, and trying to implement some ideas into my life. I was hard on myself for not being good enough at it after only a week. I had doubts and was about to decide I don't even like Buddhism based on what some people online were saying. Then I came across this writing from Thich Nhat Hanh and it just clicked. I fell in love with the ideas and decided I want to learn more from this person about Buddhism. I thought I wouldn't be able to find anyone in "real life" to talk to about these thoughts. I try talking to my boyfriend, and he's receptive but doesn't have much to add. Anyway...
My boyfriend was in a play a few weeks ago. A member of the cast invited us to a monthly party where people share readings, poems, or passages from books. We skipped the first one, but I wanted to go last night. My boyfriend didn't really feel like it, but I insisted. We don't go out like that anymore, and we need friends here. The party was amazing. It was important to see people's vulnerability on display, sharing writing that meant something to them. I also got feedback on my ideas about Buddhism from people of other religions or backgrounds, which was invaluable.
I noticed a man from my boyfriend's play holding a little book on Buddhism. He read from it a few times, and I read a few paragraphs from Thich Nhat Hanh. After the readings, I asked him about Buddhism. We then had the deepest conversation I've had in years, talking about life, death, vulnerability, religion, work, society, Buddhism, and philosophy. As a shy, self-conscious autistic person, I don't often connect with others, but this was transformative. I felt incredibly seen and like I was also seeing this person. He wasn't sure if he should come that night and wasn't sure what to bring, but he brought this little book on Buddhism that had been sitting on his shelf for six years.
I told this (a much shorter version) to my mom, and she said, "Right... I don't imagine I can know much about the true nature of the universe, but I think it likes serendipity."
Even if this was just one precious night, and it was all just the good luck of being somewhere at the right time with no magic involved, it was magic to me. It reminded me that the richness of life can be found when you least expect it.

Hey everyone, I'm seeking friendship with fellow like-minded nerds!
I'm back on the East Coast from a short time away in the Midwest, but the East Coast will always have a place in my heart.
I'm into: the 80s/90s/anything retro, but mainly I've been into traveling, being a foodie, and spending time with friends and family. I'm a married, child-free, dog-Mom, with a love for the social sciences, academia, tattoos, and 80s music.
Messages are always open!

