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Rutgers Athletics

2012.10.03 23:56 bobzelfer6595 Rutgers Athletics

Discussion of Rutgers Athletics!
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2018.07.29 09:52 PRE_-CISION-_ Maximum Football Subreddit

MaximumFootball subreddit! News, discission, content sharing and more!
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2008.10.28 16:02 Oklahoma State University

Official subreddit of Oklahoma State University and the town of Stillwater, Oklahoma.
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2024.05.16 09:04 Enolaaaaaaaaaaa 30 [M4F] Bakit pag ang aso pag umiihi naka taas ung isang paa? Kase baka mabagsakan sia ng pader.

Hello im new here, nag suggest lang mga friends ko i-try to kase ewan ko mga nag momove on pa mga tao sa bumble. So anyway sawa kanaba mag isa? Gusto mo ba ng tunay na pag ibig? Murang mura! Sa size na hindi mo kaya sa presyong abot kaya! Ilang beses ko na tinalo ung laro ng panahon. Kaya tulad nila im very strong in many ways pero sa pag-ibig ang aking kahinaan. Kelangan ko rin ng mwa mwa!
About me:
About you:
No flings please if youre ready sa seryosong relationship dun ako interesado.
So habang tinatype ko to hinihingal na ko. Kaya i chat mo na si tito! Kung nakarating ka man dito tayo rin magkakatuluyan sa dulo charot. I mean andito kana lang rin! Chat mo na ko may substance naman ako kausap.
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2024.05.16 09:00 Mizzno [H] Games [W] Cornucopia, Headbangers: Rhythm Royale, art of rally, Games (Listed Below), Steam Gift Cards

N.B.: I'm mainly looking for the games listed in the title and at the bottom of the thread. Feel free to post other offers, but if I haven't responded to your comment(s) by my next posting, I likely wasn't able to find a trade that interested me.
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For sale (for Steam Gift Cards or gifted Steam Wallet balance):
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For trade:
*signifies that a game is tentatively up for trade, assuming I buy the bundle
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WANT:
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IGS Rep Page: https://www.reddit.com/IGSRep/comments/ti26nz/mizznos_igs_rep_page/
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2024.05.16 08:40 Mr_Cool_07 Why hasn't the official Indian football Instagram page posted about Chhetri's retirement yet? It's been 2 hours.

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2024.05.16 08:18 debrato Scratchpad size

Scratchpad size
Dropper here I don't remember the scratchpad size I just remember it was pink color... Ig itna tha ya aur chota tha (each page 1/2 of A4 size paper) Maine Aaj jab test diya 4 A4 size paper ko kaat kar use kiya
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2024.05.16 08:18 haygurlhay123 “This Time, I Will Never Let You Go”: Cloud’s Mission and the Hidden Purpose of the Remake Trilogy - Literary and Musical Analysis of FFVII - Part 2

(continuation of part 1)

