I'm a 3rd year apprentice service plumber and am thinking about switching to a different trade. I'm considering refrigeration and boiler maintenance/install.
I think what draws me to this trade is the fact that you can work alone (how soon?), the general challenges of diagnosing and fixing something and I'm wondering how decent the money is as well.
I'm frankly getting a little bored with plumbing. I understand the systems that I work on. I just started with a new company and they unfortunately decided to pair me with someone who has less than half my experience and he's the "technician". So they pay me $22/hr. to train him, meanwhile I'm not building skills and am bored out of my mind. I could always memorize which shower cartridges go with what valve, but I think it would be wiser to gain a good understanding of the refrigeration cycle (which I know I can do) and apply that to my skillset.
This is the second plumbing company I've worked for and I've found it hard to get good training past a certain point. I learned a lot by making mistakes. I've found that the veteran guys will get put together because they can finish jobs faster and the newer guys seem to work together.
I do a lot of diagnostics on water heaters and sewage ejector pumps, so I know how to use a multimeter in a basic way. I went to a brief trade school for service plumbing and it helped me immensely. A lot of folks say that field experience is the only way, but I disagree. I believe that some learning is better suited to the classroom or living room. Something about being graded was a huge motivator for me to memorize wiring diagrams, troubleshooting steps, tolerances, whatever.
I could test for my license in NC immediately if I wanted to, or if I wanted to test for a national journeyman's, I could have it in 3 years. I'm not attached to being licensed in anything, I just want to earn a good income. I'd go back to school for an intensive program if it's worth it.
I'm 33 and single, so I'd be good with some late/on call work, but it's not something I'd like to make a habit of long-term.
Being in the South, I've never been involved with a labor union, but I'd be curious to know if there are any purely refrigeration unions. Would that just go along with pipefitting/HVAC?
I think it would also help me if I knew whether there were companies hiring directly from reefer programs and if so, would they guarantee a certain pay floor with a good grade?
I appreciate any tips you all have. Thanks!

I didn’t expect such an easy exam AT ALL! What the heck was that? And the DDoS diagram, it was repeated. The only problematic part probably was the fetch execute cycle blanks but literally everything else was easy. How did it go for you?

I have a 2008 TC with about 200k on it. I'm struggling with an electrical gremlin somewhere and am looking for anyone who might have seen this before. When I turn the ignition to accessory, everything functions like it should, but when I turn the key to run, only some functions come on. Power windows and turn signals work, but the gauges don't cycle, and none of the dash lights do a self-test. The odometer never comes on, and the open door chime does not change to the seatbelt chime like it is supposed to. Attempting to start the car does almost nothing. The starter solenoid does not actuate, and only one of the ignition relays click. I've checked/replaced all the fuses and relays I can find both in the cab and under the hood. The battery and alternator are both less than a year old. I've been studying over the wiring diagrams for a couple weeks now and can't figure out where the issue might be. (Good with a wrench, but suck at electrical issues). I just replaced the ecm today as a last ditch effort before reaching out to the forums. Anyone have any ideas or suggestions on what might be going on?

Introduction:

Hi everybody. Its me again. Now that Finals are over for me, I am able to participate a bit more for the next couple of months now. And a good thing too, because i really wanted to participate in this month's competition. Specifically, I latched onto the "No/Unique Ultimate" prompt, as I built an Udyr-esque champion about 2 years ago (Side Note: Damn, that was 2 years ago?? I was just starting college and now I am halfway through my degree. Man, time flies!), and it fit this prompt perfectly. This is the link to the original post, as I will be tweaking a lot of things, given how Items and Runes have changed significantly since then. and I will have tuned and tweaked some numbers as well.
To summarize from the Introduction in the other post, Umbara is designed as a Specialist, Auto-Attack based Jungler from Ixtal. The main gimmick is that, just like Udyr, she has no Ultimate instead she has 4 Basic Abilities. The kicker is that she has access to only 2 of said Abilities plus a Unique passive at any given time, and she transforms to get the other abilities and passive. This is probably the most mechanically intensive champion that I have ever created, and I am really proud of it, so I am re-submitting it here.P

Abilities:

Passive: Bloom of Life
Umbara is the Aspect of Nature, allowing her to use the Magic of the 4 seasons, allowing her Basic Attacks to scale with 100% AP instead of 100% AD. Additionally, she changes form based upon the current season, gaining a unique Passive and access to two abilities
Spring Form: Umbara gains a Stack of Wild Growth for every second in combat with Enemies, Minions and Monsters, up to a max of 5. Each Stack grants her 8% Attack Speed, and 6% Lifesteal and Spellvamp.
Summer Form: Enemies and Monsters gain a Stack of Wildfire every second in combat with Umbara, up to a max of 3 Stacks. Enemies take 5% Bonus Magic Damage for every Stack of Wildfire. When fully Stacked, each Stack of Wildfire deals True Damage instead of Magic Damage
Autumn Form: Umbara gains a Stack of Bleak Decay for Every Second in Combat with Enemies and Monsters, up to a max of 5. Her Basic Attacks and Abilities benefit from 7 Magic Penetration for Every Stack of Bleak Decay.
Winter Form: Enemies gain a Stack of Frostbite every second in combat with Umbara, up to a max of 3 Stacks. Enemies are slowed by 20% for every Stack of Frostbite they have. When fully Stacked, Umbara's next instance of Damage on an enemy will consume all Stacks, and stun them for 1 second.
Umbara will always start off in her Spring Form at the beginning of the game, and keeps her current form upon death. Every 90 Seconds, or after a Takedown, while out of combat, she will transform into the next form, in the order listed above. Every 180 Seconds, she will gain a Stack of Primordial Evolution, up to a max of 3 Stacks. She can spend 1 Stack to go to her next Form in the list, after which she has to wait 15 seconds before she can use a Stack of Primordial Evolution again.
Additionally, Umbara has no Ultimate Ability, instead she has a 4rth Basic Ability. She can only use 2 Abilities, her Primary and Secondary, per form. Her Primary Ability corresponds to her current form, and her Secondary Ability corresponds to her Previous Form:
Spring Form:
Primary: Vernal Dawn
Secondary: Steel Sleet Slash
Summer Form:
Primary: Devastating Drought
Secondary: Vernal Dawn
Autumnal Form:
Primary: Autumnal Awakening
Secondary: Devastating Drought
Winter Form:
Primary: Steel Sleet Slash
Secondary: Autumnal Awakening
The Cooldown of Each Ability depends on whether it it the Primary or Secondary Ability. Primary Abilities have a Cooldown of 8 Seconds, and Secondary Abilities have a Cooldown of 13 Seconds. She has access to all her abilities at Level 1, but they can only be leveled up 4 times instead of 5. Additionally, Cooldown Reduction affects the Primary and Secondary Abilities equally, however Ultimate Cooldown Reduction will instead reduce the time it takes to gain a stack of Primordial Evolution.
Q: Vernal Dawn
Passive: Umbara stores all Damage Taken while in Combat with Enemies, Monsters and Minions.
Active: Umbara calls upon the Power of Spring and gain a Shield equal to (100 + 0.055% Bonus Health)% of the Damage Stored for 3 Seconds, and Heal for 30/40/50/50/70% of the Shield's Value over 3 seconds as well. While she is Healing, or Shielded, she does not Store any Damage
W: Devastating Drought
Active: Umbara conjures up a Magical Flame and Blasts the area in front of her in the shape of a cone, dealing 140-60% Total AP + 10/15/20/25/30% Target Max Health Magic Damage, and reducing 40%-10% of all Enemies' and Monsters' Magic Resistance, who are still in the cone, depending on their distance from Umbara, for the next 8 seconds. Leveling up this ability increases the width and length of the cone
E: Autumnal Awakening
Passive: Enemies and Monsters damaged by Umbara gain a Stack of Wild Toxin for 8 Seconds, stacking up to 5. Affected Enemies have 20% Grievous Wounds for Every Stack of Wild Toxin
Active: Umbara Ignites all Stacks of Wild Toxin into Spirit Fire, consuming all Stacks that exist, and Dealing 50/65/80/85/110 + 2/3.5/5/6.5/8% Target Missing Health Magic Damage per Stack consumed to all Enemies who where affected by Stacks of Autumnal Toxin.
R: Steel Sleet Slashes
Active: Umbara empowers herself with Snow Magic, giving her Basic Attacks and Abilities 75 + 30% Bonus AP On-Hit Physical Damage for the next 5 Seconds. She can recast this Ability within those 5 seconds.
Recast: Umbara dashes to a nearby Enemy or Monster, and rapidly striked them 3 times. Each strike counts as a Basic Attack and applies On-Hit Effects. Additionally, each strike ignores 5% of the Target's Armor, stacking on top of the previous amount of Armor ignored. Leveling up this ability makes her strike the target an additional time. This abilities animation and speed is reduced by Attack Speed
If the target enemy moves out of range of this ability, it will pause for 3 seconds, during which is the enemy comes into range, this ability will resume. If they do not come into range within those 3 seconds, then this ability will go onto cool down immediately.

Lore:

Umbara was born Millennia ago to a family of Nomads. They where camped at the edge of Shuriman Desert and the Ixtali Jungles. While this was happening, a terrible Winter Storm was paving its way through the continents, the like of which have never before been seen again. Snow fell meters at a time, sleet rained like blades from the sky, and the temperatures dropped to below freezing, even in what was supposed to be the warmest portion of the day. Yet when she was born, the storm started to cease. In front of their eyes, the snow and sleet stopped falling, the temperature started to rise,a and the clouds dissipated. And where Umbara touched the ground for the first time, a beautiful flower bloomed, one that no one had ever seen before. Thus her surname became, "Winterbloom".
Even as a child, Umbara had a close relationship with Nature. Whenever she was angry and threw a tantrum, the clouds immediately disappeared, plants withered and died, and the heat increased to near lethal heights and when she was sad, sleet and hail would drop from the sky, and feet of snow would start falling as well. Whenever she became happy and joyful, the spring rains would fall, and the jungles around them bloomed like nothing else, and when she was melancholy or nostalgic, the autumnal season came. In her early years she had no control over her emotions, and thus the seasons ran wild, yet as she grew up she cut herself completely off from her emotions. This was a strange power, with the ability to produce devastating consequences. She knew that it was her responsibility to bear, and she willed that it would never be used again by her.
Everything changed when more humans came. Her parents and their group, once nomadic, had settled into a small village on the edge of the border of Shurima and Ixtal. Ixtal had always been eyed by Shurima for its vast forests and rich resources, and now the culling had arrived. Hundreds of Thousands of Sand Soldiers poured into the Jungles, razing nature and people alike. The Ascendants lead the charge, and powered by the might of the Sun Disk, they left a trail of pure devastation in their wake. Umbara was the first village to fall, being right at the border, though not without a fight. The Ascendants where not yet in command of the Soldiers, and in their uncontrolled destruction they awoke a terrible beast. By this point Umbara was alone in this world, her family having been carried off by a plague years earlier, yet even still she felt no emotions. Instead she dedicated her life to preserving and serving the nature around her, finding a deep beauty to it, and trying to find out anything about her powers. It was as if Nature itself called out to her. When the soldiers came, she and the others in her small Hunter-Gatherer village fought well, but where defeated. Most where killed or taken prisoner, doomed to be slaves for the rest of their life.
Yet when they came for her, Nature itself unleashed its wrath. She was not in control of her body anymore, instead the Aspect itself had taken control. Her eyes glowed a bright neon green, and a green aura surrounded her. Up until now it had been content to let the world be, and Umbara to lock away her gifts with it, but now it was time to stop the defilers in their tracks. Dark Clouds churned overhead, appearing almost instantaneously. From them a rain of sleet and hail fell, arriving with devastating force. The temperature spiked rapidly, creating forest fires so hot, Soldiers burned inside thier armor near instantly. All the creatures that the Shuriman soldiers where using on their crusade, all the horses, oxen, even the creatures within the jungles that the Soldiers hunted for food died, their flesh turning acidic and toxic. The Vanguard of the invasion was utterly decimated beneath this reign of chaos.
In an entire day, the Aspect halted the entire invasion, yet when the Ascendants came it was different. Up until this point the Aspect had taken control of Umbara's Body and utilized the gifts it had given her at Birth to enact its vengeance, suppressing Umbara's conscious up till now. But Umbara was stronger than the Aspect had expected. When the Ascendants came, Umbara had suppressed the Aspect once and for all. She was horrified at the destruction she had caused by being so weak to let her power take over her, and once again forsook the Aspect's gift, repressing the Aspect itself nearly entirely. THe Ascendants easily found and captured her.
She let herself be captured, let herself be sold into slavery, let herself take the brutal punishments of her master, all as repentance for her mistake. Through all of this, she still suppressed her emotions and powers, though not nearly as well as she had thought. The Aspect could have taken over her body at any point, yet it was curious. Never before was it heard of that a mortal had resisted the power of an entire Aspect, and the Aspect wondered if it had finally found the perfect host. It had already given Umbara many gifts when she was born, yet she controlled them, and sacrificed an entire part of her personality to keep them under control. She had even devoted herself to Nature entirely as a way to understand her gifts even further. It watched for years as Shurima grew stronger, and Ixtal became a vassel state. It watched for years over Umbara, as she endured multitudes of pain, agony and hard labor as a penance.
The Aspect eventually devised a test for Umbara. One night, after a particularly harsh lesson from the Master, as Umbara slept, it gave her access to all of its' powers. It didnt take over her body this time, but the Aspect's powers where temporarily hers. it wanted to see what would be done with it. Would she waste them pettily by killing her master, escaping and then getting caught back again? Or would she demonstrate the same restrain she had earlier? The latter outcome came true in the end. Umbara felt a change within her that night, an increase in power, similar to what she felt when she stopped the Shurimans, yet without the extra-worldly force controlling her. She had vowed to never use it herself, and still kept this vow, but at the same time, she knew that it was within her, and it scared her deeply, fearing still a loss of control. For another set of years, she endured her self-punishment, feeling that no amount of it could redeem her self, and even through the multiple sales to different masters, even under the pain of the whip, even under the threat of death working amongst other slaves, she kept it to herself. Umbara was captured when she was a teenager at the age of 16, and now she was 27. She had kept her powers under control for so long, and quite impressively that the Aspect was satisfied.
It sent the the Aspect of Twilight to bring her to the peak of Mount Targon. It took many weeks, but the Aspect of Twilight, in its host, found Umbara. She tried to buy Umbara from her master, but he was having none of it, being a very suspicious and jaded person. Shurima had long finished its conquest of Ixtal, and thus good slaves where hard to come by. The Aspect of Twilight was having none of it. Diplomacy having failed, it secretly freed Umbara in the middle of the night. They started their journey back to Targon. Along the way she fed hydrated the malnourished Umbara, and explained all about the Aspects, the different one, their powers, responsibilities, and that she was destined to become the Host to the Aspect of Nature. Umbara herself did not believe any of this at first, and eventually when she did, she rejected the offer of the Aspects. Guilt and horror still overcame her, even 11 years later. She oft woke up screaming at night, as she dreamed of the destruction her body had caused, and only being able to watch it. She escaped multiple times, and attempted to again sell herself into the Shuriman work horse, yet every time she did, the Aspect of Twilight bought her back. Once they crossed over into Targon, Umbara gave up on escaping, as this was a wholly foreign land, and instead tried to end herself multiple times, yet she threw herself off a cliff, a portal would appear and dump her back on the path. Eventually they reached the peak of Mount Targon, and the Aspect of Nature itself spoke to her.
It told her many a things. It admitted to giving her gift at birth, it praised her for her sacrifice to control these gifts, it admitted to taking over her body to defeat the Shuriman Army, it recognized her conviction to her word, even after many years of abuse. It spoke many more things, yet Umbara was in shock. A Divine entity, hitherto she had never even heard of was speaking to her, and telling her how her life had been shaped for this very moment. She then felt once more, a feeling of Guilt, but this time it was mixed with a sense of Duty. She contemplated her life thus far, wondered if this was what she was meant to do in life? She remembered when she first suppressed her emotions, and in extension her powers, when her family died of a plague and she felt nothing for fear of unleashing it all, she remembered all the years of study and introspection in the Wilds of Ixtal, as she sought to understand what where these powers, and why she of all people had them. The Aspect's final words before its offer, was praising her for her restraint and her sense of duty. Nature itself was a benevolent being, yet when triggered it was a force not to be toyed with, and Umbara displayed all these qualities.
In the end, she accepted the Aspect's offer, and in view of all the other Aspect's and their hosts, she transformed. A Beam of Bright Green light surrounded her. Raw natural energy flowed through her. And she came out a different person entirely. Her eyes glowed green. Her hair, once brown, was now shamrock green. All scars and imperfections on her body where healed and removed. She now wore a white dress outlined in colors reflecting the current season, replacing the tatters that she had worn as her time as a slave. And her powers grew exponentially as well.
The Aspect of Nature had not just taken Umbara for its Host, they had instead fully merged together, something only few Hosts and Aspects have managed to do. Their conscious was one, their memories one and their power one. Every single experience, memory and power of the Aspect was no Umbara's giving her a eternity's worth of experience and knowledge to pull from. Umbara now wielded the Bident of Nature. The 2 pronged Scepter exuding the power of the Seasons, just as her powers had before, but now instead of attuning itself to her emotions, she had free will over them. Finally, with this power, comes the final Gift of Nature itself. Nature is unending, it can never be fully destroyed, and it will always regenerate. The Aspect's Host is considered immortal unless the physical body of the Host is irreversibly destroyed, otherwise it will regenerate over time, no matter the injuries. There was no more Aspect and Host anymore, there was only Umbara.
For Millennia, Umbara was the personification of Nature. She watched as time flowed around her, and she protected Nature around the world. She watched as the Host to the Aspect of Twilight died, and became good friends with the new one, Myisha. She watched as Azir's ambition led to the fall of Shurima, and she spit upon his final resting place. When the Great Darkin War began, she was instrumental in not only protecting her domain, but also proposed a scorched earth method to ending the Darkin once and for all. Hellfire and Sleet rained from the sky, the oceans churned and the sand of the Shuriman Desert swirled under her wrath. She nearly succeded in destroying the Darkin once and for all until Mysiha taught the mortals how to seal them away. When Myisha died, she mourned her, and became a Mother figure to the new Host to the Twilight Aspect, Zoe. Now, as the Noxians have sown chaos and discord over the natural world in Ionia, Umbara unleashes her Anger. Nature is benevolent, until it is crossed, then it becomes veangeful. These traits where reflected in Umbara, making her the perfect host to the Nature Aspect. She changed the weather on the Noxians, made the Seasons so severe that they oft retreated under threat of death. She sank their fleet, burned their crops, killed their livestock and healed and preserved the Ionian wilds.
Now, several new issues have appeared in Runeterra. Ionia itself is forgetting about Nature itself, and becoming no better than the Noxian scum. Azir has been resurrected, and with him the bastardly Ascendants. The Frejlord is in chaos as the followers of Volibear wreak havoc, and the Demigods stand idly by. Targon itself has two rogue Aspect Hosts, both of whom have no respect for Nature either. And on top of this, the void has been unleashed in parts of Shurima, destroying anything and everything in its path. Through all of this, Umbara watches, waiting for the right time to strike, and when she does, the world hath better be ready, for the might of Nature has not been released in millennia, and none thus far are prepared for such a harrowing, nor on this scale.

Quotes, Interactions and Appearances:

Pick and Ban Quote:
Pick Quote: All that Blooms, can also Wilt!
Ban Quote: Nature waits for no one but me!
Special Interactions:
Aatrox: You where sealed away once before, NOW YOU DIE!
Anivia: There is more Weather than Snow, Cryophoenix.
Azir: You where better as Sand, let me turn you back to it!
Diana: Host or not, I will defend my domain!
Ivern: My praises, Green Father.
Kennen: You should learn something new, Lightning Lord!
Leona: As I told your lover, my power Eclipses both of yours. Don't forget it!
Maokai: One day, we will restore your home.
Nasus: You should have stayed in your Library, Ascendant! All the knowledge in the world cannot save you now!
Ornn: Balance will be bought back to the Frejlord, with or without you!
Pantheon: Do what you will Pantheon, we have no grievances, nor will I make any.
Renekton: The Butcher indeed! Your blood waters my garden!
Swain: Your Dark Magic is a Defilement on the land. I will purge you and your sin from it!
Udyr: You think nature is your ally? You merely adopted it, I was born with it!
Volibear: End this, or I will!
Umbara's appearance changes depending on her form. She has Shamrock Green Hair, Pale Skin and wears a white dress. The Dress itself is is outlined and has designs in colors depending on her form. Summer Form is Dark Red, Autumnal Form is Orange, Winter Form is Light Blue and Spring Form is Light Green.