My normal posts are 2-5 paragraphs. This is long because it's a starter.
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The sloping ground around the Kiaurk family mesa had been sculpted into shelves or terraces, and it was on one of those upper terraces that Kiaurk Nshurr now lounged beneath a pergola anchored to the striated stone face behind her. The mesa rose at her back: an enormous, looming, almost sheer outcrop that her family's dwellings had been carved into the face of. Wide, shallow steps cut into the artificial (but entirely convincing) sandstone wound their way up between landings and porticos leading inward, between tiny balconies shaded by bright solid-colored canopies, between rooms with flat walls and rounded corners that came jutting out to shadow the steps below. Rriigkhans rarely used glass as window barriers; smooth-edged holes had been cut through the rock in varying shapes and sizes. It could be difficult to tell which apertures were windows and which were entryways. A physical barrier that kept out the elements was obsolete in all but the crudest dwellings, though some of these larger holes were curtained with braided string or strips of cloth that served a purely decorative purpose.
From her high vantage point Nshurr could see the shelves stretching out below her as the base of the mesa leveled out to flattish terrain that was a wonderland of vegetation in muted rainbow colors: mustard yellows, clay reds, earthy browns and the occasional dash of sage or dusty blue. This scrubland lay like a blanket around everything below that was not part of the village between the mesas. Down there, adobe compounds never taller than two or three storeys seemed so squat compared to the mesas that Nshurr could see towering in the distance, many of those family mesas only a few hours walk from her own if she traveled by foot. The village sprawled, with tile parkways winding in serpentine fashion between the various buildings, courtyards, parks, and ponds. There were no property lines, no clear division of the land into neat little plots owned by the individuals who lived and worked in these places. It all seemed to be part of a whole, with a single unifying aesthetic. The village housed those rriigkhans of the lower castes, the kharratah and chelhautah, and the humans which were a caste all their own, haukagh-ar, except for a small number who lived with their masters in the caverns of the mesas or up on the plateau.
This planet, Sgarrl, terraformed over three hundred years ago, was home to more human servants than any other Ssaarian world – aside from Earth, of course, discovered eighty years ago. The fact that humans shared so much in common with rriigkhans made them the perfect species to incorporate into the rriigkhan caste structure as servants. They breathed the same mix of gases and required similar gravities, and their nimble little fingers were very useful for all sorts of work.
The rriigkhan language was not necessarily too complex for humans, but it was wholly unfamiliar – too many phonemes that did not fit comfortably in human mouths, from grunts to huffs, to rolling trills that might by voiced or not, sometimes rumbling out like a purr. To a human, Nshurr's name was a sigh and a trill, and yet she was accustomed to humans vocalizing her name in their heavy, slurring way: Na-Shuurr! Nasher! Sometimes simply: ɽ͡r! which she recognized more easily as her name, or at least part of it, and not some random sounds.
Still, despite the weird pidgin humans had made of her language and their English, she liked the little creatures. She had come to live with her Grandmother on Sgarrl only days ago, and had never encountered them before. The males only stood as tall as her collar. The females were shorter still, much like the males of her own species.
To human eyes Nshurr was felinoid, with a muscular swimmer's body and the broad muzzle of a big cat, with watchful, forward-facing predator's eyes that seemed unexpectedly expressive, because rriikghans had almost as many muscles around their eyes as humans did around their mouths to convey the nuances of emotion. Despite being larger than even many Earth men, she was considered sleek by rriigkhan standards. She made up for that with her broader crest.
The rriigkhan crest was something like the crest of Utahceratops – a keratinized plate growing up out of the skull, except divided into three lobes instead of two, with scalloped edges along the outer rim. Unlike depictions of Utahceratops, the rriigkhan crest was not covered by skin. At least, not on the top. Thick ropy veins squiggled under velvet fur on the underside, closer to the neck. (A thick, arching neck muscular enough to support the weight of that crest meant that Rriigkhans walked with a stoop that made them seem hunchbacked, to humans.) The surface of the plate on top was often rough, even bumpy or corrugated like deer antlers in some areas, smooth in others. Every female crest had four tines jutting from the front – a pair several inches above the eyes, and another pair further up. Directly above the lowest set of tines were twin holes, the howrf channels, just big enough for a human to insert a finger. These holes were very much like nostrils – much deeper, but damp inside, and lined with short, fine hairs to protect the sensitive mucous membrane from debris. The organs housed within these channels were the heart of rriigkhan culture, the foundation of all relationships, of sex.
Male rriigkhans, of course, had only their neotonous crests: diminutive, mostly smooth with rounded edges, without tines or howrf channels. Cute.
Nshurr's crest was wider than average, her upper tines spaced further apart, and combined with a compact face this made her look top-heavy. (A human might say that she was more snow leopard than lion.) Most female crests did not interfere with the movement of the ears – highly mobile, highly expressive paddle shaped things – but the edges of Nshurr's crest did jut out enough to almost shield them.
That her crest was weighty, that it was inconvenient, that she was often aware of it – this was Nshurr's pride. Her long tail curled in pleasure when she caught males looking at it. Humans seemed to be intimidated by it sometimes, as if she might decide to gore them with her “horns.” She considered herself a confident person; not a braggart, but self-assured, and to carry her jhekaah so visibly pleased her to no end.
Her fur was an almost peachy off-white, but a mask of pale peach shaded each seafoam green eye. The mask blended into the white further up her forehead until fur gave way to bone-tan crest, and was split between her eyes by the white of her nose. Oblong spots in that same peachy color, each blending from dark to light, streaked down her sides.
These weren't the natural colors of her distant ancestors. It was unheard of to see a rriigkhan who was not gene-modified in some way, even if those modded genes had been part of rriigkhan life for so long that no one thought of them as mods any longer. She also thought nothing of the subtitles her augmented reality implant displayed whenever a human spoke, AI translated to help her decipher the pidgin. AR was simply a part of her, had been since she was a kit.
Reclining as she was on a padded lounger in front of an iron brazier, full of cold ashes from last night's fire, Nshurr was dressed in a pale coral shift only a few shades darker than the peach of her fur. Medallions trailing fringes of cloth had been sewn onto the front bottom half of the knee-length garment. A row of those ornate medallions defined a plunging neckline that bared much of her chest, muscular and broad, possibly even masculine to a human. Her breasts were lower on her body and similar in appearance to a mare's udders: long nipples on a pudge of fat nestled close together on the pelvis, just above the place where her thighs joined her body. They were only small lumps beneath the shift when Nshurr stretched out her legs so that the thin fabric fell across them. It was the roundness of her hips and buttocks that marked her female to the human eye. (As if her crest didn't make that obvious!)
She was listening to the sound of two younger female cousins wrestling on a nearby terrace, and although from her vantage point Nshurr could not see them, she could imagine the scene from what she heard: Fherou and Lahk growling while they grappled with their arms, the crack of crest hitting crest and then the scrape of tine sliding against tine. Each was fighting to control the other's head, each trying to bite the other. It wasn't easy when each had a shaggy ruff to protect her neck, and any attempt to bite the other's face would be thwarted by an interposing crest. Rriigkhan hands were less dexterous than human hands, more pawlike with stubby fingers, but capable of delivering hard blows, and once or twice Nshurr heard a cousin snarl in response to a strike against her body.
The competitive pheromones her cousins exuded from their unextended howrfs, quite unconsciously, were beginning to make Nshurr's own heart beat faster. The end of her long tail, where it hung down from the reclining chair, lashed in agitation. She was beginning to imagine sinking her teeth into someone's skin herself, and if her cousins had not been so much younger and smaller than herself she might have gone down to their terrace to show them a thing or two. It was putting her off the human flute music she'd been listening to, fed directly into her own brain through her implant for her private enjoyment. (Certain aspects of human culture were very popular here on Sgarrl; she'd been curious about it.)
She did not feel like going inside to escape the pheromones; Nshurr craved the warmth of the sun on her fur, not the cool stone and artificial light of those warrens. Most of her male cousins had gone into the village for boating today. Well, perhaps she would go down and join them after all.
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OOC Information:
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For this prompt I imagine you'd play a human servant, probably a new arrival to Sgarrl but maybe someone who was born there. Even though I've set up a situation where my character would have a lot of power and yours very little, I want to clarify that I'm not interested in abusing your character I am looking for a slow burn interspecies romance that develops naturally. This story may deal with power imbalances and even speciesism, but I'd like to explore those topics realistically.
I want to explore all aspects of loving relationship... Flirting, cuddling, kissing, lots of romantic scenes and character growth. My “type” that I'm most attracted to are men with average bodies in the 40-60 age range, with realistic personality flaws. I am more than willing to tailor my character's personality and physical attributes to suit your tastes, within reason. I appreciate partners willing to do the same.
I prefer to reply more than once a day. 2-3 replies per day would be ideal, but I understand life gets in the way. I usually write 2-5 paragraphs, or 150-450 words per post. This starter is much longer than my typical post length, but my lengths vary according to need. If I'm introducing a new character or setting a scene, my post might go up to 1,000 words.
Please send a writing sample if you have none in your post history. No need to custom write anything for me, old samples are fine. Click here to PM me!

