I am trying to use a resource (.tres) file to save my game data.
Here is the script I am using for the resource:

extends Resource class_name LevelData @export var pins : Dictionary ## Dict containing all pins in the level @export var gates : Dictionary ## Dict containing all gates in the level @export var wires : Array ## Array containing all wires in the level 

And here is my function for saving the file:

# Save the level func save_level(): var data = LevelData.new() data.pins = pins data.gates = gates data.wires = wires # LEVEL_DIR is a constant value "user://levels/" print(ResourceSaver.save(data, LEVEL_DIR + "test.tres")) 

When I try to run this code, I get the following error:

E 0:00:04:0110 level.gd:41 @ save_level(): Cannot save file 'user://levels/test.tres'.  Condition "err" is true. Returning: ERR_CANT_OPEN  scene/resources/resource_format_text.cpp:1966 @ save()  level.gd:41 @ save_level() playground.gd:22 @ _process() 

Printing out the output of ResourceSaver.save() gives this output (I assume this is an error code): 19
Anybody know what's going on here? If you need any extra information, feel free to ask :) Thanks in advance!

Ballers: Ball or Nothing” is the riveting documentary that follows the journey of Scotland’s only professional basketball team, the Glasgow Rocks, as they strive to end a 20-year trophy drought. Here is your complete guide to watch Ballers: Ball Or Nothing on BBC iPlayer on September 19 via VPN in USA.
The Glasgow Rocks, a team characterized by a small yet dedicated group of players and coaches, have been striving for victory despite facing numerous challenges, including limited funding.
The documentary showcases the heartwarming camaraderie and the relentless spirit of the team as they juggle multiple jobs to sustain themselves while pursuing their basketball dreams.
Ballers: Ball or Nothing” is the riveting documentary that follows the journey of Scotland’s only professional basketball team, the Glasgow Rocks, as they strive to end a 20-year trophy drought. Here is your complete guide to watch Ballers: Ball Or Nothing on BBC iPlayer Ballers: Ball or Nothing” is the riveting documentary that follows the journey of Scotland’s only professional basketball team, the Glasgow Rocks, as they strive to end a 20-year trophy drought. Here is your complete guide to watch Ballers: Ball Or Nothing on BBC iPlayer on September 19 via VPN in USA.
The Glasgow Rocks, a team characterized by a small yet dedicated group of players and coaches, have been striving for victory despite facing numerous challenges, including limited funding.
The documentary showcases the heartwarming camaraderie and the relentless spirit of the team as they juggle multiple jobs to sustain themselves while pursuing their basketball dreams.

Quick Steps: Watch Ballers: Ball Or Nothing from anywhere

Follow these simple steps to watch Ballers: Ball Or Nothing

1. Download a reliable VPN [we recommend ExpressVPN OR PureVPN as it provides exceptional streaming experience globally]
2. Download and install VPN app!
3. Connect to a server in the Uk
4. Login to Bbc iPlayer
5. Watch Ballers: Ball Or Nothing on Bbc iPlayer

Watch Ballers: Ball Or Nothing with ExpressVPN

Why Do We Need a VPN to Watch ‘Ballers: Ball Or Nothing

Using a VPN allows you to bypass geographical restrictions by changing your IP address, enabling you to access content available exclusively in the UK. It is a necessary tool for fans outside the UK eager to follow the Glasgow Rocks’ journey in “Ballers: Ball or Nothing”.

Where to Watch ‘Ballers: Ball Or Nothing Online For Free

If you are in the UK, tuning in is straightforward. You can watch “Ballers: Ball or Nothing” on BBC Three or stream it online via BBC iPlayer for free. All you need are your TV provider credentials to access the service. On the other hand, for viewers in the USA, watching the series is a bit more complex due to geographical restrictions on BBC iPlayer. However, there is a workaround: using a VPN.
BBC iPlayer free trial gives access to its extensive content that includes the best movies and series to stream anytime. Also, the BBC iPlayer subscription plan offers affordable prices depending on the viewing preferences of people in the USA.
Moreover, BBC iPlayer is a free streaming service in the UK, but if you’re in the USA, you’ll need to purchase a TV license in order to view it legally. A TV license costs £157.50 ($195.36) a year and entitles you to use the BBC iPlayer and other BBC channels.

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For a seamless viewing experience in the USA, consider using one of the following VPN services known for their reliability and speed:
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What is the Release Date of Ballers: Ball Or Nothing

The documentary premiered on BBC Scotland on September 18, 2023, and in the UK on BBC Three on September 19, 2023.

About the Documentary Ballers: Ball Or Nothing

The documentary offers an intimate look at the Glasgow Rocks, showcasing the challenges and triumphs of a small yet dedicated team striving for victory despite limited funding. The series portrays the heartfelt efforts of the team, including the management’s endeavour to provide the utmost care for its players, helping them overcome various hurdles such as homesickness.

Behind the Scenes with the Glasgow Rocks

Under the guidance of MD Sean Skelly and Head Coach Gareth Murray, the team has managed to assemble a formidable group of players, including both domestic UK talents and imports from Europe and America. The documentary offers an intimate look into the lives of these players, portraying their struggles with homesickness and the pressures of being part of a team with limited resources yet unlimited heart.

Ballers: Ball Or Nothing Episode Guide

Here is a sneak peek into the first four episodes of the series:

• Episode 1 (September 19, 2023): The club’s sale news puts everything into doubt for the staff both on and off the court.
• Episode 2 (September 19, 2023): The new owners announce a shocking new name for the team.
• Episode 3 (September 26, 2023): The team faces turmoil due to homesickness, injuries, and on-court selfishness.
• Episode 4 (September 26, 2023): A new signing might be the turning point the team needs as they reach mid-season.

How to Watch the documentary Ballers or Nothing?

For viewers in the UK, the series is available on BBC Three and can be streamed online on BBC iPlayer shortly after its broadcast. International fans, however, will need to use a VPN service to access BBC iPlayer and follow the Glasgow Rocks in their pursuit of glory.

How many episodes are there in the “Ballers: Ball or Nothing” series?

The series consists of 8 episodes, detailing the highs and lows of the Glasgow Rocks’ season.

Can I watch “Ballers: Ball or Nothing” for free?

Yes, viewers in the UK can watch the series for free on BBC iPlayer. However, you will need to have TV provider credentials to access the service.

In a Nutshell

Ballers: Ball or Nothing” promises to be a series filled with determination, heart, and the spirit of teamwork. Whether you are in the UK or elsewhere, this guide ensures you won’t miss a moment of this inspiring journey.on September 19 via VPN in USA.
The Glasgow Rocks, a team characterized by a small yet dedicated group of players and coaches, have been striving for victory despite facing numerous challenges, including limited funding.
The documentary showcases the heartwarming camaraderie and the relentless spirit of the team as they juggle multiple jobs to sustain themselves while pursuing their basketball dreams.

These are Castlevania Netflix icons made available as part of the limited \"Netflix and Chills\" collection (October, 2018).
Before I include the steps, I would like to give a few thanks. Some of you may know that I started this mission to find a way to get these icons a few days ago a while back. It took a bunch of work, posting on Facebook groups, Reddit, Twitter, desperately asking for people to help, haha. Well here we are. Thank you u/Sartana for getting the ball rolling by giving me the unique ID of Dracula. Thank you u/sublimeme for providing us with Trevor's. Thank you @insightsoda (Twitter) for helping us get Alucard's. And thank you u/N313intruder for helping me ask around once you were made aware of my mission, haha, and successfully helping me get the icons I would have missed.
Well, that's it. Here's what you need to do to be able to change your Netflix avatar to these icons (taken and altered from u/TaylorSwiftAddicted's guide):
* Be sure to turn off VPN before attempting as some people are having trouble with them on *

1. You will need to be on Microsoft Edge or Chrome to do it.
2. You will need to temporarily install this extension to help you change it. Should you worry about whether or not it is safe to install, it has over 2 million users, and is made by Facebook. You can remove this extension after you have changed the icon, should you wish.
3. Go to https://www.netflix.com/ManageProfiles, and navigate to the page where you can change your profile icon.
4. Open the React Developer Tools by right clicking anywhere on the page and choosing 'inspect'.
5. At the top of the developer tools, you will find a tab named 'Components'.
6. On the left inside this Components tab, you will see a bunch of rows of things. Click on the first row that says 'LolopiIcon'.
7. Now on the right side, you will see a bunch of information about the icon. Next to 'icon' there is an arrow, click it to expand the information inside icon.
8. Inside 'icon' is an 'id'. This is the one we will need to change. Double-click on the value to the right of 'id' so you can edit it.
9. Replace it with the unique ID of your desired icon. In our case, the IDs are as follows: Dracula: "AVATAR0c531682-c1ea-11e8-a863-1204ac6e63e2enMX81029379" Trevor: "AVATAR0c52c863-c1ea-11e8-a863-1204ac6e63e2enMX81029379" Alucard: "AVATAR0c5364a0-c1ea-11e8-a863-1204ac6e63e2enMX81029379"
10. Back in your browser on the edit profiles page, click the very first icon on the screen (this would normally be the first icon in your history of past icons used). This icon is the one we just set a new ID on. Don't worry, it didn't overwrite this icon and you can still change back to this icon in the future, should you wish.
11. After you click, you will be shown a prompt about whether or not you want to change. This will not yet show your desired icon under 'new'. Click let's do it.
12. You will now be shown another prompt about whether or not you want to save your profile settings. Again, it will not show your desired icon yet. Click 'save'.
13. You should now have your desired icon! And yes, this change would be reflected on all devices.

Have fun!
ALSO, if it's not working, try following these steps, but it really should work.
If you're interested, here are links to reddit posts relating to our little mission hehe:
https://www.reddit.com/castlevania/comments/r9efwx/i_finally_have_draculas_icon_on_netflix_still/
https://www.reddit.com/castlevania/comments/r1mfst/does_anyone_still_have_alucard_as_their_netflix/
https://www.reddit.com/castlevania/comments/rammz5/how_to_use_alucard_dracula_netflix_icon_2021/

I wanted to preface this by saying this occurred 7-8 years ago, when I was a sophomore in high school, and im a much different person now and not proud of who I was. Even so, the events of that semester haunt me even today, to the point that it occasionally keeps me up at night, I feel like if I get some impartial judgement on the situation I may be able to resolve some of the lingering grief. I feel like all things considered my actions were justified, but of course you will always be the protagonist fighting off the antagonists in your own story.
So it started in February 2017. I entered into an alternative high school program in my county designed to give students who couldn't otherwise function in normal schools a second chance. I had missed a few weeks due to a hospitalization earlier that year, and while my teachers had been lenient, I was having a difficult time catching back up and it was decided by my school counselors that I would be an excellent candidate for transfer.
It started off really well, I immediately was making new friends, I felt refreshed and hopeful about my new school, I really liked all my teachers, things finally felt right for the first time in awhile. Then I met a boy who i'll call "T", he was pretty cool, easy to talk to, very friendly, overall welcoming and we became friends right off the bat. I decided to get involved in extracurriculars, and T was part of the schools forensics club, which I had an interest in, so I joined up. On the trip we exchanged phone numbers, and ended up flirting over text over the next couple weeks. Eventually he asked me out and I accepted, this is where it started going downhill.
I figured dating this guy meant we would spend more time together, so we could really get to know each other, I was mistaken. I asked him to eat lunch with me, he wasn't interested, he wouldn't walk me to class or really interact with me outside of the classroom and texting. On top of this I learned some information about him over text that I will still not share because this story is still recognizable by those involved but lets just say it was a major turn off for me, I ended the relationship quickly. After that "J" and "A" his two female besties, quickly entered the scene to make my life a living hell. The initial accusation was that I led T on, and that I was trying to control him by forcing him to eat lunch with me, the truth is, I just wanted something different than what he was offering. I even told him we could still be friends. Meanwhile I was in my promiscuous phase and had many non serious flings and sugar daddy's and whatnot, this was just a run of the mill whelp that didn't work out moment for me, I was ready to move on immediately. They were not.
Rumors quickly spread about me, about me being a slut, apparently I was a prostitute and everyone seemed to know except me, and honestly I was unbothered by this. The prostitute thing was untrue, though I absolutely accepted gifts from people I talked to online, and I kinda was a slut, to be fair, so, not exactly the reputation I wanted but things could be much worse. I still had my friends, and I poured myself into my studies and ignited a love for STEM that I still have today.
Then one by one my friends disappeared. I would see them talking with A or J or one of their misc. associates. I was confused, because I hadn't done anything to them. I tried to talk to them, but I was blocked or laughed at, the more I was mocked and ridiculed the less confident about that whole thing I became. It wasn't just my current friends though, A kept tabs on who I was trying to befriend and snatched them up before I could clear the air. This happened with a couple people, but one in particular really hurt, i'll come back to him in a bit. I still had my best friend "M" who I had known years prior to coming to the school, she stuck around the longest, but eventually she started dating a guy from that clique, I was completely alone.
Meanwhile I was getting sneered at and laughed at, and whispered about, I would see girls I didn't know except through association with A and J who would point at me when they thought I couldn't see, and they'd lean into their friends to quitely gossip behind their hands. I tried not to see it, I found myself staring at the floor a lot.
I ended up talking to A and J and asking them to stop, I told them they were being immature (which in hindsight fanned the flames) there was no ceasefire. I ended up going to the school counselor who basically told us to be nice and did nothing to help. I talked to her 1 to 1 and explained the situation and she shrugged it off. I was growing increasingly desperate for support I wasn't receiving. I started to notice an impact to my grades, I was depressed, I couldn't focus, I was randomly tearful. I started eating lunch in a random corridor away from my peers. I wish I could have disappeared completely.
Then one day a boy transferred in from another school, a teacher asked for a volunteer to give him a tour of the building, I was chosen. His name was S. Talking to him was like a breath of fresh air, we hit it off quickly, I was so relieved to finally made a friend. We connected over history, he was a nerd like me and funny too. I went home that day and cried joyful tears, I was so excited to see him again the next day in first period, and when I walked into the room and saw A, J and him sitting together, my stomach hit the floor, we made eye contact and he just frowned and shook his head. I went to my desk and just put my head down and cried. At this point I didn't care if I was seen or not. This is the one that really got me.
A few weeks passed by, I was quietly working in biology class and I heard a dude call my name across the room, he said "OP, "D" thinks your cute!" and the group of guys laughed, I motioned the guy over, and gave him my number, I didn't have any interest in dating the guy but I really really wanted someone to talk to me. It wasn't even two hours before he was hitting it off with A.
At lunch time I went to a different counselor, one who showed more empathy to my situation. She told me I could stay in her office the rest of the day. 4th period came around and I was reeling in my head, I felt like I was a cornered animal, I was desperate for something to change. When she stepped out for a meeting I marched myself up to Spanish class, Which I shared with A, J, T, and S. I cracked the door and asked if I could speak with A in the hallway. I had the perfect speech planned, I had rehearsed a million times, that teacher said no. I told her it was incredibly important, she told me no and to get out. I looked at her, I looked at A, I stepped toward her and before I knew it she had a fist full of my hair, she was hitting me in the head while J grabbed my arms, I broke free and shoved J hard, and started punching A back but couldn't gather the momentum to do any damage as she still had my hair. The teacher who was 6 months pregnant tried to step in, I was so disoriented I shoved her away with my elbow. A male teacher came in and pulled us apart. I looked around at several cameras, faces of disgust. Sam looked at me and said "what the fuck is wrong with you?" I took my bags, and ran out into the hallway, down the stairs and was almost out of the building when the principal stopped me. I was suspended for a week.
My mom picked me up and I told her everything. We decided I would be withdrawn and I would be homeschooled the rest of high school. I eventually got my GED. I mellowed out, met my husband, and now we have a sweet baby boy. For some reason though, my heart can't handle what happened, even still it plays on a loop in my head. Everything I never got to say is still in my throat and has been since that day. Im hoping sharing this will finally put all that to rest. I want to move on, truly.
AITA?