III. Searching for Aerith Beyond FFVII

There were absolutely no answers in Remake or OG (at this point in my research, Rebirth wasn’t released yet), no matter how much I looked; nothing at all hinted at how Cloud could’ve obtained the memories of OG that emerge in Remake as MOTFs. I knew I had to look elsewhere to search for more clues, so I decided to check every piece of media ever released by SE with a mention of Cloud or Aerith in it, digging for hints in the compilation and beyond.
And boy, did I find them.
III. a) Core Worlds and Suspension Worlds
There are a couple of general FF rules that we need to establish before going forward.
It’s important to note that there are multiple realms in which the FF stories take place, each with a different name, history and society. This ensures that all FF stories occur separately, never intercepting or interacting— though they do have creatures like moogles and chocobos in common, as well as concepts like airships, gil, magic and some form of crystal. For simplicity, I will refer to these separate worlds in which the numbered FF games (FFI, FFII, FFIII, etc) occur as “core worlds”.
Characters from different core worlds may appear together in non-numbered FF games, the events of which have no impact on the core world at all: it seems that sometime after a FF character has reached the end of their core world’s plot-line, they may somehow be summoned to far-removed realms where they will face new adventures. I call these far-removed realms “suspension worlds”. One example of a FF game that takes place in a suspension world is Dissidia Final Fantasy, wherein characters from multiple core worlds unite to accomplish a mission as a team.
III. b) Final Fantasy Tactics
First on our list of non-compilation SE games to explore is 1997’s Final Fantasy Tactics (FFT), a game whose plot takes place in the suspension world of Ivalice. Let’s plot out the relevant events, and then analyze!
III. b) i. Fact-Finding
The main character of FFT, Ramza, encounters a brunette flower peddler with Aerith’s iconic, gravity-defying bangs:
\"Aeris\" in FFT's Ivalice
If you choose to buy a flower from her, she express her relief: apparently, business isn’t going well because no one is interested in flowers. The girl wistfully dreams aloud:
“When is my knight in shining armor going to take me away from here...?”
Later, Ramza and his companions encounter a mysterious machine that can summon people from across universes. The machine is activated, and a rather rude young man with spiky blonde hair appears. Cloud claims he used to be in SOLDIER, and says the last thing he remembers is “getting stuck in the current”. He looks to be disoriented and lost, and suffers from piercing headaches. Mere moments after being summoned to Ivalice, Cloud rambles:
“What’s this? My fingers are tingling… My eyes… they’re burning… Stop… stop it [Se]phiroth…”
He dashes out of the room, but not without announcing:
“I must go… must go to that place…”
Outside, Cloud encounters the brunette flower girl Ramza met earlier. She offers Cloud a flower, but he only stares at her wordlessly:
“Flower girl: Buy a flower? Only 1 gil.
Cloud: …
Flower girl: Something wrong? Do I resemble someone?”
Cloud: No… it’s nothing.”
As soon as Cloud leaves, a gang of ruffians surround the flower girl and start harassing her, demanding payment that’s apparently overdue. One of them finally calls her by her name: “Aeris”. He grabs her, insinuating that he might sexually assault her in lieu of payment. Aeris is not strong enough to push him away. That’s when Cloud returns:
“Cloud: Get your hand off her!
Thug: What did you say!?
Cloud: Didn't you hear me? Get your dirty hand off her!
[…]
Cloud, to Aeris: Go… now.”
Aeris heeds Cloud’s advice, fleeing the scene before a fight between Cloud and the thug can break out. After Cloud scares the ruffians off with the help of Ramza and his companions, he speaks once more:
“I lost… something very important… Ever since, I’ve been lost […]. What should I do? What about this pain [?] Must go… to the Promised Land.”
III. b) ii. Fact Analysis
There’s a lot to unpack here, all of which you probably clocked in your head upon reading, but let’s put it down in writing.
While FFT Cloud’s memory is far from perfect, the Aeris he encounters in Ivalice doesn’t recognize him at all. FFVII Ultimania Omega addresses this question without answering it:
“[The flower seller’s] name is Aeris, and she has the same appearance and tone of voice as the Aeris of FFVII. However, when she comes across Cloud, she does not recognize him. Could she really be the same Aerith who appears in FFVII but with memory loss, or is she a completely different character?” (“#4 Proof of Omega”, “FFVII in Other Games”, “Final Fantasy Tactics”, page 560).
Regardless of her unknown identity and inability to recognize Cloud, FFT Aeris’ fantasy of a “knight in shining armor” is quite reminiscent of the flower girl/bodyguard dynamic we’ve come to know and love. Cloud’s armor doesn’t shine, but in my opinion, if you’re looking for the dystopian, corporatocratic equivalent of a knight, you can’t get much closer than a supposed-former-SOLDIER-turned-bodyguard. Additionally, despite his rude and cold attitude toward Ramza’s gang, the urgency with which Cloud swoops in to save the flower girl from the ruffians betrays a softer, warmer side to him: the flower girl/bodyguard dynamic strikes again!
FFT Cloud’s dialogue borrows two lines from the speech OG Cloud makes as Aerith lies dead in his arms (disk 1, chapter 28): “My fingers are tingling. My mouth is dry. My eyes are burning!” and “What are we supposed to do? What about my pain?” You might’ve noticed that this glimpse of grief Cloud experiences in FFT bears a resemblance to the fourth MOTF 4 experienced by Remake Cloud (see section “II. a)”). Could it be that FFT Cloud and Remake Cloud have something in common?
Shortly after being summoned to Ivalice, FFT Cloud declares that he must go to “that place”, a mysterious line that is later elucidated when he tells Ramza that he must go to the Promised Land and find the “very important” thing he’s lost. The Promised Land is the Cetra culture’s afterlife, meaning FFT Cloud is looking for someone who’s died, someone “very important” to him. OG suggests this is none other than Aerith:
“Cait Sith, reading Cloud’s fortune: You will find [what] you pursue. However, you will lose the most precious thing” (disk 1, chapter 16, English translation by Kotaku’s “Let’s Mosey: A Slow Translation of Final Fantasy Seven: Part Eight” by Tim Rogers, 9:42-9:52).
&
“Cloud, after seeing Aerith’s hand reach for him through the Lifestream: … I think I'm beginning to understand.
Tifa: What?
Cloud: An answer from the Planet… the Promised Land... I think I can meet her... there” (disk 3, chapter 3).
Finally, let’s try to understand where on the OG timeline Cloud was summoned to this suspension world from and what he remembers. His comment about getting stuck in a current has to be about the Lifestream; apparently, on top of its atemporal nature, it can act as a conduit to other worlds. One only enters the Lifestream if they’ve somehow fallen into the core of the planet or once they’ve passed away and returned to the planet. Both scenarios merit consideration.
On the one hand, it’s possible that Cloud was summoned to Ivalice after he and Tifa fall into the core of the planet: this point in the FFVII OG timeline occurs after Aerith’s death and shortly before Cloud finds out he was never SOLDIER, which matches the gaps in FFT Cloud’s memory quite well. However, this scenario does not account for the vagueness with which FFT Cloud remembers Aerith and her death. Most importantly, Cloud’s realization that he can find Aerith in the Promised Land occurs much later in the game (FFVII OG, disk 3, chapter 3) than when he falls into the Lifestream with Tifa (FFVII OG, disk 2, chapter 8).
On the other hand, FFT Cloud’s vague yet persistent memories of Aerith suggest that he’s been summoned to Ivalice after his eventual death post-OG, but also that he’s lost quite a large portion of his memories. His incomplete memory loss is likely the result of Cloud’s individuality’s erosion by the Lifestream after death, which we discussed in section “II. a) ii.”. We can therefore surmise that by the time he is summoned to Ivalice from the Lifestream, Cloud has been dead for long enough that the Lifestream eroded a large portion of the memories of his lifetime. This post-death scenario is likelier than the first. The memory of Cloud’s realization that he was never SOLDIER must be gone, which explains why he claims otherwise upon being summoned to Ivalice. Contrastingly, vestiges of Cloud’s OG memories of Aerith cling to his soul, even after others have been wiped clean. Could this be a consequence of their soulmate bond? Could the strength of Cloud’s love and grief for Aerith have made his memories of her stronger and more difficult for the Lifestream to erode? Could it be both?
One thing is clear: Aerith is of fundamental importance to Cloud, even when he can’t quite remember her. In fact, the only other character he remembers and/or mentions in FFT is Sephiroth. It does make sense that the memories of those who have marked one’s soul forevermore would be the most difficult for the Lifestream to erode.
III. c) Dissidia Final Fantasy
The next stop on our travels through suspension worlds is 2008’s Dissidia Final Fantasy! Now strap in, because here’s where things get really serious.
III. c) i. Fact Finding
In the suspension world of Dissidia Final Fantasy (DFF), the goddess of harmony Cosmos and the god of discord Chaos are engaged in a never-ending cycle of conflict. Both deities need warriors to fight on their behalf, so they recruit core world characters into their respective teams by summoning them to DFF. Some of these summoned characters are FFIV’s Cecil, FFVI’s Terra, FFVII’s Sephiroth, FFX’s Tidus, and of course, FFVII’s Cloud. The warriors find themselves in the suspension world of DFF with no memories of their core worlds’ plotlines. However, as the DFF adventure progresses, they are able to recover pieces of their memories here and there. It isn’t clear how much they come to remember. Ultimately, the warriors hope to return home to their core worlds by fighting in this war and seeing to its end.
Cloud is summoned to DFF as a warrior on the side of Chaos, who seeks to destroy all existence. Sephiroth is also on Chaos’ side, meaning the two are teammates despite being enemies in their core world of FFVII. It just so happens that Tifa is a summoned warrior in DFF too, though she’s fighting on Cosmos’ side. Intrigued by her vague familiarity, Sephiroth hypothesizes that killing Tifa will bring back his memories of OG’s plot line: before long, the masamune wielder finds Tifa alone and corners her into a one-on-one fight. Thankfully, Cloud swoops in and saves her before Sephiroth can do any harm. Tifa is thankful for Cloud’s help, though confused that Cloud would elect to assist her and turn against a fellow warrior of Chaos; she doesn’t remember what Sephiroth and Cloud mean to each other in OG. In fact, Tifa doesn’t even remember Cloud’s name or that they share a core world, though Cloud feels somewhat familiar to her. For his part, Cloud at least remembers that Tifa is someone he cares about from his core world. As Tifa thanks Cloud for saving her from Sephiroth, something she says elicits an odd reaction from the warrior of Chaos:
“Tifa: The way you showed up and fought that guy off. It was a pretty cool thing to watch. You were like a hero, charging in to save the girl.
Cloud gasps at her words. She doesn’t notice” (Dissidia 012: Treachery of the Gods, report 5: “Unexpected Fulfillment 2”).
On another note, Cloud knows he will have to fight Tifa once the Cosmos-Chaos conflict comes to a head, as they are on opposing teams. He thinks to himself:
“Once [her] memories return, [she]’ll lose the will to fight just like I have. So... Before that can happen, I have to act...” (Dissidia 012: Treachery of the Gods, report 5: “Unexpected Fulfillment 2”).
In order to end the cycle of the conflict and to avoid fighting Tifa, Cloud decides to try and defeat Chaos himself. Predictably, Cloud is no match for the deity. As he dies, Cloud pleads the following to the goddess Cosmos:
“Cosmos, goddess of harmony. If you can hear me, listen to my plea. I beg you. Save her. Save my friend… Tifa.”
Cosmos hears him and responds immediately:
“Cosmos: An end to this conflict, and a life spared? This is your heart's desire? If your will remains unchanged, I shall bring you here when the battle draws to a close. Cloud. My chosen" (Dissidia 0.13: Treachery of the Gods, report 7: “Unexpected Fulfillment 3”).
Cloud’s wish is granted by Cosmos: the first phase of the conflict ends without Tifa getting hurt, and she is sent away from the suspension world of DFF before the second phase begins. Cloud is saved from death, and Cosmos enlists him into her team of warriors for phase two: this time, Cloud is fighting on the good side.
Now we enter phase two of the war. Cosmos tells her team of ten core world warriors that in order to save the world from Chaos’ destruction, they must collect what she describes as crystals containing the power to persist through darkness. I call these the “DFF crystals”. There are ten DFF crystals in total: one for every warrior in Cosmos’ group to find. To obtain their crystal, each hero must overcome a trial that will confront them with whatever personal struggle they faced in their core world; if they prove themselves worthy, their DFF crystal will appear to them. On one hand, some warriors’ DFF crystals simply take the form of the crystals found in their core world. For example, Onion Knight’s DFF crystal looks to be nothing more than one of FFIII’s elemental crystals, which hold little to no personal significance to him. On the other hand, some warriors’ DFF crystals symbolize something more personal to their respective warriors. For instance, Cecil’s DFF crystal looks to be one of FFIV’s dark crystals, which specifically represent the dichotomy of light and darkness he struggles with in his core world’s plot line. Cosmos describes the quest for the DFF crystals as follows:
“Cosmos: The crystals embody the strength to face despair. With ten gathered, there is hope yet to save the world. The path to your crystal will be perilous... and different for each and every one of you. But you must believe in and follow your own path. Even if you know not where that path leads" (Dissidia 013: Light to All, prologue: “A Final Hope”).
From this exposition, simply keep in mind that: Cloud must find his crystal by overcoming a personal trial, and his crystal may have the appearance of an object in OG that’s important to him.
Once the team is debriefed on their mission, Cloud remains reticent to fight; he doesn’t much like the mysterious nature of this conflict. Not knowing exactly what they’re all fighting for is clearly bothersome to the swordsman, and the idea of thoughtlessly engaging in battles leaves a bad taste in his mouth. Fellow warrior Firion understands that without a reason to fight, Cloud’s heart just isn’t in it. He imparts upon Cloud that he must have a dream he’s fighting to protect, something he wants to see come true, to motivate him to stop Chaos from destroying all existence. Unfortunately, Cloud doesn’t have a dream to preserve, or can’t find one for himself:
“Cloud: I've looked, but I'm still empty-handed. And without a dream, what do you suppose I should do? […] Maybe what I'm looking for... isn't here” (Dissidia 0.13: Light to All, chapter 1: “Beyond Doubt”, “Gateway of Good and Evil”).
Another fellow warrior, Cecil, expresses worry for Cloud, whose response evokes the main theme of FFVII OG:
“Cecil: Everyone's worried, Cloud. But... Do you shoulder a larger concern?
Cloud: Concern... Maybe a sense of loss" (Dissidia 0.13: Light to All, chapter 1: “Beyond Doubt”, “Beyond the Continent”).
Whatever Cloud is looking for “isn’t [there]”, and he feels “a sense of loss”: Cloud’s motivating dream has been lost to him. This is later reasserted in a conversation with Terra, another warrior of Cosmos:
“Terra: And you, Cloud... What's your dream?
Cloud: I've lost mine" (Dissidia 0.13: Light to All, chapter 3: “The Chosen Battle”, “Gateway of True Intent”).
Later, Cloud encounters and fights Sephiroth, who is still a part of Chaos’ team. Sephiroth is defeated, but not before he’s taunted Cloud with his habitual puppet talk. However, Cloud remains strong and refutes Sephiroth’s manipulation, asserting that only he can determine his own path. This must’ve been Cloud’s personal trial, because his crystal appears at that very moment: it is a small, light green orb that looks like materia from his core world. Having pocketed his crystal, Cloud decides he must find his own reason to fight. Interestingly, his search is depicted as intertwined with Fate:
“Cloud: Even if I have my doubts... I have to find my own answer […] Until then, I'll keep fighting.
Narration: The warrior has vowed to keep fighting— and keep fighting he will […]. Etched in destiny, his quest for answers continues on” (Dissidia 0.13: Light to All, chapter 1: “Beyond Doubt”, “Gulg Gateway”).
Later, the nemeses meet again in a segment called “Recurring Tragedy”. Their interactions here are particularly interesting. Sephiroth speaks of making Cloud suffer through despair and pain as though referencing their history together:
"Sephiroth: This disease called hope is eating you alive. The world of suffering was born out of such half-baked ideals.
Cloud: If that's the case, I have to endure the suffering. There's no moving on if I run from it.
Sephiroth: If that is what you wish for, you shall drown in the pain. I'll lead you to true despair. [My] shadow is burned into your heart. We'll meet again, Cloud. I'll keep coming back— as long as you are who you are."
Sephiroth disappears. Cloud looks out into the distance before the scene ends.
“Cloud: No thanks. The one I really want to meet is…” (Dissidia 013: Light to All, epilogue: “Conclusion of a Cycle”, “Recurring Tragedy”).
This final line suggests Cloud has finally found a reason to fight: he wants to meet someone unspecified.
Finally, after the war has ended, we arrive at the final cutscene of DFF. I will let you read the full script, with notes added by me in bold behind the spoiler censors. Please do not read my notes if you do not wish to encounter spoilers for FFI, FFII, FFIII, FFIV, FFV, FFVI, FFVIII, FFIX or FFX:
“[The] heroes are all standing together in a grassy field with a forest behind them. Birds are chirping, the sun is shining brightly, and the wind is blowing gently. The heroes look around them in awe. They're all holding their crystals.
WoL: The battle has come to an end...
Tidus notices that his crystal has begun to emanate a blue glow.>! His crystal is a movie sphere from his core world of FFX: a capsule containing sounds and images that people record for later viewing. Tidus’ crystal likely represents the specific movie sphere recorded by his love interest Yuna, which revealed that she’d loved him from the beginning.!<
Tidus: Gotta go, huh...
The blue glow transfers to him as well. He turns to look at the others
[…] Tidus grins at the others, then turns and runs toward a nearby lake. He leaps into it in a manner reminiscent of [the events] of FFX. He vanishes as he descends toward the lake.
Zidane: We're not vanishing. We're returning—
Zidane is sitting on a tree limb as he says this. His crystal begins to glow gold, as does he. His crystal is shaped like a highly important ‘progenitor of all life’ crystal from his core world of FFIX.
Zidane: — to where we're supposed to be.
Zidane spins around the tree limb with the use of his tail and launches toward the sun. He's lost to view.
A white feather then drifts down from that direction and Squall catches it. The feather is reminiscent of his love Rinoa Heartilly, whose character symbol is a white feather. In fact, Squall’s crystal looks like a mix of his revolver gunblade from FFVIII and Rinoa’s feather motif. [Squall glows blue.]
Squall: Perhaps we can go on a mission together again.
Squall vanishes.
Cloud is then visible, standing in [a] flower field. The flowers are white and yellow. Cloud has his crystal, a light green materia from his core world of FFVII, in hand.
Cloud: [(Chuckles shortly, like a scoff)] Not interested.
Cloud walks off into the flower field, gaining a green glow. He vanishes.
A snowflake then falls into Terra's right hand as her crystal begins to glow pink. The flames drawn on her crystal represent her power, which is connected to the element of fire: her character arc in FFVI.
Terra: I think I've learned how to keep going. Thank you— and take care.
Terra glows pink and then vanishes. Bartz throws a stick. He's glowing pink as well.
Bartz: When you're having the most fun, that's when time always flies. His crystal is the Adamantite from his core world of FFV.
Bartz vanishes.
Cecil: It's mine to pass on—
A moon appears behind Cecil and goes through its phases as he begins to glow blue. His crystal has shadowed and illuminated parts, representing the duality of his character, which is central to his personal arc in his core world of FFIV. It also represents his brother Golbez, who has chosen the darkness. Cecil considers his familial bond with Golbez his guiding light and hopes to be with him someday.
Cecil: — this strength I've gained from everyone.
Cecil vanishes.
Onion Knight hugs his crystal and looks up toward the sky. His crystal is shaped like those found in his core world of FFIII.
Onion Knight: Everyone... thank you!
OK briefly glows blue and then vanishes.
There are wild roses at Firion's feet. He and WoL are looking toward the sky. WoL suddenly begins walking away while Firion looks down and sees the roses.
Firion: This isn't the end. Another dream is waiting to begin.
His crystal is the color of the wild roses that were at the center of his dream and of his motivation to fight Chaos. The roses are also the emblem of the Rebel Army he was a part of in his core world of FFII. His crystal is shaped like Pandaemonium, the final dungeon of his core world story. Firion gains a violet glow and then vanishes.
WoL is walking through the field and then comes to a stop. He's looking at something.
WoL: May the light forever shine upon us.”
As you can see, everyone’s crystal is very important to the story of their core world, and in the cases of at least Tidus, Squall, Terra and Cecil, the crystals represent something very personal. What about Cloud and his crystal, then? What about the dream he lost and the person he wants to meet? Let’s begin analyzing to answer these questions.
III. c) ii. Fact Analysis
Firstly, it’s clear to me that the Cloud that appears in DFF is a post-OG Cloud, given how many plot points from OG he interacts with. I’m reticent to say whether or not this post-OG Cloud is dead like in FFT, as he recovers many of his memories of OG during DFF and there is no evidence of him having passed away and joined the Lifestream.
The second thing I’d like to point out is Cloud’s strange reaction when Tifa compares him to a hero who swoops in and saves the girl from the bad guy. Cloud gasps, indicating that her words mean something to him; the trope Tifa references must therefore be included somewhere in the FFVII OG plot-line. Some of you are surely ahead of me by now, having realized that only the tragic antithesis of this trope appears in OG: Cloud is unable to save Aerith from Sephiroth (disk 1, chapter 28). Whether or not DFF Cloud remembers Aerith herself at this point, it’s clear he recalls the pain and guilt of losing Aerith to Sephiroth.
Next, let’s address Cloud’s lost dream: to meet an unspecified person. It seems Cloud is aware at this point that in OG, he was eternally separated from the person he dreams of meeting. So, who was he separated from in his core world? Who can he never meet again, even if his team of warriors defeats Chaos and Cloud returns to the realm of FFVII? There are a few options —his mother, his father, Zack, Jessie, Biggs, Wedge, and any other person he knew who died—, but the sheer narrative weight that Aerith’s untimely death carries makes it clear who he truly wants to meet. This is corroborated by Cloud’s “I think I can meet her… there” line in OG (disk 3 chapter 3), by FFT Cloud’s search for Aerith during his appearance in Ivalice, and by Cloud’s strange reaction to Tifa’s comparing him to a hero who swoops in and saves the girl from the bad guy. All the available evidence suggests that Cloud’s dream is indeed to reunite with Aerith, and that this dream is “lost” to him because she was killed by Sephiroth (disk 1, chapter 28). This would also explain the title of the DFF segment “Recurring Tragedy”, since as we all know, the ultimate tragedy of FFVII OG is Aerith’s death. Considering Sephiroth was the one to take Aerith away from Cloud, Sephiroth’s threats of drowning him in despair in “Recurring Tragedy” only solidify this interpretation of Cloud’s lost dream.
Finally, we arrive at the ending cutscene. Cosmos’ warriors return to where they belong to try and accomplish whatever dream they held as motivation during the Cosmos-Chaos conflict, each carrying their DFF crystal. Cloud is shown standing in a field of white and yellow flowers and walking deeper into it with a light green materia in hand. Why was a white and yellow flower field chosen to represent DFF Cloud’s dream? The answer is obvious. White and yellow flowers symbolize Aerith: she sold Cloud a yellow blossom upon first meeting him in OG (disk 1, chapter 1), and her yellow and white flowerbed cushioned Cloud’s fall when the two reunited in the Sector 5 church (disk 1, chapter 4). What’s more, we have the iconic credits video of the original cut of Advent Children to refer to, wherein Cloud is seen driving near flower fields. Aerith stands there (3:20), seemingly waiting for him. Here’s what Nomura had to say about this credits scene:
"[...] we filmed the video for the ending credits in Hawaii. There are fields of flowers on both sides of the road, and the colors —yellow and white— are the same as the flowers in Aerith's church […]. With Aerith, 'flowers' have been her image throughout the series” (FFVII Reunion Files, “Countdown to Reunion”, “Stories from CG Production”, page 87).
Even in the Advent Children Complete cut of the film, where Aerith is not shown standing in the field, the flowers and their symbolism of Aerith remain. That being so, it’s more than fair to say that the white and yellow flowers in DFF’s ending cutscene serve as yet another confirmation that Cloud’s dream is to be with Aerith.
With all of this established, we can address the nature of Cloud’s DFF crystal. As we established, every core world has its own version of a crystal, each possessing a distinct appearance, function and meaning. Materia are the crystals of FFVII, so one could be satisfied by the proposition that Cloud’s DFF crystal is simply meant to represent a random materia. However, I think Cloud’s crystal is specifically the White Materia, as it represents Aerith’s sacrifice, her importance to the plot and what she died fighting for. If any one object symbolizes her death, it’s the White Materia; it’s even given closeups during the event (2:33-3:02). Besides, unlike any other materia in FFVII, the White Materia is known to glow a light green when Holy has been activated:
“Bugenhagen: If [the prayer] reaches the planet, the White Materia will begin to glow a pale green” (FFVII OG, disk 2, chapter 15).
Here are pictures of the White Materia in OG and Advent Children, and two pictures of Cloud's DFF crystal (in order) so you can compare for yourself:
https://preview.redd.it/0qtumfeyfq0d1.jpg?width=386&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=3995f010738c83fca0c5842a0564d0a9ad206dfd
https://preview.redd.it/0kj525tzfq0d1.jpg?width=1144&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=575573ef1d2c937635cf569d4a376886a24b384c
Cloud's DFF Crystal
Cloud’s DFF crystal
So far, in both suspension world games we’ve examined (FFT and DFF), Cloud is searching for Aerith. As a final note on DFF, it may interest you to know that codirector of the Remake trilogy Toriyama was actually a writer for DFF: he may have carried some themes from DFF to Remake…
III. d) Detour: The Final Fantasy 30th Anniversary Farewell Exposition
Before we hop onto the next suspension world, let’s return to ours for a quick detour: the 2018 Final Fantasy 30th Anniversary Expo. Themed with farewells and tragedy, this expo showcased the heartbreaking goodbyes featured in different FF games. Artwork, clips, quotes and images aplenty here! As the highly anticipated Remake was going to be coming out approximately a year and a half later, the FFVII section of the expo featured a few sneak peek Remake designs. This means the expo was at least partly curated with the Remake trilogy in mind; there could be interesting material in the FFVII section of the expo related to Remake. Let’s dive in!
Unsurprisingly, the focus of the FFVII section is Cloud and Aerith, since she is the loved one he lost in OG. Zack is also given a mention, however Aerith was the glaringly central star of the show. To showcase how important Aerith’s farewell in particular was to the expo, the FFVII portion was introduced by a photo of Cloud lowering Aerith into her watery grave and a video of her tragic death:
Final Fantasy 30th Anniversary Farewell Exposition, FFVII Introduction
The description under the video screen reads:
“She was gone in the blink of an eye. But the pain never went away.
Aerith awoke the ultimate magic to protect the planet and the people she loved. Yet her life came to a sudden end at the hands of Sephiroth, a man bent on seeing the world destroyed. Even the usually stoic Cloud couldn’t hide his grief at the unexpected death of an irreplaceable companion. ‘My fingers are tingling. My mouth is dry. My eyes are burning.’ True words, revealing Cloud’s deep sorrow” (Final Fantasy 30th Anniversary Exposition).
Conveniently enough for us, the expo’s tagline is “Who is the person you want to meet again?” Given that Aerith holds the spotlight in the FFVII section of the expo, it’s clear who SE is telling us Cloud wants to reunite with. Recall Cloud’s unfinished line in DFF: “The one I really want to meet is..." (Dissidia 013: Light to All, epilogue: “Conclusion of a Cycle”, “Recurring Tragedy”). We theorized that he must be referring to Aerith, and now, we are certain.
The expo also had pamphlet descriptions of the farewells depicted. Here is the general summary of FFVII‘s farewell story according to that pamphlet:
“The story follows the lead character Cloud, but it is the heroine, Aerith, who opens Cloud’s eyes and helps bring him closer to understanding the mystery that is his past. Through her, we draw closer to the truth of the story.
This scene, in which the heroine Aerith is lost, is easily the most shocking and tragic in the story. No one expected to say goodbye to such a major character in the middle of the story. Rumors of a secret way to revive Aerith spread, and it was clear players were having a hard time saying goodbye to her too. Even now, twenty years later, it still feels like a shocking turn of events” (Final Fantasy 30th Anniversary Exposition Pamphlet, page 36).
It’s interesting that SE would mention the rumors of Aerith’s revival circulated by players back in 1997, especially as fans were awaiting Remake’s release…
In light of everything we’ve analyzed so far, it can be said that between FFT (1997) and this farewell expo (2018), SE has consistently demonstrated that reuniting with Aerith is post-OG Cloud’s goal. That’s a period of over two decades— two decades of wishing, seeking, longing in real-world time for this character. This is a huge long-term commitment for SE to make, and you can bet the devs don’t take it lightly. Again and again, once the events of the OG game have ended, Cloud is shown to desire a reunion with Aerith. This ever-present and ever-insistent theme will become very important to us later in this analysis.
submitted by haygurlhay123 to cloudxaerith [link] [comments]

