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So I called TD Bank customer service and questioned the charge. Who wouldn't? The rep says there was an error in my wife's verification because the SSN did not match when they checked it. I'm still determining who they checked with, because, we showed them the Social Security Card, driver's License, and marriage certificate. So my wife and I stopped work in the middle of the day (luckily, we have the freedom to do this) and drove 20 minutes to the nearest branch to fill out a W-9 form and again show the SS card. We were assured that the matter was handled and the pending charge would be removed within hours.
The next day, I got a text from my daughter, who said that her lunch money account at school was out of funds. This account is on auto-pay from the TD checking account. I checked the app once again, and I still -$99 million in that savings, and apparently, the checking is frozen. I had yet to try to use the account up to this point. I again called customer service and told them the tale. They put me on hold and blindly transferred me to a "supervisor," who explained that they did not get the W9 and that we would need to go to a branch and fill out a new one.
I explained that this was not happening and that they would need to fix it and give me access to my money. I have been a TD customer for four years, and my information was already "verified." They apologize and said there was nothing they could do and that my wife would have to go to a branch so they could verify the information. I then called the local branch and explained the situation, which they knew about because the TD verification department had notified them. I told them I would be down at the branch in an hour and that either the issue would be resolved or I would need all my money in cash, and the accounts would be closed.
After waiting an hour, I went to the branch and asked if the issue had been resolved. I knew it had not as the app still showed the -$99 million. I asked for my money and I was told I could not get it because the account was frozen. I sat patiently for 2 hours waiting for them to fix the issue. I provided them with the same information we had already provided on multiple occasions. After 2 hours, I was done and demanded my money and the closing of the accounts. They got this done in 15 minutes.
Now I understand TD thought they were protecting themselves from fraud. However, some faceless security officer should have reached out to the branch to understand exactly what was happening, and we could have been notified that further verification was needed to add my wife to the account. But this is not what they did. Instead, TD attempted to steal $99 million from my account and then froze the account.
I advise anyone doing business with this institute to remove all their funds and find a nice local bank where you can talk to the faceless people who make irrational decisions and you can get actual customer service. I do feel bad for the local branch folks who did their job and attempted to solve the issue. However, I suggest they seek new employment with a company that cares about their customers instead of stealing from them and causing them grief.

I'd have to say the time she borderline committed Grand Theft Auto.
A close second would be the time she harassed that guy using the phone box. Richard usually let her get away with everything, but this was a rare occasion he told her to knock it off.

I messed around for a few hours and everything g seemed solid. So I played an online set last night and it was an absolute car crash. Nothing would sync properly. I had to revert to beatmatching, which would normally be fine, but even though the grids were setting properly with everything lined up it was not in time. I could audibly hear on occasion the decks slowing down. I tried turning off and on the CDJ3ks that weren’t playing to try to reset something, and that resulted in RB completely locking up for a few seconds with no audio.
I’ve noticed a bunch of the settings are written in poor English. Stems seem drastically worse, especially for removing vocals. And the auto cues are all set in the middle of the first beat despite the grids being correct.
Leave this alone for now. Good thing we’re not paying for this software and it’s not intended for professionals. Oh, wait.

I'm adding some more analog gear to my rack and this unit (RND MBT) has an optical compressor on board. I'll also have an SSL style VCA comp at my disposal, and for those occasions where I might want to put two stages of compession on the master bus (or occasional drum bus), I'm wondering if I'll get more milage from placing the VCA compressor first in the chain (set slightly faster with auto release in this instance) to grab peaks and let the slower optical compressor catch strays as well as more sustained elements. That's my instinct at least. It won't be too difficult to get behind the desk and re-route to try it in the other configuration, but I prefer my signal to flow top down on my rack and would like to mount it once in the position I'm most likely to use it. Although it's very possible I more often use only one, or none at all when I plan on outsourcing mastering.

So I have my 6 inch Astro-Fi telescope and right from the start I was told about this amazing app SKY PORTAL! so I set my telescope up and go to use it with the app. It is doing nothing but disconnecting. I then seek advise from where I bought it from and they tell me I need a better battery for it. So I buy a better battery which does improve the situation but more often than not it’s either disconnecting or my other issue is it is failing to align which never used to be a problem on the occasions I had no disconnecting issues.
Ive gone to to 2 different companies that specialise in celestron equipment and one of them even got in touch with someone that works for celestron and nobody can seem to give me a straight answer of what’s going wrong with this “FANTASTIC APP”.
So my next thing is do I stop using this app and look into the star sense auto align? I think it will work with my telescope. I’ve asked the question before and all I got told is I don’t need it because I have the app instead 🙄
Any advise would be very much appreciated. But with my love for anything space and being a novice when it comes to telescopes I’m getting very much disheartened with it all now.

Thoughts + what is actually happening with the CW APDS+ ammo changes.

The news article – Link

The news article examples it pretty well, but im seeing a lot of people quickly complaining about lights being buffed. While i could see a few having a tad better chance to bounce, there is not many.

What is mainly being affected is armor plates of 30 to 40mm. As most guns in Era 2 and 3 are between 100 and 125mm with a handful of 140/152’s. Most light tank armor is 25mm and below. There are spots of higher thickness, but those spots are often 50+ or so and thus dont matter much.
The main tanks affected by this change are western MBT’s mostly. So to get an idea of what tanks and what parts are being affected by this, here is a list.

(gonna ignore stuff like flat 38mm on the front of lights cause at that point your just missing.)

Quick reference for new overmatch.

• 25.4mm - 89
• 30 – 105
• 38 - 133
• 40 – 140
• 45 – Nope.

Lights:

• RDF LT – Lower sides are 38mm
• M8 AGS - has some parts of the turret, but remains a pin cushion.
• M3A1 /2 – Front upper hull and lower sides are 38mm to block 115-130.
• Scorpion 90 – Upper sides and front are 34mm to block 100-115 guns now.
• VFM 5 – Hull and turret sides are 38mm (tank could use the help)
• Stormer 30 – Sides of turret are 40mm
• Begal Panzer – there is some parts of the turret, but really it should remain a easy enough pen. (that or you would have missed the small turret anyhow)
• WZ-132-3 – some side parts of the turret at 35mm
• ARMADILLO – Sadley this one will be affected as it has good coverage of 38 and 40mm plates.
• Its really only the M3, VFM and Armadillo that im seeing are being heavily affected among lights.

Mediums:

• M60’s based tanks: - have a part of the lower sides at 35mm, though it be hard to hit.
• Leopard 1’s - Hull sides being 30/35 so you can get some lucky bounces.
• AMX 30’s /32/40 - Hull sides are 30-40 with the upper hull often bouncing shots into the turret.
• Vickers mk 3 – Sides being only 30mm, this could use the help.
• Jaguar Black – turret shot trap
• Amolad – has some 30/40mm plates in the front that could cause issues.
• Magach 7C – could have a turret shot trap, but not as much.

Heavies (MBT’s)

• M1 Family – sides and upper hull no longer an easy pen. Upper plate will also no longer send all shots into the turret ring. Though turret ring is still a somewhat easy pen, just have to get lucky to hit it.
• FV4211 – Cupola may not be as easy of a auto pen with it being 38mm.
• Chieftain – same deal as the M1’s
• Challengers / MBT 80– Hull sides are 38
• Leopard 2’s - Upper plate being 40/45 that could hit the turret ring. 2A5 with the shot trap too.
• Leclerc (peace sells) – Forward sides being 30mm
• Obj 490 – Turret/ hull shot trap + Lower sides being 30mm
• Merkava’s - Small portions of lower sides are 30mm

TD’s

• M113 – There's a lot of 38mm, but hay its the box, aim better.
• Thumper – See M1 Family
• Rak 2 / Jaguar – 30mm front and sides offer some hope.
• Chieftain CTR – Rear sides and top of cupola are 38
• Obj 120 – May bounce a shot of the turret front of 30mm
• Obj 477a – Sadley the 40mm sides will now block a lot more shots.
• Type 89 – 30mm sides for 105’s
• Wolverine – Sides are 30mm
• (Future STRV’s*) - mostly likely the front’s will be 40mm so they can block most shots anyhow.

The main winners i see in all these changes are the M1 and AMX family along with Armadillo, Obj 490 and 477. Outside these tanks i don't think you'll have to adjust your playstyle much, just you may bounce a random shot on occasion or you'll just have to re-learn a few overmatch match ups.

Of course all the above is somewhat moot as i do hear complaints about hit registration against lightly armored fast tanks so eh, can't say much on that topic.
External fun YT links:

• APFSDS High angled armor performance - LInk

Drake has on several occasions referenced Kendrick Lamar's stance on the removal of artist's music catalogues from streaming services, specifically R Kelly. I haven't seen much discussion on why removing this music isn't a particularly good idea.
I understand if no one wants to listen to an artist due to their actions, they may even see this as some form of endorsement. Personally, I am able to differentiate between the art and the artist. I listen to Michael Jackson on a regular basis. Now while he has never been convicted of anything, I personally believe he did do many of the things he is accused of, yet I still listen. But this should be left up to the individual to decide if they want to listen or not, and should not be left up to a third party.
Another point that I'm not sure that people are aware of is that during the sentencing of these criminals, judges often include fines that are to be paid to the victims. These fines usually exceed the current assets of what the artist may hold and so the artist's percentage of any royalties are paid to the victims until the full value of the fine is paid off. There are even some instances where a judge may order all future royalties or income go to the victims, due to the severity of the crimes in question.
Certain material based on crimes, such as auto-biographies of serial killers that include details that are not public, will also be published under the condition that victims, or their families, are in someway compensated via a percentage of profits made. It's important to bear in mind that this does not mean all material. Netflix was able to create the Dahmer series using information that was already public and therefore do not have to provide compensation.
In R Kelly's case, the judge ordered a fine be paid to one of the victim's family, as they had since passed away. He was also ordered to pay several other sums to other victims. These sums have since been fully paid due to incoming royalties and I believe there is nothing else to be owed from what I have been able to gather from the sentencing and article regarding this. Regardless, R Kelly will likely not see these royalties anyway as he will be 88 I believe after serving his sentence.
So in some convoluted fucked up way in certain circumstances, it is actually financially beneficial for the victims for everyone to listen to the perpetrator.
It's also important to note artists do not receive 100% of royalties. I do not feel producers, featured artists, or even Drake's ghost writer's hard work should potentially be penalised when he is convicted.

I am close with my Dad, Mom, Sister, and Nieces and currently live 145 miles from them.
Background:
My Dad (mid-70s) started showing signs of cognitive decline around 2013. He was diagnosed with Alzheimers in 2018. I confided in his sister, "A", about his diagnosis, prognosis and test results. "A" sent an e-mail to extended family (Aunts, Uncles, etc.) Advising everyone of my Dad's diagnosis, prognosis, and test results. "A" and I explicitly discussed that his diagnosis, etc. was not to be shared. I distanced myself from "A" as a result of her actions.
We moved my Dad into Assisted Living in 2021. He no longer knows or recognizes my Mom, Sister, and I. Processing everything is a heartbreaking cycle. The grief journey is so difficult - he's still alive, but he's not the person I knew as my Dad. He no longer communicates with us and pretends to be asleep when we visit. While it's hard to see him do that, I know it's not who he is. I miss him more than I'll ever be able to articulate.
As time passed, I forgave "A", but the relationship wasn't the same. I held back from sharing anything with "A".
In 2022, my Mom (early 70s), began having health issues - she became forgetful, depressed, tempermental, falling asleep on the toilet, falling asleep when eating, and was not sleeping at night. On multiple occasions we found her asleep in her car on the driveway with the engine running after her errands. (She no longer drives.)
Mom's decline has, unfortunately, been rapid. In 2023, she was diagnosed with a rare Auto Immune Disorder that had recently been discovered/identified/named. There is not much information about her Disorder and effective treatment options. The disorder is poorly understood, most neurologists haven't treated patients with it.
I spent a weekend visiting Mom in 2023. Mom was having trouble speaking, walking, sleeping, choking when eating, sleeping on the toilet, and doing minor tasks. I took her to the ER where, in addition to her Auto Immune Disorder, it was identified that she had had multiple strokes. I was crushed.
On my drive back home, "A" called and asked about my weekend with family. I began sobbing and had to pull over. I am losing both of my parents at the same time - it's heartbreaking, devastating, hard to process and make it my "new normal".
"A" asked why I was so upset, and I told "A" that my Mom had suffered multiple strokes, I wasn't processing (or coping well) and how much it hurts to know you're losing both of your parents at the same time.
"A's" reaction was to laugh. Hysterically. I plead with her that this was by no means funny - this is serious. Both of my parents are in rapid declines. "A" could not stop laughing the entire time. I understand laughter is sometimes a reaction to bad news, but this hit different.
An hour after I got home, I called "A" to tell her that I was hurt by her reaction. This is not a laughing matter - it never will be - this is serious. I no longer had/have one functional parent. I am losing both of them, together. I reiterated that I was really hurt by her actions. "A" continued to laugh the duration of my call. I ended the call due to being so upset.
I haven't spoken to "A" since. I shouldn't have told her what happened that weekend. It was so raw and I was really hurt. I place some blame on myself for thinking that I could trust her after the last time I confided in her.
I received a letter from "A": "I genuinely regret dismissing your fears about your Mom's health. I wasn't aware she was so ill. I ask your forgiveness. I hope there is something that I can be done to mend the split in our relationship. I miss you."
I'm not sure what to make of this. Is ignorance a valid excuse?
Would I be the Asshole if I don't respond? What do you say, lovely people of Reddit?