I've thought about switching things up for tonight's script and decided to make it an M4F one! I guess this kinda flows into the lore of my previous three scripts, with this being a sequel to the third one. Hope you enjoy it! As always, my script is free to use without monetization, just crediting me under my YT Handle @"AkitaScripts" is all!
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Synopsis: You and your boyfriend have been together for about a week. You just had your first date a few days ago, and the two of you have discussed not to tell anyone. However, your classmates are beginning to notice your relationship with him, with some jealous students making fun of it. Eventually, it becomes too much for you, and you end up in detention after a fight in the hallways. As you exit the school, you find your boyfriend waiting outside in the rain…
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
(The school is nearly empty, and the rain is pouring outside the walls. All of the students except you have already left. As you walk out through the quiet hallways, you hear the janitor mopping the floor, rumbling about his job.)
[faint dialogue from the Janitor]
(You barely pay attention to whatever the janitor said as you reach into your backpack, only to find nothing but your books and supplies. You forgot your umbrella back at home. You put on your hood and push open the doors, the gates of freedom letting out a loud creak. You point your head down to the ground and begin to walk outside, feeling the rain hit your head. Suddenly, you stop feeling the raindrops, and you look up to see your boyfriend, the VA, close to you with an umbrella.)
VA: Hey.
(You lock eye contact with him with gloomy pupils.)
[short pause]
VA: I heard about what happened from Jalen… and I’m sorry you had to-
(You suddenly wrap the VA in your arms, interrupting him. Tears begin to roll down your face and onto his shoulder as you start crying.)
VA: Hey, hey… it’s okay… it’s okay.. (holds you close to him with one of his arms, and kisses you)
[pause]
VA: Hey… look at me.
(You raise your head up from his shoulder, looking him in the eyes.)
VA: It’s going to be okay… hey, you wanna go sit down somewhere? We shouldn’t be standing out in the open.
[pause]
VA: Alright, follow me, and stay close to me.
[short pause]
(You and the VA walk in silence for a few minutes to a nearby pavilion. After a few minutes, You gently shake his arm to get his attention.)
VA: Mhm? (looks at you)
[pause]
VA: Did he tell me anything?[pause]
VA: Well, other than you landing in detention, Jalen didn’t say much. I just got the news an hour ago, before our last class ended. So, I just waited out there. I didn’t know how long detention would last.
[pause]
VA: Well… I was gonna wait by the doors, but that janitor kicked me out. He said he still needed to quote-unquote “clean the corners”.
[pause]
VA: Yeah, he’s quite grumpy. Anyways, we’re here.
(The two of you walk to one of the tables in the pavilion. As you sit down, the VA sits down next to you.)
VA: So… (puts down his umbrella on the wooden table) are you still okay, or do you need some time?
[pause]
VA: Alright… take your time telling me what happened. (wraps his arms around you and gently moves closer)
[pause]
VA: Yeah… we did decide on not telling anyone about our relationship until we were ready. And yes, I know that everyone else figured it out already.
[pause]
VA: So… lemme get this sorted out: Maddison and her group of friends found out and made fun of our relationship..?
[pause]
VA: And did they start making fun of you today, or has this happened before?
[pause]
VA: This started yesterday?
[pause]
VA: Alright, so… after a day of them making fun of you, what exactly happened that landed you in detention?
[pause]
VA: (surprised) You slapped her in the face?!
(You don’t say anything, but you look away from him and dig your head into his chest, nodding afterwards in confirmation. The VA holds you even closer in comfort.)
VA: Hey.. again, it’s okay.
[pause]
(You let go of him. Stressed and upset, you explain how you’re not okay, as you begin to cry again. The VA hugs you again to calm you down.)VA: Hey, hey, listen to me… listen to me… there’s no need to be upset about what you did. Even though there were better options, you were in the right to do that. Not that I would recommend doing it again as an option, but if you have issues like this, just come talk to me… okay?
(You look up at him and nod.)
VA: Alright then. (takes off your hood and gently combs through your hair)
(As he comes through your hair, you ask him a question.)
[pause]
VA: Why did they do it?
[pause]
VA: Well.. first off, why do you think they did it?
[pause]
VA: You think they just wanted to make fun of you for that?
[pause]
VA: Okay… I might know why they made fun of you for dating someone.
[pause]
VA: What do I mean? Well.. lemme explain. So, before you and I met a few months ago, I used to be friends with Maddison. Sure, I was never romantically interested in her, but she’d used to always flirt with me at times. Now, I don’t know if she did like me the same way you do, but she could also just be jealous.
[pause]
VA: Well, think about it: have you ever even seen Maddison date anyone?
[pause]
VA: No, right? That’s because she never has dated anyone.
[pause]
VA: Now, you also have to take into the fact she’s friends with Joe. And as we both knew, Joe liked you in a… eeh… certain way.
[pause]
VA: And he knows that you and I are dating, so he’s jealous.
[pause]
VA: No, Joe probably isn’t just jealous of how you’re dating someone else. He’s jealous that you’re dating someone else.
[pause]
VA: No, it’s not the same way as what I just said. Joe’s jealous because someone has something special in their relationship that he doesn’t.
[pause]
VA: He doesn’t have you.
[pause]
VA: Look, every relationship is different. Whether it’s a dominant one, flirtatious, or even toxic… hopefully that doesn’t happen… Joe and other people don’t have you as their girlfriend.
[pause]
VA: Lemme also tell you something: I knew this person named Stephen, and he was dating this girl named Val. His friends found out, and they were jealous and constantly made fun of him. It got so out of hand that he was pressured to break up with Val.
[pause]VA: Look, you and I can tell them to stop making fun of our relationship. But if they’re gonna continue doing it, don’t break up like with what Stephen did. Don’t be pressured to listen to the mockery. Don’t listen to them. Move on, and walk forward, and just ignore them. I know it can be challenging, and I have been in those shoes before, but it’s okay to feel this way. You have me to take care of you, to cuddle you in times like this, and to make sure that you’re okay. I’ll be here every step of the way. If you need to hold my hand, don’t hesitate. I’m here for you, babe. And it’s all gonna be okay.
(The VA plays with your hair, and kisses you. You look up to him and kiss him in return.)
[pause]
VA: I love you too.
(You snuggle in closer to the VA, feeling his warmth and his beating heart. Eventually, the rain slowly stops.)
VA: Hey, the rain stopped.
(You look around to see the birds fly in to sing. You lean in to kiss the VA.)
[pause]
VA: You’re welcome, babe. Now come on, we gotta get back home. (begins to put his dry umbrella away in his bag)
[pause]
VA: Yeah sure, we can get some food on the way home. (he picks you up in his arms and helps you off from the table) Any ideas?
[pause]
VA: Yeah sure… ramen sounds good.
(As you and the VA walk away holding hands, the birds continue to chirp as the scene fades, ending the episode.)
THE END

SHARING THIS. WINOOSKI RESIDENTS, PLEASE STEP-UP FOR THIS POOR PUP -- TW - ANIMAL ABUSE
Hey y'all,
To those peeps who've been following the dog abuse case in Winooski, Please email the mayor and city council! Luna, the abused dog, was getting beaten *again* outside of Chicks this afternoon on 5/21 per a witness.
Please email the mayor and city council utilizing the letter draft provided below!!
[klott@winooskivt.gov](mailto:klott@winooskivt.gov)
(Mayor)
[trenner@winooskivt.gov](mailto:trenner@winooskivt.gov)
(Deputy Mayor)
Council:
[cjudge@winooskivt.gov](mailto:cjudge@winooskivt.gov)
[ahurd@winooskivt.gov](mailto:ahurd@winooskivt.gov)
[boakleaf@winooskivt.gov](mailto:boakleaf@winooskivt.gov)
Reference statute "13 V.S.A. § 354" which states "the officer may seize the animal without a warrant" if an animal's life is in jeopardy. You can even just state your concern that this statute isn't being followed and multiple witnesses have seen this dog being beaten *again* as recently as 5/21. A few concerned community members are behind the scenes trying to get eyes on this dog and assist. I appreciate you. Let's flex some collective muscle to get some movement.
Script:
Hello, I'm expressing concern as a community member about the alleged dog abuse that occurred on 5/17 in Winooski, and is still intermittently occurring per witness reports, as recently as 5/21 outside Chick's Market. Statute "13 V.S.A. § 354" states "the officer may seize the animal without a warrant" if an animal's life is in jeopardy.(https://legislature.vermont.gov/.../section/13/008/00354....)I'm writing on behalf of this dog, who does not have a voice, so we can move this case forward. Another day living with beatings is a day too long. Thank you, -Name

These twenty annoyances have “equal-stream fruit” nature, therefore are called Following Annoyances; and are further subdivided into three categories. (1) resentment, (2) hate, (3) concealment, (4) rage, (5) jealousy, (6) stinginess, (7) deceit, (8) flattery, (9) harm, (10) contemptuousness, the ten laws, each arises separately, therefore are called Small Following Annoyances. The (11) shamelessness and (12) sinlessness are prevalent in all nonbenevolent hearts, so they are called Medium Following Annoyances. (13) drowsiness, (14) depression, (15) unbelief, (16) slackness, (17) indulgence, (18) lost spell, (19) agitation, (20) incorrect know, the eight laws are prevalent in all contaminated hearts, therefore are called Large Following Annoyances.
11.4.4.1.5-1 Small Following Annoyances
(1) Resentment, to the present unfavorable environments, indignity is its nature; by irritation’s first juristic quadrant (cf. section 11.1) as body, holding Crosier (i.e., stuff) is its karma. Crosier is a juristic stick, a walking stick, a campfire poker, but also can be used as a weapon like a club. Harmony Sutra says that “holding crosier” is saying from the rough and fierce occupying more percentage, in fact, also the vibrant colors (i.e., matter) include the ferocious filthy languages.
(2) Hate, due to earlier resentment, bosom with ferocities not giving up, tying up complaints is its nature; by irritation’s first juristic quadrant as body, heating up irritability is its karma.
(3) Concealment, in self-inflicted sins, fearing of losing profits and fames, hiding is its nature; by greed’s and ignorance’s first juristic quadrant as body, regret and rage are its karma.
(4) Rage, due to earlier resentment, chasing triggering fervidity, brutal violence is its nature; by irritability’s first juristic quadrant as body, maggots and nippers are its karma.
(5) Jealousy, complying with own fames and profits, not countenancing other glories, grudge is its nature; by irritability’s first juristic quadrant as body, gloomily vexation is its karma.
(6) Stinginess, indulging in wealth and laws, not able to beneficially donate, secretly hiding and miserly saving are its nature; by greed’s first juristic quadrant as body, its karma is vilely amassment.
(7) Deceit, for gain on benefit or fame, cheatingly exhibiting virtues, fraud is its nature; by greed’s and ignorance’s first juristic quadrant as body, its karma is heretical life.
(8) Flattery, for hoodwinking other, deceitfully saying strange majesties is its nature; by greed’s and ignorance’s first juristic quadrant as body, its karma is hindering being taught and instructed.
(9) Harm, non-sympathy on sentient beings, damaging and enraging other are its nature; by irritability’s first juristic quadrant as body, affiliating rage is its karma.
(10) Contemptuousness, deeply intoxicated in one’s own abundant affairs, intoxicated arrogance is its nature; by arrogance’s first juristic quadrant as body, being depended by miscellaneously dyed laws is its karma.
11.4.4.1.5-2 Medium Following Annoyances
(11) Shameless, disregarding the laws of self, easily rejecting sages and benevolences is its nature; by ignorance’s first juristic quadrant as body, growing ferocious behaviors is its karma.
(12) Sinless, in defiance of the mundane world, reverence for violence and ferocities is its nature; by ignorance’s first juristic quadrant as body, growing ferocious behaviors is its karma.
11.4.4.1.5-3 Large Following Annoyances
(13) Drowsiness, having heart unqualified to perform its duty on environments is its nature; by ignorance’s and suspicion’s first juristic quadrant as body, hindering Vipassana (i.e., gnostic view) is its karma. Samatha-Vipassana is a Sanskrit word, often used in Buddhism.
(14) Depression, having heart disquietude on environments is its nature; by ignorance’s and suspicion’s first juristic quadrant as body, hindering “acting renunciation” and Samatha (i.e., equality hold) is its karma. Disquietude is a common phenomenon of annoyances. The self-referential clamor of depression prevents aggregative hearts and laws belonging to hearts from being aroused to perform their normal functions.
(15) Unbelief, not countenancing and laughingly desiring to factual virtues and abilities, heart’s filths are its nature; by ignorance’s and suspicion’s first juristic quadrant as body, its karma is the being depended by laziness.
(16) Slackness, on affairs of severing ferocious laws and cultivating benevolent laws, laziness is its nature; by ignorance’s and suspicion’s first juristic quadrant as body, its karma is to escalate contaminations.
(17) Indulgence, not dyeing immaculate laws, not defending cultivations, going with randomly intentions at large is its nature; by ignorance’s first juristic quadrant as its body, its karma is being depended by hate and damaging benevolence.
(18) Loss spell, on those objective environments, not clearly remembering is its nature; by ignorance’s first juristic quadrant as body, being depended by agitation is its karma.
(19) Agitation, on objective environments, having heart dispersed is its nature; by ignorance’s and suspicion’s first juristic quadrant as body, being depended by ferocious gnosis is its karma.
(20) Incorrect Know, on being observed environments, wrong interpretation is its nature; by ignorance’s and gnosis’ first juristic quadrant as body, regretting transgressions is its karma.