2024.05.16 08:17 bsgriffin1 Chargers blogs/websites

Hi Bolt fam,
I’ve been wanting to read about some Chargers content; be it news, pre/post-game analysis, rumors, insider information, general rational feels, etc….
I’ve been a lifelong SAN DIEGO Bolts fan but honestly have mostly followed college football most of my life until the past 2-3 years where i’ve had a growing interest in the NFL and expecially whats going with the Chargers.
Anyways, I’ve always followed the Michigan Wolverines extensively and they have this amazing blog named MGoBlog.com. Which i admit, is probably one of the best team-specific blogs in the world. But i was wondering if there is anything like that dedicated for the Chargers somewhere in the world.
Any help would be appreciated, and Go Bolts!
submitted by bsgriffin1 to Chargers [link] [comments]

2024.05.16 08:12 veganfizz type me accurately please.

I am twenty three years old and about to be twenty four. To society, I am male, sometimes I think about having a different persona than male though. Such as being neither male or female or my gender blending between the two. I was diagnosed with social anxiety in my teenage years and later developed into general anxiety disorder. I also am schizo, it mostly comes through sounds and sometimes small visions. Also, I deal with depression on a daily basis. Sometimes I wake up and do not want to be alive or other days I hear a sound that only I can hear to put it into context.
My upbringing consisted of my mom wanting us to attend church and learn about Jesus, the bible, Christianity. But I never truly believed in it even as a child, even when forced. And, I never attended church either, it was just something my mother would have liked us to do. I mainly became more spiritual as I grew older and it gave me a more open outlook if I do decide to have kids. I did feel bad, and even now that I did not follow the same religion as her. I try to be an agnostic regarding God as a whole.
If I spent a weekend by myself, it would feel refreshing to be honest. I like silence, to hear my thoughts when I am in that relaxed state. External noise is very bothersome to me and it troubles me to concentrate. Being alone never bothered me, I feel powerful when I am alone. I prefer activities that are at my house, so gaming, reading, drawing, typing, writing, etc.
Sports at a young age, I was involved in but it felt forced upon my parents. My dad would claim the opposite, but it felt forced since I was put into football, baseball, and basketball, and I always had mixed feelings about those sports specifically and made me feel like an outcast to this day. Even though those sports are not my favorite, they taught me what I actually do like instead. Such as table tennis and bowling, and e-sports. I never understood the reason sports are popular, or why some people are gifted with special abilities at birth, but I am ok at some sports, good at some, and bad at others such as golf.
I am relatively curious, I'd say, not necessarily ideas that I want to execute. But, they are just my curiosities about the world, like is there really a God, or does gmo food cause cancer, and just things like that, sometimes taboo. I never liked leading something, it felt like there was too much pressure on me or something. If I tried it, I might be decent at it, who knows? But I prefer to not lead, and feel I would be bad at it anyways, so why try? My leadership style would just make sure everyone’s on the same page and treat everyone equally. I think I am coordinated, I don't really like using my hands though I would rather just think about it.
Artistic? I mean kind of, I did film photography, and enjoyed that. My film photography was dark and I was told it seemed to have hidden meaning behind it. Sometimes I draw in my journal with pencil sketches and that is it. I appreciate the aesthetic of pencil only drawings. I like to do it but I sometimes think it looks bad, sometimes good. That is why art is subjective to me.
The past is something that can help with the future and present, but you do not have to rely on it. The present is whatever to me, very mundane. I like to put emphasis on the future, since that gives you an opportunity to grow in some way.
When someone asks for my help, I usually do not want to do it, probably due to my laziness. But if I do decide to help I would do it because I am being forced to. I would say logical consistency is important to me, so yes. Efficiency and productivity are important to me given what context it is. I do not control others, I feel more controlled if anything. My hobbies are collecting expensive pokemon cards, reading, and typing. My learning style is unknown to me, I struggle with loud learning environments and if there is more than one person. I struggle with those things due to my social anxiety. Classes in general give me anxiety unless they are online but I prefer a creative class I think such as the photography class.
I am ok at strategizing I guess, I do a combination of having a structure and improvising. Something important to me is finding a potential partner, having a good education, and finding peace within myself. My aspiration is to love myself deeply. My fear is losing my memory, having cancer, or the fear of holes, makes my skin itch. I would hate it if I was called ignorant or stupid to be honest because that seems like the worst to me. A “high” in my life would be talking to my dad about my dreams in life while on the porch. It feels good to know there is a decent foundation regarding my dad and I even though we do not talk much. A “low” in my life would be having to go through the mental health situations that I can never forget.
I am attached to reality, but often see myself dreaming of being somewhere else, or being someone else, or putting myself into someone else's shoes and see how it feels. When I day dream it can sometimes feel like the world stops and I am in motion while everything stops.
If I was alone in a room, an empty, isolated room. I would think about my parents or even my brothers. Or, how to get out of this inevitable death we call life. If I had to make an important decision, it would take me a long time I feel. But, if I make a decision on something I do not usually change my mind though unless what I did was really irrational. My sad emotions are of great importance to me, sometimes I feel I do not cry enough because it feels so good when I do cry. It could take me hours to express my emotions or realize them.
I appease others a lot. I feel unnecessarily, mainly because I am a peaceful person and will do things to keep it so. But, then again I am not really a conversationalist to begin with. So it makes it seem I am a people pleaser possibly? But, in reality… I would really just like to get out of the situation I am in.
To be honest, I rarely break rules. But, sometimes do think authority should be challenged in some way or they might think they rule over more than what they have.
submitted by veganfizz to MbtiTypeMe [link] [comments]

2024.05.16 08:10 Sad-Pop6649 Lunetten, Utrecht, Netherlands, a higher density green suburb?