[OC Intro: The game is modded to increase basic jobs cost, seasonal events are disabled. Much of the crash details are based on NASA/SP-2008-565 Columbia Crew Survival Investigation Report recommendations especially Chapter 3 "Occupant Protection".]
The ship is without power, and Tightniks can't run the radar much without draining the batteries. He has only a few minutes of APU power left, goes over the best clearing he can find, and radars it. It varies by only a few feet from the aerodynamic glideslope there. He spots it out on the cameras and circles to go after that spot. He's only at two hundred feet now. With one hand on the stick, he uses the other to open the pressure equalization valve on the side hatch, then at one hundred feet, gets it undogged. Depending on how much damage he's going to get, it's less likely to be stuck closed and trap him. The dynamic vacuum this pulls in the cockpit rips most of the survival pack data cards from that rack and scatters them across the landscape. Crap, I'm gonna need those! Refocusing on surviving the next few seconds, he turns on the radar for the final approach, takes a last look around, then straight ahead at his forward camera and PFD, he clicks his HANS and shoulder strap locks in; after that, he can barely move, but that now is better than dying in this crash with a broken neck. He's a decent pilot and brings up the flare gently. Bringing up the alpha on this delta-winged ship, he balloons a little, but keeps the nose going up and restores a zero aerodynamic sink rate just above the highest terrain indicated by the radar altimeter. The ship bumps a little in the ground effect, and he can see the radar altitude cycling irregularly up and down about five feet at a time. Rougher than it looked from higher up! The body flap protecting the dead engines hits first, and the nose comes rapidly down. It hits, the screens go blank, and Tightniks is surrounded by airbags, some lifting his feet from the rudder petals and his hand from the control stick. It's blinding, it's disorienting, it's noisy, and, to his relief, it's long! It takes several seconds before the crashing cockpit stops moving. How many times did he flip over? Did he go sideways and roll? Am I rightside up? Are we really stopped on the ground? The airbags deflate, and he can move his arms. He gets his restraints loose and inspects himself. "Uck!" he says out loud (without the 'f'). No broken bones. His pressure suit can take his blood pressure. 116/81, pulse 112, blood oxygen 99 reads off on his left arm, I'll friggin' take it!
The ship is amazingly intact from what he can tell. He can't get any readings. The systems test meter seems to be working, but can't find any voltages anywhere. The ship seems to be completely dead. Behind him, 10 passenger seats are all surrounded by airbags and the back of the cabin ends in some sort of dirt-and-gravel and there's a bit of daylight seeping in around the edges. He was the only one on board, though, so their deployment was mostly academic (they might have stiffened the structure a little during the crash, but that's probably trivial.) Tightniks gets out of his spacesuit. The air on this planet is actually breathable. He gets the hatch open, steps outside and-
"A green shimmer erupts then disappears, and you hit the ground."
The human emerges from the glowing green mist and hits the ground. Groans. Pushes against that ground, trying to get back up. Where am I? What's my name? I remember nothing. Aren't babies born naked? He's got a dark blue button-down shirt on. A uniform? A shoulder patch. Gets up, looks around. I feel really heavy. I'm not that fat, am I? He picks up a small stone from the ground, this also feels heavier than it should. He rises to his feet and holds it out somewhat (he's unable to fully extend his arm) and lets it go. The stone hits the ground near his feet quickly and with remarkable speed. It's the gravity, it's greater than it is on- ...where am I from? This is- ...not my home planet? "Oooh..."
"Ka?" it says.
What is that? It's cute, at least.
It is not tame. He has no hope of catching it on foot. The creature seems to like the berries. Maybe if I gather some of those into one place and set some kind of trap...
33s: First trap.
I got one! The human lumbers up to the trap and gets the catch open. Do you bite? It doesn't matter much to me; I'm so friggin' screwed.
It doesn't. It looks at the human with a sense of wonder, actually. A blink and tilt of the head. Seems almost to be asking, Is it you? My purpose? My savior? Once out of the trap, which is totally wrecked, he has to make a new one from scratch, it follows him around like a imprinted hatchling bird.
Wiry little fella, you are. You're going to need some bulking up to do anything useful. The- ...'trimp', I guess... The trimp seems just barely able to feed itself. The human lets him into the broken ship's intact cabin, and it curls up comfortably in a passenger seat for a nap.
1m03s: Second trap.
"Apparently the Trimps breed if they're not working. Doesn't look pleasant."
What are they doing?
The trimps appear to be androgynous, and these two have paired off in the back of the ship. They're holding something carefully within a few hours, feeding it berries, grass, and- ...corundum.
Corundum?? Whatever that is, it isn't a baby.
1m35s: Third trap.
Only it IS a baby! The third trimp he trapped immediately joined the other two in raising it. They have a strange diet of food the human has found compatible with his own body, but they also eat rocks! They're careful to crush and sort aluminate minerals from silcate ones and only eat aluminate. Actually, they don't eat aluminate, they're only feeding it to the baby.
2m06s: Fourth trap.
All four are raising the same child, who is just starting to toddle. It seems these fellas have alumina or maybe even aluminum bones. The human takes a nap and wakes to find the first child grown up and they're starting to raise a second child, all five of them.
2m46s: Huts.
The human found a working bit of electronics. He calls it a pad, but maybe it's more like a smartphone. It has plans for two residential structures. The first, the smaller one, he can build right away, but the second one needs something called "drywall", and he has to figure out how to make that before he can build it. Huts and houses, apparently.
3m13s: 10 pop, full, first farmer.
The trimp he trained to farm and make paper took an incredible 50 units of food to get bulked up to do the work, and now it's not participating in rearing the child. But less than an hour after the trimp started farming and pulping, the child was out on its own, and the trimps did not start another. The ten seats on the ship were all full. Well, eleven counting the one up front that the human sleeps in. The pilot starts exploring the area.
3m28s: Battle.
Wait, what are you do-
The hostile roars and charges at the human, but one of his trimps jumps in front of him with a stick and they fight. It started right when the human got far enough away from the ship that the hostile non-trimps away from the ship began to regard him as leaving his own territory. After the trimp defeats the first enemy, it continues after other hostiles.
3m53s: Shield I in Z1c5.
The human is easily able to recover the loot in the territory cleared by the fighting trimp. Then he sees something glinting in the- That can't be! What the heck is that? It's a data card that fits his pad. It quite clearly regards trimp combat. He gets it loaded into his pad and studies it. I can do this, it just takes some wood. He returns to the ship to discover that they had already started on a new child before the fighter had even expired in battle. The human concentrates on his research.
4m38s: Mskel in Z1c11 defeated.
The remains of this one seem rather white and shiny. It's titanium! This enemy had titanium bones! He'll store them away. They'll be useful someday, I'm sure.
5m52s: Dagger I in Z1c20.
Where are these data cards coming from? The human wonders as he loads this one into his pad, It's for a weapon it calls a dagger. He blinks. I don't know what a dagger is. I'll take your word for it, data card. Needs metal. He has gathered some, but ore is plentiful. He can just dig and smelt it whenever he wants. For now, I'll continue researching.
6m18s: Arable in Z1c21.
It's an old cave that trimps like to live in. Why weren't they able to live there before? How could these friendly critters be confined to only the exact spot where THAT thing, he looks back where he came from, not remembering that he piloted the wrecked ship to its current resting place, crashed? This is really strange. I'll let them fill up this cave before advancing further. Wait, what about defenses? The hostiles never try to reclaim territory that they've lost, so he stops worrying about that fairly quickly.
8m22s: First hut is 0.3% first ever AP.
The trimps seem fairly easy to please in terms of living quarters. Two move into his first hut and start raising a child. The human has his tent, uniform, and the heater pilfered from his space suit. Not much of a mud fan.
9m59s: Miners in Z1c30.
Oh, what's on this data card? Sl3niw? Oh, I'm holding the pad upside down. Miners. I can teach trimps how to mine ores and smelt met- 200 units of food? Each job is getting more expensive to train a trimp for. He puts his bee nickels to his eyes and spots another data card probably 10 enemies away. "Sc"? Does that means science? I can teach trimps to do science??
13m57s: Scientists in Z1c40.
Due to the expense of training trimps, the human couldn't afford to build them shields until now, he's got Sh1-3 made for the fighter to capture the science training data card. 14m02s: One head went into that turtlimp shell, that of his fighter, but two came out: his fighter still has his head on, and he managed to get the turtlimp's head off. It rushes off after the deadly penguimp in the next cell. The shields are not doing all that much good, actually, but they're better than nothing. The human picks up and loads the science data card and- Holy runny sugar-free fudge crap! 1000 food units, but it'll endow them with the ability to speak. Good. I'm getting bored with no one to talk to.
14m28s: Bloodlust purchased and AutoFight enabled (that delay after getting it is an effect of jacking up the job cost.)
As the human buries this expired little trimp warrior, he comes to the sobering realization that he has more trimp graves in his growing trimp colony than he does live trimps. And yet they seem more hopeful now than before I got to know any of them. They seem to think I'm the solution to all their problems or- Those two look east somberly, then notice that he's watching them and smile back and wave at him. ...one problem that is specific, but very, very huge for them. [The only reason I say 'east' is because that's right on a map, and the game advances right across a row, then up. I might say 'northeast' on occasion for that reason.]
20m47s: Z1c73, Miners taken.
Are you my new mining foreman? The trimp who took to the mining training has dark brown fur that lays flat on its head. It's unusual in not having any bits that stick out from its head, ahoge or whatever. This one is relatively quiet, and while it has assimilated the mining and smelting knowledge, it needs to bulk up to do any mining. Smelting is relatively easy, and getting a strong natural draft going in a furnace is almost trivial with the increased gravity. This trimp builds furnaces like nothing. And likes to nap in holes it digs right on the spot; it's weird that way. [Puchim@s Yukipo, and furnaces are not explicit in Trimps.]
21m58s: Farming in Z1c80.
The resourcing "books" are not data cards but paper scrolls, apparently lost to the trimps. It seems that they were civilized in the recent past and some calamity swept over the planet to reduce them to this. Did I have something to do with it? Amnesia sucks harder than a Dyson- ...what's a Dyson? Whatever, it sucks. This disaster happening just before I crash in the only spot with trimps still alive would be a seriously crazy coincidence! Something is really, really wrong about all this. [The author has not sought or received product placement permission or fee from Dyson Technology Ltd. or any resellers of their stuff, just they literally suck balls and made my favorite vacuum cleaner.]
23m50s: Builder in Z1c90.