11.4.4.1.6 Uncertain Laws

Regret, sleep, seeking, and awaiting, the four laws uncertainly appear in benevolent laws, dyed laws, etc., not as if touch, attention, acceptance, etc. certainly pervade in all hearts, not like desire, resolution, spell, etc. certainly pervade all heartlands; therefore, they are named as Uncertain Laws.
(1) Regret, also known as Detesting Deed, abominating what had done past, chasing repentance is its nature; hindering Samatha (i.e., equality hold) is its karma.
(2) Sleep, having heart insufficient and gloomy, skipping on aggregate objective environments is tis nature; hindering Vipassana (i.e., gnostic view) is its karma.
(3) Seeking, having heart hasty, intentionally saying of environments by intention, having heart turning rough is its nature; by first juristic quadrant of mean and gnosis as body, having heart not quietly dwell is its karma.
(4) Awaiting, having heart hasty, intentionally saying of environments by intention, having heart turning slim is its nature; by first juristic quadrant of mean and gnosis first as body, having heart not quietly dwell is its karma.
↪️Back to Catalog of Chapter 11 Tree of Life

Here’s a list of some of the books that were referenced on the most recent (2024) AP Lit exam: ● The Age of Innocence - Edith Wharton ● The Handmaid’s Tale - Margaret Atwood ● Invisible Man - Ralph Ellison ● Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte ● The Joy Luck Club - Amy Tan ● The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini ● King Lear - William Shakespeare ● Little Fires Everywhere - Celeste Ng ● Native Son - Richard Wright ● A Raisin in the Sun - Lorraine Hansberry ● The Scarlet Letter - Nathaniel Hawthorne ● The Secret Life of Bees - Sue Monk Kidd ● A Thousand Splendid Suns - Khaled Hosseini ● Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte ✻ Here’s a list of some of the books that were referenced on the 2021-2023 AP Lit exams: ● The Awakening - Kate Chopin ● Catch-22 - Joseph Heller ● Ceremony - Leslie Marmon Silko ● Death of a Salesman - Arthur Miller ● Fahrenheit 451 - Ray Bradbury ● The Glass Menagerie - Tennessee Williams ● Great Expectations - Charles Dickens ● The House on Mango Street - Sandra Cisneros ● Mrs. Dalloway - Virginia Woolf ● The Nickel Boys - Colson Whitehead ● 1984 (Nineteen Eighty-Four) - George Orwell ● Othello - William Shakespeare ● The Poisonwood Bible - Barbara Kingsolver ● Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen ● A Streetcar Named Desire - Tennessee Williams ● Their Eyes Were Watching God - Zora Neale Hurston ● Things Fall Apart - Chinua Achebe ● To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee ✻ Here’s a list of additional titles (sort of a random assortment) compiled by some AP Lit teachers: ● Born a Crime - Trevor Noah ● Brave New World - Aldous Huxley ● Dear Martin - Nic Stone ● The Great Gatsby - F. Scott Fitzgerald ● Just Mercy - Bryan Stevenson ● One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez ● The Things They Carried - Tim O’Brien

I have 8+ years of experience in commercial real estate lending. Naturally, my applications have been almost exclusively originations and underwriting roles, with a small amount of asset management applications as well. I've applied to 200+ roles over the last 6 months and only interviewed at 3 firms. One firm didn't email me back after 2 rounds of interviews (5 individual interviews). Two others interviewed me (3 interviews and 8 interviews, respectively) and offered roles different from the ones I applied for. I turned down those offers as they were obvious bait and switch postings and I have no desire to work for liars.
Undoubtedly, CRE is suffering from a downturn. But at this point, I can't help but think I'm being discriminated against because of my ethnic name and face. Please let me know what I can improve and how I can address this discrimination.
https://preview.redd.it/9uan9duw0a3d1.jpg?width=1700&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=7388540cd509549a1d074051538a1b312bca01fe

Took a day trip and wrote this around 9:30PM. Enjoy.
Everyone has those dreams they want to accomplish in a lifetime. The ones that seem so far fetched but still obtainable. In my case it has always been on my bucket list to travel every corner of Texas. I have been blessed in my 27 years of life to have gone as far north to see the Panhandle plains near Amarillo and as far east to see Huntsville surrounded by the piney woods. I’ve been able to see the Third Coast from H-Town through Corpitos, down to McAllen and Harlingen. I’ve drank on 6th Street in ATX, and have had countless nights I couldn’t remember in San Anto. I’ve seen a Cowboys game in Arlington while staying in Dallas with family, and I’ve floated down the rivers in San Marcos with friends. I know the backroads of South Texas between Uvalde and Laredo, like the back of my hand, and if I needed too, I could probably drive between El Paso and Fort Stockton blindfolded. In the past 4 years, I’ve spent the majority of the 100,000 miles I’ve driven, on Texas highways and county roads. Passing through small towns that people would never know existed, such as Dryden, Camp Wood, Orla, Goliad, and Dilley, where my son lives. There’s so many other cities and towns I could name which would take up the majority of this story and bore you but there is one area of Texas that I’ve always wanted to see with my own eyes and be able to experience it all. This place is actually a lot closer than many of the places I mentioned. It’s pretty much the next door neighbor to my hometown of El Paso.
On December 28, 2023, I was finally able to see it. Big Bend and Terlingua. As I was driving into the national park I stopped at the park’s entrance sign and took a typical picture in front of it like everyone does, but after, I turned back down the road, made a right and drove 28 miles to La Linda. I did this all without having a GPS or signal on my phone after I lost it passing Marathon which about an hour or so from the park entrance. I followed the old green highway signs down a road that you could tell was hardly used because of all the weeds and brush growing in the middle and side of the road. I was probably the only truck on the road with the expection of two trucks going the opposite direction that had passed me. I kept going until the road ended at a blocked off bridge that only a small car could drive over. The only time I had ever seen this place was through Google Maps when I’d sit there looking at random places that you’d think no one would ever go. I got off my truck and look around, it was quiet but the sound of the river is what got me. It was surreal to say that across that bridge was Mexico and the river I heard was the Rio Grande, which surprisingly had water in it and wasn’t dry like the way it is in El Paso. As I was looking at the graffiti on the bridge I noticed a part of it said “Chuco Town” which I though was weird because why would some slang from El Paso be tagged on some random bridge literally in the middle of nowhere. So I got curious and ended up making my way down underneath the bridge where I found this clear box with a small notebook in it. Several people had written in it with their names and when they had visited the bridge. It was like an Easter egg. I wrote my name in the book, put it back and went to go look for a way to get to the river but I couldn’t because of all the bushes and trees. I spent like a good hour looking around before getting back to my truck. I ended up driving about two hours to the Big Bend National Park Headquarters where I finally got signal on my phone. The drive into the Chisos Basin was beautiful. The color of the rocks and trees made it feel as if it was still the Fall season. The canyons were huge, the road curved through the mountains, the air hitting me through the windows was fresh. Seeing the amount of trees, for the mountain range being in the middle of a desert was crazy. Again, I only spent about an hour or so before driving through the park and into Terilingua. As I drove to Terlingua, the scenery changed drastically. It went from mountains covered in trees to something out of a Mad Max scene. It was nothing but desert with little plant life. I ended up stopping at a gas station where two the highways met. One would take me to Alpine and the other to the Terlingua ghost town. After fueling up, I drove through the ghost town to find a couple of restaurants open. I ended up eating some green enchiladas that were good but nothing compared to the ones found in El Paso. I continued to drive down the highway towards Presidio as the sun started to set. About half way to Presidio, I turned back around to head back. By this time it was 7pm. The sun had almost set completely. I pulled over to the side of the road so I could look at the sky. I had heard so many stories and seen so many pictures of the Terlingua night sky. I wanted to see if it was real. As I stepped out and looked up I saw more stars than I could ever imagine. Everything around me was pitch black, except the sky. There were hundreds of stars, they were brighter than ever. There were no clouds. I stayed looking at them for a good minute, actually I stayed looking up so long I ended up laying in the bed of my truck trying to take it all in. I ended having to go back into my truck because of the cold. Even with a thick hoodie and thermals underneath I couldn’t stay out any longer. I continued my drive back to the gas station where I had first put gas so I could type this out before my plan to head back into Big Bend. I only arrived about 8 hours ago, drove down to the La Linda bridge, drove through the national park, drove through the ghost town and saw a night sky many wont get to see in their lifetime but maybe on this drive back, I’ll be able to find the moon.

It happened. He didn't deny that. Not like he was a suspect or anything—not yet—but he never denied it to himself. At the same time, this all happened over a decade ago—twelve years to be exact.
He didn't think of it every day; in fact, sometimes an entire month would go by where it barely crossed his mind.
In a way, that whole experience—he thought of all the abductions and murders as a singular event—now felt as if it belonged to somebody else.
It was a time in his life when he was confused, mixed-up, searching; a dark time, you know, like a phase. Who didn't have one of those in their past?
Plus, he was married now. His wife, Dee, obviously didn't know about it and he felt no obligation to tell her. Did he ask about her former lovers?
Sometimes there are things in the past and you just let them be. Whether it was Dee losing her virginity to the quarterback of the football team in the backseat at a drive-in or him using multiple black garbage bags and masking tape on that thing he didn't have time to bury in rural Tennessee, everyone has things they would rather forget about. Sometimes you just leave things where they lie.
So that's what Ned Doyle did.
Until that Sunday morning, November 6th, 1988.
He was a having a glass of Dee's pulpy homemade orange juice, waiting for his coffee to percolate, when he opened his heavy weekend edition of the New York Times (probably Ned's greatest extravagance—he liked its heft; and how the Arts & Leisure section made him feel culturally superior to his Ohio townsfolk, “the Philistines of Findlay,” he called them) when he saw the article buried in the back.
The country was two days from heading to the polls for the General Election—Bush v. Dukakis—so most everything else that week had been relegated to the back.
He read the article twice before he could even begin to make sense of it. It seemed to be a story about something called "DNA fingerprinting" and a 27-year-old baker in Great Britain named Colin Pitchfork who had confessed to raping and murdering two 15-year-old girls, in separate incidents a few years apart, after a new scientific process had been used to extract information from semen which he, Colin Pitchfork, had left at the crime scenes (likely inside the victims) some five years earlier.
Now if they could do all that after five years, why not ten years—or maybe even… twelve?
"Interesting story here," he said to Dee. It wasn't uncommon for Ned to read a news story twice—once for himself and a second time aloud to Dee while she brewed his coffee and burnt her toast. But this was his third reading and Ned acted as if it were his first.
"What do you make of that?" he asked. It somehow got worse each time he read it. After the third time, he felt as if he had been sucker punched in the stomach.
"Science Fiction is what it sounds like," Dee said matter-of-factly, pouring Ned his coffee in a mug that bore the Marathon Oil insignia. Findlay, Ohio was Marathon’s headquarters although there had been rumors circulating about a move to Texas.
"And unconstitutional," he said. "Cops running a dragnet like that, taking blood samples from 5,000 townspeople. Thankfully, that would never pass the muster here."
"They did catch the killer so maybe it wouldn't be a bad idea," she said, buttering her burnt toast. "Otherwise, who knows? They could have convicted the wrong man.”
Ned had already gotten lucky once – astonishingly so. Griffin Gerald Jones, the famed “I-75 Corridor Child Killer,” had claimed responsibility for all but one of Ned’s victims before dying in Florida’s electric chair.
"You can't have police in this country running around, sticking everyone with needles, drawing blood for some sort of science experiment,” he said. “Nevermind the Constitution, what about AIDS?”
“What about it?” she asked.
“There's been hundreds, thousands of cases now where people have been infected by giving blood,” he said. “That's a medical fact. Get accused of a crime and AIDS too?"
"It doesn't sound like any of the townspeople there in England got AIDS, darling. Unless there's more to the story, besides what you read to me."
He watched her spread orange marmalade over her burnt toast and take a bite. She had a dead tooth and he saw it every time she opened her mouth. He loved Dee but had never been sexually attracted to her. Not in the way he had been attracted to others.
"It really is just a matter of time before that stuff makes it over here," she said with her mouth full. "To this side of the pond, as they say." She took a sip of his orange juice. "Isn’t that how it always works? Things start over there in England, or in California, and then phht, before you know it, it makes its way to Findlay."
He held his hand over his stomach. She saw him wince.
"Was it my orange juice again? Was it still pulpy? I squeezed it by hand and even strained it twice this time."
"It’s not your fault,” he said. “I think it’s me. Orange juice is getting too… acidic for me." He looked at the clock on the coffee maker. "I'm going to be late."
He turned the page.
He played the 8 o'clock Mass by rote as he had many a bleary-eyed Sunday morning. It was pure muscle memory at this point. He made a few mistakes here and there, missed a key or two, but it was nothing the organ's sustain pedal couldn't mask – not that anyone would complain (not at the 8 o'clock anyway).
On Sundays Ned had four Masses: the 8, the 9:30, the big one at 11, and the 12:30 for the dilettantes who couldn't get their acts together for the 11.
He turned the page.
Today he was using Glory and Praise, AKA "the blue hymnal" for songs he knew by heart.
Turning the pages of his sheet music, reading each note, he was able to keep his mind off it.
Ned abhorred cliches (especially those involving sports) but he made an exception for “Out of sight, out of mind.” For Ned, that wasn’t a cliché; it was a way of life. He was a man who preferred to be heard, not seen, which made St. Bartholomew (or St. Bart’s) the perfect home for him.
In a spectacular architectural oversight, the church's pipe organ was situated so the organist's back was to the altar and pews. The organist of course needs to see what's going on in the Mass to read certain non-verbal cues but the arrangement suited Ned just fine. The congregation was comprised of many young families who had many young children—boys in particular—and it wasn't so much that he couldn't control himself because he was now firmly in control of all that; it was more that he didn't need any reminders of that time when he couldn't.
Especially during church.
So to see the altar behind him, Ned had installed an actual rearview mirror, the type you'd find on an old Buick, and he used a special type of putty to affix it to the mantle of the pipe organ. Having been the church organist at St. Bart's for nine years, he seldom needed it anymore—he could do it in his sleep—but it came in handy today as he found his attention drifting and he nearly missed the oratory refrain at the 9:30 Mass.
His real problems didn't start until the 35-minute break between the 8 and 9:30.
He was reorganizing his sheet music after the first wave of churchgoers had cleared out, when he began thinking about Colin Pitchfork again. The article said he was a baker in England somewhere—did it say he baked cakes or was that Ned's invention?
Even though no picture was provided in the Times article, Ned spent the balance of the 9:30 service picturing the 27- year-old ex-rapist/murderer working in his small English bakery, quietly going about his business, baking his cakes, when the police (Bobbies?) came.
Was he expecting them?
He played the offertory hymn, "On Eagle's Wings," as the ushers began taking up the collections and a family of parishioners he’d never seen before brought the gifts up.
And what was going through Pitchfork's head when he saw the Bobbies there? When they began asking him about rapes and murders that happened almost five years ago? The article said that he had initially given investigators someone else's blood when “the enquiry” began. Had he somehow caught wind of this “DNA Fingerprinting?”
There was a new usher, Ned noticed, in his makeshift rearview mirror.
The Times article said that one of Pitchfork's co-workers at the bakery had taken the blood test masquerading as Pitchfork because Pitchfork had told the co-worker that ‘he could not give blood under his own name because he had already given blood while pretending to be a friend of his who had wanted to avoid being harassed by police because of a youthful conviction for burglary.’ This story was later overheard by a woman in a pub who immediately went to the police.
Ned realized he had missed the homily twice now. Not that it mattered. Heard one you've heard them all and Ned was pretty sure there would be no surprises. Plus, he'd have two more chances to catch it. He knew he would have to really focus for the 11 o'clock. That was always the main event. He was going to play "I Will Raise Him Up," a complex hymn, which required his full attention. He would scratch that one now if he hadn’t read that article and if the Sunday programs hadn't already been printed. People liked that one –it was a real barn burner, as they say—and if he skipped it, there might be questions.
The last thing Ned needed right now were fucking questions.
Who was this new usher, by the way?