Analysis:

So for the Analysis portion, I will be going over what changes I made, as I did rework a lot of stuff. Looking back, there are some quite absurd stuff that I wrote in the old post, like 30% Max Health True Damage for example. At the bottom is a full change log that you guys can see, and I will keep that updated if there are any other changes I make before the voting stage.
A lot of my changes where in the spirit of aligning things more closely with how I want this champion to function. I want this champion to be an AP Bruiser of sorts, akin to Gwen, Diana and Mordekaiser in the jungle. I really took a lot of inspiration from Mordekaiser's builds of Riftmaker, Liandry's Rylai's, but I also wanted to make things like Malignance and Blackfire Torch and Nashor's Tooth potentially viable as well. The goal was to make her abilities scale not with primarily damage but with other stats. For example, Vernal Dawn's shielding and Healing is based on Bonus Health, While Steel Sleet Slashes scale with the amount of Strike it can make. This means that you can build things like a Riftmaker and not be punished for building not raw Damage.
The Passive is where I made a lot of changes. Specifically, I reduced the Stack count from 8 and 5 to 5 and 3. Keeping 8 stacks on an enemy is just not viable, given that they will most likely have some form of mobility to get away and let the stacks fall off, or if it is a sort of champion that wants extended fights like Darius, Aatrox, etc then they are going to very much stat check you unless you are in your Spring Form. Overall, the stack count is down, but to compensate the stats and effects per stack is up. Everything comes out roughly even at max stacks. The other major component I changed is how Ability Haste affected Umbara. Now that there is significantly reduced CDR on Mage/AP Items in general, I think it is safe to allow CDR to affect normal abilities now, especially given that the items that have CDR are Bruiser-y items anyway. Ultimate CDR via Ultimate Hunter and Malignance now affect how Primordial Evolution stacks. The one thing in retrospect that I did not want was having players use primordial evolution to liberally change their forms at will, as the entire point of this champion was the 4 Seasons and balancing different playstyles and effects. To that end, I made Primordial Evolution Stacks take much longer to get, however if you really wanted to, then a fully Stacked Ultimate Hunter + Malignance reduced the CD by about 1/3 which is still significant enough that it makes speccing into these items viable, at least at first sight. Beyond that, i also reduced the lock out time of using a stack of Primordial Evolution, as the goal of Primordial Evolution is to give a way for players to get the right/needed/wanted form before major objectives without disrupting the overall cycle of the Seasons.
As I mentioned above, I reworked a lot of how the abilities scale, so that she can be that AP Bruiser Champion. Vernal Dawn no longer has an absurd Healing and Shielding Ratio, but rather now scales with Bonus Health a la Riftmaker, Liandry's, Rylai's etc. This is also much healthier design, as healing and shielding that much is absurd, and this keeps the essence of the ability intact while keeping her on track.
Devastating Drought has a significantly higher AP scaling when Champions are close to Umbara, and deals Max Health Magic Damage, however realistically this would only max out if an enemy is so close that the models are basically overlapping. Its hard to describe and tune such things without a diagram and actual models, so just assume that the scaling is reasonable enough to not be absolutely bonkers for the sake of the champion design. The main idea behind this ability, which is that leveling it up increases the cone size, is still intact, all that is changed is the damage.
Autumnal Awakening got a lot of number re-tuning to make it more balanced and useable. Again, the Stack count is down because 8 is just unrealistic in modern League, and thus the damage has been amped up a bit to compensate. In addition, it now deals Missing Health Damage, and this is because it is intended to function more as a Conditional Finishing tool rather then an engage or simple damage nuke.
Steel Sleet Slashes, I made a lot more conditional but I also reworded a lot of things to be more clear. Most importantly, since leveling up this ability added an additional strike, If it was a simple Pantheon W then anybody in range would get obliterated once you level this up a bit. Pantheon W is anyway super un-fun to play against, so this was an automatic red flag in my book, so I balanced it on when enemies come into and leave the range of the ability. When they leave, there is a small window where if Umbara can reach them again, the ability will resume, otherwise it goes on Cooldown. This way, if you have mobility you can use it to escape the onslaught of damage, and if you do not then Umbara in Winter Form is designed for you to die to.
In terms of build, I really see some combination Rylai's, Riftmaker, Blackfire Torch, Malignance, Liandry's, Demonic Embrace and Nashor's Tooth being core items on her, depending on how you want to play her. Umbara really synergizes with DoT effects and Bruiser items, however hybrid Assassin-Bruiser items like Nashor's Tooth I can see being viable, especially given that she can be a viable assassin for half the time if you spec into it. At the same time, you are Bruiser for the other half the time, and the abilities you have still function on Bruiser items, so you can certainly spec into the other side. In total, I would forsee her having a lot of build variety and the ability to switch gears on a whim.

Change log:

May 11-12, 2024:

• Passive: Bloom of Life
  • Spring Form Passive: Max Stacks 8 > 5, AS and Lifesteal adjusted to be the same at Max Stacks. Spellvamp added.
  • Summer Form Passive: Max Stacks changed from 4 > 3. Bonus Magic Damage Ratio changed from 2.5% > 5% flat. 5% more Bonus Damage at Max Stacks
  • Autumn Form Passive: Max Stacks 8 > 5. Magic Pen per stack increased 5 > 7. 5 Less Magic Pen at max Stacks but still 35 Magic Penetration
  • Winter Form Passive: Max Stacks 4 > 3. MS Slow increased per stack, but overall 10% less slow at full stacks. Changed wording to be more clear
  • Form Transformation will occur out of combat instead of immediatly.
  • Primordial Evolution charge time 120 > 180 seconds.
  • Primordial Evolution lock-out time reduced from 30 > 15 seconds.
  • Max Stacks of Primordial Evolution reduced 4 > 3 (using 4 stacks puts you at the same form, therefore its pointless)
  • Cooldown Reduction now affects Basic Abilities, and Ultimate CDR now affects the time for Primordial Evolution
• Q: Vernal Dawn
  • Shield value changed to (100 + 0.055% Bonus Health)% of Damage stored
  • Heal amount changed to 30/40/50/50/70% of the Shield's Value
• W: Devastating Drought
  • AP Ratio changed to 140-60% Total AP + 10/15/20/25/30% Target Max Health Magic Damage
  • Magic Resist Reduction now applies for the next 8 seconds instead of only benefiting this Ability
• E: Autumnal Awakening
  • Max Stacks reduced 8 > 5
  • Grievous Wounds per Stack increased 10 > 20%
  • Damage per Stack changed to 50/65/80/85/110 + 2/3.5/5/6.5/8% Target Missing Health Magic Damage per Stack
• R: Steel Sleet Slashes
  • Slightly re-worded
  • Reworked slightly
    • Active now empowers Basic Attacks
    • Recast is a Dash + Striked
    • Moving out of range pauses strikes for 3 seconds

For example, the cyclin diagram, the menstrual cycle diagram, the heart pressure and stuff one, etc.

As I’m about to get this fella off the stand and down the stairs of my apartment I’m at the wiring bit and wanted to see if this makes sense.
Running a low volt cycle electric generator for kick start bike. Have duel tail lights but seems I just connect them then run those off.
But my key Ignition has the letters B I L which I’m assuming battery, ignition and then lights?
The diagrams only have usually accessory or sta. On their drawings. So wanted some input if any.
Please and thank you for helping this challenged individual.

Hi everyone!
Here are my cycle results applying to both the US and Canada. I did not apply to many schools in Canada because it would have been the equivalent of burning money with my stats (would have been auto-rejected and screened by all other schools outside of the ones I applied to this year). I ultimately decided to withdraw my US acceptance because it was just too expensive with the lack of a scholarship ($600k CAD in the US vs $100-200k CAD here at UBC). I didn't find the education to be worth triple the price of learning here despite the potential opportunities that UCLA may have been able to provide (the weather and location would have been amazing though ngl). It was a really expensive cycle with all the applications I did (spent a few thousand dollars applying).
Here is a previous post I made about my cycle and experiences as well: https://www.reddit.com/premedcanada/comments/1aqd7x2/for_those_thinking_of_applying_to_the_us_my_cycle/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web3x&utm_name=web3xcss&utm_term=1&utm_content=share_button
Overall, I am SUPER happy and excited for the fall and can't wait to meet many of y'all :)))))))
Good luck to those in future cycles and those still on waitlists - my heart goes out for you.
Here is my Sankey diagram: https://imgur.com/a/yMYItyk

I'm trying to get better asap. So far I'm not getting any better. I'm looking at all the diagrams I can, all the videos I can, all the online instructions I can of drawing heads and faces. Now I'm just getting stressed out again to the point I'm sitting here scribbling my trash sketches with my heart rate being about 157 bpm cause if this stress. I'm always stressed about everything and I want to be good enough to draw good art. I just don't know what to do. There's so many videos and diagrams of diffrent ways to draw a face or a head you have no idea which one will work or which one is good enough. I can't draw what I see. (Even flipping the subject upside-down doesn't help) I can draw a head 1000 times and it's not getting better. I draw a couple good heads one day and the next it's like everything I leaned just the previous day is gone even though I try so hard and put so much work into it. I don't want to drift back to the cycle of me destroying my own artwork and sketch books potentially hurting myself cause I'd get so pissed off at myself and stressed out. I desire to create and draw. I want to draw characters and comics and graphic novels so bad but I can't till I'm good enough to do so. Practice doesn't make perfect cause if it did I would be getting better.

🪞 “It's much easier to get in that it is to get out,” Emilie Autumn used to say. Part 1 Part 2 Part 3 Part 4.1 - Part 4.2
She was not wrong. Welcome back to the Asylum write-up!
In this installment, we're finally getting down to the nitty-gritty of the enmity between EA and her fans.
It's time for war. It's time for blood. It's time... for tea. 🎵

THE PRESENT DAY: “ASK ME ANYTHING (WELL, NOT QUITE)”

​

"Ask me anything" titles are catchy, and that’s why I’m using one. But, obviously, don’t ask me anything, by which I mean that, if you think I wouldn’t answer it, you’re probably right. Ask me something really good. I’d love to answer you. I’d love to have comments on these posts, in fact, so that I could answer questions there regularly and ask you things as well, but insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results, or so Einstein is supposed to have said, and attempting to create yet another interactive online venue after every previous attempt has ended in heartbreak—forums, facebook groups, social media accounts—it would indeed be insanity to think that this time would be any different. So there are no comments. This too is heartbreaking in the sense that, and you may not realize this, but I desperately want to connect more completely with you—to be able to intelligently converse and share and exchange. We can do that in person, of course, because the wrong people never show up in person. Isn’t that funny… So, perhaps we’ll have to arrange that;). I’ll start you off with an example question I’d want to know if I were you (I can almost guarantee that you do not want to know this). Q. Hey EA, how do you keep your wireless bodypack transmitter secure when you are leaping about in skimpy costumes and doing frequent costume changes? Also, dye your roots. A. Fantastic question, EA, and I just dyed my roots thank you very much. ... (Deleted blog post followed by a year of radio silence, 2022 📝)

Sooo. For the past five-ish years, the vibe in the Asylum has been that of a protracted Christmas dinner where everyone is tensely moving their food around in their plate, bracing themselves for whatever will trigger the screaming match. Wondering what it's going to be this time. Weary old-timers make small talk about the food because no other topic feels safe. Every glance, every forced smile, is fraught with eons-old grudges and unspoken regrets; every nervous pleasantry sounds like a thinly-veiled accusation. Aunt Emilie always insists on hosting, but not-so-secretly hates having people over. Sooner or later, she finds a way to get all of these assholes out of her house. Most of the adult children are daydreaming about going no-contact.
Everyone ready for some dysfunctional family history?
CW for discussion of bullying, online harassment, mental illness stigma.