They've rescued an, I dunno, gelding trimp? It just started to build a shed around the piled lumber I left to build one. It's really slow compared to me, and just banged its thumb, but it is super cute with that long reddish head fur. That particular trimp is also fascinated with pink ribbons and likes to decorate its head fur with them. Because of its inherent inability to participate in rearing children, it isn't counted in the population. [Puchim@s Io, builder on the basis of Iori seen building in 1x10.]
26m02s: Zone 2, 44 pop, 5.5s RC with Z0/1.
It's some sort of tactical manual - tactical coordination. Coordination! He's starting to sort out some trimpese on the research he has done so far. It needs a lot of metal, so they won't be able to implement it for some time. Hopefully, they're still good one at a time, but these enemies seem to be getting bigger as we go along. Uh oh!
27m33s: Gym in Z2c5.
It's some sort of training dojo or sporting arena. The human examines the ruins, I think I can back-engineer drawings for this, get one built, and see what happens.
29m02s: 1g, 47 pop, 10.8s RC with Z1/2.
The two fighting trimps now with their gym and coordination are dodging and blocking enthusiastically, and making much faster ground against the bad guys then a little while ago when it was just one trimp fighting at a time and unable to avoid the enemy hitting back.
40m46s: Fresh turkimp in Z2c74, 63 pop, 7.9s RC, Sh1-10, Da1-5, Bo1-3, Ma1-3, Hm1-3, 6g.
Oh, wow, the laborers seem really hot after this turkimp. He cooks it up and tries a slice. It's really awesome! I have to work alongside his laboring trimps to share it, but I'm getting used to the gravity now. That scroll we found back in Z2c10 really helped. Trimps' techniques and appliances for handicapped individuals, and I'm really handicapped in this higher gravity. He joins the woodcutters with the turkimp; they're the most numerous resource laborer right now, building more gyms, enough that the block/dodge ability of the fighting trimps is almost caught up to the enemy's ability to cause damage.
43m15s: Zone 3, 63 pop, 7.9s RC with Z1/2.
I'm neglecting my science and trimp scientists are really expensive. Curiously, that grey-haired one can't speak all that well, only says "Tai" and "Shijou", but it can write and draw like nobody's business. It's the only scientist so far. [Puchim@s Takanya: Online references probably still claim that she can utter the first two syllables of any word, but she can actually utter only the first two kana syllables of someone's name, most often the given name of basis human Takane Shijou, who also has that habit. (All the utterances of the puchidoru are based on the speech foibles of their basis humans except maybe Piyopiyo, where I haven't seen anything match up so far.)]
47m32s: Finally, we can make drywall and houses. 59m30s: Z3c77, 94 pop, 7.8s RC.
Oh, those poor things are really struggling up at the front. These trimps are enthusiastic and know no fear, but I still feel like telling them to stop for a while. I don't have the heart to keep them from trying while they're still doing some damage.
1h05m24s: Zone 4, 107 pop, 9.3s RC with Z3/4. 1h15m26s: Zone 5, 120 pop, 8.2s RC with Z3/4.
"What is that?" the human asks. He has three scientists. His first does all the writing, but the other two can actually speak. One of them hops up on a rock spire beside the human to reach his eye level.
At the next ridge line, over the lowest and most passable gap in the terrain, this really mean looking hovering sausage monster.
"I dunno," the scientist trimp shrugs, "But it's making me hungry. Looks like a perfectly cooked frankfurter from here." [John Morell's dubious dirigibles.]
"Oh, yeah," the human nods, "that's a blimp."
"A blimp?" the trimp tilts its head quizzically at the human, "How could you know?"
"I wish I could tell you, little buddy," the human extends his arm braces to descend the pass on the side of the zone boundary in the boss enemy's direction, then grunts, "Let's go kill it."
1h16m11s: Z1c9, 120 pop, 10.3s RC with Z4/5. 1h33m34s: Zone 6, 151 pop, 7.4s RC with Z4/5.
1h33m54s: TP in Z1c3.
"What's this?" the human asks, having picked up the little square document with the curling corners.
"Oh," the hungry scientist looks at it, "It's a garden path, follow me."
"You want to lead me down the garden path?" the human says.
"Yeah," the scientist says.
"Are you kidding?" the human asks.
"No," says the other scientist, "We don't get human humor. Listen, these fighters can't go, let them wear themselves out here, then we'll take the next group through this garden."
"Okay," the human nods, watching two more trimps join the fray as he issues the Z5 coordination orders, "they're doing pretty well after all that block training research we just wrapped up." [That's a common artifact, even in normal games, Z5 Traintacular combines with many gyms, enough population to add several trainers, affording Blockmaster, which is expensive on a run zero, plus a break on Tion Z5, a 40% all-stat increase. I don't think Zach designed it into the game on purpose, it just worked out this way.]
1h34m07s: 151 pop, 10.5s RC with Z5/7. 1h37m44s: Drop from Z6c39, TP for 3.
"Now we have these access map frags we can use to route through the old trimpopoli," the scientist explains, "Atlimpis for food, Morimpa for gems, Everimp for metal, and Impazon for wood."
"What about the garden?" the human asks.
"Well, we got lucky with Tricky Paradise," the scientist says, "but you can randomize the route and maybe get lucky. What's with that look?"
"Somehow, I'm remembering 'frag' as something that blew up with deadly pieces," the human says. [Different video games - ones with better graphics and worse gameplay Ｏ(>▽<)Ｏ]
1h39m59s: Blues back up to the top on series I...
"Tai, Tai!" the first ever trimp scientist stops the human just before he upgrades the mace and dagger to Mk.6 and Mk. 8 respectively. It has a note for him.
"Why do you keep calling me that?" the human asks, "Do you think that's my name?"
"Shijou, Shijou," it nods as though to indicate, I KNOW it is. Then it proffers its note again. The human takes it and reads, "Don't upgrade the first row equipment right now."
"Why not?" the human asks.
"Shijou," it points at the end of the mapped route, where there's a scroll sticking out of the thistles.
2h24m07s: Zone 8, 224 pop, 12.2s RC with Z7/12.
"Your settlement is getting crowded, there's Trimps in the streets, and you're taking heat. You feel a sudden strong desire to create a map, though you're not quite sure how that would help."
2h49m10s: Zone 9, 357 pop, 9.5s RC with Z8/15.
"You can't shake the feeling that you've been here before. Déjà-vu?"
The trimps really seem to like the new high capacity mansions, and the village has rapidly expanded since they started building them.
"There's something familiar about this," the human says.
"Tai," the grey one that writes clings to his arm and shows him a note that says, "Don't give up now."
"We must persist," says the yellow one has found a foothold it can grab onto and grabs the human's shoulder gently, "If you give up to early, we'll never solve this. You'll be stuck here forever."
The human puts his hand over the trimp's paw on his shoulders, then looks at him, "I can die, too."
"No, you can't," the trimp says quietly, "Please don't test that, tall one."
"Death is just another path..." he remembers.
"Gan," the grey one squeaks. [That's the first two kana syllables of "Gandalf"]
"...one that we all must take," the human continues, "The grey rain-curtain of this world rolls back, and all turns to silver glass, and then you see it-"
"A green mist," the yellow trimp interrupts, "flash of fire, we're all gone and our progress forgotten. The wandering stars return to that day, and you again crash that ship- ...a little better every time."
"Wait," the human looks around, "have I been here before?"
"I-" the yellow trimp tries in futility to share what little it knows, "...or... somebody got just a little coolant into the-"
"Into the what?"
"This side up," the grey one's note says.
"Into the that," the yellow one points at the note, "It really helped. You- ...I don't think we've ever had mansions before."
Well, of course they didn't have mansions before. That was one of my ship's data cards. How did it get way out here? Will anything start to make sense?
3h02m13s: Zone 10, 387 pop, 8.7s RC with Z8/15; '28s: 11.1s RC with Z9/19. 3h16m41s: Tough snimp after food book, L10 rand dept from lo-hi-med 118/25/96, 4 Items.
"That's twice our frags led us to gem-rich Moria," the human says.
"Morimpa," the new red trimp scientist corrects, there now being 5 scientists. [There'd be more if there were more turkimp.]
"The question is how do we use all these gems?" the human looks at the village zoning plans again, "I like those mansions and all, but they use hardly any gems compared to, well-" he gestures at the pile of over two dozen thousand gems they've gathered, "-that! And still a lot of wood and lumber."
"I think there's something," the yellow one sighs, "I wish I knew more."
Quite some time later, after they're done looting that route for equipment plans, the trimps are again advancing through Zone 10, and he hears it.
"Tai?" the grey one wonders.
"Where are you going?" the yellow one asks.
"To the farm," the human answers.
"Whatever for?" the red one seems exasperated.
"Shijou?" the grey one sighs, then looks at the fighting front. It's been around long enough to remember, "Shijou!"
"You guys already get so much to eat this doesn't do you much good," the human explains.
3h32m33s: L11 112/35/78 rand sea, dropped from Z11c6 with disband, 4.
"What's wrong?" the red one asks.
The human comforts one of the wounded. Once trimps start into a zone fight, they have to finish before they bleed out. He's really bothered making them desert in front of that second turkimp. "They had a lot left in them," he sighs, rubbing his eyes, "but we can't keep that much dead turkimp at once, we have to leave it alive to use up all of this one."
"Shijou," the grey one presents a note, "We need this map right away, anyway. Don't worry about it, Tightniks."
"Tightniks?" he looks at the grey one, "Is that me? How do you know?"
"Tai," the grey one points at the top of the human's left breast pocket.
"Ah, crud," the yellow one curls its tail around in front of itself as trimps do when they're embarrassed, "Is that really a name tag?"
The human hadn't even noticed it since the green flash blew up his memory as he was stepping out of the ship.
4h04m22s: Block (sub-8h AP is only 0.3%), taking it, 504 pop, 9.8s RC with Z10/24.
It's a pretty thick book about using shields for block instead of hit points. The pad has the stats analysis. Sh3-1 is only giving us 9% of our hit points. Turning to his trimp scientists, he says, "It seems to me to be worth it."
"Let's," the yellow one nods.
"Shijou," it hands him a note, "It scales badly, but that won't matter for a long time. I think there's a way to undo it before it matters."
"Doing it." The human takes out his pad and starts scanning.
4h29m05s: L14 rand moun 137/26/80 is really good for a lo-hi-med. 4h30m52s: Hotels.
"Ah," the yellow one says, "I knew there was something. That must be it."
5h08m09s: L15 lo-hi-hi rand gard 129/28/82 (just got explorers). 5h09m32s: Picked up Wall.
"Dam," the human says.
"Damn?" the red one chuckles.
"No," the human says, "Earthen wall dam; it's a thing that makes artificial lakes by holding rivers back."
"Lakes?" the yellow one asks, "Rivers?"
"Oh yeah," the human says, "This planet doesn't have enough rain for those..."
5h48m21: Leaving Wall from about c70 to fetch Tion Z15.
"You can't resume the map from the same point if you start another," the human reads the grey one's note.
"We can go back to the same point on that route if we hold there and finish Zone 15, right?" Tightniks asks.
"Shijou!" it seems to be saying yes.
"Yes," the yellow one adds, "but we're out of Series III upgrades, and you need a fresh map route to start up Series IV."
"We should be okay," Tightniks says, "but if we have to start it over, I don't see that being a big deal." As they advance through the rest of Zone 15, Tightniks resumes his usual duties at the research desk instead building and running traps like he was before.
The trimps seem hopeful at this decision.
5h49m10s: Fresh turkimp. 5h50m16s: Zone 16, 1071 pop, 13.4s RC with Z15/75, 13m43s turkimp (skel in c1.)
"Z:16 Seriously? Another Blimp so soon?"
"So," Tightniks lowers his bee nickels and looks at the red one, "is it going to be boss fights at the end of every zone from now on?"