By the start of the 11 o'clock Mass, Ned wondered whether anyone would even show for the 12:30, seeing that it was already standing room only. The 11 was always the most popular Mass, but today felt different; it was packed like Christmas Eve. What was the occasion? Was the predominantly conservative town that afraid of Dukakis winning the presidency? Ohio was a swing state after all and that image of the little Greek man in the tank was unnerving, sure, but was it enough to warrant this sort of turnout for the 11 AM Mass at St. Bart's in Findlay?
Or was something else going on?
Ned didn’t believe they had come to hear his rendition of "I Will Raise Him Up."
Or could there be another reason? Maybe they had all read the same Times article. Maybe there had long been simmering suspicion of Ned in the community and maybe the article finally prompted the townspeople to join together and take arms. With pitchforks.
On March 31, 1892, the only known lynching in the history of Hancock County occurred when a mob of 1,000 men, many "respectable citizens," broke into the county jail in Findlay. They lynched Mr. Lytle, a man who had killed his wife and two daughters with a hatchet the day before. The townsfolk hanged the man twice (first from the bridge, then a telegraph pole) and then, in a classic case of overkill, shot his body over a dozen times. The authorities had intended to transfer the prisoner out of town at 1 o'clock in secret, where a train was scheduled to transport him to Lima, but someone talked.
Ned had only confessed what he had done to one person – a priest eight years prior. The priest was set to retire as he was dying of pancreatic cancer and visiting from a nearby parish. For years Ned had heard this priest was “of the old school” – i.e., your word to God’s ear, and it went no further. He was as safe as they come. Still, even then, Ned used the screened side of the Confessional, lowered his voice a full octave, and spoke of what he had done obliquely and in generalities. They were mortal sins. His penance severe: to repent and refrain from repeating the act again. The priest was now long dead. There’s no way he could have tracked Ned down and told anyone. Was there?
The last one was named Derek. That was the only one left unsolved.
He would play "I Will Raise Him Up" during Communion. Because of the crowds, he knew the communion lines would be longer and would thus require him to stretch the already difficult song a few minutes longer. If he was going to supply the masses, he was going to need a bigger yield. In a way it was like baking a cake, wasn't it?
He met Derek at a Dairy Queen in Paducah, Kentucky. It was Labor Day 1976. It must have been 100 degrees out, but it felt even hotter with the humidity. It was a real scorcher.
Derek had a bicycle with an American flag banana seat. It was the summer of Bicentennial Fever. The Dairy Queen was in an area known as Noble Park. It had a tin canopy that kept cars cool in the shade.
Ned missed a note as he turned the page. He stepped on the sustain pedal and his mistake sounded deliberate and beautiful even.
It was early evening; fireflies were out in full force and Ned was blotto. He had been drinking beer—cans of Schlitz—all day at the picnic of a friend (technically, the friend of an acquaintance so basically a stranger). A born introvert who still lived alone (this was pre-Dee), Ned was very drunk and primed for small talk. You must also remember this was a very different time. This was back when you still opened cans with an opener; drunk driving was frowned upon but not the cardinal sin it is today; and a grown man could still park outside a Dairy Queen and strike up an innocent conversation with a prepubescent boy on a bike.
"What da ya' got there?" Ned asked.
"Butterscotch Sundae," the boy said. The boy was blonde with brown eyes.
"Butterscotch, eh?"
The boy licked his plastic spoon and stared somewhere beyond the pea-green 1974 Buick Riviera Ned had inherited from his old man after he had kicked the bucket.
"For the life of me, I can't remember if I like butterscotch or not," Ned said. "That probably sounds pretty screwy, I bet."
"Get a free sample at the window,” the kid said. “They're free."
"Looks awfully busy over there. Mind if I have a taste of yours? I don't have any cooties, I promise."
The kid dragged his spoon over his ice cream as he mulled it over. Maybe seeing that he was almost done with it anyway, he figured what's the harm. He handed Ned the Styrofoam cup.
Ned looked at the boy as he stirred it a little and then placed the curved side of the spoon on his tongue and kept it there.
"I do like butterscotch," Ned said, giving it back. "Thank you for sharing that with me, that was awfully kind of you—say, what is your name?"
"Derek," the boy said.
"Derek. What a nice boy you are. Do you like dogs, Derek?"
"Sure," Derek said.
"Do you have a dog?"
"Not anymore. Used to. We had a beagle named Eleanor but she went blind and then lame and then..."
"What kind of dog was she?" Ned asked.
"A beagle," the boy said.
"A beagle, yes you said that. You like Golden Retrievers?"
"Sure," the boy said.
"Cause I have a Golden Retriever. It's a girl too. A bitch."
Derek smiled.
"She's pregnant. I mean she was. But… she just gave birth."
"To puppies?"
"You betcha. It was just a few weeks ago. She had a whole litter of 'em. Boys, girls. Cutest little pups you've ever seen. The thing is, Derek, I don't know what to do with them all. You're a nice boy. You just shared your Butterscotch Sundae with me and I'd care to return the favor. Would you… like a puppy?"
"How much?"
"For nothing,” Ned said. “For free.”
"You'll give me a puppy for nothing? And I can pick the one I want?"
"Sure can. They're at my place just down the road. Thing is, it's probably too far to bike there. And you're going to need both hands to hold on to the puppy. Hop in, I’ll give you a lift."
"What about my bike?"
"We could put it in the trunk but we're not going to be long. We'll be right back. It'll be safe here. People don't take things that aren’t theirs around here – especially when there's a lot of people around."
He remembered waking up on the floor of his apartment disoriented. He was late for work. He was still working as a salesman at the piano store. There was a big Labor Day sale still going on. Labor Day was always a big day for retail. The owner was a nice man and Ned wanted to call him and apologize but he wasn't sure what to say yet.
He hadn't planned on sleeping in. Forgetting work on Labor Day. The irony.
He saw the boy's underwear on his floor. They were tighty-whities from Fruit of the Loom. He thought of that every time he saw an ad for that company afterward.
They weren’t bloody but they were torn.
He remembered the sound of the filter on the aquarium he used to keep in his apartment. It was noisy but sometimes that was a good thing. He was very into Japanese Fighting Fish for a while until it became too expensive as they always killed each other.
There were no puppies obviously.
His apartment did not allow dogs.
His sense of disorientation and the ensuing panic prevented him from experiencing any of the usual remorse he felt afterward.
There would be plenty of time for that later.
The boy's body was in the bathroom just off the bedroom and he needed to get rid of it. He needed to get out of town. Out of Paducah. Out of Kentucky.
He placed the boy in a hardshell Samsonite suitcase, carried it out of his apartment, walked down the one flight of steps. He saw no one and he was confident no one had seen him. The suitcase was lighter than it should have been—a detail he never forgot—and he walked out to the carport where he saw his Riviera parked sloppily between the lines. He felt a wave of nausea come over him but he suppressed it. He opened his trunk, placed the suitcase in the back, and then looked around the apartment complex before walking back inside. He cleaned up with bleach. Showered. Hit the road.
There were no police gathered outside the Dairy Queen. It wasn’t a crime scene. He didn't look to see if the boy’s bike was still there; he didn’t want to appear suspicious.
He needed to get out of Paducah so he headed toward the freeway.
For a moment he briefly considered the Shawnee National Forest, which was to the north, but he stuck to his gut and took the newly-constructed Interstate 24 East toward Tennessee. Aside from getting out of Kentucky, he didn't have a plan. The asphalt was brand new and at times he felt as though he were floating across the highway. It took about two hours to get to the state line and once he was over, he filled up at a 76 Station in Clarksville, Tennessee. Only when he was filling his tank and had a moment to reflect, did he think about what was in the trunk. He imagined he had Superman's X-Ray vision and pictured the suitcase in the back, the boy's tiny body folded like a pretzel inside.
He missed both the readings, the Gospel, and the homily again. Then came the Consecration which was over before he knew it. It was time. He began to play "I Will Raise Him Up." In his rearview, he saw the communion lines forming and he thought he caught a glimpse of the new usher staring at him, but he couldn't be sure. He needed to concentrate on the song. People knew this one; people wanted to hear it exactly as they remembered it, and it was a full house, so the sustain pedal wouldn't save him this time.
Once he made it through the chorus, he knew he could relax a little.
The "DNA fingerprinting" in Pitchfork's case came from semen that was left inside of the victims.
Ned had made it to the outskirts of Nashville faster than he expected. He still hadn't checked in with Mr. Cory, the owner of the piano store. He desperately needed an alibi. Old Mr. Cory could probably send Ned to the electric chair if he wasn't careful.
He got on Highway 386 and headed north. After 20 minutes, he exited in Gallatin and drove around until he found an area he thought was remote. There was a road called Cages Bend.
He liked the sound of that.
It sounded hopeful.
He took that until he came to a gravel road, which looked as if it led to an even more secluded wooded area.
In the rearview, he remembered the cloud of dust kicked up by the tires of the Riviera he had inherited from his father, the drunk, who had done to him what he had gone on to do to others.
In the rearview, the communion lines were still going strong. No sign of that new usher.
He came upon a bend in the road that looked totally secluded, as if no one had been there in years. He cut the engine and listened for a moment. The invisible cicadas high up in the trees made it sound as if a giant rattle snake was slithering around him, preparing to strike. He got out of the car.
He didn't know if it was the trees or the fields of tall grass, but something smelled like semen.
He opened the trunk with his keys and pulled out the hardshell suitcase. When he closed the trunk there was a rustling in the tall grass but when he looked, he saw only a herd of white tail deer scattering.
Initially he had planned on dumping the body and taking the suitcase home with him. He didn't think to bring a shovel. Then he heard the sound of a bush hog—a piece of farm equipment with spinning blades that cut vegetation and cleared the land. He couldn't tell which direction it was coming from. He checked to make sure his suitcase didn't have any labels on it or name tags. He then two black trash bags in his back seat and wrapped the suitcase – one bag around the top, the other on the bottom, and secured it with masking tape. Then he carried it into the woods and set it down in some brush. He began snapping tree branches off to make cover but as the bush hog got louder and closer he panicked, leaving it only partially covered.
The communion lines had dissipated. Everyone was sitting now, even the priest.
Everyone always knelt until the priest sat and Ned should never be playing if the priest was sitting but somehow, Ned had missed his cue.
He concluded "I Will Raise Him Up" softly, using the sustain to ease himself out.
He looked in the rearview and saw the priest staring at him.
As was the rest of the congregation.
They would all be coming for him soon enough.
Unless he could make it back down to Tennessee and get rid of that thing once and for all – assuming it hadn’t been found yet.
Somehow, deep down, Ned always knew it was going to happen.
He was raised up, alright.
Now it was just a matter of time.