YE OLDEN DAYS: CUCKOOS OF A FEATHER NEST TOGETHER

In the beginning, it was beautiful.
EA had the excellent instinct to start banking on her online presence📝 long before MySpace was even a thing. She had a website, several online stores, an active LiveJournal and a ProBoards forum right from the turn of the millennium.
In 2004, she attached an official forum to her website; the earliest archive shows 74 registered users. By the time Opheliac came out in 2006, that number had grown tenfold. And it was, by most accounts, a pretty dope place to be! (I should specify that this write-up focuses on the anglophone side of the fandom: there were also thriving fan-run communities in at least German, French, and Spanish. Because EA doesn't speak any of those languages, the lucky bastards were mostly left alone.)
Forum users enjoyed interacting with some of EA's closest IRL friends and associates – and with the mistress of the house herself (user flair: PsychoFiddler), when she occasionally responded to comments under her own posts. But that wasn't even the main appeal for many. For a long time, on top of all EA-related topics, the official forum had very active “Off-Topic” subforums, with lively and friendly conversation on a variety of subjects. (There was even a “Filthy Libertines (18+)” sub for a while, which was closed due to preemptive concerns about minors.) Swear words (not slurs) were allowed and encouraged, and moderation was overall pretty loose beyond basic enforcement of civility. There was a lot of mutual support, creativity, and solid banter going around.

It wasn't just about Emilie on the forums. People could chat about almost anything with near free reign, making connections and lifelong friends. ... This community mattered SO MUCH to people. They felt included, accepted, and understood within the walls of the Asylum. People invested their time and creative energy into keeping the forums a vibrant, active community, and made sure that carried over into the real world. ... I've never seen anything like it in a fan space. I doubt I ever will again. (@Asylum_Oracle - “Fandom History” Instagram highlight 🔍📝, which contains most of the sources for this segment.)

And it did, indeed, carry over into the real world. There were numerous meet-ups – a few organized by EA, many more spontaneous. People who didn't know any other EA fans in real life, or were just excited to add new Plague Rats to their friend group, would regularly connect with other forum users from their area to meet up and hang out before EA shows. “Who else is dressing up??”
In 2008, for instance, EA held an afternoon meet-up at Lincoln Park in Chicago. 📺 The event was free to attend; it featured live acoustic music and a reading from EA's upcoming book, the intriguingly-titled Asylum for Wayward Victorian Girls.
On the appointed day, EA rolled up in a fabulously tousled red wig, bedazzled white corset and steampunk-altered wedding dress. She had brought friends alongs. Sporting blue hair and a pink bustle and corset was her Chicago bestie, the main forum admin. Rocking a guitar and a top hat was EA's sound engineer, the soft-spoken wizard behind the Victoriandustrial sound, who was also a forum mod. The photographer from the original Opheliac cover art was there as well; he was formally introduced by EA and got his own round of applause.

People who would never normally be involved in an artist's fanbase were in EA's world. And not only were they known – they were respected and incredibly active with the fanbase. These people who managed an online message board were willing to engage in real-world meet-ups (with no security??) because of how tight-knit the community they had built was. People turned out to this event. People traveled to go to this event. It was a short reading of a book that hadn't been released yet, and wouldn't be for some time. Why? Because not only was it a chance to meet Emilie and listen to parts of the new book, but it was also a chance to hang out with their friends from the Asylum. ... The fandom really was a family for a lot of people. (@Asylum_Oracle)

“SERIOUSLY, GET THE FUCK OUT OF MY HOUSE.”

It all started with The End.
The End Records, that is! Quick refresher: in 2009, after three years or so with Trisol, EA split from the label over allegations that the owner was embezzling money from ticket sales. A few months later, she signed with The End Records. Understandably, EA still wanted to sell the album that had made her famous, and to which she had smartly retained the rights – which meant a brand new, “Deluxe” release of Opheliac. (Remember, from part 3? The one you could pre-order as a bundle with the book? Some projects are just cursed, I guess.)
At that point, Opheliac had been released three times already, as recently as the year before, with only slight variations in format and tracklist. (Yes, that is a theme in this story.) The End Records version would feature new cover art and a handful of new tracks, but overall, it was... you know... the same album.
(The following paragraphs are largely sourced from this excellent recap 🔍📝, which also provides potato screenshots for all quotes.)
One fateful day of August 2009, a user started a thread entitled “Opheliac US edition deluxe re-release??” in the “EA News” subforum. In the thread, some people were kind of balking at the re-do, pondering whether to buy the “new” Opheliac or sit this one out. Some expressed that after three years, they were jonesing for a new album. Others shared what B-sides or dream covers they would have liked to see included on the bonus disc. Just... fans being fans, in a fan discussion space.
And then EA jumped out from behind the curtains.

Fan: Okay. Before I start, I just want you to know that I think it's very good that EA is getting more popularity, and that she can release lots of albums, but - are 5 editions of the same album really needed? You may say now “ah, it's not the same, it has 2 bonus tracks” or whatever, but I mean: it's not new material. Now don't get me wrong. I'm happy for it, maybe I'll even buy it, but I'm just wondering if she shouldn't keep herself busy with other (maybe more important) stuff? * hides * EA: Nobody's forcing you to buy it. Thanks.

Record scratch.

Fan 1: is this Opheliac release version number 4? lol If she's recording NEW tracks, then surely they deserve to be sold by themselves, otherwise people are going to have to buy an album that they may have already bought twice (like me!). But... alas, I am a fool and adore everything this woman does... im buying it lol Fan 2: exactly – if it was just reissuing the last version of Opheliac to tap into new markets that would be fine (...) but if they start adding extra bits of material to albums people already have then the true muffins are going to feel obliged to buy new copies (...) EA: How exactly are you obliged to buy anything? Nobody is forcing you to spend a fucking penny, my dears. I suppose it would make more sense to you to simply not have my records available any more as the old label I just escaped from will no longer be distributing them? Forgive me for adding extra tracks. No obligation necessary.

...Okay, so I'm pretty sure that we can see both sides of the argument here. Fans are annoyed at the idea of spending money on barely-anything-new, because they love EA and buy every single CD she releases. EA is exasperated by fans acting like she's twisting their arm and somehow resenting the inclusion of new material, when she was just ensuring that her album would remain available for purchase and trying to keep things interesting.
But maybe we can also agree that those replies should have been screamed into a pillow rather than typed out on a keyboard.
EA was getting increasingly (and, I'll just say it: disproportionately) sarcastic and defensive in her replies. Enter poor FantineDormouse.
FantineDormouse meant well, I think. Maybe she thought, she's spiraling. Maybe she thought, friends don't let friends go down that road. Granted, FantineDormouse probably should have known better than to phrase it the way she did. Or to assume that EA perceived her as a friend.
Either way, at some point, FantineDormouse jumped in and posted the comment that finally made EA lose it. THE comment which, overnight, ended the honeymoon period of the Asylum, triggering a doomsday domino effect from which the fandom would never truly recover. Are you comfortably seated?

FantineDormouse: Uhm, Emilie, love, I don't mean to sound rude or anything... but maybe you should have a cup of tea and relax a little.

...
* sound of archduke getting shot *

EA: Excuse me? You can throw this onslaught of absolute cruel bullshit at me and those I work with in my own space that I own, and I can't say anything back? How fucking patronizing. Relax? Are you fucking kidding me? Who the fuck do you think you're talking to? FD: I'm not trying to piss you off even more, Emilie. And trust me, I have to deal with it myself, and as much as I would really love to punch the cunts I have to deal with in the face, I don't. You're pissed off, I get it. You're bipolar, which makes it 10x worse, I get that. I'm just not the person to stand around and do nothing when a fight where I'm pretty sure there will be a lot of regret is going on.

Famous last words. Literally! Immediately after EA delivered her irate closing statement – which includes one of my all-time favorite EA zingers, bolded...

EA: I cannot believe this... You just don't stop, do you? So just because I've shared the personal information with you all that I happen to be bipolar, I can't get pissed off at all of you being perfectly awful in the very space that I pay fuckloads a month to have up (has it ever occurred to you all that I pay dearly for this space you play around in?) Why not just tell me that I must be upset because it's my time of the month? Seriously, get the fuck out of my house. You are unbelievable, and your level of patronization is almost criminal. Don't make me write another book. With muffins like you, who needs enemies? Nothing I say or feel is legitimate, not ever ever ever because I'm bipolar... discredited before I begin... unbelievable...

...FantineDormouse got permabanned.
Jaws dropped. After days of infighting between white knights, detractors, and crossfire negotiators, several mod resignations, and general mayhem surrounding the ban, EA made a post entitled “In Which: I Invite You to Make a Fucking Choice.” 📝 For brevity's sake (cue laugh track), I can't reproduce it in all of its righteous splendor, but it's quite a read. It runs the gamut from fair and articulate points about how mental illness shouldn't be used to discredit someone's legitimate anger... to histrionic commands that “deserters to the cause” should “turn in their weapons” if they can't handle her way of doing things.

To those of you who appear not to understand why said posts, most especially those of the banned party, were offensive to me, I give you the option to either educate yourselves on your own time and in your own space (because please never forget that this is my space that I share with all of you at my own expense, and in which I generally give you all the freedom I would wish for myself), or to resign your posts in the Asylum Army – this is not the place for you, and I humbly suggest that you turn your attention and support towards other artists of a more placid, non-controversial, and less opinionated nature; there are more than enough of them out there, and I’m sure they all have forums of their own.

Some fans did leave. Most stuck around, whiplashed. Soon, the storm quieted down, and business as usual resumed on the forum. But something had been damaged beyond repair. The FantineDormouse fiasco had erected walls and drawn lines in the sand, both around EA and among her fans; its sad specter would haunt every Asylum crisis that spiked up forever after. “Fucking Patronizing Fucking” or “FPF” 🔍 became memetic shorthand in the fandom for overreaction and self-righteousness. 🐀
...And now you understand why, in the following years, some fans were so delicate and diplomatic in voicing their very legitimate complaints about messed-up orders, unsigned books, and puzzling lies... while unofficial platforms like Tumblr flourished with pent-up resentment and snark. 🦠

A NOTE ON HARASSMENT: “MAD GIRL, CAN YOU BELIEVE WHAT THEY'VE DONE TO YOU?”

Wouldn't they stop When you asked them to leave you alone? (“Mad Girl”, 2008 🎵)

Now, let's be clear, because it should not be minimized: EA has also been the target of genuine online harassment. Based on the simple fact that she is a woman with a public presence on the internet, I have zero doubt that EA has received (and perhaps continues to receive) more than her share of truly vile, bigoted, creepy and threatening messages – and, knowing what I know about the darker recesses of the Asylum, a terrifying amount of emotional blackmail and obsessive projection from people who hold her to punitively high standards. I'm also inclined to believe that it started way before she ever did anything that warranted any backlash. And that fucking sucks. It's repulsive and inexcusable, and the people who harass her should crawl into a hole and live among the worms.
Notwithstanding. In my decade-plus of following EA drama, the public comments on EA's own platforms (where people knew she was likely to be reading) have been, for the most part... civil and nuanced, and relatively mindful of the human? Even very confrontational comments (some clearly written from a place of anger and desire to shame) rarely resorted to outright name-calling or cruelty. When abusive or bigoted language did crop up, it was often promptly shut down by other fans as gross and uncalled for. In short: I have, with mine own two eyes, in real time, read some of the comment sections that EA described as cesspools of blind rage and odious attacks, and... I just couldn't see it.
If anything, for a long time, a lot of the angry comments directed at EA during any given controversy read more like break-up letters to an ex-best friend: harsh, curt and targeted in a way that cuts deep.... but also kind of screams how much love you still have for this person, against your better judgement.
Not that it wouldn't mess a person up to get hundred of those in a matter of hours, even if they don't individually qualify as “abusive”.
It's worth noting that prior to becoming semi-famous and regretting it, EA was also (by her own account and among other forms of abuse) a victim of intense childhood bullying. It feels like the two situations are closely connected in her mind when her focus seamlessly transitions from one to the other. 📺 I don't think that tremor in her voice is put on.
Based on her writings, I get the feeling that over the years, EA has developed a very black-and-white view of two monolithic groups of people. There's (an idealized vision of) her “real audience”, well-dressed, well-read, kind-hearted, and Asylum-savvy, who she fully trusts to “get it” – and buy it, and love it, unquestioningly, whatever “it” may be at any given time – because that is the true measure of love and loyalty. These are the people she makes art and merch for, the people she writes heart-emoji-filled newsletters to, and desperately longs to see in person again.
And then there's the lynch mob, those who really don't “get it”: the trolls, the faceless creeps, the basement-dwelling mouthbreathers, the ones who stalk her every move obsessively, waiting for any chance to spam her with vicious abuse and slander and obscenities. The latter only exist online (they are manifested into arbitrary existence by the internet itself, not by anything EA said or did), and there is zero overlap between the two sets of people. That seems to be the official narrative.