Lunetten, Utrecht, Netherlands, a higher density green suburb?
https://preview.redd.it/8yds0x4mdq0d1.png?width=1482&format=png&auto=webp&s=92f6de754e519475997b6af36b838a95b80ae404
This might end up as a bit of a weird post. But mostly a very long one. I don’t think this place I’m presenting here is heaven, but without SuburbHeaven Thursday this subreddit may give viewers the idea that we’re all just hating, and this case study may help illustrate some of the alternatives and what one could like and dislike about them. I know that yelling “the Netherlands!” on any urbanist platform is overdone and so 2 years ago, but I also feel like the available “Netherlands!” content is giving people an incomplete picture. So I’m going to discuss a suburban neighborhood, Lunetten, in Utrecht, where I’ve lived for about a year now. It’s a place built in the 70’s and 80’s, housing about 11,000 people in 5,500ish homes, for a density of just over 4,000 people/km2, 10,000 per square mile.
Obviously that’s pretty dense. In a North American context Lunetten may count more as an example of the “missing middle” than a true suburb, but I feel it still works as a comparison because it is situated at the edge of a city* and it offers features people often look to the suburbs for, like a low noise environment, plenty of green and child oriented features. So, what can we find in this example that people may like or dislike in their suburban areas?
If you want to look along on your favorite online map: 52° 3'53 N, 5° 8'13 E.
Traffic and transit
Lunetten has a clear main road (middle left image, bright pink line on the map) that serves as the main way of getting around by car. It is the only road where the limit is 50 km/h (30 mph), not 30 km/h. The main road has priority over all side roads, indicated by the exits or all side streets being raised a bit. The speed bump automatically makes one slow down to yield to the traffic on the main road. In the places where people’s front doors open towards this main ring there are service roads for them to do their parking and loading and such on. In the busiest part of the ring the road was raised a few meters so pedestrians and cyclists can pass underneath through tunnels. So while the maximum speed cars can go on most of the roads in this place is quite low, the time to destination is pretty good, because a lot was done to ensure a good flow of traffic.
A more debatable feature is the lack of through-traffic options. If you want to leave Lunetten by car there are two roads leading West, connecting to the rest of the city and to the 70km/h raised road that serves as the exit from the city. There is also one small road going South-East along the train line, and that’s it. Despite being next to two highways Lunetten has no direct on- and off-ramp accessing it, and even no direct way across the highways for cars. Cyclists and pedestrians do have options leading in basically all directions. On the one hand this does wonders for how quiet the neighborhood is, but on the other hand that one road taking people in and out of the city is still more prone to blocking than a direct ramp to the highway, so car owners will experience some travel delays because of this.
Lunetten is no public transit hotspot, but there are like two bus lines both going to more connected places including the city’s central hub, and the train station is two stops from said hub as well, which happens to be the biggest train station in the Netherlands.
Public Spaces
Even by Dutch standards Lunetten has a pretty urban-ish density. There’s a mix of mostly rowhouses and midrise apartment buildings, mostly gallery flats up to 5 stories tall, including the ground floor. To give you an idea of Dutch standards for density: I grew up in a commuter town of about the same size as Lunetten, housing 1,000 less people (present day numbers) on roughly 1.25 times the surface**. But what I find interesting is what that space is used for. In Lunetten, on the outer ring of the neighborhood, adjacent to the two highways, busy raised road and train line that surround the neighborhood, there are quite sizable parks (bottom right picture). There’s plenty of space for dogs to run off their leash, there are football/play fields, there are two skate parks, two ponds for amphibians to spend the winter in (granted: that’s an amenity most people could live without) and an entire petting zoo, in case you had doubts this was a suburb. Together with a football/soccer club, a tennis club, some allotment gardens and a small business park near the train station these parks take up most of the space where traffic noise is an issue. There is room for recreation and other daytime activities in the noisy bits (there are sound screens, but that’s not blocking all of the noise) so that peoples’ homes can mostly be in the quiet parts, shielded from noise by trees and stuff. And then there’s the neighborhood interior. You’ll see on the map a few yellow locations marked as “playground/square”, but in reality many, probably most, of the dark green “courtyards” contain a little playground too. All of the courtyards have grass, most if not all of them have trees, many of those trees being taller than the midrises. Some of the courtyards feature parking space as well***. The middle right image is far from the greenest example. The combination of the parks and the courtyards make Lunetten much greener than the actual smallish town I lived in mentioned previously. Plenty of birds live here too, including a bunch of water birds who enjoy the ditches and canals. In the smallish town much more of the space was simply used for row houses with pretty large gardens, and in the newer parts a bunch of four home and two home units and free standing homes as well****.
Which brings me to the reality check. With all these pedestrianized public spaces around and loads of playgrounds, is Lunetten actually a good neighborhood to raise kids? From what I can tell, opinions are mixed. Because one thing that does tend to come with density of people is density of crime. In my year here I have personally witnessed a man snorting coke off his bicycle saddle, in broad daylight, in the middle of a bike lane near a skatepark with playing children in it*****. There is also the occasional lost shopping cart dumped in a canal and apparently there was a pretty shocking supermarket robbery just before I moved in. Especially if your budget only allows for an apartment and not a house I could imagine feeling a little scared to let young children wander around near the house on their own, also maybe because of the canals and ditches they might fall into. The sweet spot age for children in Lunetten is probably around 9-12, old enough to be trusted with their own safety around water and some minor drug use and vandalism, yet young enough to fully enjoy all the outdoor play space.
The blame for the crime is often put on the street pattern that is said to attract drug dealers and the like who love having good get away options, and the many green public spaces and nice dry apartment building entrances are certainly not the worst place a homeless person could go to for another night of hopefully not being bothered by the police. More recently developed neighborhoods have tried to avoid these effects by using a “cauliflower pattern” for their streets, branched streets ending in a bunch of (at least to cars) dead ends. The downside of that pattern seems to be less sense of community. The more direct neighbors you have, the more interaction. That’s why cul-de-sacs can be so isolating after all. Lunetten is not the worst crimey part of its parent by a long shot, but it’s noticeable enough to be worth mentioning.
A planned neighborhood
The big advantage I think Lunetten has over a lot of other places is that it was designed in one go. The land it was built on was part of the Dutch Water Line******, and had to stay free of buildings and obstructions that would block the firing lines of defending artillery. (That’s what the two weird shapes in the northern park are: old fortifications, called Lunette 3 and 4. Hence the suburb’s name.) When the line was legally disbanded in 1963 Utrecht started planning to build a new neighborhood here. Because of the highways (current configuration built at the same time as the suburb) and the train line that surround the place it was very clear to where the neighborhood would stretch. And it shows. The suburb is designed as a cohesive whole. There’s a neighborhood shopping center (bottom left image and the main soft pink blob on the map) at the heart of the neighborhood. It has two supermarkets, some small other shops, several small fast food/lunch places in different styles, two bicycle shops and repair places (it’s the Netherlands), a restaurant (there’s another one on one of the forts in the park, which doubles as a sort of social work place), a community center which houses some clubs and such (not the scouts, those have a place in one of the parks) as well as a library. There’s even a bar (I think, I should maybe go there ones), and some space where small neighborhood markets and events turn up with some regularity. The other main soft pink and yellow blob in a convenient central location on the map is two elementary schools*******. In many more organically grown neighborhoods or places the amenities wouldn’t be so conveniently centralized or would eventually be “centralized” on the outskirt of town.
The Bijlmer comparison, what not to do
Another interesting point of comparison I think is the Bijlmer (Bijlmermeer officially) in Amsterdam, another green neighborhood designed as one big plan outside of its parent city’s core, yet quite different. The Bijlmer is nationally famous as a bit of a ghetto, a place where you don’t want to live. (To be fair: the plane falling down on it didn’t help its case.) A lot of work has been done to improve the place, but its initial “ghettoization” was surprising because the Bijlmer was never intended to even be particularly affordable, but more of a vertical suburb, spacious family apartments (around 120 m2) for 100,000 people or more in large highrise buildings with between them plenty of green. A quiet place, with quick access to the city, using density to save on land use and travel time. There are three main differences I see between the struggling Bijlmer and “doing pretty well” Lunetten: 1 The Bijlmer has a higher density through the use of massive apartment buildings, literally and figuratively increasing the distance between people’s homes and the public space. 2 The Bijlmer is a much bigger place, I’m not sure they ever got to those 100,000 inhabitants, but it certainly loses that towny vibe. 3 They’ve been correcting this in the rebabilitation, but as designed the Bijlmer had basically no amenities. It wasn’t a town or city, it was people storage, housing for people who mentally lived several kilometers away but couldn’t afford it there. See the rest of this subreddit for why that doesn’t work for many people.
Interdependency with other suburbs
Looking back on growing up in that smallish town I notice that there really isn’t that much of a difference in amenities. The town offered much of the same things Lunetten does. But Lunetten’s status as a suburb gives it a big advantage over that town. Because while suburbs mostly serve themselves, they also serve each other. Take sports: there’s a football and tennis club and two indoor sports halls in Lunetten, but what if I want to swim or throw spears instead? Well, there’s a pool in a suburb to the North, as well as an athletics stadium. After elementary school there’s no middle/high school in Lunetten, but there are in nearby neighborhoods, and there are even college options******** spread throughout different suburbs and neighborhoods. These things are closer than they are in a small town not because the suburb is associated with a city center, but because it is associated with other suburbs. There are things I liked about the commuter town, but having to take either an honestly too long bike trip or a bus ride that only went whenever it was not convenient for me whenever I wanted to do something my town didn’t provide, like going to school, wasn’t one of them. And I say that even as a spoiled person whose commuter town at least had buses and bicycle paths.
Conclusion
And that is I think the main takeaway from this absolute wall of text: suburbs don’t have to be places where there’s nothing to do and you feel disconnected from the world. That’s the entire point of living in a suburb instead of in a town: there are other places nearby. There is a balance to be found between private space, public space and connectivity. Essentially, in a neighborhood of 10,000 people, for every 100x100 meters of public space or amenities either every person gets 1 square meter less private space or everybody gets maybe a few meters of extra travel distance on the average trip. Lunetten probably provides too little private space for the taste of many North American suburbanites, but it does show I think that there is quite a bit of room on those sliders. A green place with amenities sort of near other places can still be built with more spacious houses. (Just maybe go easy on the sea of lawns?) And that’s when all the separated bike lanes and other urbanist talking points really start making sense: when you found the balance between having your own place, having local places worth going to and being close enough to other places worth going to, then you want a good way to get there.
The other takeaway I feel is that it pays to design neighborhoods as a unit. And that’s another reason why suburbs can be better than towns. A town of 10,000 residents can’t plan ahead for the next 10,000, but a city of several hundred thousand people can. And it pays off. Don’t lose track of the human scale though, planning 10,000 residents ahead might actually be better than planning 100,000 or 1,000,000 residents ahead when it comes to suburbs. It is still supposed to feel like a quiet little place with maybe a bit of its own identity.
* On the other side of one of the highways there’s a bit of forest tied to several historic estates that’s very nice for walking in as well as a golf course half as big as this entire neighborhood, this really is the edge of town and will be for the foreseeable future.
** I’ve also lived in several other cities since then, near the city center, further out and on the far edge in a highrise neighborhood. Honestly I might still prefer the smaller cities I’ve lived in, being near everything the city offers and even to some of the stuff outside of it. But work took me back to a larger city (pretend I said “less tiny” if you’re from Mexico City or something), and I could honestly have landed in a much worse place than this particular suburb.
*** Fun fact: this is one of the very few neighborhoods of Utrecht where parking is currently still free, because of enough parking space and enough distance to the city center. It really is a suburb.
**** In the 90’s a style of more expensive neighborhoods called “Vinex” set standards for the ratio of more expensive to cheaper houses in those neighborhoods, and ever since both contractors and local politicians refuse to let go of those ratios everywhere. A newer, competing vision is that we shouldn’t be building new neighborhoods at all, just filling in the gaps in our cities. So now we mostly build quite large houses, but only in very small spaces. We’re still not sure where that massive housing shortage came from, somehow.
***** I stopped and addressed him because I thought he was having bicycle trouble, chain ran off or something. Quite a chill dude, very apologetic, but still maybe not exactly what the average parent is looking for in a neighbor.
****** More accurately: Holland Waterline, because it wasn’t the only Dutch waterline, but it was the main one defending the part called Holland. But that sounds a bit off in English.
******* We have a bit of a weird school system, for every public elementary school there is at least one other founded on religious grounds or based on some specific didactic theory. That’s why there are two schools in the same central location instead of just one bigger school or two in separate locations.
******** If I start going into the differences in advanced education systems we’ll be here all day, but there are options within cycling distance ranging from trade school to university, depending on the field you actually want to study *********.
********* I could start using other symbols instead of these confusingly long rows of asterisks, but where would be the fun in that?
submitted by Sad-Pop6649 to Suburbanhell [link] [comments]

2024.05.16 07:42 Scared_Set7883 Aspergillus luchuensis rice HELP

Aspergillus luchuensis rice HELP
Hi, I buy for the first time this spores of aspergillus luchuensis albino Version says in the web fermentationculture.eu where I bought them, I grown it on rice, after 40 hrs was sporulating white, but at 48 get this kind of green, smells a little bit of lemon zest but it doesn’t taste like acid or citric as most of pages says, I’m not sure if it’s correctly grown or not, not sure if it has to get that green color, thanks
submitted by Scared_Set7883 to fermentation [link] [comments]

2024.05.16 07:32 CarelessSentence1709 Coates comment about wondering why he thought Judy Garland was 39 playing 10 year old Dorothy has the simplest answer…..The Wizard of Oz came out in 1939.