PLAYBOY Interview With Conan O'Brien Interview by Kevin Cook For Playboy Magazine February 1998
A candid conversation with the preppie prince of "Late Night" about his rocky start, his show's secret one-day cancellation and how David Letterman saved the day.
He was polite. He was funny. He gave us a communicable disease.
At 34 Conan O'Brien is hotter than the fever he was running when we met in his private domain above the "Late Night" sound stage. A gangly freckle-faced ex-high school geek he is "one of TV's hottest properties" according to "People" magazine. The host of "Late Night With Conan O'Brien" has become his generation's king of comedy.
Uneasy lies the head that wears a crown. Congested too, but O'Brien has far more to worry about than his head cold. A perfectionist who broods over one bad minute in an otherwise perfect hour of TV, he worries he might be anhedonic, "I have trouble with success," he says, "I was raised to believe that if something good happens something bad is coming." Sure things look good now "Rolling Stone" calls "Late Night" "the hottest comedy show on TV." Ratings are better than ever, particularly among 18- to 34-year-olds, the viewers advertisers crave.
But O'Brien only works harder. Despite his illness he taped two shows in 26 hours on three hours' sleep. He smoothly interviewed Elton John then burst into coughing fits during commercials. Later in his crammed corner office overlooking Manhattan traffic Conan the Cool gulped Dayquil gel caps. He coughed spewing microbes.
"Sorry, sorry," he said. Of course O'Brien can't complain. He came seriously close to falling to being banished behind the scenes as just another failed talk show host.
At his first "Late Night" press conference he corrected a reporter who called him a relative unknown, "Sir I am a complete unknown," he said. That line got a laugh, but soon O'Brien looked doomed. His September 13, 1993 debut began with O'Brien in his dressing room preparing to hang himself only to be interrupted by the start of his show. Before long his career was hanging by a thread. Ratings were terrible. Critics hated the show. Tom Shales of "The Washington Post" called it as "lifeless and messy as roadkill." Shales said O'Brien should quit.
Network officials held urgent meetings discussing the Conan O'Brien debacle. Should they fire him? How should they explain their mistake?
In the end of course he turned it around. The network hung with him long enough for the ratings to improve and the host of the cooler-than-ever "Late Night" now defines comedy's cutting edge just as Letterman did ten years ago.
Even Shales loves "Late Night" these days. He calls O'Brien's turnaround "one of the most amazing transformations in television history."
O'Brien was born on April 18, 1963 in Brookline, Massachusetts. His father, a doctor, is a professor at Harvard Medical School. His mother, a lawyer, is a partner at an elite Boston Law firm. Conan, the third of six children became a lector at church and a misfit at school. Tall and goofy, bedeviled with acne, he tried to impress girls with jokes. That plan usually bombed, but O'Brien eventually found his niche at Harvard where he won the presidency of the "Harvard Lampoon" in 1983 and again in 1984 - the first two-time "Lampoon" president since humorist Robert Benchley held the honor 85 years ago.
After graduating magna cum laude with a double major in literature and American history he turned pro. Writing for HBO's "Not Necessarily The News." O'Brien was earning $100,000 a year before his 24th birthday. But writing was never enough.
He honed his performance skills with the Groundlings, a Los Angeles improv group. There he worked with his onetime girlfriend Lisa Kudrow, now starring on "Friends." But Conan was not such a standout. In 1988 he landed a job at "Saturday Night Live" - but as a writer, not as on-air talent. In almost four years on the show O'Brien made only fleeting appearances, usually as a crowd member or security guard. His writing was more memorable. He wrote (or co-wrote) Tom hanks' "Mr Short-Term Memory" skits as well as the "pump you up" infosatire of Hanz and Franz and the nude beach sketch in which Matthew Broderick and "SNL" members played nudists admiring one another's penises. With dozens of mentions of the word that hit was the most penis-heavy moment in TV history. It helped O'Brien win an Emmy for comedy writing.
In 1991 he quit "SNL" and moved on to "The Simpsons" where he worked for two years. His urge to perform came out in wall-bouncing antics in writers' meetings. "Conan makes you fall out of your chair" said "Simpsons" creator Matt Groening. O'Brien's yen to act out was so strong that he spurned Fox's reported seven-figure offer to continue as a writer. He was driving for the spotlight.
By then David Letterman had announced he was turning shin - leaving NBC taking his ton-rated act to CBS. Suddenly NBC was up a creek without a host. The network turned to Lorne Michaels, O'Brien's "Saturday Night Live" boss. Michaels enlisted Conan's help in the host search planning to use him in a behind-the-scenes job. But when Garry Shandling, Dana Carvey and almost every other star turned down the chore of following Letterman, Michaels finally listened to Conan's crazy suggestion, "Let me do it!" Michaels persuaded the network to entrust it's 12:30 slot which Letterman had turned into a gold mine to an untested wiseass from Harvard.
O'Brien was working on one of his last "Simpsons" episodes when he got the news. He turned "paler than usual," Groening recalled. The Conan moseyed back to where the other writers were working, "I'll come back with the Homer Simspon joke later. I have to go replace Letterman," he said.
NBC executives now get credit for their foresight during those dark days of 1993 and 1994. They snared the axe and now reap the multimillion-dollar spoils of that decision. In fact, the story is not so simple. We sent Contributing Editor Kevin Cook to unravel the tale of O'Brien's survival, which he tells here for the first time. Cook reports:
"His office is chock-full of significa. There's a three-foot plastic pickle the Letterman staff left behind in 1993 - perhaps to suggest what a predicament he was in. There's a copy of Jack Paar's 'I Kid You Not' and a coffee-table book called 'Saturday Night Live: The First 20 Years.' His bulletin board features letters from fans such as John Watters and Bob Dole and an 8" x 10" glossy of Andy Richter with the inscription: "To Conan - Your bitter jealousy warms my black heart. Love and Kisses Andy."
"Of course it's all for show. From the photos of kitch icons Adam West and Robert Stack to the framed Stan Laurel autograph, from the deathbed painting of Abraham Lincoln, to the ironic star taped to Conan's door - they're all clever signals that tell a visitor how to view the star. Lincoln was his collegiate preoccupation: stardom is his occupation. Somewhere between the two I hoped to find the real O'Brien.
"As a Playboy reader he wanted to give me a better-than-average interview. I wanted something more - a definitive look at the guy who may end up being the Johnny Carson of his generation."
"Here's hoping we succeeded. If not I carried his germs 3000 miles and infected dozens of Californians for no good reason.
O'Brien: Yes, this is how to do a Playboy Interview -- completely tanked on cold medicine. I'll pick it up and read, "Yes, I'm gay."
Playboy: We could talk another time. O'Brien: (coughing) No, it's OK. I memorized Dennis Rodman's answers. Can I use them?
Playboy: You sound really sick. Do you ever take a day off? O'Brien: No. The age of talk show hosts taking days off is over. Johnny Carson could go to Africa when he was the only game in town -- "See you in two weeks!" But nobody does that now. I will give you a million dollars on the first day Jay takes off for illness.
Playboy: Do you ever slow down and enjoy your success? O'Brien: If anything, the pace is picking up. Restaurateurs insist on giving me a table even if I'm only passing by, so I'm eating nine meals a night. Women stop me on the street and hand me their phone numbers.
Playboy: So you have groupies? O'Brien: Oh yes. And other fans. Drifters. Prisoners. Insomniacs. Cab Drivers, who must watch a lot of late night TV, seem to love me lately. They keep saying, "You will not pay, you will not pay, you make me happy!"
Playboy: How happy did your new contract make you? O'Brien: Terrified. The network said, "We're all set for five years." I said, "Shut up, shut up! I can't think that far ahead." Tonight, for instance, I do my jokes, then interview Elton John and Tim Meadows. We finished taping about 6:30. By 6:45 my memory was erased and my only thought was, Tomorrow: John Tesh. And I started to obsess about John Tesh. Sad, don't you think?
Playboy: Not too sad. You got off to a rocky start but now you're so hot that People magazine recently said, "that was then, this is wow." O'Brien: I try not to pay much attention. Since I ignored the critics who said I should shoot myself in the head with a German Luger, it would be cheating to tear out nice reviews now and rub them all over my body, giggling. Though I have thought about it.
Playboy: Tell us about your trademark gag. You interview a photo of Bill Clinton or some other celeb, and a pair of superimposed lips provide outrageous answers. O'Brien: We call it the Clutch Cargo bit, after that terrible old cartoon series. They saved money on animation by superimposing real lips on the cartoons. I wanted to do topical jokes in a cartoony way -- not just Conan doing quips at a desk. TV is visual; I want things to look funny. But we're not Saturday Night Live; we couldn't spend $100,000 on it. Hence, the cheap, cheesy lips, You'd be surprised how many people we fool.
Playboy: Viewers believe that's really the president yelling, "Yee-haw! Who's got a joint?" O'Brien: It's strange. You may know intellectually that Clinton doesn't talk like Foghorn Leghorn. Ninety-eight percent of your brain knows the president wouldn't say, "Whoa Conan get a load of that girl!" But there are a few brain cells that aren't sure. When Bob Dole was running for president we had him doing a past-life regression: "My cave, get away." And then back further, "Must form flippers to crawl on to rocky soil," he says. There may be people out there who believe that Bob Dole was the first amphibian.
Playboy: Do you ever go too far? O'Brien: The fun is in going too far. It's a nice device because you get Bill Clinton to do the nastiest Bill Clinton jokes. We'll have Clinton making fart noises while I say "Sir! Please!"
Playboy: Are you enjoying your job now, with your new success? O'Brien: Well, there are surprises. I hate surprises. Like most comics, I'm a control freak. But I am learning that the show works best when things are out of control. Tonight I ask Elton John if he likes being neighbors with Joan Collins. He says he isn't neighbors with Joan Collins. He lives next door to Tina Turner. So I panic -- huge mistake! But Elton saves the day. "Joan Collins, Tina Turner, it doesn't matter. Either way I could borrow a wig," he says. Huge laugh, all because I fucked up. Later he surprised me by blurting out that he's hung like a horse. The camera cuts to me shaking my head: That crazy Elton. What can I do? Of course, I'm delighted that he went too far.
Playboy: That "What can I do?" look resembles a classic take of Jack Benny's. O'Brien: There's an old saying in literature: "Good poets borrow; great poets steal." I think T.S. Eliot stole it from Ezra Pound. Comics steal, too. Constantly. When I watched Johnny Carson, I noticed that he got a few takes from Benny and Bob Hope. When a comedy writer told me how much Woody Allen had borrowed from Hope, I thought, What? They're nothing alike. Then I went back and watched Son of Paleface, and there's Hope, the nervous city guy backing up on his heels, wringing his hands and saying, "Sorry, I'll just be moving along." Now look at early Woody Allen. You see big authority figures and Woody nervously saying, "Look, I'll just be on my way." Of course Woody made it his own, but he must have watched and loved Bob Hope.
Playboy: Who are your role models? O'Brien: Carson. Woody Allen. SCTV. Peter Sellers. When Peter Sellers died I felt such a loss, thinking, There won't be anymore of that. There's some Steve Martin in my false bravado with female guests: "Why, hel-lo there!" And I won't deny having some Letterman in my bones.
Playboy: You were surprise as Letterman's successor. At first you seemed like the wrong choice. O'Brien: I didn't get ratings. That doesn't mean I didn't get laughs. Yes, I had a giant pompadour and I looked like a rockabilly freak. I was too excited, pushed too hard, and people said, "That guy isn't a polished performer." Fine! But it isn't my goal to be Joe Handsomehead cool, smooth talk show host. Late Night with Conan O'Brien is supposed to be a work in progress, and now that we've had some success there's a danger of our getting too polished and morphing into something smoothly professional. Which would suck.
Do you know why I wanted this show? Because Late Night with David Letterman played with the rules and it looked like fun. Here was a place where people did risky comedy every night for millions of people. We had to keep this thing alive. There should be a place on a big network where people are still messing around.
Playboy: How bad were your early days on the show? O'Brien: Bad. Dave left here under a cloud: his fans and the media were angry with NBC. Then NBC picks a guy with crazy hair and a weird name. And the world says, "Harvard? Those guys are assholes." I sincerely hope that the winter of December 1993, our first winter, was the worst time I will ever have. I'd go out to do the warm up and the back two rows of seats would be empty. That's hard to look at. I would tell a joke and then hear someone whisper, "Who's he? Where's Dave?"
Playboy: You had trouble getting guests. O'Brien: Bob Denver canceled on us. We shot a test show with Al Lewis of The Munsters. We did the clutch cargo thing with a photo of Herman Munster. Unfortunately, Fred Gwynne, who played Herman, had recently died, and Al Lewis kept pointing at the screen, saying, "You're dead! I was at your funeral!"
Playboy: For months you got worried notes from network executives. What did they say? O'Brien: They were worried. The fact that Lorne Michaels was involved bought me some time. But Lorne had turned to me at the start and said, "OK, Conan. What do you want to do?" Now television critics were after me and the network was starting to realize what a risk I was. Suggestions came fast and furious. I kept the note that said, "Why don't you just die?"
Playboy: Did they suggest ways to be funnier? O'Brien: They were more specific and tactical. The network gets very specific data. Say there was a drop in ratings between 12:44 and 12:48 when I was talking to Jon Bon Jovi. I'll be told, "Don't ever talk to him again" Or they'll want me to tease viewers into staying with us: "You should tease that -- say, 'We'll have nudity coming up next!'"
Playboy: You did come close to being cancelled. O'Brien: We were cancelled.
Playboy: Really? You have never admitted that. O'Brien: This is the first time I've talked about it. When I had been on for about a year, there was a meeting at the network. They decided to cancel my show. They said, "It's cancelled." Next day they realized they had nothing to put in the 12:30 slot, so we got a reprieve.
Playboy: Were you worried sick? O'Brien: I went into denial. I tried hard not to think, Yes, I'm bad on the air and my show has none of the things a TV show needs to survive. We had no ratings. No critics in our corner. Advertisers didn't like us. Affiliates wanted to drop us. Sometimes I'd meet a programming director from a local station where we had no rating at all. The guy would show me a printout with no number for Late Night's rating, just a hash mark or pound sign. I didn't dare think about that when I went out to do the show.
Playboy: Are you defending denial? O'Brien: How else does anyone get through a terrible experience? The odds were against me. Rationally, I didn't have much chance. Denial was my only friend. When I look back on the first year, it's like a scene from an old war movie: Ordinary guy gets thrown into combat, somehow beats impossible odds, staggers to safety. His buddy say, "You could have been killed!" The guy stops and thinks. "Could have been killed?" he says. His eyes cross and he faints.
Playboy: How did you dodge the bullet? O'Brien: There were people at NBC who stood up for me. I will always be indebted to Don Ohlmeyer, who stuck to his guns. Don said, "We chose this guy. We should stick with him unless we get a better plan." He was brutally honest. He came to me and said, "Give me about a 15 percent bump in the ratings and you'll stay on the air. If not, we're going to move on."
Playboy: Ohlmeyer started his career in the sports division. O'Brien: Exactly, his take was, "You're on our team." Of course, it wasn't exactly rational of Don to hope I'd be 15 percent funnier. It was like telling a farmer, "It better rain this week or we'll take your farm away."
Playboy: What did you say to Ohlmeyer? O'Brien: There wasn't time. I had to go out and do a monologue. But I will always be indebted to Don because he told me the truth. Wait a minute -- you have tricked me into talking lovingly about an NBC executive. Let me say that there were others who were beneath contempt -- executives who wouldn't know a good show if it swam up their asses and lit a campfire.
Playboy: Finally the ratings went your way. Hard work rewarded? O'Brien: Well, I also paid off the Nielsen people. That was $140,000 well spent.
Playboy: Ohlmeyer plus bribery saved you? O'Brien: There was something else. Just when everyone was kicking the crap out of the show, Letterman defended me.
Playboy: Letterman had signed off on NBC saying, "I don't really know Conan O'Brien, but I heard he killed someone." O'Brien: Then I pick up the paper and he's saying he thinks I am going to make it. "They do some interesting, innovative stuff over there," he says. "I think Conan will prevail." And then he came on as a guest. Remember, this was when we were at our nadir. There was no Machiavellian reason for David Letterman, who at the time was the biggest thing in show business, to be on my show.
Playboy: Why did he do it? O'Brien: I'm still not sure. Maybe out of a sense of honor. Fair play. And it woke me up. It made me think. Hey, we have a real fucking television show here.
Of six or seven pivotal points in my short history here, that was the first and maybe the biggest. I wouldn't be sitting here -- I probably wouldn't even exist today -- if he hadn't done our show.
Playboy: The Late Night wars were hardly noted for friendly gestures. O'Brien: How little you understand. Jay, Dave and I pal around all the time. We often ride a bicycle built for three up to the country. "Nice job with Fran Drescher!" "Thanks, pal. You weren't so bad with John Tesh." We sleep in triple-decker bunk beds and snore in unison like the Three Stooges.
Playboy: You talk more about Letterman than your NBC teammate Leno. O'Brien: I hate the "Leno or Letterman, who's better?" question. I can tell you that Jay has been great to me. He calls me occasionally.
Playboy: To say what? O'Brien: (Doing Leno's voice) "Hey, liked that bit you did last night." Or he'll say he saw we got a good rating. I call him at work, too. It can be a strange conversation because we're so different. Jay, for instance, really loves cars. He's got antique cars with kerosene lanterns, cars that run on peat moss. He'll be telling me about some classic car he has, made entirely of brass and leather, and I'll say, "Yeah, man, I got the Taurus with the vinyl." One thing we have in common is bad guests. There are certain actors, celebrities with nothing to say, who move through the talk show world wreaking havoc. They lay waste to Dave's town and Jay's town, then head my way.
Playboy: You must be getting some good guests. Your ratings have shown a marked improvement. O'Brien: Remember, when you're on at 12:30 the Nielsens are based on 80 people. My ratings drop if one person has a head cold and goes to bed early.
Playboy: Actually, you're seen by about 3 million people a night. Your ratings would be even higher if college dorms weren't excluded from the Nielsens. How many points does that cost you? O'Brien: I told you I'm an idiot. Now I have to do math too?
Playboy: Do you still get suggestions from NBC executives? O'Brien: Not as many. The number of notes you get is inversely proportional to your ratings.
Playboy: What keeps you motivated? O'Brien: Superstition. We have a stagehand, Bobby Bowman, who holds up the curtain when I run out for the monologue. He is the last person I see before the show starts, and I have to make him laugh before I go out. It started with mild jabs: "Bobby, you're drunk again." Bobby laughs, "Heehee."" Then it was, "Still having trouble with the wife, Bobby?" But after hundreds of shows, you find yourself running out of lines. It's gotten to where I do crass things at the last second. I'll put his hand on my ass and yell, "You fucking pervert!" Or drop to my knees and say, "Come on, Bobby, I'll give you a blow job!"
"Ha-ha. Conan, you're crazy," he says. But even that stuff wears off. Soon, I'll be making the writers work late to give me new jokes for Bobby.
Playboy: Did you plan to be a talk show host or did you fall into the job? O'Brien: I was an Irish Catholic kid from St. Ignatius parish in Brookline, outside of Boston. And that meant: Don't call attention to yourself. Don't ask for too much when the pie comes around. Don't get a girl pregnant and fuck up your life.
Playboy: Were you an alter boy? O'Brien: I wanted to be an alter boy, but the priest at St. Ignatius said, "No, no. You're good on your feet, kid," and made me a lector. A scripture reader at Mass. He was the one who spotted my talent.
Playboy: What did you think of sex in those days? O'Brien: I was sexually repressed. At 16 I still thought human reproduction was by mitosis.
Playboy: How did you get over your sexual repression? O'Brien: Who says I got over it? My leg has been jiggling this whole time.
Playboy: What were you like in high school? O'Brien: Like a crane galumphing down the hall. A crane with weird hair, bad skin and Clearasil. Big enough for basketball but lousy at it. My older brothers were better. I would compensate by running around the court doing comedy, saying, "Look out, this player has a drug addiction. He's incredibly egotistical."
I was an asshole at home, too. My little brother Justin loved playing cops and robbers, but I kept tying him up with bureaucratic bullshit. When he'd catch me, I'd say, "I get to call my lawyer." Then it was, "OK, Justin, we're at trial and you've been charged with illegal arrest. Fill out these forms in triplicate." Justin was eight; he hated all the lawsuits and countersuits. He just cried.
Playboy: Were you a class clown? O'Brien: Never. I was never someone who walked into a room full of strangers and started telling jokes. You had to get to know me before I could make you laugh. The same thing happened with Late Night. I needed to get the right rhythm with Andy and Max and the audience.
Playboy: So how did you finally learn about sex? O'Brien: My parents gave me a book, but it was useless. At the crucial moment, all it showed was a man and a woman with the bed covers pulled up to their chins. I tried to find out more from friends, but it didn't help. One childhood friend told me it was like parking a car in a garage. I kept worrying about poisonous fumes. What if the fumes build up? Should you shut off the engine?
Playboy: For all your talk about being repressed, you can be rowdy on the air. O'Brien: The show is my escape valve. When I tear off my shirt and gyrate my pelvis like Robert Plant, feigning orgasm into the microphone, that shows how repressed I am -- a guy who wants to push his sex at the lens but can only do it as a joke.
Playboy: Aren't you tempted to live it up? O'Brien: I always imagined that if I were a TV star I would live the way I pictured Johnny Carson living. Carousing, stepping out of a limo wearing a velvet ascot with a model on my arm. Now that I have the TV show, I drive up to Connecticut on the weekends and tool around in my car. I could probably join a free-sex cult, smoke crack between orgies and drive sports cars into swimming pools, and my Catholic guilt would still be there, throbbing like a toothache. Be careful. If something good happens, something bad is on the way.
Playboy: Yet you don't mind licking the supermodels. O'Brien: At one point a few of them lived in my building, women who are so beautiful they almost look weird, like aliens. To me, a woman who has a certain approachable amount of beauty becomes almost funny. It's the same with male supermodels. They look like big puppets. So while I admire their beauty I probably won't be "romantically linked" with a model. I'd catch my reflection in a ballroom mirror and break up laughing.
Playboy: The horny Roy Orbison growl you use on gorgeous guests sounds real enough -- O'Brien: Oh, I've been doing that shit since high school. It just never worked before.
Playboy: Your father is a doctor, your mother an attorney. What do they think of their son the comedian? O'Brien: My dad was the one who told me denial was a virtue. "Denial is how people get through horrible things," he said. He also cut out a newspaper article in which I said I was making money off something for which I should probably be treated. So true, he thought. But when I got an Emmy for helping write Saturday Night Live, my parents put it on the mantel next to the crucifix. Here's Jesus looking over, saying, "Wow, I saved mankind from sin, but I wish I had an Emmy."
Playboy: Ever been in therapy? O'Brien: Yes. I don't trust it. I have told therapists that I don't particularly want to feel good. "Repression and fear, that's my fuel." But the therapists said that I had nothing to worry about. "Don't worry Conan you will always be plenty fucked up."
Playboy: When a female guest comes out, how do you know whether to shake her hand or kiss her? Is that rehearsed O'Brien: No, and it's awkward. If you go to shake her hand and her head starts coming right at you, you have to change strategy fast. I have thought about using the show to make women kiss me, but that would probably creep out the people at home. I decided not to kiss Elton John.
Playboy: Do you get all fired up if Cindy Crawford or Rebecca Romijn does the show? O'Brien: I like making women laugh. Always have, ever since I discovered you can get girls' attention by acting like an ass. That's one of the joys of the show -- I'm working my eyebrows and going grrr and she's laughing, the audience is laughing. It's all a big put-on and I'm thinking. This is great. Here is a beautiful woman who has no choice but to put up with this shit.
But it's not always put on. Sometimes they flirt back. Sometimes there's a bit of chemistry. That happened with Jennifer Connelly of The Rocketeer.
Playboy: One guest, Jill Hennessy, took off her pants for you. Then you removed yours. Even Penn and Teller took off their pants. O'Brien: Something comes over me. It happened with Rebecca Romijn -- I was practically climbing her. Those are the times when Andy and the audience seem to disappear and it's just me and this lovely woman sitting there flirting. I keep expecting a waiter to say, "More wine, Monsieur?"
Playboy: Would you lick the wine bottle? O'Brien: It's true, there's a lot of licking on the show. I have licked guests. I have licked Andy. Comedy professionals will read this and say, "Great work, Conan. Impressive." But I have learned that if you lick a guest, people laugh. If I pick this shoe off the floor, examine it, Hmmm, and then lick it, people laugh. I learned this lesson on The Simpsons, where I was the writer who was forever trying to entertain the other writers. I still try desperately to make our writers laugh, which is probably a sign of sickness since they work for me now. Licking is one of those things that look funny.
Playboy: Johnny Carson never licked Ed McMahon. O'Brien: We are much more physical and more stupid than the old Tonight Show. Even in our offices before the show there's always some writer acting out a scene crashing his head through my door. A behind-the-scenes look at our show might frighten people.
Playboy: One night you showed a doctored photo of Craig T. Nelson having sex with Jerry Van Dyke. Did they complain about it? O'Brien: I haven't heard from them. Of course I'm blessed not to be a part of the celebrity pond. I have a television show in New York, an NBC outpost. I don't run with or even run into many Hollywood people.
Playboy: You also announced that Tori Spelling has a penis. O'Brien: I did not. Polly the Peacock said that.
Playboy: Another character you use to say the outrageous stuff. O'Brien: Polly is not popular with the network.
Playboy: You mock Fabio, too. O'Brien: If he sues me, it'll be the best thing that ever happened. A publicity bonanza: Courtroom sketches of Fabio with his man-boobs quivering, shaking his fist, and me shouting at him across the courtroom. I'm not afraid of Fabio. He knows where to find me. I'm saying it right here for the record: Fabio, let's get it on.
Playboy: Ever have a run-in with an angry celeb? O'Brien: I did a Kelsey Grammar joke a few years ago, something about his interesting lifestyle, then heard through the network that he was upset. He had appeared on my show and expected some support. At this point my intellect says, "Kelsey Grammar is a public figure. I was in the right." Then I saw him in an airport. Kelsey didn't see me at first: I could have kept walking. But there he was, eating a cruller in the airport lounge. I thought I should go over. I said hello and then said, "Kelsey, I'm sorry if I upset you." And he was glad. He looked relieved. He said, "Oh, that's OK." We both felt better.
....See my other post with the last third of the interview