"Hmm," the red trimp looks up past the human at some random rock spire or cloud.
"Well?" the human persists.
"Yup," he says.
"Hmph," Tightniks grabs a Sw3-1 of the rack and advances towards the front, "Before then, we have another Mister Titanium."
"What does he like about skeletimps?" the red one asks the grey one as the human marches off.
"Shijou?" the grey one seems just as confused by that.
"He's not going back to the ship, and he's not getting himself killed," the yellow one smiles, "so I'll take it."
5h58m32s...
"Hey guys, go for the mortar!" the human suggests to his 75 fighting trimps in the Wall's boss fight.
"I can tell from your bedtime stories that you're used to the artillery in that other place," the yellow one gripes, "but fighting works differently here, there's no artillery."
And the human instantly collapses laughing, the scientists a little worried he might have injured himself in the planet's severe gravity. But he's okay, at least physically, "Mortar is the stuff between the bricks, fellas. That's is a brickimp, right?"
5h59m18s: Wall, 1076 pop, 13.3s RC, 1% AP for sub-8h finish, first L16 roll good 156/35/84 moun, 10 for the metal.
Beyond the Wall was a more edenic section of the trimpolis ruins, doubling the production of the lumberjacks. The trimps are actually really happy with the mode of all of the laborers moving between the three big jobs, along with the turkimp, except for the foremen specialized at leading the job. It isn't enough to boost their productivity, but the human goes to them with trays of sandwiches.
6h06m52s: 50 map run 0.3% AP...
6h19m13s: Zone 17, 1141 pop, 16.0s RC with Z16/94, no turkimp.
"Z:17 You climb a large cliff and look out over the new Zone. Red dirt, scorched ground, and devastation. Is that a Dragimp flying around out there?!"
"Hmm," the human surveys the new zone with his bee nickels, "Looks like crap. Any ideas?"
"You're the idea man," the yellow one groans.
"Set the map flag," he puts his bee nickels away, "We'll run a depth for practice and to load up on gems for more hotels."
"Righto," the red one gets to work.
6h44m34s: First DCP. (Draglimp Care Package; I refuse to call it a tribute.)
"Oh," the human says, "It's tame now, so it brings back gems in exchange for food?" He looks at his gaping scientists, "That's what it looks like, huh? Guys? Yo!"
"Tai..." the grey one sighs.
Draglimp, the dragimp imprinted on Tightniks, lands beside the human, drops some gems at his feet, and accepts some scratching behind its horns before diving into the food bowl.
"You tamed a dragimp???" Grey's note says.
"Well," the yellow one huffs, "I guess that happened."
8h18m53s: L20 depth of 154/27/79.
"Mapping up here?" the red one half closes one eye and tilts his head.
"Yeah," the human says while fitting together the depth map fragments, "With the coordination book not right at the end, we have an extra mark of coordination to take advantage of. Let's take our housing up to 2000 or so, shall we?"
"Okay," the yellow one says from a pile of logs, "What's all the wood for?" They had been collecting it for days now.
"The series upgrades follow a rather specific pattern," Tightniks explains, "Just on the other side of this blimp is Zone 21, where we should be able to find the Shield series V, right?"
"Shijou!" the grey one nods.
8h56m17s: 1% AP for 100 map runs, leaving it, 1751 pop, 24.8s RC with Z20/232. 8h56m54s: Zone 21...
"Ooooookay," Tightniks growls, "There is something off about this thing."
"Shijou?" the grey one looks at the yellow one with concern about their human starship pilot friend.
The human stoops, picks up the little green gem on the ridge between Zone 20 and 21, looks at it, huffs, and asks, "Any idea where this comes from?"
"Err..." the red one seems hesitant to say, "I think you made it."
"Really?" the human huffs, "How could that be?" Then he tosses it at Red, "See if anything reacts to it. It might be radioactive, so we should take turns to minimize exposure."
"Really?" Red's holding it now, "What makes you say that?"
"Because I'm pissed off for no reason I can figure out," the human says, "I think it's coming from that."
"Frags," the red one says quickly, "I think it's arranging a route. You're good with maps," it tosses the gem to the grey scientist.
"Shijou," the grey one says hopefully, and has a map drawn within a few minutes. [Whether it looks like the one in Puchim@s 1x61 is anyone's guess. That one annoyed me as well as Chihya.]
9h02m37s: L21 moun first roll was a decent 160/26/84. 9h21m00s: Starting run 5 of that map...
Tightniks had taken his anger out on some food and wood to build about 8000 traps. Now he's leaning against a rock spire in his increasingly tattered uniform. A nap begins, perhaps unintentionally.
Wild trimps are examining the pile, finding it unwelcoming, and also finding no place in the town, just mill about. It looks like they want to help.
"Ku?" it's a blue trimp, probably a farmer waiting for stuff to grow, climbs up on the rock spire the human is leaning against, starts patting him on the head, "Ku. Ku ku." [Puchim@s Chihya.]
9h23m09s: Still working that lap...
Tightniks wakes up from that nap, and the grey one is standing there. "Shijou," it says with a note of concern, although not much of one. The note it holds says, "It wasn't me."
"Oh, what wasn't you, buddy?" He stretches out a bit, feeling somewhat refreshed. It feels like somebody washed his face and hair while he was sleeping.
The grey one is also holding a small mirror, apparently broken off from a larger mirror and with the sharp edges filed down to make the edges safe.
The human takes it from the grey trimp and holds it in front of his face to discover that somebody has bound up all his hair into about twenty little pigtails. He touches them with his other hand to confirm. "Eh, whatever." He hands the mirror back and goes back to sleep. [Puchim@s Koamimami.]
9h30m08s: The following run...
"He's not throwing stuff every which way yet," the yellow one whispers to the red one, watching the human snoozing with his pad on his knee.
"You remember that, too?" the red one asks.
"'Remember'?" the yellow one turns to face the red one, "I s'pose that's better than imagining it."
"I remember it, too," the grey one says via a playing card sized note.
"If we're stuck in a time loop," the yellow one sighs, "maybe this cycle will be different."
"Tai..." the grey one admires him for a moment. Then thumbs in the direction of the mountain, "Heh, Shijou!" it laughs.
9h35m58s: Run 8, c9 of that map.
The scientists nap and take notes, and meditate and take notes, and draw stuff. The grey one often storyboards for the other nine because it's the best at drawing stuff. They have come up with a list, and most probably "order" (they're debating whether their ranking means "order" (sequence of things happening over the various loops) or "frequency" (what proportion of previous loops they have happened in). But they've come up with this, from first (or perhaps most often) to most recent (or perhaps least often):
- The ship crashes (they're pretty sure that happens every loop) - The human builds huts - The human teaches some of his trimps to speak and do science - The human builds houses - The human makes maps - The human builds mansions - The human blows up and gets himself killed somewhere around Z17 to Z21, often on a dragimp - The human only recently/occasionally builds hotels - The human only recently/rarely tamed a dragimp - The human only recently/rarely maps the Dimension of Anger
They're all agreed that that they have never finished the Dimension of Anger. What they are not all agreed on is that they've never done this conference to figure out whether they're in a time loop or what that might mean. [See also Star Trek: The Next Generation episode "Cause and Effect" ...which was sort of a time loop but they weren't going back in time. It's very interesting, but its meta makes no sense - no one ever went looking for the Bozeman in 80 years? No one who went looking for the Bozeman also got stuck? No one noticed the passage of time outside the little area of space where the not-quite-a-time-loop was happening? Errr... sci-fi writers, don't be half-assed about your time loops, lmao! Be like Harold Ramis- ...what am I saying?? (That would be Groundhog Day, which grafted a time loop into a romcom; there are no other sci-fi elements. But it was a full-blown time loop and not half-assed like "Cause and Effect".)]
9h54m06s: Dropped from Z21c95...
I think it would be a bad idea to bypass that green area, as much as I'd rather not face it. Both his domesticated trimps, which are breeding up a new group of fighters, and the wild trimps he has decided just now not to open the traps for, stare at him and point in that direction. He shoulders a huge Shield V-3 and grabs an Mace IV-2 as well and announces, "We're doing it." Thus equipped, he marches off into the Dimension of Anger.
10h27m53s: Taking Pi4-2; recently had taken Pa4-2...
The group at the front had expired, and the snimp in DoAc95 glares at the advancing colony of trimps, which had halted only because of it. It refuses to counterattack the vulnerable colony and its human, instead snorting and huffing, waiting for the next bunch of 232 fighting trimps to come in range.
Tightniks runs along the line of traps, releasing the recently tamed trimps, singing a song that he doesn't remember the meaning of, that he doesn't remember was crafted by an ethnically Chinese guy out of an African language, and later mastered by two caucasians over the internet before they ever met in person. "Baba yetu yetu uliye, mbinguni yetu yetu amina..." because it just happened to be stuck in his head. [Because the Doylian author decided on a whim to. Christopher Tin got it into Civilization IV and at the time (2010 July), I made the best video for it on YouTube, which got subsequently blown to shreds when Peter Hollens and Malukah re-recorded the song from scratch in their own voices and instruments in 2014, pity with no English translation, the purpose of my video.]
Noticing the last batch of metal he needs coming out of the furnace, he waves the waiting grey scientist to fire up the forge [to use the term properly and not as the game does], for it was time to wrap up the forging dies for the Spetum IV, Mark 2 pike heads.
"Shijou!" the grey one cheers, setting aside a snack that looks like maybe ramen, and starts jumping up and down on the bellows handle.
It takes a while for the human to chip out the tip in the two halves of the forging die, and then polish it, and then heat it up in the forge, and then quench it, inspect it, and put it into service crafting thousands of new pike heads for the fighting trimps.
But only one second passed on the map frame clock (10h27m54s) four cells behind that snimp, in the case being brooded over by this huge, and if it's honest, rather concerned megablimp.
10h35m45: Portal PB, 45 He, 4.247 He/hr, 1891 pop, 22.7s RC with Z20/232, no turkimp.
The last head of the map's boss monster goes limp as one of the fighting trimps' mace heads bounces of it, and the huge thing settles on its tail, resting on the package that seems to be the prize of this map. And there's a popping sound, and then something mechanical.
Is that a scroll compressor? Tightniks looks at the package. The deflating monster's lifting envelope material drapes over everything underneath it. "Red, Shijou!" he snaps and points, "roll up that side of it. Keep this part from sucking down on the extractor nozzle!"
All ten of the scientists jump in, literally, pushing the gas in the bag towards the compressor. Tightniks as well, rolling up the front.
Until he kicks, and nearly trips over, a smaller package that might be the explanation for the reason why the center of the monster's defense seemed to be a little away from the big package he could see. It's in the right place, he realizes. He gets it uncovered and reads stenciled-and-sprayed block letters on it:
"DT TIME PORTAL / THIS SIDE DOWN"
Perhaps the Dimension of Anger is so named because of the rage suddenly rising up in Tightniks' throat. It isn't so much as the free-floating aggression suddenly has an answer, there is definitely a fresh batch of rage and anger as he grips the nearest Mace IV, Mark 3 with both hands and gets it over his shoulder, its target obviously this object, anger at the realization he screams at the top of his lungs, "We are stuck in a mutha FAH-king time loop!!" His swing begins. [Tightniks almost never cusses, unlike Snugniks.]