I don’t even know why I knew that, except maybe from studying Radio/TV/Film in college, and that movie being the first color picture was likely something I heard multiple times….
But I thought Dorothy was a little older than 10. And Judy Garland I thought was younger than 17, I saw 16 but I also think I read somewhere that they changed her age for contractual reasons. But that may have been Mila Kunis lying to get on That 70s Show.
submitted by CarelessSentence1709 to orangeisthenewblack [link] [comments]

2024.05.16 07:26 AssetHobby After 6k credits wasted - finally nailed creating Adult Coloring Pages through Leonardo!

After 6k credits wasted - finally nailed creating Adult Coloring Pages through Leonardo! submitted by AssetHobby to leonardoai [link] [comments]

2024.05.16 07:19 ls4ka Translating my Hungarian WWII generation GrandPa’s book of published (sort of) poems

So kind of need opinions on if I should continue. I (31f) lost my GrandPa when I was 6 but he had so many books he wrote, from war anthologies to historical biographies to poetry and radio broadcasts (he worked as a radio jockey during the Hungarian Revolution for Radio Free Europe and instigated a little too much violence 😅). Anyways, he was pulled out of college during the war for writing something anti nazi and ended up on the Russian front as an artillery spotter. I only give this background as it colors the poem a bit as they would often get shot out of trees. These two poems were written in Hungarian but are after he had Immigrated to NYC.
Translation is really hard. Please understand I am trying to keep his words and intent as close to his original thoughts as possible and so it may not be perfect or read as well in English. Still, looking for thoughts on if translating a series of his poems might be worth it.
So is this work engaging to any of you?
Two Selected Poems by Karoly Szakmary 1970
submitted by ls4ka to poetry_critics [link] [comments]

2024.05.16 07:14 Contactunderground “THE EARTH - A LIVING CREATURE!” This is the message of a brief video created from NASA satellite imagery.

“THE EARTH - A LIVING CREATURE!”
Joseph Burkes MD
I was a contact team coordinator for the CE-5 Initiative in Los Angeles from 1992 to 1998. “She is alive. She is awake and She loves us.” is the message that I received during of a kind of channeling experience that I had back in 1994 at Carlsbad Caverns New Mexico. It was an occurrence that Linda Irwin of the Unseen World radio show called a "contact download.”

I was meditating 600 feet underground. It just an hour before closing time. I sat alone in a small amphitheater cut into the rock face. With no expectations of results, I decided to reach out with my mind and try to contact with what I imagine is Earth Mother. She is called Gaia by many.

Soon two beings appeared in my mind's eye. Dressed in the garb of medieval pilgrims, I was informed that I could not interface with her directly, but through them a link could be established.

What followed was an "awake dream" that was so poignant because it combined striking visual imagery in full color with emotion and thought. The message that I “received” was as follows:
The Earth is like a beautiful woman, alive and awake and conscious of her reproductive power. Her love for all of her children, plants, animals, including us is profound. But humankind is now experienced by her as if we were a kind of pest. The rivers and oceans, her life’s blood, the mountains her skin and the forests her fur, are infested with a blight called man.

So, a cleansing has been called for and this brings her sadness. Brief images of devastation flashed through my mind during the download. Like a forest animal that rubs against a tree or dives into a lake to cleanse her fur, I saw earthquakes smashing cities, and walls of water, tsunamis, hitting the coasts.

But like a mother preparing to give birth, volcanic islands rose from the ocean floor to make new land, new homes for more of her beloved creatures.

I appreciate the work of those who created this brief YouTube video that still gives me pause to remember a strange bittersweet experience from three decades ago.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zlqjz9OEhk0

Additional Remarks:
Back in the 1980s I was part of a movement of scientists and physicians that studied the possible effects of an all-out-nuclear war in which thousands of megatons of TNT equivalent explosives might be detonated over our cities.

Hundreds of millions would be killed immediately and billions more from what is called "Nuclear Winter." That dreaded event would result as the ashes of burned cities blocked out the sun. Our calculations, however, indicated that in the southern hemisphere there would be many survivors. Civilization as we know it would end, but human life most certainly would go on.

We cannot destroy the Earth. Perhaps it is an expression of our limitless pride that makes us think that we can. As suggested by my "contact download" her capacity to generate new life is boundless.

Many contact experiencers, while in communication with what we imagine are extraterrestrials, describe being shown images of terrible environmental destruction. This type of encounter conveys the impression that the "aliens" (my wife Yael calls them "the whatevers" as she is not very interested in these matters) really do care about the fate of our planet.

I suggest that we are getting important wake up calls about the need to become better stewards of this jewel of a planet. Sometimes the message comes from medical doctors like my colleagues in The Nobel Peace Prize winning organization International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War. Sometimes the warnings come from those "little grey guys with wrap around eyes" that enter our minds with what have been called inconvenient truths.


Comments:
Name deleted: I had a similar contact experience. On 12/12/12, I lay down to meditate, which I always do, before sleep. On this particular night, which was associated with the end of the Mayan Calendar, I immediately began to get a "download" of images. It was as if there was a slide show going on in my mind's eye. Image after image of nuclear holocaust, natural disasters, death and destruction. These images were interspersed with images of mathematical formulas...none of which I recognized consciously. Pages and pages of mathematical formulas. This went on all night long and I didn't get a wink of sleep. The following night, the same went on as soon as I closed my eyes to meditate. This time I began to telepath questions to whomever or whatever was sending me the downloaded images. The answers I got were: 1. That I was being shown images of past and possible futures, 2. That our earth and our species is in peril if we continue on this path of self-destruction, and 3. I asked about the math and was told..."Don't worry. You now have it and will understand it when you need it." This experience was a profound and "otherworldly" awakening for me, one that led me to begin exploring my relationship both with the earth on a deeper level, and also my connections with the RAHMA mission.

Joseph Burkes Thank you for sharing your personal contact experiences. I too had a download that involved mathematical equations that I couldn't understand other than they had to do with determinants of the contact drama and interactions between human action and a masterplan to open up our planet to peaceful contact with UFO intelligence.

submitted by Contactunderground to HighStrangeness [link] [comments]

2024.05.16 07:13 Throwaway727733 I was the last person she ever talked to.

Throwaway for obvious reasons. TW: Suicide. So some context. I work/worked (recently submitted my two weeks) at a very high end gunshop. I typically dealt with higher end items and collector grade pieces. The people on the sales floor were very busy and I was called in as back up. I usually enjoyed when that happened to due to me not needing to hit a sales quota and can take my time with new customers, ensuring to answer any and all questions and generally be as approachable as possible as I am (was) very passionate about the sport/hobby. I have been in this industry for almost 10 years now and generally enjoyed it. Anyway, she came in looking like a deer in headlights, not an uncommon thing to see in a gunshop. One of my guys asked me if i could work with her due to everyone else being tied up. No worries, I love working with people, especially those new to firearms.
We spent a good 45 minuets to an hour going over options and pricing. She finally settled on a .22 caliber handgun and i knocked off some money on the ammo. For all intents and purposes allow me to reiterate that I have been in this industry for almost 10 years. I do my due diligence. I know which questions to ask and how to ask them. Besides, we spent a fair amount of time together. I asked her why she got into shooting. Her resposone was that several of her friends got firearms during 2020 and she wanted to learn more/target shoot with her friends. Seems pretty reasonable enough. General small talk, where she went to college and things like that since we were the same age. She even pointed out a typo in a massive display sign. I didnt see/feel any red flags. Pretty typical sale, nothing stuck out to me. She filled out the paper work, I ran her background check and she got an instant proceed. (For those that dont know, the background checks are run through an FBI database and they give you one of three answers. 1. Proceed 2. Delay 3. Deny.) I ring up the sale, and wrote my personal contact info and the contact info of a local trainer I have good rapport with. She paid, thanked me and left.
The following morning I came in as per usual, and was prepping for my day. I get paged to come to the office as there were local PD that wanted to speak to me. PD: "Are you employee #?" M: "yeah, why?" PD: "Did you sell any [insert brand] yesterday?" M: "Youre going to have to narrow that down" PD: "[This brand] .22 LR?" M: "okay, yea [Insert the transaction details here.]" PD: "anything seem odd about that sale?" M: "honestly, no. Pretty friendly customer, very kind. Standard sale." M: "Am I in any sort of trouble?" PD: "No, we recovered the firearm at a crime scene and needed to determine if it was a homicide or not" M: "is [insert customer name] okay?" PD: "well we found her body and just wanted to follow up. Thanks have a good day"
Im going to be completely honest, after the PD left and I was alone, I broke down. Ive have had several friends over the years "check out early" to the point where I swore I'd never go to another funeral for someone my age or younger than me again. I know that pain. I know it all too well.
I hate to say, this isnt a first. Its somewhat par for the course in this industry, but she immediately took her life after the transaction. Usually, these type of things (PD involvement) are a simple phone call asking for the paperwork. I cant help to feel like I failed. Like I failed to catch something or notice something or maybe I didnt ask the right questions or not enough questions. Was there anything I could have done different? This felt personal to me. I hardly knew anything about her other than where she went to school and that she majored in English and had a keen eye for grammatical typos. I do know that she was kind. This fucking hurt. It has been over a year since this occurred and it still keeps me up at night some nights.
If you have read this far, I appreciate you giving me the space to vent. With all of my rambling concluded, I want to leave you with this: You never know what people are going through, be kind. If you or anyone in your life are showing signs of need support, I beg you, please reach out. The number here in the US is: 988
Please dont feel any any shame reaching out, Id rather you reach out than not be here. This chance meeting is one that I will carry with me for a long time.
submitted by Throwaway727733 to offmychest [link] [comments]

2024.05.16 07:13 Contactunderground “THE EARTH - A LIVING CREATURE!” This is the message of a brief video created from NASA satellite imagery.

“THE EARTH - A LIVING CREATURE!”
This is the message of a brief video created from NASA satellite imagery.
Joseph Burkes MD
I was a contact team coordinator for the CE-5 Initiative in Los Angeles from 1992 to 1998. “She is alive. She is awake and She loves us.” is the message that I received during of a kind of channeling experience that I had back in 1994 at Carlsbad Caverns New Mexico. It was an occurrence that Linda Irwin of the Unseen World radio show called a "contact download.”

I was meditating 600 feet underground. It just an hour before closing time. I sat alone in a small amphitheater cut into the rock face. With no expectations of results, I decided to reach out with my mind and try to contact with what I imagine is Earth Mother. She is called Gaia by many.

Soon two beings appeared in my mind's eye. Dressed in the garb of medieval pilgrims, I was informed that I could not interface with her directly, but through them a link could be established.

What followed was an "awake dream" that was so poignant because it combined striking visual imagery in full color with emotion and thought. The message that I “received” was as follows:
The Earth is like a beautiful woman, alive and awake and conscious of her reproductive power. Her love for all of her children, plants, animals, including us is profound. But humankind is now experienced by her as if we were a kind of pest. The rivers and oceans, her life’s blood, the mountains her skin and the forests her fur, are infested with a blight called man.

So, a cleansing has been called for and this brings her sadness. Brief images of devastation flashed through my mind during the download. Like a forest animal that rubs against a tree or dives into a lake to cleanse her fur, I saw earthquakes smashing cities, and walls of water, tsunamis, hitting the coasts.

But like a mother preparing to give birth, volcanic islands rose from the ocean floor to make new land, new homes for more of her beloved creatures.

I appreciate the work of those who created this brief YouTube video that still gives me pause to remember a strange bittersweet experience from three decades ago.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zlqjz9OEhk0

Additional Remarks:
Back in the 1980s I was part of a movement of scientists and physicians that studied the possible effects of an all-out-nuclear war in which thousands of megatons of TNT equivalent explosives might be detonated over our cities.

Hundreds of millions would be killed immediately and billions more from what is called "Nuclear Winter." That dreaded event would result as the ashes of burned cities blocked out the sun. Our calculations, however, indicated that in the southern hemisphere there would be many survivors. Civilization as we know it would end, but human life most certainly would go on.

We cannot destroy the Earth. Perhaps it is an expression of our limitless pride that makes us think that we can. As suggested by my "contact download" her capacity to generate new life is boundless.

Many contact experiencers, while in communication with what we imagine are extraterrestrials, describe being shown images of terrible environmental destruction. This type of encounter conveys the impression that the "aliens" (my wife Yael calls them "the whatevers" as she is not very interested in these matters) really do care about the fate of our planet.