The "public eye" isn't an [enviable] place to be, and the closer I've come to it, the more horrified I've been. Because, for starters, who is "the public?" Is "the public" my audience? Hell no. My audience is special. They are not the general public. If they were the general public I would be a lot wealthier. The "public eye" means getting stalked, harassed, viscously judged, and put in danger. If I do things in the future that gain notoriety, I will do them in spite of fame, not because of it. I am out for world domination, but not fame. (Interview for The Moaning Times, 2014 📝)

In real life (well, mostly online, but I mean: on this shared plane of existence), things play out slightly differently. The Venn diagram of “true blue fans” and “people who criticize EA" and "people who know way too much about EA” is a circle. The call is 100% coming from inside the Asylum, and I think EA rationally knows that. But here's the thing: no matter how many shows and meet-and-greets you've dressed up for, how many loving and supportive comments you've left, or how many family heirlooms you once pawned to purchase a copy of the not-for-sale 2003 DJ pressing of Enchant... the instant EA feels attacked, everyone is a saboteur and a bully until proven otherwise, and suspected treason is dealt with on the spot. One strike, you're out. Unfortunately for everyone involved, her threshold for bullying seems to be “any remotely thoughtless opinion from any stranger on the internet”.
It makes for outstanding human-interest entertainment... but it also sounds an awful lot like the unhealthy patterns of a person suffering from all sorts of PTSD. 🔍 So, please bear that in mind as you read through this write-up. It's easy to make EA out to be the sole villain, a paranoid and delusional drama queen, based on her extreme reactions to things that often “weren't that bad”. Anything can, in fact, be “that bad” when you're thrown back into the very worst moments of your existence every time your brain decides that the situation is even remotely similar.
PTSD takes over your rational mind and actively distorts your perception of reality. That can be how a person ends up impulse-reacting to “a few people expressing an unfavorable opinion” as if the entire internet had just ganged up on them with knives. Which makes their audience feel unjustly accused, which makes them hostile, which gives the person actual good reason to feel attacked... and so the cycle of hurt continues.

You know the games I play And the words I say When I want my own way You know the lies I tell When you've gone through hell And I say I can't stay You know how hard it can be To keep believing in me When everything and everyone Becomes my enemy, and when There's nothing more you can do I'm gonna blame it on you – It's not the way I wanna be I only hope that in the end You will see: It's the Opheliac in me... (“Opheliac”, 2006 🎵)

And YES, it is extremely regrettable to have this as a trigger, when you're a public figure and you're bound to receive more negative feedback than the average citizen. “It's what she signed up for”, “it comes with the territory” and all that jazz. I really don't think EA was unaware of that fact when she decided to become a musician, share her personal life, and form an intense parasocial bond with her audience. But maybe she underestimated how hard it would be to process and recover from.
Just because you expect something unpleasant to happen, doesn't mean your psyche will be ready to handle it when it does – or that you'll pick the best and most effective strategy to deal with it.

A MADHOUSE UNDER MARTIAL LAW: MARCHING INTO THE FORUM WARS

There are two sides to every story... except for this one! (“If I Burn”, 2012 🎵)

You may have noted the military imagery in EA's “Make a Fucking Choice” response post – “resign your post in the Asylum Army”! What do psychiatry and the military have in common? They're both institutions of top-down social control. 🔍 EA's mixed metaphor may be a bit clunky, but it did foreshadow the evolution of the Asylum – in terms of aesthetics and power dynamics – in the years that followed the FantineDormouse incident and the release of The Book.
EA's next big release after the Asylum book came in 2012. It was a new album, an outline of the soon-to-be Asylum musical, called Fight Like a Girl (FLAG for short). As the name suggests, the main mood was bellicose. Incidentally, in the interim years, EA's communication style generally became noticeably more combative, incendiary, and (within her own spaces) controlling.📝 You remember those quirky word filters on the forum, that would change “fan” to “muffin” and “bra” to “teacup holder”? They kind of took on a Nineteen-Eighty-Four-burlesque flavor when you realized that one filter automatically changed “Fischkopf” to “Liddell” - and that circumventing the rule to address her totally real last name would get you banned, as would any discussion of her family. (“Wikipedia, random internet sites and heresay are not credible sources.” - Mod reminder of forum rules, 2010.)
Also, you try sustaining a serious, grown-up conversation among concerned fans about how Emilie Autumn should “take ratsponsibility for her mistakes out of ratspect for her muffins”. Thus, the official Asylum forum kept a tight grip on overt criticism of EA's claims and actions.

The Emilie Autumn forum is a dystopian hell. Truth be told, when I decided to leave you could not do anything but gush about Emilie. Otherwise all of her extremist arse kissing fans will be down your throat, ripping you apart in seconds, if you so much as questioned her behaviour. So much for freedom of opinion, let alone the idea of creating a harmonious community for ‘outcasts’. Hahaha. (2014 🐀)

The word filter thing really wasn't a big deal – I'm just pointing it out as one goofy expression of EA's need to control the narrative and rhetoric, which became especially noticeable in those post-book, pre-FLAG years. By that point, EA's fuse had been shortened by near on half a decade of non-stop touring / recording / writing / promoting / adjusting to the pressure and demands of an ever-growing fanbase, while also dealing with a horrorshow of personal turmoil and health issues behind the scenes. In other words: she was done taking any shit, in any form, or humoring anyone's ridiculous feedback regarding anything.
To be fair, it was never her forte to begin with. Will it come as a shock if I tell you that EA doesn't have the greatest track record for successful collaborative work? Let's do a quick-cut montage!
EA's very first corporate sponsor was her mother's “Enchant Clothing & Costume” online store 🔍; she went on to claim that her mother was dead. She sessioned for Billy Corgan, that went super well. 🎵 She liked Courtney Love for a minute, but that didn't work out because she felt that Courtney only valued her for her pee. 📝 (It probably didn't help that in early 2006, while EA was recording her post-break-up-tell-all album about Corgan, C-Love was recording her post-rehab-redemption album with Corgan. 🔍 Either way, EA didn't seem to like Courtney anymore after that. Courtney likes her, though! 📝) The one artist EA has ever approached for a duet (and by approached, I mean she recorded a demo and threw the CD on stage when he played Chicago in 2004) was, of all people, Morrissey. That never came to pass, thank mercy 🔍 – this fandom has suffered enough. In 2005, EA recorded some haunting vocals and violins for a potential collab with the frontman of Attrition. When, three years later, they were used on one track 🎵 of Attrition's All Mine Enemies Whisper, she alleged 📝 that the recordings had been obtained from her under the false pretense of a different project, then hideously altered to sound “out of tune”, and used without her permission. She enlisted her fans to boycott the album and the band, and threatened legal action. Meanwhile, on LiveJournal and Attrition's message boards, band associates were appalled: according to them, EA had been aware of the project's nature from the start... and had been completely unreachable, even through her label, during the months of its development. (Besides, Attrition is a semi-obscure English darkwave band from the 80s, whose micro-distributed albums don't even have their own Wikipedia pages... so I wonder what EA was hoping to get out of that theoretical lawsuit. These people own nothing but vintage gain pedals!) The song “Cold Hard Cash” 🎤 by Angelspit (who contributed a remix to one of her EPs in 2008) may or may not be an EA diss track. 🐀 Back when indie jewelry brand RockLove (which now has licensing deals with Disney, Marvel, and DC) was still someone's bedroom project, their first drop was an EA-inspired collection 🔍, which appears in many early Opheliac photoshoots. The partnership was terminated on bad terms, for unclear reasons; the RockLove owner shared in a statement that EA had “drunk the cool-aid” of Trisol Guy's shady business practices, and that the two of them had been spamming her with “crazed angry message[s]” for days.
Why am I talking about this? Because it was precisely one such ill-fated business partnership that triggered the Great Asylum Secession.
One fine day of spring 2010, the owner of vegan make-up brand Aromaleigh popped onto the Asylum forum to announce that they were cutting ties with EA, with damning receipts of copy-pasted emails (lost to time). Basically, the brand had been sponsoring her for half a decade, and while Aromaleigh had been actively promoting her music and tours, EA hadn't exactly been returning the favor. (Indeed, the extent of EA's sponcon seemed to have been a banner link to their website on her front page, and a single “random drunken endorsement” LiveJournal post that kind of reads like satire📝, from 2005.)
EA responded by banning the owner's account, deleting the thread, and posting this flippant statement a few days later:

Dearest Plague Rats, To be honest, I have no idea of what the hell happened with Aromaleigh, and I don't care to find out – the whole drama is a complete mystery to me, as I've been away for months touring and have not been in contact with anyone. All I know is that I've been promoting the company for ages and have not asked them for anything in years. (...) Please focus on more interesting things. I am. (“Save the Drama...” forum post, March 2010)