Right everyone, I must thank the literal hundreds of people who have DM’d me off the back of a couple of comments I’ve made the last few days on posts! I'm hoping that this post will give a bit of clarity to the people who have asked me questions! Also, must apologise I am dyslexic so please give me a break if my punctuation is off haha.
Background -
In 2021 I got an internship at JPM, did a great job and was offered a role on the graduate scheme. I worked in investment services and quickly found out jpm is such a well-oiled machine that there is a team for every single layer of the department. I was placed in Investment services but in the projects team which I wasn’t interested in and was told to work in the market stuff I’d have to grind for 3-4 years. Just FYI I wanted to get into high finance, more specifically trading but knew it would be mega competitive so thought I'd get my foot in the door by going into the support functions.
I loved my time at JPM and I met such awesome people there but there was always something about the rest of my cohort that I just couldn’t gel with. I'm from a working-class family and saw my parents struggle a lot when I was younger. I watched my dad slowly deteriorate until he had a full-blown mental breakdown and never got help for it after and my mother had been on antidepressants since her brother killed himself like 20 years ago and thought she could occasionally come off the tablets which made the home environment real tough. I also don’t have siblings or cousins so I felt so alone during those times. Going back to the people their troubles were so much different to mine and I found it hard to fit in with their lifestyles. ( this is important later).
Anyway, looking into how I could transfer my skills while getting exposure to what I wanted to do which was market work I found out that large industries which have business all over the world require a lot of different currencies, which brought me to oil and gas. I started researching different functions within the industry and found that two very specific departments would offer me that exposure!
Treasury-
looking after the company's cash levels and supplying different currencies when required. This role was marketed to me as a varied role which included FX, market and economic analysis. This would then be used to make decisions on when to purchase, sell or hedge a certain currency. It also involves M&A, board-level presentations and pitches.
Corporate Development -
they look at M&A opportunities constantly, they also look at asset management and can put forward option contracts to different companies for rights to drill in a certain well in exchange for that company getting to drill in their well for some time. Or even simpler. Both companies stay in their wells and just option their revenue for that well. They also work on competitor analysis for earnings calls and shareholder meetings.
I was offered the role of treasury analyst one year ago and have never looked back! I have in the last year worked on Fx, market and economic analysis, trading FX, Hedging FX, and Options, and even been part of a billion-pound merger. All of this with just 1.5 years of experience! I literally would have never gotten this experience if I had stayed at JPM as I'd have been stuck in one team doing one of those functions.
What people have been asking
Where do I live?
I currently live in Aberdeen, Scotland. Aberdeen is one of the O&G capitals of the world with every big name you can think of having a head office of sorts here. We also have thousands of other O&G companies you will have never heard of. Aberdeen is also home to the Big 4 accounting and Big 4 law firms. Several investment banks, wealth management, asset management and pension firms.
Why do I live in Aberdeen?
I was born here and saw what riches the O&G industry could give people. What is also a great opportunity with Aberdeen is that there is a serious shortage of people to work in these firms because the media has been stating for years and years “just five more years left in the oil industry”. This means that you can leverage much higher wages. I’m currently earning well over the national average wage with 2.5 years of experience and could leave my firm tomorrow and get a 10% pay rise down the road.
Another reason. Property is very very cheap here. With the oil boom from the 80’s to 2010 hundreds of thousands of properties were built here and in 2015 people were paying 300,400,500k just for an average flat/apartment because there was so much demand. However, in 2016 there was a huge oil crash and there were thousands of redundancies. This scared off the youth to safer industries. However, this means that there are more properties than people who want to buy at the moment I recently at 26 just bought a two-bed, 70 sqm flat for 113k in the west end next to Michelin-star restaurants, high-class wine bars and that sort of scene. I'm betting the house that Aberdeen makes its return with the renewable sector as well as the oil market growing further. Recently Aberdeen was selected to have the world's largest floating wind farm built starting in the next few years. That is thousands of jobs, people moving here for the construction and then the maintenance. There is also an energy plant being built 35 miles away which needs another 11k people to operate it.
Schedule and benefits -
I work 37.5 hours per week, 8 am - 5 pm mon-thur and 9-1 pm Friday.
35 days holiday plus a further 5 days at Xmas and new year
All health benefits included
8.5% pension from employer and I add 1.5% also.
Wages are different everywhere but as someone junior, I make more than I did in banking.
I go to the office 2/3 days per week
How I got the job -
I had random recruiters message me which prompted me to look into other recruitment firms and apply for every single one of them in my city. They promptly set up calls with me and then I proceeded to get applications left right and centre.
Qualifications -
I have an undergraduate degree in finance and real estate and a diploma in law. However, all qualifications are considered.
What roles should you look for that cover trading, derivatives and M&A-
The two departments you will find these roles and Treasury and Corporate Development
The roles to look for are Treasury, market, financial, finance, and data analyst.
Extra tip - a lot of O&G companies have not changed title names for years like since the 80’s. So look for titles with assistants in them, they are referring to analysts. Once you’re in our you can get her to alter your title. Mine was an accounting assistant. I then got a treasury analyst. My role has nothing to do with accounting.
What other roles are there in O&G?-
Well, there are two sectors onshore and offshore. Onshore is office-based and offshore is site-based.
Onshore you have finance, treasury, CD, tax, legal, audit, accounts, and sales. All that sort of business. I will also say Audit is another interesting one. One of my mates is constantly setting off to Dubai, Saudi, Oman, Chile, Colombia, and Peru all for work, all business class and all 4-5 star hotels (unless they are on base).
Offshore you have account controllers, finance managers, and rig supervisors. You can see for yourself online. These lots get paid extremely well. 3-4 times what you get onshore, however you will live on a boat or an oil rig for 6 months a year, but get the other 6 months at home without having to work.
What companies to look for -
I'd stay clear of the huge firms, they will be the same as banking. A team working on one specific area in the department so your exposure will be much less. Look for small to mid-sized firms. I'm at s small/mid firm with 11k employees and a revenue of around 3 billion per year.
Genuinely, you don’t need to look for the companies, the companies will look for you if you get with a recruiter.
What level can you come in at -
Most places offer internships, grad programs, junior roles, mid roles and senior roles. One of my mates was a manager at a coffee shop for 5 years and did an accelerated uni course to get the minimum qualifications to get an interview. He now tenders bids for international contracts. They love a career switch because you’re fresh and not burnt out! If you can show you can handle your workload and think you’re a good fit you will find a job.
What If I think my finance background isn’t relevant (insurance) -
Whatever you think about your background you can spin it on your CV. I’m not talking about lying but just making the bits which are more important prettier. Most corporate functions are the same. Can you time keep? Can you juggle multiple jobs? Hit deadlines etc. If you can you then apply! Explain you have had an interest for some time and that you want to make a career switch. Then list your strengths and apply them to the role! You will be successful if you want it.
Are there many trading opportunities in this industry? -
Yes and No. The larger firms will likely have full teams like in banks, sitting in London. They will have an fx team, commodity team, derivative team etc. They will be revenue-driving teams! Whereas small to medium-sized firms will have one/two departments doing all of the above but trading for risk mitigation. This means that there is severely less stress on the team to lock in trades! However, you still get the same experience as the market lot but can enjoy your life! Haha. Smaller companies might not be able to fulfil this sort of role and will likely just take losses on straight trades.
Do I need to know about oil and gas to get a job in the industry? -
NO! I knew nothing before joining. I knew about finance and that was that. However, after a year of being there, I have picked up so much to do with the industry. So moving forward if I go to PE or something I will bring banking, trading and energy knowledge which is more than someone who works on the markets desk at JPM.
Can I move to Aberdeen from a different country? -
Yes! And I'd encourage it. In Aberdeen, we have large communities of Americans, Canadians southern Americans, Europeans, Africans, and middle eastern ppl. There is a huge emphasis on bringing outside talent to the city and we have a great integrated and diverse city. I say it like that because I know in larger cities there can be a lot of segregation of certain races and communities. However, in Aberdeen, there is a greater tolerance for internationals because we all bring something different to the table. The people I have met on nights out have been incredible. Helicopter pilots from Nigeria, underwater welders from Peru, and ultra depth divers from iceland. Its a one in a million place where everyone gets along and everyone makes a shit land of money so there is no divide! I've been to every celebration of every religion, I’ve eaten at the table of every race and by the end, it's nothing but respect.
Cost of living in Scotland - my experience -
Considerably less than a lot of other western countries. I’m 6’5 240lb and my weekly food shop is £50-£60. My mortgage is £500 per month, utilities another couple hundred, cars I own three with no debt. You can buy a 2018 range rover here for less than 45k. Aberdeen also has the highest level of disposable income in the uk. If you want to find out more about Aberdeen check out aberdeen. We have beaches, shopping malls, great food, great bars less than two hours from some amazing ski slopes in the winter too.
Hopefully, I have covered most questions. If anyone wants to add me on LinkedIn just dm me and send your link!
If you want me to answer any more questions just comment below and I will reply.