I suggest that we are getting important wake up calls about the need to become better stewards of this jewel of a planet. Sometimes the message comes from medical doctors like my colleagues in The Nobel Peace Prize winning organization International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War. Sometimes the warnings come from those "little grey guys with wrap around eyes" that enter our minds with what have been called inconvenient truths.


Comments:
Name deleted: I had a similar contact experience. On 12/12/12, I lay down to meditate, which I always do, before sleep. On this particular night, which was associated with the end of the Mayan Calendar, I immediately began to get a "download" of images. It was as if there was a slide show going on in my mind's eye. Image after image of nuclear holocaust, natural disasters, death and destruction. These images were interspersed with images of mathematical formulas...none of which I recognized consciously. Pages and pages of mathematical formulas. This went on all night long and I didn't get a wink of sleep. The following night, the same went on as soon as I closed my eyes to meditate. This time I began to telepath questions to whomever or whatever was sending me the downloaded images. The answers I got were: 1. That I was being shown images of past and possible futures, 2. That our earth and our species is in peril if we continue on this path of self-destruction, and 3. I asked about the math and was told..."Don't worry. You now have it and will understand it when you need it." This experience was a profound and "otherworldly" awakening for me, one that led me to begin exploring my relationship both with the earth on a deeper level, and also my connections with the RAHMA mission.

Joseph Burkes Thank you for sharing your personal contact experiences. I too had a download that involved mathematical equations that I couldn't understand other than they had to do with determinants of the contact drama and interactions between human action and a masterplan to open up our planet to peaceful contact with UFO intelligence.

submitted by Contactunderground to Experiencers [link] [comments]

2024.05.16 07:11 Contactunderground “THE EARTH - A LIVING CREATURE!” This is the message of a brief video created from NASA satellite imagery.

“THE EARTH - A LIVING CREATURE!”
Joseph Burkes MD
I was a contact team coordinator for the CE-5 Initiative in Los Angeles from 1992 to 1998. “She is alive. She is awake and She loves us.” is the message that I received during of a kind of channeling experience that I had back in 1994 at Carlsbad Caverns New Mexico. It was an occurrence that Linda Irwin of the Unseen World radio show called a "contact download.”

I was meditating 600 feet underground. It just an hour before closing time. I sat alone in a small amphitheater cut into the rock face. With no expectations of results, I decided to reach out with my mind and try to contact with what I imagine is Earth Mother. She is called Gaia by many.

Soon two beings appeared in my mind's eye. Dressed in the garb of medieval pilgrims, I was informed that I could not interface with her directly, but through them a link could be established.

What followed was an "awake dream" that was so poignant because it combined striking visual imagery in full color with emotion and thought. The message that I “received” was as follows:
The Earth is like a beautiful woman, alive and awake and conscious of her reproductive power. Her love for all of her children, plants, animals, including us is profound. But humankind is now experienced by her as if we were a kind of pest. The rivers and oceans, her life’s blood, the mountains her skin and the forests her fur, are infested with a blight called man.

So, a cleansing has been called for and this brings her sadness. Brief images of devastation flashed through my mind during the download. Like a forest animal that rubs against a tree or dives into a lake to cleanse her fur, I saw earthquakes smashing cities, and walls of water, tsunamis, hitting the coasts.

But like a mother preparing to give birth, volcanic islands rose from the ocean floor to make new land, new homes for more of her beloved creatures.

I appreciate the work of those who created this brief YouTube video that still gives me pause to remember a strange bittersweet experience from three decades ago.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zlqjz9OEhk0

Additional Remarks:
Back in the 1980s I was part of a movement of scientists and physicians that studied the possible effects of an all-out-nuclear war in which thousands of megatons of TNT equivalent explosives might be detonated over our cities.

Hundreds of millions would be killed immediately and billions more from what is called "Nuclear Winter." That dreaded event would result as the ashes of burned cities blocked out the sun. Our calculations, however, indicated that in the southern hemisphere there would be many survivors. Civilization as we know it would end, but human life most certainly would go on.

We cannot destroy the Earth. Perhaps it is an expression of our limitless pride that makes us think that we can. As suggested by my "contact download" her capacity to generate new life is boundless.

Many contact experiencers, while in communication with what we imagine are extraterrestrials, describe being shown images of terrible environmental destruction. This type of encounter conveys the impression that the "aliens" (my wife Yael calls them "the whatevers" as she is not very interested in these matters) really do care about the fate of our planet.

I suggest that we are getting important wake up calls about the need to become better stewards of this jewel of a planet. Sometimes the message comes from medical doctors like my colleagues in The Nobel Peace Prize winning organization International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War. Sometimes the warnings come from those "little grey guys with wrap around eyes" that enter our minds with what have been called inconvenient truths.


Comments:
Name deleted: I had a similar contact experience. On 12/12/12, I lay down to meditate, which I always do, before sleep. On this particular night, which was associated with the end of the Mayan Calendar, I immediately began to get a "download" of images. It was as if there was a slide show going on in my mind's eye. Image after image of nuclear holocaust, natural disasters, death and destruction. These images were interspersed with images of mathematical formulas...none of which I recognized consciously. Pages and pages of mathematical formulas. This went on all night long and I didn't get a wink of sleep. The following night, the same went on as soon as I closed my eyes to meditate. This time I began to telepath questions to whomever or whatever was sending me the downloaded images. The answers I got were: 1. That I was being shown images of past and possible futures, 2. That our earth and our species is in peril if we continue on this path of self-destruction, and 3. I asked about the math and was told..."Don't worry. You now have it and will understand it when you need it." This experience was a profound and "otherworldly" awakening for me, one that led me to begin exploring my relationship both with the earth on a deeper level, and also my connections with the RAHMA mission.

Joseph Burkes Thank you for sharing your personal contact experiences. I too had a download that involved mathematical equations that I couldn't understand other than they had to do with determinants of the contact drama and interactions between human action and a masterplan to open up our planet to peaceful contact with UFO intelligence.

submitted by Contactunderground to ContactUnderground [link] [comments]

2024.05.16 07:10 Contactunderground “THE EARTH - A LIVING CREATURE!” This is the message of a brief video created from NASA satellite imagery.

“THE EARTH - A LIVING CREATURE!”
Joseph Burkes MD 2018
I was a contact team coordinator for the CE-5 Initiative in Los Angeles from 1992 to 1998. “She is alive. She is awake and She loves us.” is the message that I received during of a kind of channeling experience that I had back in 1994 at Carlsbad Caverns New Mexico. It was an occurrence that Linda Irwin of the Unseen World radio show called a "contact download.”

I was meditating 600 feet underground. It just an hour before closing time. I sat alone in a small amphitheater cut into the rock face. With no expectations of results, I decided to reach out with my mind and try to contact with what I imagine is Earth Mother. She is called Gaia by many.

Soon two beings appeared in my mind's eye. Dressed in the garb of medieval pilgrims, I was informed that I could not interface with her directly, but through them a link could be established.

What followed was an "awake dream" that was so poignant because it combined striking visual imagery in full color with emotion and thought. The message that I “received” was as follows:
The Earth is like a beautiful woman, alive and awake and conscious of her reproductive power. Her love for all of her children, plants, animals, including us is profound. But humankind is now experienced by her as if we were a kind of pest. The rivers and oceans, her life’s blood, the mountains her skin and the forests her fur, are infested with a blight called man.

So, a cleansing has been called for and this brings her sadness. Brief images of devastation flashed through my mind during the download. Like a forest animal that rubs against a tree or dives into a lake to cleanse her fur, I saw earthquakes smashing cities, and walls of water, tsunamis, hitting the coasts.

But like a mother preparing to give birth, volcanic islands rose from the ocean floor to make new land, new homes for more of her beloved creatures.

I appreciate the work of those who created this brief YouTube video that still gives me pause to remember a strange bittersweet experience from three decades ago.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zlqjz9OEhk0

Additional Remarks:
Back in the 1980s I was part of a movement of scientists and physicians that studied the possible effects of an all-out-nuclear war in which thousands of megatons of TNT equivalent explosives might be detonated over our cities.

Hundreds of millions would be killed immediately and billions more from what is called "Nuclear Winter." That dreaded event would result as the ashes of burned cities blocked out the sun. Our calculations, however, indicated that in the southern hemisphere there would be many survivors. Civilization as we know it would end, but human life most certainly would go on.

We cannot destroy the Earth. Perhaps it is an expression of our limitless pride that makes us think that we can. As suggested by my "contact download" her capacity to generate new life is boundless.

Many contact experiencers, while in communication with what we imagine are extraterrestrials, describe being shown images of terrible environmental destruction. This type of encounter conveys the impression that the "aliens" (my wife Yael calls them "the whatevers" as she is not very interested in these matters) really do care about the fate of our planet.

I suggest that we are getting important wake up calls about the need to become better stewards of this jewel of a planet. Sometimes the message comes from medical doctors like my colleagues in The Nobel Peace Prize winning organization International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War. Sometimes the warnings come from those "little grey guys with wrap around eyes" that enter our minds with what have been called inconvenient truths.


Comments:
Name deleted: I had a similar contact experience. On 12/12/12, I lay down to meditate, which I always do, before sleep. On this particular night, which was associated with the end of the Mayan Calendar, I immediately began to get a "download" of images. It was as if there was a slide show going on in my mind's eye. Image after image of nuclear holocaust, natural disasters, death and destruction. These images were interspersed with images of mathematical formulas...none of which I recognized consciously. Pages and pages of mathematical formulas. This went on all night long and I didn't get a wink of sleep. The following night, the same went on as soon as I closed my eyes to meditate. This time I began to telepath questions to whomever or whatever was sending me the downloaded images. The answers I got were: 1. That I was being shown images of past and possible futures, 2. That our earth and our species is in peril if we continue on this path of self-destruction, and 3. I asked about the math and was told..."Don't worry. You now have it and will understand it when you need it." This experience was a profound and "otherworldly" awakening for me, one that led me to begin exploring my relationship both with the earth on a deeper level, and also my connections with the RAHMA mission.

Joseph Burkes Thank you for sharing your personal contact experiences. I too had a download that involved mathematical equations that I couldn't understand other than they had to do with determinants of the contact drama and interactions between human action and a masterplan to open up our planet to peaceful contact with UFO intelligence.

submitted by Contactunderground to CE5 [link] [comments]

2024.05.16 07:08 Contactunderground “THE EARTH - A LIVING CREATURE!” This is the message of a brief video created from NASA satellite imagery.

“THE EARTH - A LIVING CREATURE!”
Joseph Burkes MD 2018
I was a contact team coordinator for the CE-5 Initiative in Los Angeles from 1992 to 1998. “She is alive. She is awake and She loves us.” is the message that I received during of a kind of channeling experience that I had back in 1994 at Carlsbad Caverns New Mexico. It was an occurrence that Linda Irwin of the Unseen World radio show called a "contact download.”

I was meditating 600 feet underground. It just an hour before closing time. I sat alone in a small amphitheater cut into the rock face. With no expectations of results, I decided to reach out with my mind and try to contact with what I imagine is Earth Mother. She is called Gaia by many.

Soon two beings appeared in my mind's eye. Dressed in the garb of medieval pilgrims, I was informed that I could not interface with her directly, but through them a link could be established.

What followed was an "awake dream" that was so poignant because it combined striking visual imagery in full color with emotion and thought. The message that I “received” was as follows:
The Earth is like a beautiful woman, alive and awake and conscious of her reproductive power. Her love for all of her children, plants, animals, including us is profound. But humankind is now experienced by her as if we were a kind of pest. The rivers and oceans, her life’s blood, the mountains her skin and the forests her fur, are infested with a blight called man.

So, a cleansing has been called for and this brings her sadness. Brief images of devastation flashed through my mind during the download. Like a forest animal that rubs against a tree or dives into a lake to cleanse her fur, I saw earthquakes smashing cities, and walls of water, tsunamis, hitting the coasts.

But like a mother preparing to give birth, volcanic islands rose from the ocean floor to make new land, new homes for more of her beloved creatures.

I appreciate the work of those who created this brief YouTube video that still gives me pause to remember a strange bittersweet experience from three decades ago.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zlqjz9OEhk0

Additional Remarks:
Back in the 1980s I was part of a movement of scientists and physicians that studied the possible effects of an all-out-nuclear war in which thousands of megatons of TNT equivalent explosives might be detonated over our cities.

Hundreds of millions would be killed immediately and billions more from what is called "Nuclear Winter." That dreaded event would result as the ashes of burned cities blocked out the sun. Our calculations, however, indicated that in the southern hemisphere there would be many survivors. Civilization as we know it would end, but human life most certainly would go on.

We cannot destroy the Earth. Perhaps it is an expression of our limitless pride that makes us think that we can. As suggested by my "contact download" her capacity to generate new life is boundless.