Posts questioning her good faith in the conflict were deleted from the forum. Shortly thereafter, citing how prolific and labor-intensive the Asylum forum had grown, EA shut down all non-EA related subforums – which, among many other topics, included a pretty active thread about Aromaleigh products.
So one Plague Rat decided to create a separate, members-only forum 📝, where users could recreate some of the now-defunct off-topic threads... and also freely voice their critical opinions of EA's behavior without fear of backlash from mods or rabid stans. Thus, “The Reform” was born. (Reform [n]: amendment of what is defective, vicious, corrupt, or depraved.)
For a few weeks, the two-state solution seemed to work fine. And then word spread among forum mods and other diehard fans that there was this horrid other forum, where obsessive haters gathered to spew disgusting lies and vitriol about EA... and soon enough, it was bedlam in the Asylum.
Any explicit mention of the Reform was forbidden on the Asylum forum. Suspicion of participation in the Reform would get you banned. The party line was that The Reform was the enemy 🐀 – even though a number of people were active on both forums, because they liked freedom of expression almost as much as they liked EA. Double agents would lurk on the forum and report back with snark material; sycophants would infiltrate the Reform to identify traitors – much to the amusement of the “haters”, who mocked them and their ilk for “licking EA's pink sparkly boots”. There was no containing the seething, or the sass, among Asylum ranks.
Pretty soon, the insubordination spread to Tumblr. There was the “Ask the Reform” Q&A blog, where questioning fans could interact with “Rebel Rats”, get more details on past drama, and make up their own minds about the people EA called bullies.
And then, there were the “confession blogs”, which published anonymous submissions about EA, positive, negative or neutral, with little censorship. Finally, you didn't even have to pick a throw-away username on a private forum to voice your hottest / strangest / most controversial EA takes. Fans could vent, rant, lament, wonder, shitpost to their heart's content, anonymously. Obviously, given the context of frustration and censorship in the fandom, a lot of the first waves of confessions were EXTREMELY negative.
EA's acolyte Veronica managed to get the first one shut down. If memory serves, she misunderstood the confession blog format, and may have believed that all the posts on “Emilie Autumn Confessions” came from one or a small group of individuals. She was genuinely devastated, and wrote the blog admin to let them know that they were a terrible person who said terrible things. The admin was mortified, apologized profusely and deleted the blog of their own initiative. (Which goes to show that the concept did not come from cruel and malicious anti-fans, as detractors often claimed.)
But a new blog sprung up almost immediately, with a different mod team, and did not surrender. And much like in EA's own book, once the Plague Rats found out that they possessed the gift of speech... well, they really took to it.
Established in 2011 and passed on through generation after generation of mod teams to the present day, Wayward Victorian Confessions would turn out to be the longest-lived institution in the EA fandom. For over a decade now, through all the bleakest nights and dankest debacles of the Asylum, and despite its initial reputation as a troll den, WVC has acted as a kind of neutral ground and vox populi for the active fanbase and anti-fanbase. (The last nominally-active EA fansite to date, She Fights Like a Girl, is actually an offshoot of WVC: one of the old admins created it as a database to answer “frequently asked questions” about EA.)
Wayward Victorian Confessions has now outlived every other EA platform, official and unofficial. Were it not for the continued existence of the “troll den”, what little fan community survives in 2024 would be non-existent, plain and simple. To quote from late 20th century Canadian philosophy: isn't it ironic?

I feel like [WVC] is the only place I feel any of that old Asylum community kind of feeling I felt before EA got so focused on the book. It sucks that it’s so full of unhappiness, and I wish she hadn’t poisoned the sanctuary she claimed to have built. It’s just kind of fallen apart, like a crumbling building. (🐀 2016)

CONTINUED IN COMMENTS

So I've just been quoted £995 for a 5-day DAS course. It's not dissimilar to what many training schools charge. I ask the title question because the amount of test fails I see in this sub has led me to believe that riding schools aren't packaging their courses properly and due to restrictions around riding big bikes they know that once someone has paid the lump sum for the course they don't really have much options but to see it through.
The course breakdown is as follows:

• Day 1: Full day training on a 500cc or 650cc bike for £205 (6 hrs)
• Day 2: Full day Module 1 Training for £225 (6 hrs)
• Day 3: Half-day Module 1 practical test and bike hire for £115 (3 hrs)
• Day 4: Full day Module 2 Training for £250 (6 hrs)
• Day 5: Half-day Module 2 practical test and bike hire for £200 (3 hrs)

This is with somewhat limited riding experience, only 8.5 hours on a manual bike to date. I've held a full car driving licence for over 15 years and cycled peak time London streets too (I'll leave the tales of racing commuter cyclists to a different sub). My motorcycle licence journey this far has cost me:

• CBT in 2015 on a 125cc moped: £89 (7 hrs)
• CBT in 2023 on a 125cc geared bike: £160 (6 hrs)
• Theory test: £23
• Big bike day in March 2024 on a 650cc: £50 (1.5 hrs)

For the 5-day course, the hourly rate comes to approximately £41.5, assuming both Module 1 and Module 2 are passed on the first attempt. However, in case of failure, retests incur additional costs of £115 for Module 1 and £200 for Module 2.
Considering the frequency of test failures discussed on this sub, I decided to investigate pass rates. It's evident that my local test centre in Mitcham consistently falls below the national pass rate for both Module 1 and Module 2. Conversely, centres like Norwich, Bangor, and Dundee have exceptional scores for Module 1, while Ipswich, Swindon, and Leicester stand out for Module 2. Ipswich, notably, boasts impressive pass rates of 91% for male candidates and 92% for female candidates.
Here are the pass rates for Module 1 and Module 2 across various locations:
Module 1:

• National Pass Rate (2019-2024): Male 76%, Female 56%
• Mitcham (London) April 23 to March 24: Male 70%, Female 54%
• Norwich April 23 to March 24: Male 89%, Female 70%
• Bangor April 23 to March 24: Male 84%, Female 80%
• Dundee April 23 to March 24: Male 80%, Female 81%

Module 2:

• National Pass Rate (2019-2023): Male 72%, Female 70%
• Mitcham (London) April 22 to March 23: Male 59%, Female 61%
• Ipswich April 23 to March 24: Male 91%, Female 92%
• Swindon April 23 to March 24: Male 80%, Female 85%
• Leicester (Wigston) April 23 to March 24: Male 84%, Female 84%

Provided I go with the above quote and pass first time I'd of spent £1,317 over 38.5 hours of training. What's really frustrating is unlike learning to drive a car where you can build up experience outside of formal lessons in a family member's or friend's car provided you have insurance, there isn't much scope for the doing the same in learning to ride a big bike. You can potentially hire or purchase a 125cc but even that doesn't seem to cut it now that I've experienced being on a 600cc.
There are supermarket car parks that lay empty that could double as a makeshift training yards if only there was a platform and policy that allowed big bike owners to hire their motorcycles in closed spaces with their supervision. I think £10-15/hr would be a fair price. A few cones, the DVSA manoeuvring area diagrams, a laser measure and you've got a mock Mod 1 test centre. Just a thought.
How many hours of training did it take you? How much did it cost you and how much experience did you have before hand? Has anyone done the DAS specifically in an area that has a high pass rate?

Introduction:
F. Scott Fitzgerald's novel, "The Great Gatsby," is a classic work of American literature that explores themes of love, wealth, and the pursuit of the American Dream in the Roaring Twenties. While the novel is primarily a social commentary on the excesses and disillusionments of the Jazz Age, it also offers insights into ecosystem ecology and the interconnectedness of human activities with natural systems. This essay examines the intersections between "The Great Gatsby," ecosystem ecology, biogeochemical cycles (specifically the hydrologic, carbon, nitrogen, and phosphorus cycles), and human impacts on the environment.
"The Great Gatsby": Wealth, Excess, and Ecological Disruption
"The Great Gatsby" is set in the wealthy enclaves of Long Island, New York, during the 1920s, a time of unprecedented economic prosperity and cultural upheaval in the United States. The novel follows the story of Jay Gatsby, a mysterious millionaire, and his pursuit of the American Dream, as narrated by his neighbor, Nick Carraway.
At its core, "The Great Gatsby" is a story about wealth, excess, and moral decay in American society. The characters in the novel live extravagant lifestyles, characterized by lavish parties, opulent mansions, and reckless behavior. However, beneath the surface of this glittering facade lies a world of moral ambiguity, social inequality, and ecological disruption.
Ecosystem Ecology: Interactions, Dynamics, and Feedbacks
Ecosystem ecology is the study of how living organisms interact with each other and their physical environment to form self-regulating systems. Ecosystems are comprised of biotic (living) and abiotic (non-living) components that interact and exchange energy and nutrients through various biogeochemical cycles.
In "The Great Gatsby," the ecosystem of Long Island is depicted as a microcosm of the larger American landscape, characterized by human activities such as urbanization, industrialization, and agricultural expansion. The interactions between human society and the natural environment have profound effects on the health and stability of local ecosystems.
Biogeochemical Cycles: Hydrologic, Carbon, Nitrogen, and Phosphorus
Biogeochemical cycles are pathways through which elements such as water, carbon, nitrogen, and phosphorus are exchanged between living organisms, the atmosphere, the hydrosphere (water bodies), and the lithosphere (rock and soil). These cycles play a critical role in regulating Earth's climate, nutrient cycling, and ecosystem functioning.
The hydrologic cycle describes the movement of water through the atmosphere, land, and oceans, driven by processes such as evaporation, condensation, precipitation, and runoff. In "The Great Gatsby," the characters' extravagant lifestyles and excessive water use contribute to the degradation of local water resources, such as the polluted waters of the Long Island Sound.
The carbon cycle describes the movement of carbon between the atmosphere, oceans, soil, and living organisms through processes such as photosynthesis, respiration, and decomposition. In "The Great Gatsby," the burning of fossil fuels, such as coal and gasoline, contributes to atmospheric carbon dioxide levels and global climate change, as depicted by the smoky industrial landscape of the East Egg.
The nitrogen and phosphorus cycles describe the movement of these essential nutrients through the atmosphere, soil, water, and living organisms. In "The Great Gatsby," agricultural runoff from nearby farms leads to eutrophication of water bodies such as the East Egg Bay, resulting in algal blooms, oxygen depletion, and fish kills.
Human Impacts on the Environment: Urbanization, Pollution, Deforestation, Climate Change, and Habitat Destruction
Human activities have significant impacts on the environment, including habitat destruction, pollution, deforestation, climate change, and loss of biodiversity. In "The Great Gatsby," these impacts are depicted through the lens of human society's excesses and moral decay.
Urbanization and industrialization lead to habitat destruction and fragmentation, as natural landscapes are converted into urban developments, roads, and industrial zones. Pollution from industrial activities, such as coal mining and factory emissions, contributes to air and water pollution, as depicted by the smoky, polluted skies and waters of Long Island.
Deforestation and agricultural expansion lead to loss of biodiversity and habitat destruction, as natural ecosystems are cleared for urban development, agriculture, and timber extraction. Climate change, driven by human activities such as burning fossil fuels and deforestation, leads to global warming, sea level rise, and extreme weather events.
Conclusion
"The Great Gatsby" offers valuable insights into the interconnectedness of human society and the natural environment, highlighting the ways in which human activities impact local ecosystems and global biogeochemical cycles. By examining the intersections between literature, ecosystem ecology,
biogeochemical cycles, and human impacts on the environment, we can gain a deeper understanding of the complex dynamics of human-nature interactions and the importance of environmental stewardship and sustainability in shaping our collective future.
As we navigate the challenges of the 21st century, it is essential to recognize the ways in which our actions affect the health and stability of ecosystems around the world. By promoting conservation, sustainable development, and responsible stewardship of natural resources, we can work towards a more equitable, resilient, and sustainable future for all. Just as the characters in "The Great Gatsby" grapple with the consequences of their actions, so too must we confront the ecological realities of our time and strive to build a better world for future generations.