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We have a neighbor who we let cut across our driveway to go to his upper ranch from his house. Yesterday he ran over one of our dogs with a kabota and she had to be put down, it’s technically private property, we just allow him to cut across. He flys through here and we’ve asked him on multiple occasions to slow down. I was also outside when it happened. In this case, are they legally responsible for the vet bill? We are in California if that changes anything. I don’t think kabota has auto insurance.

As many of you may have read, there is a case of two missing adopted kids in North Carolina, where remains have been found. The news has reported that their adoptive “mother” is Avantae Deven.
I’m a curious person and started digging up information on Avantae Deven when I first read the story in my news feed and could not believe what I was reading. It seemed like whomever this woman is must have be using an alias; Avantae Deven is not a name like Kim Jones or Mackenzie Smith.
The more I dug, the weirder it seemed to get. I found a property deed to a place in Sedona, Arizona, and figured out that whomever this Avantae person is, she at one point in time had owned a home together with someone named Nicole Adams. So I dug into who Nicole Adams was, and learned that she was the widow of a spiritual leader named Robert Adams. It appeared to me that there would be no way to identify who Avantae really was, unless I could also identify the true identity of Robert Adams.
*******
I've done investigative work for many years, including skip tracing. I can conclusively state that there was absolutely no person actually named Robert Adams born in New York State on January 21, 1928. This is demonstrated by the New York Birth Index. I have combed the census records for 1930, 1940, and 1950, and cross-checked them against multiple databases, and am confident that nobody with the birth name of Robert Adams was born anywhere in the United States on January 21, 1928.
Moreover, there was absolutely no person with the true name of Robert Adams who died anywhere at all in the United States, let alone Sedona, Arizona, on March 2, 1997. This is demonstrated by the Social Security Death Index.
I began this research largely by performing exhaustive searches on the known addresses that are associated with Robert, his wife Leonie (who used to use the alias Nicole), and Avantae Deven (who turns out to be their daughter Michelle who began using the alias Avantae in the mid-1990’s or so). Most of the addresses are PO boxes. Those that are PO boxes are all *private* PO boxes, not PO boxes that one can rent from the United States Postal Service. To me, that spoke volumes. The family were clearly using aliases.
As I explain further below, I eventually determined that “Robert Adams” was Robert Spiegel, born 21 January 1932 in New York. “Nicole Adams” was actually Aileen Beverly Leonie Maxwell, born February 2, 1929, in Jamaica. “Avantae Deven” is actually their daughter, Michelle K. Spiegel, born on October 1, 1960, in California.
One of Robert’s many false stories about Robert’s life that my research has refuted is Robert’s claim that his mother was Jewish and his father was Catholic. That was a lie. Both of his parents were Jewish. It’s also interesting that he claimed that he was “raised Catholic.” There is absolutely nothing to suggest that. His mother always, in New York, lived in Jewish neighborhoods. Moreover, as will be discussed below, his parents had a Jewish wedding. It’s also downright absurd that he would tell people that he was “half Jewish.” If your mother’s Jewish, you are Jewish, pure and simple. Even if Robert’s father had truly been Catholic (which he wasn’t; his name was Samuel Spiegel and he immigrated to America in 1907, lived with his Jewish, Yiddish-speaking cousins, and spoke Yiddish himself), Robert would have been Jewish because the status of being a Jew comes from the mother. Robert’s mother’s name was Fannie (nee Fleisfeder) Spiegel. Fannie’s parents were Itzik Fleisfeder and Esther Libke (nee Rifkin) Fleisfeder. Esther’s parents were Mendel Rifkin and Sarah whose maiden name is lost to time and the disappearance of the shtetls. Robert’s claim to having had a Catholic father was utterly false, but is part and parcel of his ongoing compulsive daily lying about anything and everything.
Here is the story.
*******
Kolomyia, formerly known as Kolomea, is a city currently located in the Western Ukraine.
On January 21, 1892 (the same year that Kolomea tallis¹ workers went on strike for better pay and working conditions), Kolomea resident Rachel Katz, wife of Abraham Spiegel, gave birth to a son, who was given the name Schmuel.
On the date that Schmuel Spiegel entered the world, Kolomea was ruled by the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy, and almost half of the city’s residents were Jewish.
In June of 1907, fifteen-year-old Schmuel² boarded the Zeeland, which sailed from Antwerp, Belgium, arriving at New York Harbor on June 18, 1907. The ship’s manifest states that Schmuel’s father had paid for his transport, and that Schmuel intended to reside with his father, Abe, in Brooklyn. Schmuel was granted entrance, and took up residence with his cousin Charles Fetner, who resided at 353 Myrtle Avenue, Brooklyn, in Apartment A with his wife Jennie and their baby daughter Ettie. The sparse record that exists suggests that although Schmuel’s father was, indeed, named Abraham, Abraham lived and died in Europe, without immigrating to America.
The 1910 census describes Samuel’s cousin Charles as a carpenter, who had been married to housewife Jennie for six years, and a father of three children-- Ettie age four, Nathan age two, and baby Jacob, who was not even a year old. Eighteen-year-old Samuel was identified by profession as a “Foreman Sailmaker” in an industry described as “pocket-books.”
Three and a half years after being granted admission, on a bitterly cold winter day, January 4, 1911, Schmuel (now employed as a pocket-book maker, and having Anglicized his name to Samuel) signed and submitted his declaration to become a United States citizen. He stated, in that declaration, that he was born on January 21, 1892.
By 1915, Samuel had left his cousin’s abode and was residing as a lodger in the home of a widow named Rose Hammer, who lived with her two adolescent sons, Meyer and Louis, at 531 E. 5^th Avenue; Samuel was now working as a “driver.”
Two years after the 1915 state census was taken, Samuel had moved back to Myrtle Avenue, but this time at building no. 849. On June 15, 2017, Samuel registered for the draft, and described himself as being a pocketbook maker, working for “A. Shoenfeld,” at 101 Crosby Street, New York. He was single. He stated, in his draft registration, that he was born on January 21, 1892.
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A woman named Fruma Fleisfeder was born in Beltz, Bessarabia, sometime between July 1, 1893, and 1901, to Itzik Fleisfeder and Esther Lieba Rifkin. Fruma (not living up to her pious given name) provided different dates and years of birth to different authorities on different occasions, making it impossible at this point in time to know her true position in the birth order of her family. Regardless, Fruma, who began using the name Fanny upon her entrance to the United States, did have three brothers and a sister who also came to America-- Louis Fleisfeder who was born April 10, 1890, Max Irving Fleisfeder who used October 10, 1892 as his birthdate, Hersch (later known as Harry), whose official birthdate was December 15, 1901, and Sylvia who was born in approximately 1906.
On December 1, 1919, Fruma arrived in New York Harbor on the ship La Touraine, declaring her intention, at entry, to become a United States Citizen. The ship’s manifest describes her as five feet five inches tall, with fair hair, blue eyes, and a fair complexion. The ship’s manifest states that she was, at that time, age 24. If that were correct, she would have been born in 1895.
Fruma (then going by Fanny) took up residence with her cousin Ethel (nee Ruchlin) and Ethel’s husband Samuel Steinberg, on 15^th Street, Brooklyn. Soon thereafter, Ethel gave birth to her first child, a daughter named Theresa. The 1920 census states that Fanny was Russian, didn’t speak English but, rather, spoke Hebrew, and worked as a milliner in a millinery store. The 1920 census also states that Fanny was age 25, which lines up with her being age 24 in the prior year’s ship manifest.
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Sam and Fanny married in Manhattan on January 24, 1925. Their marriage certificate (signed by each of them) identifies Sam as being age 32 (contradicting, by one year, his immigration records which would have placed him at age 33), and identifies Fanny as age 24, the same age that she had claimed to be six years prior, and also contradicting an immigration petition that she would file two decades in the future, which generally placed her birth year at the mid-point of 1893.
If Fanny’s immigration records (which included a petition with her signature on it) were correct, Fanny would also have been age 32 as of her marriage to Samuel, not age 24.
So did Fanny lie in her marriage certificate? Or did she lie in her immigration petition?
The marriage certificate identifies Sam as having been born in Kolomea, Austria, and his father being Abraham, and his mother being Rachel Katz. It identifies Fanny as having been born in Beltz, Russia, to a father named Isaac, and to a mother named Esther Rifkin.
The marriage certificate does not identify Fanny as having any profession, but identifies Sam as being a pocketbook maker.
Sam and Fannie were married at 125 E. 4^th Street, Manhattan, a six-story apartment building with retail units on the ground floor that is now an expensive co-op, with three-bedroom units selling for over $900,000. Present-day real estate advertisements alternatively state that the building was built in 1894, 1903, and 1905.
The first name of the rabbi who officiated was Harry. His surname starts with Reid, but the remaining letters of his signature are illegible. Rabbi Harry identified his residence as 232 Broome Street, which, at the time, was a four-story mixed use building that, among other things, housed Chevrah Ahavath Zedek Anshei Jaskinover.
Witnesses to the marriage were Mayer Budmon and Samuel Steinberg.
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Sam and Fanny’s existence was documented next in the 1925 New York State census by census. They were living at 205 S. 2^nd Street. Samuel was still working as a “pocketbook maker.” Fanny was identified as a “housewife.”
Fanny was identified as age 25. This was in accordance with her age as stated on her marriage certificate, but not in accordance with her immigration documents or the 1920 census.
Sam was identified as being age 28, which conflicted with all prior records.
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In 1930, the couple were again enumerated, this time in the Federal census. The enumerator, whose signature appears to be “Max Krahn” (or something like that) stated that he obtained the information on April 16, 1930.
Sam was identified as a “framer” of pocketbooks. He was identified as being 36 years of age, which conflicts by two years with the age that he provided to immigration authorities. Perhaps the enumerator was simply sloppy; Samuel was also incorrectly identified in the 1930 census as having been born in “Poland,” with parents who were both also born in “Poland,” notwithstanding other governmental records having identified him as being Austrian. The language he spoke? “Jewish,” according to the enumerator. Was that to mean Hebrew? Yiddish? Both?
Fannie was identified as age 30 (directly in conflict with the information she supplied in her immigration petition, which bears her signature) and as being “Russian,” with parents born in “Russia.” The 1930 census enumerator incorrectly wrote that her year of immigration was 1921. Fannie, too, was identified by the enumerator as speaking the “Jewish” language.
Although later records reflected that Sam and Fannie had a son named Irving who was born in 1926, Irving was not recorded in the 1930 census. Was he missed by the enumerator? Or was he a later-adopted son?
The couple also had a boarder, identified by the 1930 enumerator as one Esther “Larson,” age 40, born in Russia, and similarly a speaker of the “Jewish” language.
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The New York Birth Index identifies a baby boy, Robert Spiegel, as one of many babies having been born in the city on January 21, 1932.
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On May 21, 1936, Samuel committed suicide by hanging in the family residence, a tenement apartment located at 1168 Union Avenue, in the Bronx. Although, based upon the date of birth that Samuel used for official governmental purposes he was age 44, the death certificate stated that he was age 43.
Fannie engaged the Gordon Funeral Home to prepare him for burial.
Strangely, although Samuel’s headstone accurately identified him in Hebrew as Schmuel Spiegel, son of Avraham, it inexplicably incorrectly stated that he died at age 40.
Fannie of course knew her husband’s real age; both of them signed the marriage certificate that had Samuel’s correct age listed. Furthermore, Samuel had petitioned for citizenship in 1911, and stated that his date of birth was January 18, 1892.
Why would Fannie commission a headstone with a false age? Perhaps she, like her son, was a compulsive liar. Maybe that’s where Robert got it from.
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The 1940 census has Fannie (identified as age 38), Robert (identified as age 8), and Fannie’s son/Robert’s brother, Irving Spiegel, age 13, as living with Fannie’s 72-year-old mother, Esther Fleisfeder, at 1537 Fulton Avenue, in the Bronx. Fannie and Esther were identified as widows. Esther was identified as “U” (unable to work), while Fannie was identified as engaged in housework. No source of income for the family was identified.
No explanation is obvious regarding where Irving was living in the census taken a decade previously. Was he adopted?
There is no “Irving Spiegel” listed in the New York Birth Index for either 1926 or 1927. There is an “Irving Spiegal” listed, who was born April 29, 1926. But he is not Irving Spiegel.
I initially thought that perhaps Irving might be one of the unnamed Baby Boy Spiegels born in New York in 1926 or 1927, and that he left the hospital unnamed because his parents were waiting for his bris before naming him. However, Robert left the hospital with the name Robert. Why wait until the bris to name one child, but not the other?
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Slightly less than two years after she was enumerated in the 1940 census, Fannie’s mother Esther died, at home, at 1537 Fulton Avenue. The causes of death were “Coronary Thrombosis, Pulmonary Oedema Nephritis, Hypertension, Arteriosclerosis.” Esther left this world on February 6, 1942, the same day that the W. L. Steed was torpedoed, shelled and sunk less than a hundred nautical miles east of the mouth of Delaware River by a German submarine.
She was buried at Mount Moriah Cemetery in Fairview, New Jersey, the same cemetery where her son-in-law Samuel was interred.