Many contact experiencers, while in communication with what we imagine are extraterrestrials, describe being shown images of terrible environmental destruction. This type of encounter conveys the impression that the "aliens" (my wife Yael calls them "the whatevers" as she is not very interested in these matters) really do care about the fate of our planet.

I suggest that we are getting important wake up calls about the need to become better stewards of this jewel of a planet. Sometimes the message comes from medical doctors like my colleagues in The Nobel Peace Prize winning organization International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War. Sometimes the warnings come from those "little grey guys with wrap around eyes" that enter our minds with what have been called inconvenient truths.


Comments:
Name deleted: I had a similar contact experience. On 12/12/12, I lay down to meditate, which I always do, before sleep. On this particular night, which was associated with the end of the Mayan Calendar, I immediately began to get a "download" of images. It was as if there was a slide show going on in my mind's eye. Image after image of nuclear holocaust, natural disasters, death and destruction. These images were interspersed with images of mathematical formulas...none of which I recognized consciously. Pages and pages of mathematical formulas. This went on all night long and I didn't get a wink of sleep. The following night, the same went on as soon as I closed my eyes to meditate. This time I began to telepath questions to whomever or whatever was sending me the downloaded images. The answers I got were: 1. That I was being shown images of past and possible futures, 2. That our earth and our species is in peril if we continue on this path of self-destruction, and 3. I asked about the math and was told..."Don't worry. You now have it and will understand it when you need it." This experience was a profound and "otherworldly" awakening for me, one that led me to begin exploring my relationship both with the earth on a deeper level, and also my connections with the RAHMA mission.

Joseph Burkes Thank you for sharing your personal contact experiences. I too had a download that involved mathematical equations that I couldn't understand other than they had to do with determinants of the contact drama and interactions between human action and a masterplan to open up our planet to peaceful contact with UFO intelligence.

submitted by Contactunderground to AnomalousEvidence [link] [comments]

2024.05.16 07:06 Sea-Psychology-1512 AITA for not going to an "old friend's" baby shower?

(Heads up, this is a long one as the background is a lot.)
I (22 F) was invited to my friend's baby shower. For fear and to protect myself due to past trauma, let's name her H. H was my friend since middle school. In high school, she dated G and now they are married and are expecting a baby.
Here's some background info. Before H and G started dating, H, our friends, and I found G and his group of friends annoying. All through high school, G and his group kept making fun of me and annoying me just because they had tried to set me up with one of G's friends, who I kept rejecting. (As a 1st gen, my family had me involved in school and I did after-school activities so I could get into good colleges in the future. I focused on school, and I didn't have much time for friends, much less for a guy. I also didn't want a relationship due to a past event.) Well, even after G's friend took the hit, his group wouldn’t leave me alone. My family is fairly known, so everyone knew where we lived. G's group would annoy me at school, which included classes we might’ve had in common, being in the same building, finding me before or after school, and would even drive by my home yelling "That's my girlfriend" at the top of their lungs. H was part of my friend group and she agreed that the guys were being childish and our friend group basically called it harassment. Many times, G's group actually got me in trouble with my parents. My parents would believe them if the group yelled outside the house. The group also called me out on social media once and when I stood up for myself, my family told me to delete what I had commented as they didn't want their perfect girl to be involved in drama. (In my opinion, I don’t think my parents wanted their friends to see the colorful language I used.)
Sometime later, H tells our group that she started dating G. They had ups and downs in the relationship. G cheated, he wasn't winning over H's family and wouldn't put her first in some situations. While they were dating, G and his group kept messing with me. When a friend and I planned lunches with H, the plans would automatically involve G last minute, to which my friend and I decided to stay on campus rather than to go with the "happy couple." My friends and I were convinced we would lose H eventually, which little by little, we did. She tried to convince us that G was changing and was trying to change to win over her parents. According to H, G even started staying after school to talk to teachers to get his grades up. None of us actually believed it as the teasing still continued.
Well, since graduation, I haven't spoken to H, or even texted. You know how it is, you go to college, friends grow distant, and because of assignments, there's rarely any time to hang out with anyone. Before H was married, my family and I would invite her to parties. Now this is where this rule might be an A-Hole move. A rule my family follows is that if you’re invited to an event, but don't show up, you are no longer invited to any other events. I always hated this rule because sometimes things happen. The thing is, with H, she always confirms she'll show up, but never does. I didn't invite her anymore after she didn't show up to any event in 2 years as I began to think I lost a friend as with many others. Well, my mother has actually continued to invite H, even after she was married. H continues with the same routine, confirms but doesn't show. I've told the friends I've made through work and college that I fear that one day H might actually show up to an event with her husband and that the same thing as high school might happen again. My friends tell me that since they actually show up, if anything happens, they'll be there to support me as they know I've changed and see I've become more of a bad b. They say that I shouldn't worry because I'm no longer that shy girl, and that I'm no longer defenseless. My friends have also accompanied me on my healing journey as they know I’ve been going to counseling to get over all this trauma as well as other past events.
Now, for the invite. I'll be honest, I didn't know H was married until she changed her status on social media. Yes, we still follow each other. I didn't think she would’ve ended up with G after everything that happened in their relationship. Months later, maternity pictures were on her page. Sometime later, I got an invite to the baby shower. Now, I know baby shower rules run differently. In Hispanic families, 99% of the time, men are welcome to celebrate as well and it’s not women only. With this, I discussed with my family that I don't want to go because H will have her husband there and G still has his group of friends from what other friends have told me. My mother and sister called me selfish for not going to the party and still living in the past. I told them I understood their point of view, but I told them I didn't want to go to a party where I'd feel uncomfortable. My sister started saying that I was H's friend and that I should be there for her. I then asked her that question about H, stating "Okay then when has she been here for me? She hasn't been to a party or gathering in years when this is the first time she invites me." My sister became silent and went to her room. Later that night, my mom and sister tried to talk to me again. I said no. I told them they could go without me. To make things worse, my family still paints me as the villain. They know I went to counseling, but stopped due to school and work hours. They knew I was basically bullied and harassed at school, and with college and work, I’m also sleep deprived and my health has become a difficult situation in these last few years. My family told me to go as I would want H to show up for me. But here's the thing, she hasn't shown up for me at all. Any question my family tried to throw at me, I threw it back as if they were asking H about me. (Let’s say dinner was silent that night.)
I spoke to my friends and told them everything that had been going on. They agreed that I shouldn't go as they know I'm not ready to see H or G. They told me that if I was going to be uncomfortable, I shouldn't go. Since they knew about my mental journey, they reminded me that my counselor told me to take things slowly. They said that if I decide to go, to contact our group, and that some of them will accompany me to the baby shower to make sure I stay safe. I thanked them for that and I told them I would update them if anything happened. I asked my grandmother as I wanted the point of view of someone with more life experience. Even she told me not to go and let my mother and sister go alone. She told me that if I'm uncomfortable, she sees no point in siding with her daughter (my mom) when she'd rather protect me, her granddaughter. I did tell her my friends’ plan. She liked it. My grandmother also knows that because of this situation, my blood pressure might get high again. She told me that if I go with my friends, to take my medication and to tell my friends where I’ll have it in case things go wrong, as she fears I might get a panic attack (I’ve only had one) and she trusts my friends as she’s met them (before my parents). (I don’t take my medication every day as it makes me sleepy, tired, or dizzy. I also don’t take it if there’s a party so I can drink alcohol if I choose to.)
I know that some might think I'm punishing my friend for something she technically had no control over as people marry who they want and she wasn’t part of the bullying, but I don't want to be at the baby shower and risk getting made fun off again by her husband and his friends. I also find baby showers boring. Some might think that I’m holding on to a grudge, but this harassment causes fear as I had also been through worse bullying experiences when I was a child. (I was bullied from 5th grade for being small, all through middle school for being small, people thinking I had money (when I didn’t), having a rolling backpack due to back problems, and then harassed by G’s group in high school.) I don’t know what to do as my mother and sister are still pressuring me. My friends have considered taking me out on the day of the baby shower. They know my family wants me to go out with friends more, so my friends plan on telling my family that it’s a “graduation celebration” before the actual graduation party scheduled a week later since some “won’t make it” ha ha. My friends are truly amazing! I am willing to accept judgment, but I need insight. AITA for not going to the baby shower?
PS: Will probably give an update after the baby shower date. I don’t use my computer much since it’s partially broken.
submitted by Sea-Psychology-1512 to CharlotteDobreYouTube [link] [comments]

2024.05.16 07:02 Antisocial_Coyote_23 TIL women have no higher calling

TIL women have no higher calling
In response to a thread calling out that dumbass football player's college speech. I'm just so fucking tired of men feeling comfortable enough to say they think we are subhuman.
submitted by Antisocial_Coyote_23 to BlatantMisogyny [link] [comments]

2024.05.16 07:02 Turduckennn Lorelei and the Laser Eyes - Review Thread

Game Information

Game Title: Lorelei and the Laser Eyes
Platforms:
Trailer: LORELEI AND THE LASER EYES Release Date Trailer
Developer: Simogo
Publisher: Annapurna Interactive
Review Aggregator:
OpenCritic - 87 average - 94% recommended - 18 reviews

Critic Reviews

CGMagazine - Justin Wood - 5 / 10
Lorelei and the Laser Eyes fails to capture its intended mystery-filled story because of having to headbutt against puzzles non-stop and some glaring control issues.
COGconnected - Jaz Sagoo - 80 / 100
Lorelei and the Laser Eyes is a twisted puzzle adventure like no other. The high-brow approach to gameplay requires you to read pages from books to learn the fundamentals that enshroud the range of conundrums that you’ll come across. Simogo don’t underestimate your ability, leaving you to ponder clues and work out the solution. While this can halt your progress and lead to cycling around the same puzzles, it makes decryption much more satisfying. The game stubbornly sticks to its principles to the detriment of accessibility, however, losing yourself to the deep layers of intrigue makes this an unforgettable trip.
Digital Trends - Giovanni Colantonio - 5 / 5
The cryptic Lorelei and the Laser Eyes may very well be the greatest puzzle game ever made.
DualShockers - Jack Coleman - 9.2 / 10
Lorelei and the Laser Eyes is a surreal and mysterious puzzle game that executes perfectly on its vision. A potential all-timer for fans of the genre.
Game Rant - Dalton Cooper - 5 / 5
Lorelei and the Laser Eyes can sometimes feel like the Dark Souls of puzzle games, but no one will regret challenging themselves to solve its many mysteries. Players who enjoy analyzing complex stories will have a blast taking apart the many layers to Lorelei and the Laser Eye's bizarre tale, while those looking for an addicting puzzle game will find it to be an incredibly satisfying adventure. Lorelei and the Laser Eyes is a must-play puzzle game and one of the genre's best.
GameSpew - Kim Snaith - 9 / 10
Perplexing and often pretentious, yet compelling and wonderfully accomplished, it's safe to say you won't have played anything quite like Lorelei and the Laser Eyes before. Filled with puzzles and mystery at every turn, once you step foot inside the intriguing Hotel Letztes Jahr, you won't be able to pull yourself way.
GamesRadar+ - Rachel Watts - 4.5 / 5
Lorelei and the Laser Eyes is an intricate puzzle box of interconnected parts. At times it can feel overwhelming, but ultimately this stylish noir's captivating puzzle design anthology and spellbinding story feels like an entirely new and contemporary kind of puzzle game.
God is a Geek - Chris White - 8 / 10
Lorelei and the Laser Eyes is filled with tricky puzzles that require patience, pens and plenty of paper, but can be hugely satisfying.
Hardcore Gamer - Jordan Helm - 5 / 5
A masterfully-orchestrated series of puzzles that are both stand-alone and interconnected alike, a brilliant use of a more-restricted color palette emboldening its art-style and aesthetic. And best of all: one of the most curious, perplexing but ultimately satisfying mysteries to see fully unraveled and revealed in its truest form. Combined, Lorelei and the Laser Eyes stands as Simogo's best work to date. Even with a portfolio as creative as theirs, a release deserving of that most lofty of titles: magnum opus.
Hobby Consolas - David Rodriguez - Spanish - 88 / 100
Lorelei and the Laser Eyes is a new hit for the creators of Sayonara Wild Hearts. This narrative mystery adventure catches you at the first sign of change and forces you to step out of your comfort zone to face all kinds of puzzles full of imagination.
Nintendo Life - Chris Scullion - 8 / 10
Lorelei and the Laser Eyes is one of the most unique-looking games you'll see on the Switch, and it's got the substance to back up the style. Its heavy emphasis on puzzles and its refusal to throw players a bone when they need help may not be to everyone's tastes, but anyone up for a mental challenge in what's essentially an elaborate escape room will love it.
PC Gamer - Autumn Wright - 89 / 100
A thrilling mystery that asks players to rise to its challenges, and rewards them when they do.
Paste Magazine - Elijah Gonzalez - 8.8 / 10
Altogether though, Lorelei and the Laser Eyes is a game with vision. It wraps intriguing puzzles in a digital gothic framic. It makes the most of its chosen medium as it forces us to navigate the tenuous details of this backdrop. Just about every layer of the experience is creatively risky, from its fragmented narrative to its uncompromising barrage of challenges, but these gambles largely pay off to deliver something with purpose and direction. Crafting this kind of maze isn’t easy; it takes a combination of subtle guidance and faith in your audience. But despite these challenges, Simogo never loses sight of how to stoke curiosity about what’s lurking around the next corner, whether it’s a treasure you’ve been seeking or, conversely, something horrible lurking in the dark.
Press Start - James O'Connor - 9 / 10
Lorelei and the Laser Eyes is a wonderfully intricate, amazing piece of game design. It's intimidating and challenging, but it rewards all the effort you put into it. One of the best games of 2024 so far.
Screen Rant - Ben Brosofsky - 4.5 / 5
To return to the start, there's still a lot to say about what this game is. It's equal parts literary and mathy. It's elusive but self-aware. It's romantic, in fits. It's something best played with pen and paper, even if it doesn't seem necessary for a while. It's a story told as fantasy, history, parable, and performance. It's Lorelei and the Laser Eyes. And it could very well be the best game that comes out this year.
Shacknews - Donovan Erskine - 8 / 10
Lorelei and the Lasers Eyes delivers challenging puzzles alongside a mystifying narrative. It successfully trains your brain to overanalyze, experiment, and ask questions. All hallmarks of an excellent puzzle game. I was frustrated by some technical design decisions that slowed the pace and led to unintentional errors, but still had a thoroughly good time working my way through this otherworldly puzzle box.
TheGamer - Tessa Kaur - 5 / 5
You should just play Lorelei and the Laser Eyes instead of reading about it. I’ve never seen a game quite like it, and I can’t imagine I’ll see anything like it again anytime soon. It ticks all the boxes for a puzzle game that is just as intelligently and thoughtfully designed as it is atmospheric and fascinating, and I can’t recommend it enough.
Twinfinite - Lewis Rees - 4 / 5
Lorelei and the Laser Eyes isn’t a perfect game. It isn’t a game for everyone, and even fans of puzzle games like the Zero Escape series might find that this isn’t their tastes. In a world filled with Michael Bay, this is Luis Bunuel. It’s a game created with a distinct vision that isn’t out to please everyone. This isn't a game that cares about being liked by everyone: it cares about being loved by a smaller group. It’s a puzzle box where any narrative is almost an afterthought. It’s there, if you dig into it, but the greater satisfaction comes from finding a way forward.
submitted by Turduckennn to Games [link] [comments]