To preface, AQA Geography makes me want to cry every time I revise for it tbh. It used to be my best subject but ever since 2nd year content was a thing I've lowkey hated it. Which is kinda trouble because my uni offer cares about geography lol. And the exam is next week.
The AQA geog spec makes no sense imo. Does anyone actually know how to answer 4-markers?? I know that sometimes the question asks to "explain" but you only get AO1 marks i.e. NOT explaining (which is AO2), and you should ONLY use theory.
I was doing a practice question from one of the samples "explain dynamic equilibrium in the water cycle" I was talking about inputs/outputs in a river system and how it refers to balance (all in the mark scheme) but then I talked about how dynamic equilibrium is re-achieved after going out of balance via negative feedback with the example of precipitation. Apparently the mark scheme wanted to talk about systems and the closed hydrological cycle and how it is changed by humans. What???? How am I supposed to know I should talk about THAT???? Do I just get no marks for my yappanese or will the examiners pity me?
Genuinely kind of despise this subject tbh, and I'll be doing something like it in uni :(. If anyone actually knows what is going on pls help. I find if I go into my geog knowledge I end up losing marks. So i gotta think like the mark scheme atp ugh

(A) "Methane is worse. Why even worry about CO₂?"

Because it's both, there's much more CO₂ in the atmosphere and CO₂ lingers far longer than methane.

While methane is a more potent greenhouse gas than CO₂, there is over 220 times more CO₂ than methane in the atmosphere - as of 2022, 417 ppm as opposed to 1.894 ppm. The amount of warming attributed to methane is calculated to be around 30% of the warming CO₂ contributes. And the atmospheric concentration of both continues to rise (fig. 1).

(...)

Methane should not be underestimated. Once in the atmosphere it has various effects and associated feedbacks that contribute indirectly to warming. Realclimate has an authoritative post detailing some of those, here.
In AR6, the changes in radiative forcing due to methane and other greenhouse gases are presented (fig. 3). The figure shows that while CO₂ is the biggest of our problems, methane is still significant and efforts to reduce its emissions should nevertheless continue to be implemented. But never at the same time let it distract from CO₂. It's not a case of one or the other. They are both big problems requiring different solutions.

https://skepticalscience.com/methane-and-global-warming.htm
Both are a significant problem, but CO₂ is still quantitatively more important. Both need to be addressed, and not one or the other. CH₄ has a far shorter atmospheric lifetime than CO₂ - decades versus hundreds of years.
See also this diagram in the IPCC report.

(B) "CO₂ is plant food"

1. https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/ask-the-experts-does-rising-co2-benefit-plants1/
2. https://skepticalscience.com/co2-plant-food-advanced.htm
3. https://yaleclimateconnections.org/2020/12/more-co2-in-the-atmosphere-hurts-key-plants-and-crops-more-than-it-helps/
4. https://news.climate.columbia.edu/2022/01/27/how-climate-change-will-affect-plants/
5. https://www.ipcc.ch/srccl/chaptechapter-3/

(C) "It's a fantastic loop the earth has: we produce CO2, plants need it and produce O2 that we need"

Atmospheric CO₂ is increasing because the natural carbon cycle cannot absorb all of the CO₂ we emit and we emit 37 Gt every year.

(D) "It's odd for us to even try to reduce our CO2, especially when China is burning endless fossil fuels"

1. Does it matter how much the United States reduces its carbon dioxide emissions if China doesn’t do the same?
2. Analysis: Which countries are historically responsible for climate change?

(E) "It's hard to take climate scientists seriously when they don't recommend nuclear power"

False.

When it comes to nuclear power, there is a 20-point gap between AAAS members’ and the general public’s views, with the AAAS community more inclined than the general public to build more nuclear power plants. Fully 65% of AAAS members favor building more nuclear power plants, while 33% are opposed. Those figures are similar to the subsets of AAAS members who are Working Ph.D. Scientists and Active Research Scientists. By contrast, about half of Americans (51%) oppose building more nuclear power plants, while 45% are in favor.
A majority of AAAS members support more nuclear power plants, regardless of disciplinary specialty. Physicists and engineers are more strongly in favor of building more nuclear power plants than are those in other specialties. For example, 79% of all physicists surveyed and 75% of engineers connected with AAAS favor building more nuclear power plants. The views of Earth scientists are similar to those of all members; 66% among this group favor more nuclear power plants and 32% are opposed.

Pew Research Center - Elaborating on the Views of AAAS Scientists, Issue by Issue
James Hansen is a very prominent climate scientist promoting nuclear power, to name an example.

(F) "It used to be much warmer"

Crocodiles once swam around at the poles. Just because this was once the case though, that doesn't mean we can afford to all go live there now, just so we don't all die from heat stress. Global warming does have the potential to make certain areas of the planet virtually uninhabitable for human beings which were otherwise habitable before.
Introducing: the wet bulb temperature.

Talking point not listed?

Try: https://skepticalscience.com/argument.php
There are 219 debunks there for your reading pleasure, sorted by popularity, descending.
Still not listed? Use my irrefutable climate denial debunking essay. That's what it's for. Want a nice short video instead? Here you go.
Finally, read about the consequences of global warming.
Now get out there and fight back.

Hopefully this guide can serve as an exciting primer for people who know nothing about Gnosticism, but it's meant to delight and entertain even those who already gnow. I wrote it as the opener for an upcoming Gnostic novella, a malicious post-Sethian fantasia coming out in June.
*
Everyone has a body, a soul, and a spirit. The body rots and the soul kills itself, but the spirit is particular, peculiar, special. The spirit is the yolk in our self’s egg. It is the reality amid this dream. It is our vivifying cosmic light, holy and normally immortal, and in fact did not originate in our puny human selves but was borrowed from God and trapped inside our body’s prison, our soul’s hole. Yet our spicule of divine light is not safe. If we don’t arrange its heavenly escape through gnosis—that is, through secret knowledge of spiritual mysteries—then when we die, we vanish forever, our sharp sparks of holy spirit pulled down guttering into oblivion along with the material that cages us.
Or so an ancient Gnostic might have explained to a willing Catholic, circa 250 CE. A few midnight meetings later, he might let slip that the Trinity is slightly more extended than certain naïve believers imagine, and that our bodies are patterned on the Cosmic Man. I imagine his eyes flicking from side to side, before he unwraps a bundle of scrolls, pushing aside The Archangelic Book of Moses the Prophet in favor of a painstakingly detailed diagram illustrating the 365 angels of the solar year and their one-to-one correspondence to the parts of the human body—and incidentally, he says, did you know that there is a soul of hair, a soul of bone, a soul of skin? A psychical body that overlies our physical body? He’s started smiling, slowly putting down his inhibitions, for the Catholic has been plying him with date wine, and anyway the Gnostic is just so relieved to have found a friend, a fellow traveler fascinated in secret knowledge, in true salvation, in escaping their hostile world… Unfortunately, the brotherly-faced Catholic is planning to denounce him first thing tomorrow, and his valuable scrolls will be destroyed, and on some level the Gnostic senses it and ends up nearly whispering his secrets, implicitly pleading. Adam was androgynous, you see. The Holy Spirit is the Triple Male. Material is evil. Material is the portion of corruption nailed to our spirits. Like a satanic Jesus of darkness it suffers from our purity. We have been fettered with forgetfulness and deafened by death. Also: maybe not everyone has spirit. Only some do; the other humans are just creations. And as for the fellow called God, well he uh. Has a few dark secrets... “Oh, don’t look so uptight,” the Gnostic might say, anxiously chuckling: “Remember, I’m a Christian too!”
And he’d be right. Back in his day, the Church hadn’t entirely cornered power, clamped down on all other doctrines, and crushed the mindbending diversity of early Christianities in the Wild Wild Near-East. All around our Gnostic, there fumed and flowered a largely unpruned, rampant garden of sects and types and lifestyles, whose swarms of heaven-hunting believers spread out into hundreds of groups, used dozens of gospels, and disagreed on the most basic elements of doctrine, their beliefs resembling one another yet differing like the dialects of a diverging spiritual language. Within this ferment already shadowed by the upraised boot of the Church, the groups we refer to as the Christian Gnostics—actually Sethians, Valentinians, Thomasites, Cainites, Ophites, Carpocratians, Borborites, and many others—merely represented particularly spicy and syncretic Christians, a sort of semi-exclusive and avant-garde R&D tendency, their adepts intent on hidden knowledge, personal enlightenment, and the occasional rapturous ascent. Many believed in Jesuses, in an unfolded Trinity, in a higher baptism… it’s just that they also happened to mistrust the Abrahamic God and his world; to differ on the meaning and status of Jesus; to draw ideas from Platonism, Neopythagoreanism, Zoroastrianism, and possibly their dreams; and to ground salvation not in the problem of sin but on the pursuit of gnosis, their writers regularly soaring into metaphysical flights of rhetoric that portrayed our world as a cosmic mirage, an intoxicating nightmare from which the inspirited seeker must only awake.
Against such mystics, the Church had every advantage. It had party loyalty, centralized discipline, and a soberer, slightly more realist Christianity, with a message aimed at everyone and not just the self-selected few. It had simplicity, organization, and ruthlessness, grace and very sharp knives. The Church Fathers would put the Gnostics to great use, in part defining their own orthodoxy through the expulsion of Gnosticism, and the destruction of its texts… which is a shame, for many eccentric, beautiful, unique and surprising ideas must have disappeared forever into graves and clerical fires. Before the Church’s iron gate whanged shut and the flames ignited, the Gnostics were carting around wheelbarrowfuls of secret books, glittery kaleidoscopic treasuries of scripture—treatises, cosmogonies, incantations, prophecies, apocalypses, some of which were masterpieces of mystical rhetoric, offered original answers to notorious theological conundrums, or upended mainstream Abrahamic stories and embroidered them with conceptual rhinestones. Flip through the fraction of texts that’ve survived—scriptures like The Tripartite Tractate, The Secret Book of John, The Holy Book of the Great Invisible Spirit, Eugnostos the Blessed, Pistis Sophia, or The Gospel of Judas—and you’ll meet the female Holy Spirit, Judas as a double agent working for the side in white, the snake in Eden as a hero bringing the gift of enlightenment, and Jesus as the Word laughing on the cross because his real body, his spiritual body, is uncrucifiable. You’ll hear the cross itself speak. You’ll be treated to ritual glossolalia and cryptic hints at a baptism called the Five Seals. You’ll read prayers for secret power, lyrical visions of cosmic churches, of the abolition of illusion and the death of death, of how Error, with power and in beauty, made a substitute for Truth. You will be told that humans ate of two trees, the Tree of Enlightened Insight, and the Tree of Life, which cursed our spirits to forget eternity: now we “have been bound with dimensions, times, and seasons, and fate is master of all.”
But the most audacious and churchshaking of all Gnostic myths—the myths that brought the Church Fathers’ meteors down upon their heads, the myths that finally sent our hypothetical Catholic shouting into the cold desert night, cursing our Gnostic to the Devil—have survived in great detail and in many forms. I alluded to these already: I mean the shocking creation stories which claimed that the Jews and Christians had all the details upside-down, backward and darkly, that the Abrahamic God was not what naïve Abrahamites believed, that Genesis told only half the story, and that the Question of Evil, that perennial puzzler and atheist-maker, had the simplest answer imaginable.
See, many Gnostics split the Abrahamic God in two.
They had an upper God of unmitigated goodness, the great invisible spirit, the transcendent Middle Platonic God, the God of Jesus and of Paul, you know him: he’s the ineffable, unknowable, taciturn and enigmatic Father of Justice, to be kneeled under with utmost humility. This omnipotent self-originator was the first maker and the source of all spirit, and he created through thought, forming ideas which solidified into autonomous beings. First he emanated the rest of the Trinity—at least in some texts—but then he branched like a cosmic river into a flowing family tree of divine attributes, emanations both separate and a part of him, plural and one, grooving interlocked in a higher-dimensional bliss of mutual adoration. This perfect Father—especially in the myths of Jewish Gnostics called Sethians—had no direct role in the creation of evil or our world, and bore absolutely no responsibility for our suffering.
No, evil and our world only appeared when the youngest emanation, called Wisdom, or Sophia, struck out on her own and committed a catastrophic spiritual crime. The nature of the crime varies from text to text, but usually she attempted to create by herself, without her partner, or to comprehend the upper God—either way, she violated the cosmic order, acting in presumption and deficiency, out of unspeakable pride. And from her pride was born a monster.
This was the lower God, an evil deity called Yaldabaoth or the Demiurge, a mid-powered craftsman-God adopted from Platonism but mutated by Sethians into an insecure, fucked-up loser. This cack-handed cretin woke up alone in darkness, concluded that he had made himself, and then—since he was ultimately a cracked mirror of the great invisible creator—set about slapping our unreal world together, making it from shadows and dreams and other spare illusions. As he worked, he unconsciously copied heavenly forms and hierarchies… and did a terrible job. He might have been evil, he might have created a million styles of suffering, but Yaldabaoth was not at all a Christian Satan, not some diabolically intelligent heavy-metal pain-lord looming over his earthly hellscape; no, this moody, jealous punisher, this embodied sacrifice-sniffer, this amateurish meddler roving up and down and flinging lightning bolts at his own people, demanding ceaseless slaughter and sacrifice, was the God of the Old Testament, revealed not just as a murderous jerk but as a dumb, talentless hack, his mediocre world like a child’s drawing blotched with red-crayon scribbles of blood, a moldy, stinking parody of all goodness and worth.
Worse, Yaldabaoth suffered under his own inferiority and lashed out when he felt challenged. When we humans threatened to surpass him by enlightened insight, he shackled us to fate and locked us into death, so that we would forget our greatness which made him feel so subpar. Imagine: billions of people have died in the mostly ghastly conceivable ways, all because our gnosis wounded his ego. A petty tyrant writ cosmically large, he would have been pathetic, even pitiable, if he weren’t the showrunner of our lives, the petulant orchestrator of all pain, bitchily yanking at the puppet strings of the theater of torture that we think of as our world—that colossal junkyard of illusions where people reel around confused by death, dazzled by materiality, blinded by the daily phantasmagoria of horrors, having abandoned their inner wells of living light, though their flesh-buried sparks of spirit are ever tantalized by the rapturous fragrance of the All, though their darkened minds always sense on some level that they do not belong here, that it is possible to wake up from this nightmare, that reality is not real, existence does not exist, and to be is not to be.
We must picture our early Catholic, in the moments before his noisy flight, staring with nauseated horror at the Gnostic. That bloodhound of enlightenment hasn’t looked up in a while, retelling his creation story with awe and trembling, mesmerized and moved all over again by this heady doctrine which contains the solution to his suffering, the explanation for his pain, for his fears and feelings about the world, about being watched, toyed with, persecuted, about being misled and betrayed and hated, about truth being concealed and difficult to find, about the somnolence of the masses. The demonic pains in his gut, the death of his infant daughter, the idiots in charge everywhere at all times, the staggeringly high victory-rate of the forces of darkness, the godawful, unforgivable suffering of innocents—all this finally made sense. Our Gnostic found an elegant answer to the Question of Evil, and had the Churchites been able to bear it, they might have saved themselves millennia of defensive oratory on the perennially red-eyed and heart-rending question of why innocents suffer. Ask the Catholic why a good God made evil, and you’ll get that familiar rigmarole about how we are granted free will in order to be tested, to sort good from evil and place our salvation in our own hands; ask a darkened luminary like Dostoevsky, if you want to be informed that we need to suffer to be able to choose Jesus, and if necessary the poor must starve and die. All those blameless children who get beaten, diddled, napalmed? They’re collateral damage in the great sorting of souls, victim of someone else’s wrong choice, destroyed by a design some call intelligent. But why, precisely, did a good God have to make evil? Why cancer, why brain parasites? Why boil us in the tar pit of time? The Gnostic shrugs sadly, expansively, with thick maroon smudges under his eyes, and, idly rotating a lamp he’s staring into, with little lights dancing in his pupils, reveals the truest thing he knows: that innocents bleed, the rapacious rule, and our lives are carnage incarnated, because our world is a psychotic prison made from pride and pain, a ceaseless cycle of suffering dreamed down by a colossal lion-headed wanker. Our world was created by a counterfeit, a ravener and a ravisher, a violent and childish dumb-ass, and we may confirm the bad news with this insight from the Gospel of Phillip:
“God is a man-eater, and so humans are sacrificed to him.”