This episode is where some of the best acting is but also where some of the worst writing is. Also we gets the version of the Greens we will be sticking with for the remainder of the show for the first time. Let me delve into some points that will have a lot of intersection with my criticisms from last episode
-The episode starts with Corlys in a coma after offscreen fighting in the Stepstones. Vaemond and Rhaenys discuss the succession of Driftmark if things go for the worst. Like I said previously Vaemond’s actor is absolutely fantastic (if anybody knows of any other movies, shows or plays where his actor or Corlys appear in please let me know). While on my original watch I obviously agreed Luke has no basis to inherit Driftmark I opposed Vaemond trying to get it either, just because by succession rules normally for lords, it would go to a daughter and her descendants before uncle and therefore should go to Baela, though some people in this sub have brought up the argument that maybe as a Valyrian house they have slighty different succession. I absolutely sympathize more with Vaemond on rewatch, though I still get why people might see him as the standard usurping uncle
-We go to Jace who is really trying to learn Valyrian which to his credit does show at least he takes his duty as Prince seriously even if because of bastardy should not be eligible for the throne and unlike say Joffrey from the main series who for all his many faults actually thought he was Robert’s son, Jace clearly knows what’s up, and is actively contributing to his mother’s usurpation attempt
-Rhaenyra and Daemon gets the news of Vaemond’s petition, and discuss how now with Alicent and Otto in power after Viserys increasingly failing health, and Rhaenys holding being a bit upset with them to say the least after everything that has happened, Luke’s legitimacy might be put to question and by extension Jace’s. Am I supposed to feel sympathetic and worried for you? This is all your fault! She left court to the Greens instead of staying and establishing alliances. Again you could have been made Hand and Regent while Viserys was abed and basically start establishing yourself as ruler. Also you not only have obvious bastards which is an insult and makes a joke of House Velaryon while also as Rhaenys put it perfect putting right in the center of a political storm, but you also made her believe that you killed her own son. Any other House would have probably just outright rebelled against you or at least sided with the Greens, but these are the Velaryons, the House that is so powerful it is a Great House in all but name, but yet always playing as the sidekicks to Rhaenyra despite being established as their own power in their own right in the first half of the season. If she hadn’t fake killed Laenor, she might have even convinced Corlys to take Luke as a ward, and actually get him familiar with the sea and Driftmark. I just don’t get how even TB members that like Rhaenyra personally don’t just pull their hair at every horrible decision she does.
-The Blacks arrive back at the Red Keep. The Strong boys get to watch Aemond training with Cole (I just love Luke’s nervous look upon realization). It’s clear after the whole eye incident, that Aemond saw that his own father couldn’t care less and wouldn’t defend him, and that besides his mother he would have to stand on his own and defend himself, and get stronger both physically and mentally. Also again we are shown how more Faith of the Seven imagery is shown with the Greens, with after them getting into power adding in more religious heraldry. Also I love how people point to Alicent and Otto in control as them and their “evil scheming” without taking into note they have basically been running the realm, keeping it stable and prosperity.
-Dyana. This is always a awful point to talk about. Obviously it’s there to make Aegon look bad, at the same time that Aegon would never do this in the books is debatable, as some lines hint at him accosting servants as users like me and natla among others believe, but others interpret it as merely him having a affair with said servants. Still regardless of book canon and show runner intention, it is obvious this is awful. Some people just dismiss it as awful fan fiction, but I feel if you are engaging with the show as most users due, then you have to engage with its canon to an extent for better or worse. I think you can still believe Aegon is not the best person and is incredibly flawed while still believing, he absolutely has the best claim and the realm would be better with him as king. As to Dyana’s longer implications, some people theorize maybe she will turn into the show’s version of Esselyn, despite the moon tea which maybe it’s focus is supposed to either eliminate or highlight that possibility depending on how you see it. I really hope not though.
-Rhaenyra and Daemon visit Viserys, who for all of our opinions on him, is played by amazingly by Paddy who gives it his all this episode and who also the makeup department did fantastic job. We also get introduced to Aegon III and Viserys II. It does make me curious if they will most likely be recasted or if with the king shooting schedule in between seasons they will use them, since a important part is having the kids old enough to where Aegon leaves Viserys while on dragon back during the Gullet causing him great regret down the line, as well as later with him watching his mother being eaten.
-Rhaenyra and Rhaenys talk where in order for her to back Luke’s claim they would do a dual marriage with Jace and Baela and Luke and Rhaena. Now I have already given my opinion on how this change makes Velaryons previous unwavering support make no sense, and how honestly Corlys and Rhaenys would have already pushed for this realistically before. Something that should be noted is his Rhaenyra says “Jace and Baela son will rule”. This is just hilarious. I’m sure the writers just added it without thinking but it just shows how Rhaenyra sees herself as the exception rather than the feminist pioneer many fans make her out to be
-Rhaenyra just the night before the petitions talks to Viserys and of course talks to him about the Song of Ice and Fire. Now this is setup for one of the worst writing decisions ever, but let me just say, despite giving very little screentime with little redeeming qualities to the point Tom had to to ask give them to give his character more, these writers are so insecure about their golden protagonist they literally have to beat us over the head with this stupid prophecy that will lead nowhere in the end just to make her seem more important than she is. It’s bad enough we had 8 seasons worth of buildup that led to utter disappointment, do we really need more retroactive buildup to that end goal? The fans are literally giving you another chance after the Epitome of horrible endings in pop culture, I would think you would want to cultivate that good will and stay away from that reminder not double down on it. It’s honestly so stupid. Mind you with Jace at the wall and the leaks, it’s not going to be any better, so might as well just mentally prepare myself to roll my eyes with this.
-The petition are put into place between Vaemond and Luke. I have previously stated how originally I was against the race change for the Velaryons not out of some “aNti-wOkE” mentality (my opinion is quite the opposite, I think genres like sci-fi and fantasy are enriched by more representation) but because the Strong boys plotline as all about their physical appearance and how it doesn’t match their alleged father and of their house, and I think this change just completely removes any doubt to the point of entering comedic territory. Not only that but I think unintentionally it adds a very weird undertone where the framing is we are rooting the white guy to usurp one of the few if only prominent Black House in the story. I know that isn’t the intention and to be fair the concept of whiteness and race we have in our world doesn’t exist in Westeros, but still the undertone is there and because the framing is for the audience to root for Luke it is quite uncomfortable.
-Viserys walks in to the throne room, and again it is a spectacularly well acted scene by Paddy (how he didn’t get an Emmy I don’t know). While many in the audience will take this especially TB as Viserys standing up one last time for his daughter to defend what is right though, writing wise I analyze more as a poor man literally on the brink of death having to get up to defend her screw up daughter from the consequences of her own actions. Less charitable I know but I feel closer an interpretation to the truth.
-The Greens and the Blacks with Viserys are together for dinner at his insistence. He gives a well acted speech and we see him at his most vulnerable. It’s really nice. I I don’t mind maybe a more vulnerable scene or two between the factions especially before the storm. It’s when Alicent just stands up and says “you will make a great Queen” that I lost it… Again it was a great speech, but unless this is a D&D session, and Viserys that rolled a Nat 20, there should be no reason why Alicent just completely forgets everything that has happened so far. It’s one thing if maybe she finds it in her to forgive any person insults but after what happened to Aemond, that is absolutely ridiculous. I’m one of the main defenders of show Alicent and her more empathetic portrayal, but this is too far. Her just holding her arm and saying she just got here when she was about leave like some old college friend is just mind boggling. Maybe if they developed it over a couple of episodes with years passing in between, I could see how they might reach a more amicable standing if Viserys is still alive but literally after one speech I am supposed to believe all the buildup of the last episodes is a bygone? What a joke, though only second to the following
-Viserys moments before dying in delusion answers Rhaenyra’s question to Alicent about the whole prophecy and she misinterprets it as Aegon being chosen by Viserys. This is beyond stupid. They are basically solving a problem they just created. Why is this necessary? Alicent was already geared up to fight tooth and nail for Aegon’s claim you don’t need this misunderstanding. If you just remove the prior mistake I mentioned with Alicent now congratulating Rhaenyra on being a future Queen, then you wouldn’t need this. This misunderstanding completely undermines the complex legal dispute that this was is based on, and instead becomes a game of “he said, no wait he said”. The trailers already framing it as the Greens fighting because Viserys chose him, but that never the basis for their claim. Viserys could have chosen Butterbumps for all it matters, the eldest male claimant comes next in line. This just frames Aegon’s claim deriving from Viserys will, which obviously Rhaenyra from that standpoint the audience would know the truth. And it doesn’t even matter since next episode we see the Green Council already making preparations to crown Aegon without even knowing of this, so again it’s completely and utterly unnecessary and stupid. I wouldn’t be surprised if this was a last minute change, the writers came up after waking up before coffee and just added without s single second thought. This is clearly the episode that best epitomizes how HOTD strength is it’s acting not its writing. Trust me if we didn’t have talented actors frying the best to make it work it could be far worse but there is only so much they can do with this fanfiction levels of writing.
Listen I try to be positive and respectful, these screenwriters do work hard And again I actually most like show Alicent and think it an improvement over book version, but it’s decisions like this that just GOT season 8 vibes and it literally has just started.