2024.05.16 07:01 EUGsk8rBoi42p "Just check out Eugene’s Reddit section any day, but don’t say I didn’t warn you."

Admitting we have a problem is the first step in solving it! Author is a Eugenean talking about her experience with rising crime in the city, never saw this story but hey, still relevant today. Found this little gem by random chance. Title is a hopefully relatable quote from the article. You can agree or disagree with the author, but it's actually pretty well written with sources included. (just including the whole article, for people who don't want to click links!)

I Caught Two Men Stealing From My Home. The Aftermath Was Absurd—and All Too Typical.

This experience crystallized Oregon’s deeper problems.

BY REBECCA SCHUMANJUNE 21, 20225:40 AM
Typically, guys wearing power-company vests don’t leave the houses they’re working on laden down with backpacks—let alone power tools, a scooter, and a Nintendo Switch. But that was the scene I happened upon at 6:30 p.m. on a Tuesday in mid-April when I puttered into my driveway in Eugene, Oregon, my 7-year-old ensconced in the back seat.
For a second, my brain tried to normalize the incident: This is just my daughter’s dad stopping by—except there are two of him, and they’re dressed as electricians for some reason? Then, a second later, everything whooshed into place: Oh, wait, I’m being robbed. Or, rather, I was being burgled. I would get reminded of this distinction later, when I made the dubious choice to join the chorus of aggrieved buttinskies on Nextdoor, where my well-meaning post to warn the neighborhood would turn me into an accidental vigilante hero for a day.
Unfortunately, it’s true: My reaction to this burgle was the lived-out fantasy of many who have been on the business end of a property crime. As the two goons took off on foot down my street, I went into fight-or-flight mode—and I chose fight.
“Well,” I said to my confused child, “let’s go see if we can get our stuff back.”
I peeled my 2005 Subaru back onto the street and easily overtook my two targets, who then hurtled themselves into an alley, whereupon I cornered one by the driver’s side window as the other made haste across the adjacent parking lot.
“Just give it back, bro!” I yelled out my window. “Just give it back! I’m a single mom! Just give it back.”
I repeated this until either I reminded him too much of his meanest teacher or he realized he’d been caught in broad daylight. “Fine,” he said. “Just fucking take it.”
He shoved a backpack through my driver’s side window. Inside it was both my laptops and my daughter’s iPad from school. Back at home, I would discover these guys had used channel lock pliers to force open the back door, but that the general chaos of my home had prevented them from locating my passport, jewelry, or sole item of irreplaceable value: the Montblanc fountain pen that my father, who died in a bicycle accident two years ago, had gotten for his law school graduation. My cat was unfazed.
I can honestly tell you that this little caper of mine was thrilling and deeply satisfying. It was also the exact wrong thing to do. Even this fanatical open-carry gun website implores: “Don’t chase criminals.” What if these two dipsticks had been armed? As unlikely as that was—property crime in my town is often driven by addiction, and weapons are worth money, which can buy drugs—I put myself and my child in potential danger. And for what? Three grand worth of electronics. As any reputable expert will tell you, you’re never to give chase to a thief, because human life is not worth possessions. As much as I admit to enjoying being called a “badass” by everyone I told this story, plus the listeners of KLCC Oregon, I should not have done this.
I did call the police, on the nonemergency line, because the dudes were long gone and nobody was hurt. I declined the dispatcher’s offer to send two officers to fingerprint a bunch of stuff I’d already touched. At best, that would have just added two more sets of prints to my town’s burgeoning roster of perennially at-large property criminals.
There are larger issues here, issues much more important than my would-be cool story. First, it’s an example of how in Eugene, small-scale property crime is now de facto legal. It is largely nonviolent, so it’s rarely seen as worth police resources to track down the goods. At the same time, it is so prevalent that any time one vest-wearing bozo gets nabbed, three more spring up in his place. This was my house’s second break-in in six months, and my fourth property crime total in the three years I’ve lived here as an adult. Eugene is my hometown, so I can also add the four times my childhood house, where my mother still lives, has been burgled since the early 2000s. When I was little, we left our front door unlocked so regularly that I wasn’t aware front doors had locks on them until I was much older. By the time I turned 30, however, every door in my parents’ house had been pried open at least once. (“Time to finally get that alarm system!” said my dad for three straight decades.)
Still, it’s a mistake to treat this trend solely as a vexing crime problem. Eugene’s descent into its property crime epidemic has been concurrent, unsurprisingly, with two addiction epidemics: First, the methamphetamine nightmare of the 1990s—when pseudoephedrine pills were still unregulated—hit Oregon and other Western states particularly hard. That wave segued all too naturally into the opioid and fentanyl crisis of the present. Meanwhile, not only did meth never really leave, but its use in Oregon also surged with the pandemic, with three Oregonians per day currently dying a drug-related death.
Since our conversation was necessarily brief, I don’t know the housing or drug situation of the guys who broke into my place. But local statistics point to them as two more casualties of these plagues. (Granted, those statistics are from nearby Portland, and they are police-sourced, so take them how you wish.)
For all the ambivalent empathy that the opioid epidemic has engendered, the local property crime scourge has set off a fierce public backlash. My incident brought out an unsurprising chorus of bloodlust on Nextdoor and elsewhere, when I shared it because I wanted to give my immediate neighbors a heads-up: “You should have kicked their asses,” they wrote. “We need to rise up and defend our property.”
This town’s petty crime is often attributed, at least in the national conservative press, to our West Coast government’s decision to temporarily allow urban camping during the pandemic. (That policy has now officially ended, for what it’s worth.) Towns like mine have often been characterized in the popular imagination as unlivable crime-addled hellholes. I will be the first to admit that our tent cities are sometimes blatant open-air drug markets, but this is the case even as our property values inflate to absurd proportions—and our crime is actually on the decline. Still, Oregonians like me currently have about a 2.7 percent chance of being burgled, which, at almost 30 percent higher than the national average, is very high. I learned very efficiently how anecdotes like mine get around (I can’t help it if I’m a dynamic storyteller!) and attract the righteous indignation of other former victims, so many often feel, incorrectly, like we few honest vanguards are awash in a sea of riffraff.
This atmosphere, in turn, inspires my locality’s equally unreasonable political extremists to put forth and exacerbate their own untenable solutions. Even in a hyperpolarized American environment, Oregon is more polarized than most. For decades, our liberal enclaves have made Portlandia look understated, while our conservative areas make Texas’ look progressive.
For example, during the heyday of Eugene’s recently dismantled and infamous Washington Jefferson Park tent city, a larger break-in at a bicycle store was traced at least partially back to the encampment. The police swept the tents and made a flurry of arrests. Some of the bikes were found. This resulted in part in outrage over using resources to hassle the city’s most impoverished residents: “A stolen bike, yes, that sucks,” an advocate for the unhoused told a local news outlet. “But what are your priorities? And I’m sorry, but a stolen bike isn’t the priority.”
Well, trust me, in this town, it definitely isn’t. Recovering those bikes was an anomaly; in Eugene, most of these burglaries go unsolved. In fact, 87 percent of burglaries in the whole country do, too. The get-tough-on-property-crime proponents assert that statistically, this sends a message that stealing is fair game, and sure, that is a message I do not condone. But I also agree with a somewhat less rabid version of the opposing view: Property is replaceable, these crimes are nonviolent, and everyone currently rifling through houses and dealing drugs out of tents in my town is human. They deserve a chance to get their lives on track.
So, what should be the town’s priority? Fixing the addiction epidemics is a perilously long way away from happening, for reasons that are as polarizing as addiction’s consequences. In the sobering and excellent Dopesick, author Beth Macy goes into painfully exacting detail about opioids’ near-inescapable hold on the human brain. Macy argues that the true way out of this epidemic is “low-barrier treatment,” which includes supportive housing and medical interventions such as safe injection supplies, fentanyl testing strips, buprenorphine access, and supervised consumption sites. All of these options, however, are a tough sell even in a “progressive” town like Eugene, where supervised consumption sites are what NIMBY nightmares are made of, and low-barrier treatment can run up against deeply held moral stigma: Gas is $5 a gallon, and my taxes are going to some junkie?
In the meantime, while some admirably advocate and vote and wait for those breakthroughs, what should we do about the burglaries themselves? Should we pursue more law enforcement, or more compassion toward the burglars? More arrests that allegedly might deter this, or policies that might alleviate income inequality? Does—as approximately 83 percent of the suggestions from my Nextdoor thread contended—every house in town need a tripwire that handcuffs trespassers on sight? Or should all businesses be taxed at 500 percent, and the proceeds used to furnish every fentanyl dealer in town with a nice apartment and mad cash? The debate has degenerated such that these are the sorts of cartoonish positions each side believes they’re fighting—and, in fact, are the only available choices. Just check out Eugene’s Reddit section any day, but don’t say I didn’t warn you.
The actual blight on small American towns like mine isn’t property crime. It’s that any tenable solution to it has been swallowed up into a churning abyss of extremism and perceived counterextremism. No one seems to have a convincing answer to the most basic question: So what should we do? What should I do?
Burglaries don’t have to be largely unsolvable, and more property criminals could be apprehended. But while I don’t want those dudes or any of their buddies to come back to my house, I also don’t want them in an American prison, where their “rehabilitation” will consist largely of learning better ways to commit even bigger crimes when they get out, and their options for alternative forms of acquiring money will be even more limited than they are now. Lacking any meaningful restorative justice program for petty thieves in my town (which would, in turn, necessitate locating and apprehending them), I decided my own problems could be solved, for now, with a padlock on my back gate.
And then, not long after the break-in, a Nintendo Switch appeared on my town’s Craigslist. Its included components and color combination were identical to the set stolen from my house. I debated, briefly, bringing my vigilante justice alter ego Super Annoying out of retirement, answering the ad and showing up to shrill my wrongdoers into returning what was mine. But this time, I thought better of it. My life is not worth much, but it’s probably worth more than Mario Kart. I can only hope the console’s new owners enjoy it as much as my daughter did—at least until someone steals it again.
submitted by EUGsk8rBoi42p to Eugene [link] [comments]

http://rodzice.org/