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On November 12, 1943, Fannie, now residing at 1985 Bathgate Avenue, in the Bronx, petitioned for citizenship. She claimed, in that document bearing her signature, to be fifty years of age, meaning that if she was telling the truth, she would have been born in approximately 1893.
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On January 19, 1948, Robert (having assumed a false date of birth, that being January 18, 1931), enlisted in the New York National Guard. On paper, he had turned age 17 the day before his enlistment. In reality, he would be turning age 16 two days after his enlistment.
On December 9, 1949, Robert was discharged from the national guard, apparently for having been AWOL.
The discharge document identifies his address as being 1985 Bathgate Avenue, New York City.
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The 1950 census places Robert again at 1985 Bathgate Avenue, New York City. It correctly identifies him as age 18, and states that he worked as a shipping clerk for a newspaper company.
According to the 1950 census, Robert resided at the Bathgate Avenue address with his mother Fannie, who was purportedly still age 50 (seven years after she had previously claimed to immigration authorities to be age 50), and Robert’s brother Irving, age 24.
Irving was listed as unemployed and moreover, according to the census record, had not worked for the prior year. Fannie was employed full-time as a milliner in a hat factory.
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Military records reflect that Irving J. Spiegel, born in 1926 and a resident of 1985 Bathgate Avenue, who had completed two years of high school education, had flown bomber planes over Germany during the war. In his military documents, Irving described himself as single, with two dependents.
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On February 2, 1929, a baby girl given the name Aileen Beverly Leone Maxwell was born in Lucea, Hanover, Jamaica, to William Maxwell and Daisy (nee Tibbits) Maxwell. Her birth was registered by her parents.
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In 1954, Robert Spiegel and Aileen Maxwell were married in New York City. Their marriage license was given License No. 10284.
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The following year, the Kingston, Jamaica, Gleaner reported on June 6, 1955:
Miss Leonie Maxwell, daughter of Mr. and Mrs. W. J. Maxwell, was married recently in New York City to Mr. Robert Spiegel of the U.S.A. Both the bride and groom are students at the New York Institute of Dietetics. The bride left the island nearly two years ago for New York. Her wedding gown was chantilly lace and nylon tulle. The bodice was fashioned with a wide, scalloped neckline and elbow-length sleeves. Her three tier skirt of chantilly lace was over pleated nylon tulle. Her fingertip-length veil was adorned with pearls.
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If the claim regarding the couple studying at the New York Institute of Dietetics was even true, their studies at this institution didn’t last long. In May of 1956, a number of advertisements bearing Robert’s photograph appeared in the Kingston, Jamaica Gleaner. The advertisements described Robert as a psychologist, author, lecturer, and “practitioner in auto suggestion,” and identified him as “Dr. J. Robert Spiegel.” Readers were invited to come meet Robert on May 21, 1956, at Record Plaza, where he would be autographing his “latest” “world-wide” 33 and 1/3 RPM record, “How to Stop Smoking in 7 days by Auto-Suggestion.”
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On May 1, 1959, three residents of 1985 Bathgate Avenue, Bronx, New York, came through customs, having returned from a trip to Jamaica. They identified themselves as “Robert D. Spiegel” born in New York (in addition to giving himself a false middle initial, Robert neglected to complete the I-94-A fully, specifically by leaving his birthdate blank), “Leonie A. Spiegel” born in Jamaica on February 2, 1929, and their minor daughter, and “Sharon S. Spiegel,” born in New York. Someone also neglected to fully complete Sharon’s I-94-A, specifically by leaving her birthdate blank.
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Leonie had taken Sharon to Jamaica two years earlier. There are no publicly available records pertaining to their outbound transport from the United States to Jamaica. There is, however, a record pertaining to their return to the United States. That publicly available record does not provide their address, but Sharon is identified as weighing 1 stone 5 pounds (a total of 19 pounds), and Leonie is identified as weighing six stone 5 pounds (89 pounds). Interestingly, Leonie used the name “Aileen Spiegel,” and the records assert that Aileen has no middle initial. Aileen was / is her true legal first name, but it is a lie to say that she has no middle initial.
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Almost two years later, on January 5, 1958, the Kingston, Jamaica Gleaner reported:
Staying at the Tamarind Hotel are Mr. and Mrs. Bob Spiegel and daughter Sharon of Miami, Florida. Mrs. Spiegel is the former Leonie Maxwell, daughter of Mr. and Mrs. W. J. Maxwell of Lucea and has been in the United States for several years. A welcome party in their honour was given last Saturday night by Messers. Horrace, Ray, and Dennis Maxwell, brothers of Mrs. Spiegel. It was a very enjoyable affair.
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In 1963, roughly five years after their 1958 visit to Jamaica, Leonie petitioned for naturalization, in Louisiana. Although I am in possession of the index showing that she petitioned in 1963, I do not possess the petition itself. However, the fact that she petitioned for naturalization in Louisiana demonstrates that that at least she was residing in Louisiana at the time. Since she stated that she didn’t leave Robert’s side for over 40 years, presumably Robert, young Sharon, and also baby Michelle were living in Louisiana at that time.
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People who knew Robert personally relate that he stated that Leonie was a Cayman Island heiress. She wasn’t. Not only was she not born in the Cayman Islands, Leonie’s father’s estate was litigated (with the judge ruling against her) long before Robert started telling people that his wife was a Cayman Islands heiress.
Leonie’s father did leave an estate, but not to her. On November 9, 1967, the Gleaner reported that the Supreme Court had upheld the will of the late William Josiah Maxwell, the father of Horrace, Ray, Dennis, and Leonie, and the husband of Daisy Maxwell, who had contended that William’s signature was a forgery and that the person to whom his estate had been bequeathed had exercised undue influence. The court disagreed. The article reported:
The estate, which one of the executors described as “a sizeable one,” included 112 acres of land at Paradise and three houses at Lucea, Hanover.
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Robert apparently wasn’t banking on Leonie’s inheritance in any event. In May of 1966, advertisements appeared in the Houston Chronicle with Robert’s photo on them, selling a record that would purportedly assist people in stopping smoking in seven days. He identified himself as “Dr. J. Robert Spiegel.”
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On page 55 of the November 15, 1969, San Antonio, Texas Express and News, was an advertisement stating:
SCIENCE OF THE MIND
Dr. J. Robert Spiegel of Houston, director and founder of the Science of the Mind Foundation there, is conducting Sunday evening meetings at 7:30 p.m. in the Sheraton Inn, 1400 Austin Hwy.
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On page 4 of the July 10, 1970 edition of the Fort Worth Star-Telegram was a photograph of Robert, with a brief local news blurb:
GUEST – Dr. J Robert Spiegel of Houston, Science of Mind Foundation director, will speak at the 10:45 a.m. service tomorrow in First Church of Religious Science, 2001 6^th Ave. His subject is “What Religious Science Teaches.”
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On page 8 of the June 18, 1970 edition of the Houston Daily Cougar was this advertisement:
HOME OF UNIVERSAL LIFE
“Teaching Aquarian Meditation For The New Age
Meets Every Sunday, 11:00 A.M. At The World Trade Center Auditorium
Houston, Texas
DR. J. ROBERT SPIEGEL (BRAHMADANDA) DIRECTOR - FOUNDER
Aquarian Meditation Initiation for the first time offered through correspondence. For those sincere students wishing to bypass evolution and enter the 5th Kingdom. Initiation includes meditation technique, Mantra, how to "live” 24 hours a day, and much more. Write for application today:
P.O. Box 53328 Houston, Texas 052
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From the Galveston Daily News, May 02, 1971, Pg. 31:
AQUARIAN MEDITATION SOCIETY PRESENTS DR. J. ROBERT SPIEGEL AN AUTHOR, LECTURER, TEACHER OF YOGA & SELF DEVELOPMENT WILL SPEAK ON MAN, MIND & THE UNIVERSE WEDNESDAY, MAY 5th AT 7:30 P.M. IN THE RECREATION CENTER HARRIS COUNTY PARK, NASA RD. # 1 ALL WELCOME — DONATION $1.50
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The 1972 Spiritual Community Guide lists Robert twice, in the San Diego area. First, on page 117, using his alias “J. Robert Spiegel”:
THE TEMPLE OF METAPHYSICAL ABUNDANCE. J. Robert Spiegel, 1118 Torrey Pines Rd., 92037. Teaches yoga, nutrition, ESP, metaphysics, psychology, mind control
Second, on page 124, in which he, as one might have predicted, was masquerading as some sort of medical man or scholar:
"AQUARIAN MEDITATION SOCIETY, U. S. Grant Hotel, Attn: Dr. Robert Spiegel, 453-7588"
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Also in 1972, Volume 25 of San Diego Magazine published in November advertised gift certificates for the “Astrology Research Center.” “Give your loved one the gift of love. Only $50” said the advertisement. Where was this entity located? At 1118 Torrey Pines Road, the same address as Robert’s Temple of Metaphysical Abundance. The advertisement purported that person identified as “Lil Canaan” was the director. The telephone number was 459-6400.
In 2013, the San Diego Union Tribune published the obituary for Lillian Mulonas, who founded the La Jolla “Astrology Research Center.” At this point in time, unless Robert Adams’ only surviving daughter, Michelle/ Prentiss/ Avantae knows the answer and talks, we will not know what relationship, if any, existed between Robert’s Temple of Metaphysical Abundance and Lilian’s Astrology Research Center, both of which were located at 1118 Torrey Pines Road in 1972.
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From the July 12, 1973, San Diego Reader:
BRAHMADANDA FOUNDATION
“Teachings of the Cosmic Way” meets Sundays, 11:00 a.m., U.S. Grant Hotel, Crystal Room. Free admission, refreshments served. Call 453-7588 for more information.
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On page 51 of the June 29, 1974 edition of Phoenix’s Arizona Republic was the following advertisement:
Speaker from San Diego
Dr. J. Robert Spiegel from San Diego, a traveler and lecturer, will speak at 8 p.m., Friday in Universal Series Center, 4340 N. Seventh Ave., on the topic “Science of Being.”
He is the founder of the “Aquarian Meditation Society” in Jamaica and is founder and publisher of “Equinox,” a philosophical newspaper.
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The family (Adams or Spiegel, however one might want to refer to them) have resided in (that I know of) New York, Miami, Jamaica, Louisiana, La Jolla, Los Angeles, Houston, New Mexico, Hawaii, Las Vegas, Scottsdale, Sedona, and a number of cities in North Carolina.
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In at least the 1990’s, before he left for Sedona, Robert Adams used the address PO Box 7210, Jordan Avenue, D-30, Canoga Park, CA. He used that address on correspondence he wrote, and on at least one published document. Who else used that address? The data aggregators show that this address was also used by a Michelle K. Spiegel, and a person going by the name Leonie Maxwell. Michelle and Leonie also used other addresses associated with Robert, those being 1815 Willis Avenue Panorama City, and 21551 Burbank Boulevard, Woodland Hills.
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The California Birth Index shows that Michelle K. Spiegel was born on October 1, 1960, in Los Angeles County, to a mother with the maiden name Maxwell.
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In later life, Michelle used the addresses above that are associated with Robert and Leonie, as well as an address of 12004 Vanowen Street #14, North Hollywood. This is the same address at which Denniston Keith Maxwell, one of Leonie’s younger brothers, resided at, after his immigration to the United States. Denniston was one of Michelle’s uncles.
In a recent Facebook posting, Michelle/Avantae stated: “Never knew anything personal about said uncles, etc. Never asked, never cared.” Really? She shared an address with an uncle? Her uncle lived within a few minutes’ drive from her parents, and Michelle/Avantae never knew anything about him?
As an aside, Michelle/Avantae alleged (or admitted) that she “never cared” about anything personal regarding her uncles. If that is true, what does that tell us about Michelle/Avantae’s fundamental character? Antisocial? Psychopathic? Narcissistic in the extreme?
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On August 2, 1996, Michelle, going by the name Avantae E. Deven, married Tyson Ruben Alvarez in Las Vegas. The two had addresses in common in Arizona, Nevada, and Montana.
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Robert “Adams” died on or about March 2, 1997, in Sedona, Arizona.
Shortly after that, in the spring of 1997, “Nicole Adams” and “Avantae Deven” (both aliases; the correct legal names are Aileen Beverly Leonie Spiegel and Michelle K. Spiegel) purchased a home together in Sedona, on Navahopi Road. Shortly after the purchase, “Nicole” quit-claimed her portion to “Avantae.”
On July 17, 2001, Tyson, still married to “Avantae,” quit-claimed any interest in the Navahopi property to “Avantae,” and had the county recorder send the deed to “Avantae” in care of the Infinity Institute, at that time located at 9101 W. Sahara Ave. Suite 105 C29 (in other words, a private post box), in Las Vegas.
Avantae divorced Tyson in 2006. She had, by then, moved to North Carolina. She “served” Tyson via publication summons, claiming that she was unable to find him, despite his information being on multiple data aggregators.
You can go to various Facebook groups, and other sources, to pull up the documents that people have uncovered showing who is associated with the "Infinity Institute," and in what fashion, and also the addresses that they have used over the years.
In any event, this is the information regarding Robert that I think that people need to be aware of.
Why turn to a known liar and con man for spiritual guidance?
1A tallis is a prayer shawl.
2The ship’s manifest states that he was age 14, which conflicts by one year with what Samuel identified as his date of birth. These errors are not uncommon; his fare could have been purchased when he was age 14 and the records not updated.