My boyfriend and I have been together for 4 years and we live together. In the first few years of the relationship I had friends that would love to go to shows/concerts with house/edm music. This was something I enjoyed doing before I got into the relationship. I didn’t go in quite some time due to the relationship being new. But I’ve blown my friends off one to many times so I decide to buy a ticket to go with a group of friends. I told my boyfriend I planned on going and he told me I would be picking up guys and the way they dance at those places is inappropriate and he would break up with me if I went. So I obviously didn’t go. Long story short I obviously ended up loosing most of my friends in that group because I took on the role as wifey(even though he’s never brought up marriage) and prioritized him. Fast forward to this weekend he goes on a trip to Vegas with his two adult daughters. They have no idea we’re together. I have no idea why. He takes them on vacations once or twice a year so they don’t come home and obviously see we’re together. He doesn’t explain why. My guess would be our huge age gap would cause issues. We get along great besides that. But anyway this weekend he goes to Vegas with them he said that’s where they wanted to go so he books everything. They go to the sphere and watch a band he’s not interested and get dinner. Fine. The next day he texts me saying they’re going to the pool to watch some dj they like. Mind you he’s downplaying the shit out of this. He’s going to the day pool club LIV. Which is honestly probably way worse than the house/edm concert I wanted to go to. I told him it’s unfair he gets to go but threated to break up with me if I went. He blames it on his children and says he doesn’t want to be here he’s just going so they don’t come home. And I said oh so you get to go to a day beach club pretending to be single while I sit at home with the dogs because you want to keep me a secret? How is that fair. And then he blows up and turns the argument onto me and blocks me. Doesn’t talk to me his entire last day in Vegas. He comes home today and idk what to do. My feeling were valid and he fucking ghosts me? Should I get a hotel room tonight. I’m so fucking pissed. What do I do? AITA?