Floods, a recurring natural phenomenon, wreak havoc on communities worldwide annually.
Check out environmental hotspots caused by floods to see where flooding is a global concern.
Understanding their causes and impacts is crucial to mitigating their devastating effects and building resilience. Here's a glimpse into the complexities surrounding floods:
🌊 Causes:
Excessive precipitation, tropical storms, and rapid snowmelt overwhelm drainage systems.
Storms, hurricanes, and cyclones bring intense rainfall, inundating areas.
Dam collapses, like the 1889 Johnstown disaster, release catastrophic floods.
🌊 Impacts:
Loss of life, infrastructure damage, and economic disruption are common consequences.
Unsuitable living conditions and health risks persist due to contaminated floodwaters.
Agricultural losses exacerbate food shortages and economic strain.
Environmental degradation and biodiversity loss pose long-term challenges.
🌊 Climate Change:
Climate change exacerbates floods through intensified hydrological cycles.
Rising sea levels worsen coastal flooding, as seen in Western Europe.
🌊 Mitigation Strategies:
Sustainable land use practices and wetland preservation can reduce flood risks.
Early warning systems and community education enhance preparedness and evacuation.
Nature-based solutions, like floodplain restoration, bolster resilience.
In conclusion, addressing floods requires a multifaceted approach, integrating technology, policy, and community engagement. Prioritizing mitigation efforts today is key to safeguarding lives and creating a more resilient future.

My Background:
I used to be a Manufacturing Engineer and in the engineering leadership development program for one of the largest aerospace/defense corporations in the world. I spent a lot of time improving manufacturing processes, and offering feedback to design teams on design for manufacturing. With that intro, I wanted to share my insights I recently was noticing about Tesla's touchscreen design. I am copying all this direct from a text I sent to a friend a few days ago 😎:
From text:
One of the biggest differentiators for Tesla now that it is well-established is the almost complete lack of buttons. I would be willing to bet most people do not realize how huge of a competitive advantage this is. When I was at we literally studied the manufacturing efficiencies of Toyota. As an example, when GM went bankrupt, they had over 200 different part numbers for “horn” assemblies. That is mind-blowing. It is like a mess of spaghetti when you think about all of the engineering diagrams, and also the overlap of design. So picture you have some issue where a screw hole is having fatigue fracture after a few years in one specific part of the horn assembly. Stuff like this is very common in newer designs for example. You literally learn by trial and error. Then the engineers really study the hell out of what is going on, and make a version 2 with the modifications. At Toyota they only had 2 models of horn assembly, so when you fix a problem like this, at absolute most, you only have to fix it in 2 different part numbers. But at GM depending on the design overlap, you may have to redesign hundreds of different assemblies. It is a literal nightmare. You would have so many updates to do, you would literally have to have a gigantic team of engineers overhauling all of these horn assemblies. There is no way around that short of just not making replacement parts for your vehicles, which would be like a nuclear bomb blowing your brand value to pieces.
Over a product life-cycle, you will literally have potentially dozens (or more) revisions to the part diagrams. Meaning you keep learning from little mistakes, failures in production, and manufacturing inefficiencies (meaning parts that are hard to build) and you redesign them to be easier to build. And then a company that is doing things “very well” like Toyota is like “Holy Shit! That horn assembly right there… we have revised that design 100 times, and it is literally absolute perfection. We can build that thing to 6 sigma reliability where you have fewer than 3.4 defects per million. This is like the holy grail!”
The key being that it takes a tremendous amount of effort and revising to get a product to that level of maturity. Lots of money, and lots of hard work.
But this is where the Tesla advantage comes in
See, by Tesla mostly having no buttons or switches, they eliminate at bare minimum dozens of parts and wiring assemblies, and Assembly Instructions for assemblers, or assembly coding for robots, that all have to go through these product revision processes. And there is a huge economic moat for Tesla in this regard, because they started it this way pretty much from the beginning. So the cars have mostly been designed for well over a decade now with none of this. Yet for Toyota to compete on this, or Ford, Honda, GM, Stellantis, all of them, they have to take their holy grail button/wiring/connector designs, that have gone through literally 100s of revisions, and possibly 10s or 100s of thousands of engineering man hours to get them to this stage, and chunk them in the trash, and redesign everything. This would cause a reliability problem in the vehicles which would tarnish the brands in the interim. And this is a massive advantage. So while Tesla did all of this stuff right from the beginning and built everything with this focus on efficiency of design and manufacturing, these others are doing everything the same, because “If it ain’t broke, not only don’t fix it, but please don’t take all of the engineers 1000s of hours, throw them in the trash and make us start from scratch again”
And the cherry on top of all of this, is that if you build a button on the side of a seat in a regular car for example, and people bitch about it in car reviews like “I think it’s kind of hard to reach this button. It should be next to the steering wheel” - from an engineering perspective, that is like “Oh my god, we have to redesign the whole fucking seat and dash.” Because when you move a switch panel, all the interior of the seat has to be moved around. Same on the dash. All the wiring assemblies have to be carefully routed through ridiculously cramped spaces, and assemblers have to have AI (assembly instructions) to tell them how to do all of it. So all that has to be redone. On a Tesla, if someone thinks its confusing to adjust something, you just send an update over wifi to the UI. Almost like magic. All the cars are just fixed probably by one or two software guys writing the code to fix it. Compare those two from a cost perspective. THIS is one huge reason why Tesla is kicking ass on the net margins.

Hello fellow engineers
I am mechanical engineering students on my final year at the university and i'm having problems in my capstone project.
I'm working on a rehabilitation device that needs to be pumped air from zero to 50 KPA.
I'm thinking of using a portable compressor like the ones that inflate car tires and work on DC power supply And I hope it can be programmed using an Arduino. I will pump air from the compressor to the rehabilitation device For a few seconds and then release the air through the exhaust and cycle again. I found this solenoid however it's working pressure is from 0.15 MPA to 0.8 MPA. I am not very confident that I understand that the circuit diagram or valve diagram that is imprinted on the solenoid valve to perform the required job also I'm not sure using tire pump is feasible.
Any help is appreciated, thank you in advance.
solenoid