As If It Were Kismet: Prologue
Matt tore through the brush, blind in the dark. He didn’t care where he was going. He only knew he needed to be elsewhere. Far from here.
Behind him a creature howled that shocked his mind. It’s form was cruel and dangerous, though female. Nothing like the young woman she had once been. Nothing but a girl, a small and slight female.
It’s guttural growls and howls only grew closer as Matt tried to pick between seeing where he was going and getting away. The few times he looked he caught sight of the creature behind him. Hopping through the air with a speed that told him he was being toyed with. As if he were a mouse being played with by a cat.
But the reflex in him to run kept him going. His adrenaline going as hard as it could. The tightness and burning in his core tensing and locking up as his legs felt like there were being burned from within while taking on more of a heaviness.
His lungs were starting to betray him as he tried to gulp big breaths of air but only rapid and shallow breaths were all that he could manage. His brain was starting to burn….and then he was falling.
Falling down the side of a hill he saw the creature dart in a spring towards him, imperceivably fast almost. Catching him in mid air it seemed.
Managing to wrap its body around him and cushion his impact against the ground as they rolled. His mind barely took in what was happening during the roll. Only starting to understand what was happening once they were still.
The creature's triple D-cup breasts were unmistakably pressed hard against his back as he laid facing up at the night sky.
For a few seconds the world stilled and the needle light pain hitting the center of his brain took over for the cooking heat his brain had felt. His whole body felt heavy and reluctant to move.
Even if he could have really moved, a dull ache came over his limbs making them feel stilled and trapped as if by immeasurable amounts of sand that had engulfed him.
Slowly the arms holding him started to move. Moving so the creature's hands could start exploring him. Causing Matt to unstoppably let out a pathetic moan that made him go cold inside as hands lifted up his shirt and started to touch his exposed stomach and then his chest.
He would have whimpered so pathetically had he not still been in the depths of terror.
As its hands felt and groped his pecs he tried to situp as if to get away. For his efforts, his reward was a hand around his throat and a collection snarls and growls against his ear. A beastly, guttural voice spat words at him while somehow holding a feminine tone.
“Don’t move….I don’t know if I can calm down…”
Her words were not helped by her moans in his ear and the subsequent kissing of his ear. The flesh of his ear going between her lips as she moaned and seemed to pant. Releasing it and licking the side of his face with a moist warmth. He could feel its spittle, viscous and coating his flesh where the tongue touched. He could smell something in his saliva. Something that subtly entranced him.
Matt went stock still with fear and the confusion of mixed arousal. He barely perceived her right hand traveling lower on his body. A surprised moan and shudder echoed in the night from Matt’s lips as she took ahold of him. Her hand above his pants but still….stimulating him.
A light squeezing and almost probing of her digits kept him aroused and confused within her grasp. Resigning himself to the strange fate, Matt looked up at the stars as his mind tried not to shatter under the strange maelstrom of events and sensation that had started mere minutes ago.
His mind was only more confused as a slight figure, feminine in build, how it seemed to thunk the ground audibly as she landed on her feet out nowhere. Her knees barely bending under the pressure of the landing. Yet dirt was kicked up anyways and some of it onto Matt. Feeling it pepper his shirt and pants as it fell.
The figure, lit only faintly by moonlight, roared some dark tone Matt could only perceive as a demon as her eyes went bright with a crimson light. A light in the darkness that should not have been. “Let him go you bitch.” Was its words following the roar. Spittle escaping its mouth with faint droplets hit Matt's face.
The creature holding him by his throat and crotch seemed to tighten the grasp of both hands as it roared back. “HE IS MINE!”
The figure paused with a moment's hesitation. He was also her quarry. She had felt his fear without him knowing. His confused arousal. His fear. His terror.
And now he laid at the center of a struggle between two monsters. Unsure of who he wanted to win.
As If It Was Kismet Ch. 1
Matthew Berkshire hadn’t seen his mom in two years. Not that he had seen her much over the last six years.
A messy divorce between messy people and mom’s chaotic want for a life in Alaska had been one of the most…upsetting times in life. Setting him up for so much of what had defined his life thus far but then that had really started two years before he ever turned.
His ear buds were basic and simple. A part of cheap five pack, common for his life as he was known to lose little things. Small things. They had a mix of metal and hard rock playing in them. Some classics, some alternative. Whatever made him feel something, anything. Even if it was hate. Anger. Rage. It was better than feeling numb. Not belonging.
The escalator down to his lone bag to go with his lone carry on showed his mom waiting for him. His had a type, that’s for damn sure. Not that it helped him in the genetics department as he was stuck at 5’9” to go along with his mother’s five foot even as his dad stood six foot. Forever leaving him to feel small, to pale, under his dad’s shadow. Did he ever stand a chance?
The guy next to her with the unkempt former seventies porn stache was “Dave.” He’d met him twice when his mother came and visited him in Florida. To his credit the guy didn’t look annoyed. Kind of concerned kind of which made Matthew want to break his frozen look but he was well practiced. Having removed any note of sadness from his face through much…tribulation.
His mother’s look on her face betrayed a hint of worry as the bruises on his face lightly showed up close. Saying his name was his like a distant echo that belonged to someone else.
Dave cut in and pulled out his right headphone. “What the hell bud, they knock you hard enough to hurt hearing? Your mom’s asking how you are doing.”
Matthew pulled out the other bud and grunted an empty “sorry.”
“You still have bruises after two week? What did they do to you?” His mom’s voice was full of worry. Something he hadn’t heard in….too long. Too long to make him feel anything. To ever make him believe there was any sincerity to her words. To not think her voice and mannerisms were an act. An act by someone who…wasn’t really there.
“It’s only fair. I took a nose. Fractured a couple orbital bones. Left one with having to get his jaw wired shut. And one will never walk right again for what I did to his knee cap.” Matthew said it all with a bored and disinterested tone. Perhaps well rehearsed.
“My man, handing out ass kickings, not bothering to take names.” Dave was quick to be the typical man’s man about it. Matthew wasn’t quite done yet. Lifting up his shirt to expose the right side near his kidney. Revealing a nasty scar from a six inch blade. “Luckily they gave me this first so they could rule it all in self-defense. The fuck didn’t get it in more than inch before I ruined his knee cap and then I took the nose of one of the fucks holding me.” Now he chose to smile keeping the well practiced dead look in his eyes.
No retorts. No questions. Just horrified looks on their faces. As he liked. As he preferred. They could hate him. They could be disgusted by him. But by God they would fear him.
“Well the doc did a good job sewing you up.” Dave commented uncomfortably. “Dissolving sutures. Ain’t they grand.” He smiled again and let it abruptly fall off his face and started walking to the carousel for the baggage claim.
Waiting and making small talk with Dave as his mother stood in silence. He was not the little boy she abandoned. The little boy she left with an angry man. While never hitting him. Left him in constant fear till he turned twelve and just didn’t care anymore. Something snapped. Broke. And he didn’t care if he died. Didn’t care if he stole. Didn’t even care if he killed. He just knew not to get caught. Something left over from his grandfather’s wisdom which came to make more and more sense with each passing year of life since that thing inside him broke.
Finally his bag came around and Dave went to try first to grab it but Dave practically leapt ahead of him. “Is that your grandfather’s rucksack bag?” his mother asked in a perplexed voice.
“Figured it’s been around since Viet Nam. So it’d serve me better than any of the worthless stuff they called luggage.” Dave commented after Matthew’s words. “Well hell yeah I still got mine from Desert Storm. You know the first one.” Dave laughed and Matthew eyed him oddly. Be it in the south or whether it was Alaska, country boys are country boys he guessed.
The car ride to the two people’s house, as Matthew thought of them. Was uneventful and full of vistas he imagined metropolitan types wetting themselves over. At most they meant isolation to him. Furtherness from the world as there were no mountains in Florida. And what mountains he had last seen in another state had been when he was eight. Another life, to Matthew it felt like. A life alien to him.
As If It Was Kismet Ch 2
Dave and his mom’s place was some two story type tucked into a tree line far up an elevated point. It was by no means the highest point in the mountain but it certainly felt up there.
Rocks were where the driveway should have been Matthew thought. Grabbing his backpack and rucksack from Dave’s jeep was no hard thing for him. Matthew was in formidable shape for someone his age, maybe even five years older. He had gotten a mix of fairly big shoulders and arms along with the chest to go for it when compared to most kids his age. A side effect of working out at least twice a day. First thing in the morning, some time in the evening, and the school’s gym when had had a good semester in school before he had to leave Florida.
Dave tried to come up and help him but Matthew walked past him towards the house. His mom was not sure what to make of his demeanor. Matthew was not the sweet kind boy he had once been. But she had been gone from his life essentially for a long time.
Ushering him into the house she cracked some joke he did not hear. He was too busy looking about and seeing a mix of old outdated decorating mixed with the strange and odd flair of his mother. Color contrasting against drab and dated. Like brightly painting over an old home that was falling apart he thought.
“Your room is this way Mattie.” His mom brightly intoned.
Without expressing any interest he followed his mother. Still faced and nonplussed. Just going along with the current. Pushed and pulled with its roll like a piece of driftwood.
The room was simple. A single small bed. A set of rubber weights with a curl bar and barbells. “Your dad said you were into weight lifting so we got you a bunch of stuff. Dave says it looks like his department’s gym almost. The woman’s smile felt very alien to him.
“Thank you. I appreciate it. I’ve got most of my stuff from home.” Matthew starting unpacking his rucksack and pulled out cables of repetitive and mixed colors. A single plastic barbell handle. The ruck sack could be filled with water bottles for added weight during pushups he figured. Remembering a Michael Keaton movie he watched with his dad post-Batman movies where he played a convicted killer using plastic bags filled with water for weights.
Matthew caught movement outside his lone fairly large window that could let him step out onto the roof of the house given its layout.
He saw a number of people running together through what he guessed was the backyard of the property, not that it had any fences to mark boundaries
They wore clothes that looked similar yet different from each other at the same time.”Oh those are the Johnston’s. Really nice bunch of people. Been on the mountain for a long time Dave tells me.”
Matthew looked at the group of people running and noticed the lack of resemblance. “They are related?” Matthew quizzically asked. Seeing a black and possibly a hispanic person amongst the bland looking white people.
“Oh well they are all adopted but for one or two of them…besides the parents of course. The family has a long tradition of taking in orphans they say. Real nice of them to do that don’t you think.”
Matthew looked at his mother and the hosier accent made no sense to him as he arched his left eye brow. Her and his dad were both from Florida. Born and raised. Sure her parents were from New York city but…
Matthew shook his lightly without turning to look at his mother as his vision was grabbed by one of the runners in particular. A girl of moderate height. Soft brunette. A plain beauty he figured with a slim build….and lack of remarkable breasts and rear to make any note of but….girls in general were his type at his age.
She was pretty enough. He couldn’t deny that but he found himself transfixed by her visage.
But the way she turned and looked at him, especially at that distance felt very disconcerting to him. Even if she was smiling like…she was a taste of a bright shiny day. Somehow.
Matthew’s mom noticed the exchange and smiled to herself with closed lips. “Oh that’s Vicky. She’s your age I think. Very sweet girl, who does the charity functions. You know bake sales, blood drives, car washes and the like. I think you should get to know her. Might be good for you.”
A truck horn sounded a couple of beeps in rather succession. “Oh that must be Mack, he said he might come by later this evening but he seems early.”
Matthew’s mother turned and left his room. Leaving Matthew to exchange a few looks with the alluring Vicky as she turned her head away from him to talk to the others in her group and look back at him.
Still Matthew’s left eyebrow was arched. In a way that reminded him of Spock from Star Trek that he and his grandpa used to watch on some streaming service or another.
As he heard ambient chatter elsewhere outside the house he figured to check it out as the alluring sight of Vicky would be around he figured. It was dull to stare at artwork. He was a boy who preferred jet skis and the like. Something he could ride and enjoy immensely. Even if at times it got him stabbed.
As If It Was Kismet Ch 3
Matthew sauntered out of the house and down the rockway that stood in for a driveway.
A few new people had come over from what he could first surmise of the situation. As he got closer it was obvious they were indigenous people. A couple of grown men…and a girl?
She was mousey. Maybe five foot. Hiding behind glasses and a big camo jacket that was far too big for her. It looked made for a grown man and the backwards trucker hat on her head kept her long black a beautiful mess of sorts.
She was cute in a way. A little androgynous but she had a cute energy to her. She reminded him of the more tomboyish Puerto Rican girls he had gotten into back in Florida. Given the deer corpses in the back of the truck….probably more dangerous to play with given the men in her family.
Small chatter passed between the adults when the girl noticed but turned away, trying to hide the tiny hint of a smile.
“Oh Mattie, this is Mack. He works with Dave at the sheriff’s department and John, he’s with fish and wildlife.” Matthew nodded at his mom’s words with some blankness as he looked at the deer the in the back of the pickup truck.