This might be a little weird to ask here, but I find myself falling into incel thinking and I figured this community would have relevant advice
Dating has never been an issue for me.
There's no evidence that I should be insecure about anything. But I feel like there is.
When I scroll through instagram-- I get all of those "height mogging" and "canthal tilt" memes. Or the ones about your partner cheating on you or women being lying monsters that will just use you for your money / looks.
I objectively know that all this is bullshit, because in my real experience, women are not a monolith that just acts in one way. There are good women and bad women just like there are good men and bad men.
But something about these memes hit deep into my subconscious. It's like they take every insecurity I've been given about being a man and validates them. It's like they're their own entities that feed off of stereotypes of what men "should" be and gives it credence.
It's genuinely starting to affect my relationship with my girlfriend. She has never given me any reason to believe that she would betray me, and she has made it clear that she loves how I look. But I just can't get over all the incel shit.
I feel like she's going to leave me for someone taller. Or someone with more money. Or someone with this or that esoteric incel term that I didn't know about just 5 months ago.
I constantly ask her for validation about the most random shit or that she won't cheat on me, and I can tell that it's starting to make her feel bad and it's making her insecure too.
I need advice on how to completely leave this mindset and just generally start working on my self-esteem. I KNOW that the people that genuinely believe this gender war bullshit are super unhappy, and I don't want to end up like them and ruin a good relationship with a loving woman.
(I've already deleted all "shorts" based social media)

Yo Reddit- it’s been a crazy last few weeks and I wanted to start out by saying RIP to Jim Simons the GOAT. I’m continuing a series of posts sharing my experience getting started with automated trading. I haven’t had the availability I’d originally thought I would to dedicate to these posts, but I hope this is helpful information, and I’d encourage anyone starting out to go through my posts to learn about how to test your ideas and prepare for live trading.
In my last post, I walked through some different brokerage options and how to automate logging into your account. Since then, TD-Ameritrade has shut down their API but they’ve opened up access to the very similar Schwab API. With this in mind, I’d add Schwab to the list of brokerages to consider for automated trading, and I also want to shout out schwab-py which is a promising new library for Schwab.
In addition, I wanted to make a soft announcement about my etrade client, wetrade, which is in prerelease as of this post. You can check out wetrade by taking a look at the github or the documentation. I’ll plan to announce wetrade in a reddit post soon, but it can be our secret until then.
In this post, I’m going to talk about exception handling, logging, and deployment.