What is decisive is not that man frees himself to himself from previous obligations, but that the very essence of man itself changes, in that man becomes subject. We must understand this word subiectum, however, as the translation of the Greek hypokeimenon. The word names that-which-lies-before, which, as ground, gathers everything onto itself. This metaphysical meaning of the concept of subject has first of all no special relationship to man and none at all to the I. However, when man becomes the primary and only real subiectum, that means: Man becomes that being upon which all that is, is grounded as regards the manner of its Being and its truth. Man becomes the relational center of that which is as such. But this is possible only when the comprehension of what is as a whole changes. In what does this change manifest itself? What, in keeping with it, is the essence of the modern age?
When we reflect on the modern age, we are questioning concerned the modern world picture [Weltbild] *12. We characterize the latter by throwing it into relief over against the medieval and the ancient world pictures. But why do we ask concerning a world picture in our interpreting of a historical age? Does every period of history have its world picture, and indeed in such a way as to concern itself from time to time about that world picture? Or is this, after all, only a modern kind of representing, this asking concerning a world picture?
What is the world picture? Obviously a picture of the world. But what does “World” mean here? What does “picture” mean? “World” serves here as a name for what is, in its entirety. The name is not limited to the cosmos, to nature. History also belongs to the world. Yet even nature and history, and both interpenetrating in their underlying and transcending of one another, do not exhaust the world. In this designation the ground of the world is meant also, no matter how its relation to the world is thought (Appendix 5).
With the word “picture” we think first of all of a copy of something. Accordingly, the world picture would be a painting, so to speak, of what is as a whole. But “world picture” means more than this. We mean by it the world itself, the world as such, what is, in its entirety, just as it is normative and binding for us. “To get into the picture” [literally, to put oneself into the picture] with respect to something means to set whatever is, itself, in place before oneself just in the way that it stands with it, and to have it fixedly before oneself as set up in this way. But a decisive determinant in the essence of the picture is still missing. “We get the picture” concerning something does not mean only that what is stands before us - in all that belongs to it and all that stands together in it - as a system. “To get the picture” throbs with being acquainted with something, with being equipped and prepared for it. Where the world becomes picture, what is, in its entirety, is juxtaposed as that for which man is prepared and which, correspondingly, he therefore intends to bring before himself and have before himself, and consequently intends in a decisive sense to set in place before himself (Appendix 6). Hence world picture, when understood essentially, does not mean a picture of the world but the world conceived and grasped as picture. What is, in its entirety, is now taken in such a way that it first is in being and only is in being to the extend that it is set up by man, who represents and sets forth. Wherever we have the world picture, an essential decision takes place regarding what is, in its entirety. The Being of whatever is, is sought and found in the representedness of the latter.
However, everywhere that whatever is, is not interpreted in this way, the world also cannot enter into a picture; there can be no world picture. The fact that whatever is comes into being in and through representedness transforms the age in which this occurs into a new age in contrast with the preceding one. The expressions "world picture of the modern age" and "modern world picture" both mean the same thing and both assume something that never could have been before, namely, a medieval and an ancient world picture. The world picture does not change from an earlier medieval one into a modern one, but rather the fact that the world becomes picture at all is what distinguishes the essence of the modern age [der Neuzeit]. For the Middle Ages, in contrast, that which is, is the ens creatum, that which is created by the personal Creator-God as the highest cause. Here, to be in being means to belong within a specific rank of the order of what has been created - a rank appointed from the beginning - and as thus caused, to correspond to the cause of creation (analogia entis) (Appendix 7). But never does the Being of that which is consist here in the fact that it is brought before man as the objective, in the fact that it is placed in the realm of man's knowing and of his having disposal, and that it is in being only in this way.
The modern interpretation of that which is, is even further from the interpretation characteristic of the Greeks. One of the oldest pronouncements of Greek thinking regarding the Being of that which is runs: To gar auto noein estin te kai einai.*15 This sentence of Parmenides means: The apprehending of whatever is belongs to Being because it is demanded and determined by Being. That which is, is that which arises and opens itself, which, as what presences, comes upon man as the one who presences, i.e., comes upon the one who himself opens himself to what presences in that he apprehends it. That which is does not come into being at all through the fact that man first looks upon it, in the sense of a representing that has the character of subjective perception. Rather, man is the one who is looked upon by that which is; he is the one who is - in company with itself - gathered toward presencing, by that which opens itself. To be beheld by what is, to be included and maintained within its openness and in that way to be borne along by it, to be driven about by its oppositions and marked by its discord - that is the essence of man in the great age of the Greeks. Therefore, in order to fulfill his essence, Greek man must gather (legein) and save (sozein), catch up and preserve, what opens itself in its openness, and he must remain exposed (aletheuein) to all its sundering confusions. Greek man is as the one who apprehends [der Vernehmer] that which is, and this is why in the age of the Greeks the world cannot become picture. Yet, on the other hand, that the beingness of whatever is, is defined for Plato as eidos [aspect, view] is the presupposition, destined far in advance and long ruling indirectly in concealment, for the world's having to become picture (Appendix 8).
[*12. The conventional translation of Weltbild would be “conception of the world” or “philosophy of life.” The more literal translation, “world picture,” is needed for the following of Heidegger’s discussion; but it is worth noting that “conception of the world” bears a close relation to Heidegger’s theme of man’s representing of the world as picture.
*15. The accepted English translation of this fragment is, “For thought and being are the same thing” (Nahm).]
In distinction from Greek apprehending, modern representing, whose meaning the word repraesentatio first brings to its earliest expression, intends something quite different. Here to represent [vorstel-len] means to bring what is present at hand [das Vorhandene] before oneself as something standing over against, to relate it to oneself, to the one representing it, and to force it back into this relationship to oneself as the normative realm. Wherever this happens, man "gets into the picture" in precedence over whatever is. But in that man puts himself into the picture in this way, he puts himself into the scene, i.e., into the open sphere of that which is generally and publicly represented. Therewith man sets himself up as the setting in which whatever is must henceforth set itself forth, must present itself [sich ... prasentieren], i.e., be picture. Man becomes the representative [der Reprasentant] of that which is, in the sense of that which has the character of object.
But the newness in this event by no means consists in the fact that now the position of man in the midst of what is, is an entirely different one in contrast to that of medieval and ancient man. What is decisive is that man himself expressly takes up this position as one constituted by himself, that he intentionally maintains it as that taken up by himself, and that he makes it secure as the solid footing for a possible development of humanity. Now for the first time is there any such thing as a 'position' of man. Man makes depend upon himself the way in which he must take his stand in relation to whatever is as the objective. There begins that way of being human which mans the realm of human capability as a domain given over to measuring and executing, for the purpose of gaining mastery over that which is as a whole. The age that is determined from out of this event is, when viewed in retrospect, not only a new one in contrast with the one that is past, but it settles itself firmly in place expressly as the new. To be new is peculiar to the world that has become picture.
When, accordingly, the picture character of the world is made clear as the representedness of that which is, then in order fully to grasp the modern essence of representedness we must track out and expose the original naming power of the worn-out word and concept "to represent" [vorstellen]: to set out before oneself and to set forth in relation to oneself. Through this, whatever is comes to a stand as object and in that way alone receives the seal of Being. That the world becomes picture is one and the same event with the event of man's becoming subiectum in the midst of that which is.
Only because and insofar as man actually and essentially has become subject is it necessary for him, as a consequence, to confront the explicit question: Is it as an "I" confined to its own preferences and freed into its own arbitrary choosing or as the "we" of society; is it as an individual or as a community; is it as a personality within the community or as a mere group member in the corporate body; is it as a state and nation and as a people or as the common humanity of modern man, that man will and ought to be the subject that in his modern essence he already is! Only where man is essentially already subject does there exist the possibility of his slipping into the aberration of subjectivism in the sense of individualism. But also, only where man remains subject does the positive struggle against individualism and for the community as the sphere of those goals that govern all achievement and usefulness have any meaning.
The interweaving of these two events, which for the modern age is decisive - that the world is transformed into picture and man into subiectum - throws light at the same time on the grounding event of modern history, an event that at first glance seems almost absurd. Namely, the more extensively and the more effectually the world stands at man’s disposal as conquered, and, the more objectively the object appears, all the more subjectively, i.e., the more importunately, does the subiectum rise up, and all the more impetuously, too, do observation of and teaching about the world change into a doctrine of man, into anthropology. It is no wonder that humanism first arises where the world becomes picture. It would have been just as impossible for a humanism to have gained currency in the great age of the Greeks as it would have been impossible to have had anything like a world picture in that age. Humanism, therefore, in the more strict historiographical sense, is nothing, but a moral-aesthetic anthropology. The name “anthropology” as used here does not mean just some investigation of man by a natural science. Nor does it mean the doctrine established within Christian theology of man created, fallen, and redeemed. It designates that philosophical interpretation of man which explains and evaluates whatever is, in its entirety, from the standpoint of man and in relation to man (Appendix 10).
The increasingly exclusive rooting of the interpretation of the world in anthropology, which has set in since the end of the eighteenth century, finds its expression in the fact that the fundamental stance of man in relation to what is, in its entirety, is defined as a world view (Weltanschauung). Since that time this word has been admitted into common usage. As soon as the world becomes picture, the position of man is conceived as a world view. To be sure, the phrase “world view” is open to misunderstanding, as though it were merely a matter here of a passive contemplation of the world. For this reason, already in the nineteenth century it was emphasized with justification that “world view” also meant and even meant primarily “view of life.” The fact that, despite this, the phrase “world view” asserts itself as the name for the position of man in the midst of all that is, is proof of how decisively the world became picture as soon as man brought his life as subiectum into precedence over other centers of relationship. This means: whatever is, is considered to be in being only to the degree and to the extent that it is taken into and referred back to this life, i.e., is lived out, and becomes life-experience. Just as unsuited to the Greek spirit as every humanism had to be, just so impossible was a medieval world view, and just as absurd is a Catholic world view. Just as necessarily and legitimately as everything must change into life-experience for modern man the more unlimitedly he takes charge of the shaping of his essence, just so certainly could the Greeks at the Olympian festivals never have had life-experiences.
The fundamental event of the modern age is the conquest of the world as picture. The word "picture" [Bild] now means the structured image [Gebild] that is the creature of man's producing which represents and sets before. In such producing, man contends for the position in which he can be that particular being who gives the measure and draws up the guidelines for everything that is. Because this position secures, organizes, and articulates itself as a world view, the modern relationship to that which is, is one that becomes, in its decisive unfolding, a confrontation of world views; and indeed not of random world views, but only of those that have already taken up the fundamental position of man that is most extreme, and have done so with the utmost resoluteness. For the sake of this struggle of world views and in keeping with its meaning, man brings into play his unlimited power for the calculating, planning, and molding of all things. Science as research is an absolutely necessary form of this establishing of self in the world; it is one of the pathways upon which the modern age rages toward fulfillment of its essence, with a velocity unknown to the participants. With this struggle of world views the modern age first enters into the part of its history that is the most decisive and probably the most capable of enduring (Appendix 11).
A sign of this event is that everywhere and in the most varied forms and disguises the gigantic is making its appearance. In so doing, it evidences itself simultaneously in the tendency toward the increasingly small. We have only to think of numbers in atomic physics. The gigantic presses forward in a form that actually seems to make it disappear - in the annihilation of great distances by the airplane, in the setting before us of foreign and remote worlds in their everydayness, which is produced at random through radio by a flick of the hand Yet we think too superficially if we suppose that the gigantic is only the endlessly extended emptiness of the purely quantitative. We think too little if we find that the gigantic, in the form of continual not-ever-having-been-here-yet, originates only in a blind mania for exaggerating and excelling. We do not think at all if we believe we have explained this phenomenon of the gigantic with the catchword “Americanism" (Appendix 12).
The gigantic is rather that through which the quantitative becomes a special quality and thus a remarkable kind of greatness. Each historical age is not only great in a distinctive way in contrast to others; it also has, in each instance, its own concept of greatness. But as soon as the gigantic in planning and calculating and adjusting and making secure shifts over out of the quantitative and becomes a special quality, then what is gigantic, and what can seemingly always be calculated completely, becomes, precisely through this, incalculable. This becoming incalculable remains the invisible shadow that is cast around all things everywhere when mas has been transformed in subiectum and the world into picture (Appendix 13).
By means of this shadow the modern world extends itself out into a space withdrawn from representation, and so lends to the incalculable the determinateness peculiar to it, as well as a historical uniqueness. This shadow, however, points to something else, which it is denied to us of today to know (Appendix 14). But man will never be able to experience and ponder this that is denied so long as he dawdles about in the mere negating of the age. The flight into tradition, out of a combination of humility and presumption, can bring about nothing in itself other than self-deception and blindness in relation to the historical moment.
Man will know, i.e., carefully safeguard into its truth, that which is incalculable, only in creative questioning and shaping out of the power of genuine reflection. Reflection transports the man of the future into that “between” in which he belongs to Being and yet remains a stranger amid that which is (Appendix 15). Hölderlin knew of this. His poem, which bears the superscription “To the German,” closes:
How narrowly bounded is our lifetime,
We see and count the number of our years.
But have the years of nations
Been seen by mortal eye?
If your soul throbs in longing
Over its own time, mourning, then
You linger on the cold shore
Among your own and never know them.

I have no idea where to start. It seems as if bad luck and misery followed me around like a toddler throughout my life. I, 53 female, lost both my parents at a young age. I had a stepmother from hell and I was SAed by two family members. I was adopted by my maternal grandparents. My grandfather was very militaristic with my upbringing. Corporal punishment was a regular occurrance. I grew up afraid of male adults in authority positions. I was constantly compared with my sister who was academically brighter than me. I was more interested in creativity and design.
Fast forward many years, in 1999 I married the love of my life, John (not real name). I fell pregnant in early 2000 soon after our wedding. While pregnant, I lost a good friend who was one of my bridesmaids. She was struck by lightning. Soon after that my maternal grandmother passed away. After giving birth I fell into a deep state of depression. The only thing that kept me going was my new baby girl and John. He was my rock throughout this period in my life.
Three years into our marriage my John came to me with a suggestion to spice up our marriage. I didn't know what to make of this. He wanted us to have a threesome with a friend of his. I told him he must be crazy. He would leave the subject only to bring it up again on a later stage. This happened a few times and I eventually caved. I know this makes me seem weak. I felt like a loser afterwards.
In 2004, I lost yet another good friend in a motor vehicle accident. It happened while we were travelling together. John and I saw it happen in the rear view mirror. It was a terrible shock and I had to call her loved ones with the awful news. I still get panic attacks when passing an accident scene.
In 2005 we had our second daughter four years after the first one. I was happy and content with my life. Then happened the thing I promised myself would never happen to my kids. My oldest daughter was SAed at the age of four. I went feral with rage. How could this happen to my girl? Why did nothing happen to the 14 year old pervert? I went for therapy, because I wanted the scumbag unalived.
Life was steadily improving for a while. In 2007, John started a long distance affair with a woman abroad. I only found out, because he left his computer unattended for a brief moment. The words "I love you" caught my eye, and I scanned over the words written to an unfamiliar woman. I felt crushed and blamed myself. I told myself that it was because I wasn't intimate with him often enough. That my depression must be getting unbearable for him. I confronted him with what I saw and he was very apologetic about everything. He promised me he would break it off with the woman. He sounded so sincere and I forgave him.
A few weeks later John was in the shower and a notification popped up on his phone. It was a nude pic of the woman. I felt so betrayed and lost. That day I decided to pack up everything in the house that in any way resembled me and the kids. All our clothes, all the family pictures on the walls, everything was gone. I left him a note with a permanent marker on his wooden desk. Telling him that he doesn't have to hide his affair any more. I fetched the kids from school and went to my sister's place in another town a few hours away. John tried calling me a few times but I never answered. After a few calls from him I sent him a message saying that we are safe and to stop calling.
I felt so lost, and didn't even know what I should do with the whole mess that our marriage was in. I knew that I still loved him and the kids love him dearly. I didn't have the strength to go through a divorce process. Where am I going to live with the kids? How much is a divorce going to cost? What is going to happen? It was all to much for me to handle. John then begged me to go for marriage counselling with him. We went and we talked. We realised that we still loved each other very much. I held him while he cried about breaking up the affair. Yes, I know. I'm pathetic.
Life was back to normal for a while. In January 2010 we went to the coast on holiday. While we were on the beach my oldest daughter and one of her cousins decided to climb into a tree. We still laughed and John took pictures of them in the tree. Then the unthinkable happened. We only heard a deafening scream and saw my little girl come running towards us. A small trickle of blood was running down her leg. John picked her up and we ran to the life guard station. I wanted to see how badly she was hurt and was shocked to my core. I couldn't recognise anything between her little legs. An ambulance was called and she was taken to the nearest hospital. After four hours of surgery, the surgeon told us that she was extremely lucky. The tree stump she fell into missed her major arteries by millimetres and it only scraped the side of her little womb, no intestines were pierced or damaged. They had to perform a laparotomy to get rid of bark and twigs between the intestines in her stomach cavity. She had colostomy surgery done and had a colostomy bag. She was in ICU for four days and in hospital for a total of 8 days.
We went back to our hometown. We started searching for a colorectal surgeon to repair the sphincter muscle and reverse the colostomy surgery. The whole process took about six months. Between numerous surgeries and hospital stays, my attention wasn't with my job. I received a written warning about my work attendance. That was when I decided to resign. I received a decent pension payout and started a BnB. I also started designing and making dance outfits for school plays.
Our lives were getting back to normal. I was getting therapy for my depression and started feeling a lot more confident.
Then, in the beginning of 2013 John wanted us to spice up our marriage, again. I told him, no, I don't want this. He kept on prodding me and making suggestions. I only recently recognised it as gasligting. After a few weeks, I caved... again. This was the start of a ugly, terrible and very scary relationship with a diagnosed narcissistic monster. He was extremely friendly and had a very poisonous charm. John was smitten with him. I started seeing a side of John I've never seen before. He became obsessed with this man and I didn't know what to think. It's then that John told me he was bisexual. He knew he liked both male and female people from the age of eleven. I knew that his whole family was homophobic and they will not accept him at all. A toxic triangle relationship started with the narcissist, "Scar" (not real name).
It was a sickening rollercoaster ride of ups and downs with Scar. He was playing mental games with us. It almost tore our family apart. Scar would tell John that I need to find a proper job and stop living off John's money. Scar would show up unannounced and expect us to drop everything to give him all our attention. We didn't realize how we were dragged down by him. John would go cycling with Scar and do all sorts of physical activities. In the winter of 2014 John was getting very ill with pneumonia. Scar asked John to help him with something that required a lot of physical excursion. John, even though he was very ill, didn't say no to Scar. John was diagnosed with dilated cardio myhopathy soon after. He was so weak, I was terrified that he wasn't going to survive. John was treated, but he would have to take heart medication for the rest of his life. Scar didn't care at all. He was practically living off John's money. Scar never worked since we met him. He would drop off his kids and go out, expecting us to babysit them.
In December 2014, my sister and her daughters came to stay over for a night on their way home. She caught Scar with his phone taking pictures of the girls in the bathroom. I was horrified. I went off on him and chased him of our property. But the damage was done. The welfare department was called to investigate us. The children's unit of the police service came to take statements. My sister wanted me to leave John for good. I was considering the option of leaving him, but I had nowhere to go. My BnB is on John's property, I don't have my own transport and the fear of being on my own, was terrifying. I wasn't even sure if the girls are going to be with me. So, I caved and I stayed. Yes, I know, I'm such a huge coward.
Scar didn't come round our place anymore and he was charged with child pornography. All his electronic equipment was seized, but nothing was found on any of the devices.
This is where everything went south. John's mother decided to spread a rumour about Scar sending indecent pictures to my children. I asked my girls about this and they didn't know what she was talking about. She had never liked me and was mad with jealousy about my and John's relationship. She would do anything to discredit me. My laptop was confiscated and searched. I ended up in court, because there was pictures of nude men on my laptop. John's nude men pictures. I was held accountable, because the laptop belonged to me. I was found guilty on the charge of negligence in protecting children from pornography. I was on so many anti-anxiety medication that I had no clue what was happening. All I knew was that I now had a criminal record.
This is not the end of my screwed up life story, but it's 1:35 am and I'm tired. I will post a follow up soon.