Part 6: Starting to trade in the real world

Planning for expected issues

When building automated trading systems, you need to plan for every possible issue that may come up. Because it’s unlikely that you’ll be able to predict every single issue ahead of time, I’d recommend running new systems or strategies at the lowest volume possible (often trading individual shares) for several months when starting out. That said, a lot of this stuff is possible to predict and worth accounting for ahead of time.
Trading issues
Sometimes you’ll run into issues placing new orders with your brokerage. This often happens during extreme volatility. For E-Trade, I’ve had to accommodate for a generic message stating the order has failed to process, and for a message indicating a price is unavailable for the security. In both cases, I chose to resend the order after waiting 1 sec. I’ve also used the same handling to accommodate an additional message for updating an order while a previous order update is still being processed.
If you’re using stop or stop limit orders to purchase volatile stocks, you eventually may run into a situation where you try to buy below the current price or sell above the current price which will cause your order to get rejected by the brokerage. I’ve often handled this scenario by converting my order to a market order, but this may not make sense for you depending on what you’re trying to achieve.
Server issues
Unfortunately most of the issues you’ll need to accommodate are computer errors. Even if these things happen infrequently, you’ll need handling so your system can run uninterrupted.
Some common errors include timeouts, reset connections, and messages indicating that the server or endpoint is unavailable. You can resolve most of these issues by retrying your requests, but since things move quickly in markets, you may want to change the plan if too much time has passed.
It’s also possible that you’ll run into an api rate limit issue if you’re making too many requests in a short time period. This is likely only to come up when you’re making a very high volume of requests, and you’ll need to throttle your requests in order to run under the rate limit. If this is not practical (for example when trading multiple brokerage accounts on the same user account), I recommend creating multiple user accounts if possible.
Another challenge is handling a disconnected user session. Some brokerages will log out of your account if you accidentally log into another device (or randomly for no apparent reason), and this can be very problematic if your system is running during a live trading session. Depending on the API, you may have access to a refresh token endpoint. If not, or if it doesn't work, you may need to automate logging in again when disconnected.
By the way, I’ve built in handling for all of this stuff and more in wetrade, and I think one big advantage of open source trading software is that it can help ‘crowdsource’ these exceptions, some of which are rare and may come up only once in a few thousand trades.

Keeping track of everything with logs and reporting

Even with a lot of experience and preparation, it may not be possible to plan for every possible exception that you’ll run into and it’s important to handle errors gracefully. In places where you possibly anticipate running into an error, it’s helpful to log your exceptions so you can track down unexpected issues. In addition, as long as we’re letting computers trade for us, we should log important events too so we can keep track of what’s happening.
Examples of non-error-related events to log include placing, canceling, and updating orders. Additionally, you likely want to log when orders are executed and may want to include other updates such as your current balance or position. You also may want to log events specific to your strategy. For example, if you are tracking the price of a security, you may want to log certain price changes and corresponding actions taken by your program.
For my personal trading, I’m aggregating activity from all of my accounts into Google Cloud Logging which makes it easy to collect, filter and review logs. This allows me to view only a single account at a time or filter activity to only look at errors, web requests, or user messages. I also generate html reports at the end of each day which summarize the activity for each account over the previous trading session. These reports help me digest the performance of the given trading strategy while the logs provide more of a record of what the program was doing.

Setting everything up

I recommend deploying trading applications (and other software) using Docker since it makes everything portable and easy to manage. Initially, I set up cloud deployment using an AWS lambda function that ran each morning to spin up an EC2 instance, install docker, and pull/run my images (with another script to tear the server down at the end of the day). This was reliable and pretty inexpensive, but I’ve since decided to deploy on a local docker host so that I can retain docker logs which hold on to the stdout history for each of your containers.
It’s also fairly easy to deploy a persistent docker host (in EC2 for example) and run your containers on a scheduled job on your server. If you utilize webhooks and need a persistent address, this may be the way to go. The best deployment for you really depends on your system, and you can switch between different types of deployment without too much effort using docker.
Docker usage is probably too much to cover in the remainder of this post, but I’ve included a primer in the wetrade documentation which demonstrates how to dockerize a python application. If you’re using another language, the process will be very similar but your entry point obviously won’t be a python file.

What’s next?

I’ve chatted with several members of algotrading over the past few months and it’s been fun and interesting to connect with different people from the community. One pattern I’ve noticed is that a lot of people are trading futures (mostly with IBKR), and I’m considering building a wetrade-esque futures trading library but don’t love IBKR’s API. For now, I’m going to continue to build out wetrade and prepare for an official launch soon. I’d encourage everyone to check it out and reach out with comments, questions, and feature requests.