“Gale tells us you hunted with your dad some in Florida and Georgia.” Mack offered with a light hearted laugh camouflaged by his big simple and cheery but husky way he spoke.
Looking in the back of the truck he spoke. “We used lever action thirty-thirties and Mosin Nagants in seven-six-two-fifty-four-rimmed.” Mack and John whistled in an exaggerated fashion. Leaving Matthew to wonder if they were mocking him.
Mack spoke. “Well we just used thirty-odd-six in a custom gussied Garand.” That caught Matthew’s attention. “You have a Garand…” Matthew finally demonstrated interest in anything. “My dad has an SVT-40 and a Hakim 8mm but he always wanted a Garand but was too cheap to buy one.”
Gale, his mother, chimed in loudly. “Oh his Dad loved his guns but was such an odd duck about how he bought or why he bought them. Never made sense to me how he wasn’t a collector but he didn’t get the latest and greatest.” Gale laughed uncomfortably. At least it seemed that way to Matthew.
Matthew pointed to the girl with an underhanded pointing hand. “And who is this? A cute little mute mouse or does she have a name?” Dave and the other men laughed.
Mack again spoke. “Well you people call her Rebecca, she’s my adopted daughter.” Matthew was taken aback by what he heard. “You people?”
Rebecca kindly spoke with a soft but almost melodic voice as she struggled to maintain eye contact. “White people or rather not members of our tribe. It’s just easier to appease the colonizer kind of thing. Borrowed from when the Jesuit missionaries chased us up here.”
Mack stepped in. “It’s just easier to have white people names than have them try to say our tribal names. And we don’t want them shortening or Anglicising our names kind of thing.” Rebecca stepped back into the conversation cutting off her adopted father. “It’s an insult to our history basically.”
Matthew cocked his head sideways raising his eyebrows shortly before letting them drop. “Well as soon as I’m eighteen I’m out of here and back to Florida so I’m a sort of involuntary colonizer of sorts. So I won’t be taking any of your land from you. The Seminoles on the other hand are still shit out of luck.”
Rebecca’s smile caused Matthew to reflexively smile. Mack made the moment more awkward. “See Becca, I told you someone off the reservation would like you some. You just have to be creative.” Mack laughed in a chiding manner…Matthew presumed. He sensed that he was the butt of some kind of cultural joke. Like marrying a white guy was some sort of insult or mark of shame. That kind of thing.
Rebecca turning away from him was not something he had been expecting. Her then getting in the truck in a huff left the group in a silence for a moment.
Dave spoke to break the awkward silence. “Well just bring the truck to work on Monday and leave it for me to grab up.” Mack acknowledged Dave and they started to get off as Rebecca looked at Matthew for another instance. Matthew couldn’t look away for some reason as the two seemed to lock eyes for an instance.
Till Vicky and family seemed to come jogging down the road. While Matthew’s eyes diverted from Rebecca’s. Hers did not till she realized he was looking elsewhere. And her vision found Vicky and what had been a hint of smile on her face turned glum and disappointed.
Matthew did not look away from the vision of Vicky but instead of a starry eyed fool looking longingly. It was a baffled look. Well baffled for him, with his eyes drawn narrow and night with a focus.
There was something about her…he couldn’t quite put a name too. The way she appeared to him. One second brunette. The next second blonde or blonde like. As if the color appeared in her air and disappeared in fractions of seconds. Much the same way her body almost seemed to…shift…very subtly…smoothly. A nicer bum. Larger breasts. And then back to a simple and plain form. Feminine no doubt. Attractive. But not so…remarkable.
As If It Was Kismet Ch 4
The next two days passed without incident. Nothing of any real substance or challenge to note.
Matthew got settled somewhat and started working out almost immediately. Exploring around the woods but Dave told him not to go far. Especially without a hunting rifle. Dave had left a simple semi-auto Winchester out for him. His bear gun as Dave referred to it with its four round magazine. But Matt figured till he got some practice with the rifle to leave it alone. He made a hiking stick like his grandpa taught him and treated it over a low fire. He would take some electrical tape for the end his hand would grip around. Plenty enough to ward off anything smaller than a bear he figured.
The ride to school was a pain in the neck but simple enough. Dave would let him use a clunker pickup truck he had laying around. It wasn’t pretty but it would get him to and from. Even if it was from the eighties and still backfired on occasion. But for now Dave and his mom took him on their way to the sheriff’s department.
It wasn’t much of a school. It wanted to be modern but its fifties original construction was very obvious. It serviced the pipeline families and familys’ of fisherman who worked the seasons in between their time at the pipeline.
Matt was to report to the principal for some reason Dave and his mom wouldn’t share. Which annoyed him but he figured it was to read him the law of land. Small towns with their big views of the outside world and like.
Dressed in jeans, a grey sweatshirt under a light jacket with steel toed boots set him more apart then he expected. His buzzed head didn’t help matters. Already he was feeling like a stranger in a strange land but he was quite strange after all. And he liked it that way. Normal people were so pathetically disappointing to him.
A secretary or assistant or some such led him to the principal’s office. Where it reeked of real wood that was old and fabric and upholstery that needed to be updated for the last twenty years, Matt figured.
“This is Matthew Berkshire, Principal Andrews.” The man was turned with his back to the door and he was quick to wave her off as he turned her around.
He was an older man. Fat and large. Tall with a body built like he had once been fit and a demeanour of annoyed and irate already as he fixed Matt with a scowl and look of disgust. Another worthless government whore. Matt thought to himself. His father and his grandfather had bestowed unto him a natural disrespect for government workers and the figures that wore unjustified authority as a shield but pretended the weight of the state was not at their back ready to crush all who resisted. Little figures of valor pretending to be mighty and alone but acting with the tyranny of the state and all the backing.
“Mr. Berkshire, please sit down.” His tone wasn’t unusually hostile, just gruff. As if he had better things to do.
Matt complied and took a seat in the chair while maintaining a friendly facade. Not everyone was an enemy. And not everyone needed to be an enemy. Even if anybody could be any enemy. There was no reason to make enemies you didn’t have to. Another of his grandfather’s bastardised wisdoms.
“Well I looked over you file and you have quite the history Mr. Berkshire.” Matt resisted qiuping back a joke. Instead he waited for Principal Andrews to continue as he remained nonplussed and looking as if he felt no need to respond. A simple head tilt with dead eyes looking back at the principle as if he was not even there would suffice.
Matt’s reaction or lack of a reaction rather made Principal Andrews only narrow his eyes with examination. He was not used to a kid not responding to him. Especially with his gruff and hard act going on.
“Well by all accounts you moved here after some problems at your last school. A fight broke out and you did some real harm to your fellow students it appears.” Of course, he would take the side of the perpetrators. School administrators always did. Especially when they weren’t white. Just a fact of the times. Cowardice and pathetic mediocrity was the way they leaned, like good government workers sucking the dick of Big Daddy government. Worthless whores.
Matt chose to reply. “Oh you mean the criminals that stabbed me. Got arrested at the hospital and then pled to felonies. Yeah Florida, with the American counties are good like that.” Principal Andrews went real still. No shame. No fear. No penitence. He didn’t like that.
“Well be it as it may Mr. Berkshire we don’t tolerate that kind of behaviour here…” Matt cut him off responding with a deadpan tone. “You mean self-defense meant to save one’s own life while the cowardly and pathetic school workers look on with zero interest but to keep their money rolling in and will allow known gang members with records of violent acts and crimes that should have them expelled many times over, where in certain Democrat counties such cowardice and idiocy empowered a couple school shooters?”
Principal Andrews looked at the Matt with a note of disgust. “Look here Mr. Berkshire, your beliefs matter not one bit here. This isn’t Florida. We don’t like our way of life being disrupted by outside agitators who have problems with authority.”
Matt did his best not to roll his eyes and let the older fat man drone own as he dead-stared him. Lifeless and without emotion.
The man came to a finish and Matt spoke up without having listened to him or paid him any attention. “Great now that’s taken care of. Can I please get to class and finish my sentence of two years at your wonderful school?”
Principal Andrews huffed and snorted before calling in Vicky. Vicky stood in the corner after entering with a quiet and seamless presence. Matt felt disturbed and tried not betray his feelings as the young Vicky was perceived and not perceived to be moving.
Principal Andrews made the introductions and Matt nodded back. She was to be his chaperone for the day. They had the same classes and she was to show him the ropes so to speak. The ins and outs of the school. The locations of their classes.
He recognized her. It was hard not to. The way her appearance seemed to shift fluidly almost. The petite and skinny brunette ever so lightly had a big bust and blonde hair with curves added when she seemed to shift before his eyes. Like watching a film but each frame had a different person.
Matt didn’t say anything about it. Even if he did he would only be acknowledging his crazed state, if he had one. If.
Unlike an obedient puppy dog he got up in a slow and awkward fashion and followed behind her as his oddly disproportionate frame allowed. Causing her a note of concern for some reason. As if she was seeing something she shouldn’t have been….Or he was just weird. And Matt could admit to himself he was just weird. Part of his charm, he would jest about it at times. Not that he had many people to jest to now.
As If It Were Kismet Ch. 5
Following Vicky into the hall off to their first class was simple. She exchanged small talk and he slightly smiled as if to obviously suggest he was just being polite.
Inside his head, Matt was trying to figure out if he was having a psychotic break. The way Vicky looked kept changing and he looked at the other people around him and they stayed the same.
He was searching his mind as they were walking. And thus he wasn’t paying attention to where he was looking and so fell to his face forward over his feet seemingly out of nowhere.
A series of laughs erupted as it sunk in that he was obviously tripped. Like in prison this was a challenge to his superiority. If he let this pass he would be mocked and sneered at by this same group of boys. He wouldn’t walk to them like he was going to do nothing like a little bitch.
In a rage he turned and punched the stomach of the first face he saw. Some typical blonde haired wannabe jock. He knew from experience not to aim for the ribs. Instead he needed to aim for where he thought the belly button was.
Yells and screams blindly echoed around him as his after the punch he followed up his elbow of the opposite arm slamming into the face of the jock. Harder than a fist, the elbow struck the jock’s jaw and seemingly dropped him against a locker. Just in time to catch an errant and soft punch to the nose that sure enough hurt but did little to slow him down as his dad had taught him to fight through the pain. Blood and scars happened. They were a natural consequence of life to a man.
Taking the punch and falling further into his red state Matt headbutted the punch thrower before another guy arm bared his throat from behind. Which he managed to get his grip on the arm over a letterman jacked and jerk the unprepared boy to the side with him still latched on.
A few feet away from the lockers Matt knew his only chance was to jump and push off the lockers and knock the boy to the ground and so he did. He heard a thunk of the boy’s skull bouncing off the ground and he turned to pull out of the grapple.
The beatings he had taken from his father, the grapples, being choked unconscious. Had prepared him for fighting little bitches who didn’t know what a fight was. It wasn’t gay porn with rabbit punch fists flying.
Blood was running down his face and the pain started to hit him as the threats had been eliminated. Only then did he remember to breathe. Taking breathes as Vicky came up to him with tissues and took a hold of his nose.
“Owww owww owww what the fuck my nose could be broken.” He said to Vicky as she pulled his head up and back.
“It’s ok Carl. It’s done.” Matt tried to look to see who Vicky was talking to. It was a boy taller than his 5’9” by more than a small margin. The boy eyed him bored and annoyed before speaking. “What happened here?” An unoriginal line but one Matt couldn’t be a smart aleck about. “Well you see there was an outbreak of tripping and we all tripped over my dick. It happens.” Matt was about to laugh when Vicky seemed to pull up while still gripping his nose causing Matt no small amount of pain which he audibly evidenced.
Vicky spoke in a tone he wasn’t expecting. As if she was accustomed to issuing orders. “Keep Iris away from the hall till we sanitize the site. We have blood from at least three people contaminating the site. And have Jake bring me a spare jacket and shirt for this moron.”
Carl seemed to acknowledge her orders and seemed to blink away. Maybe the punch hit harder than he expected. He had no time to wonder as Vick took her hand away from his and pushed him against the lockers. With ease he had not been expecting from her form and stature.
Before he could respond Vicky licked his blood covered chin and then his lips and spoke to him. “Focus on me you little blood bag.” Her tone had an annoyed yet feminine sneer.
“Look into my eyes. Look at me. You belong to me. You are just another food source in a collection of food sources.” Her eyes were a beautiful hazel Matt thought. Almost green. Pretty like jewels in some old treasure collections. The eyes he could get lost in before kissing her. Finally Vicky was just a slight and petite brunette and he thought she was beautiful.
She would make a hell of a girlfriend. Some cute thing he could see laying on the beach in Florida on their sides laughing and smiling before trading light kisses while hands wandered innocently. Before his mind could drift further he felt her lips on his. It took him a second to mentally grasp the kiss but his arms were around her back as her hands were at his sides. His eyes reflexively closed as he saw hers close.
It was ineffable to Matt. Beyond words, what was happening. The kiss, the moments beforehand. The way his brain tickled with electricity and gentle warmth. He had never had a kiss like this and he had traded more than a few kisses with at least a few girls.
The kiss was like a warm bath with his consciousness slipping beneath the surface. Their lips only parted to try new angles and approaches as Matt struggled to take in breath. It was a moment he could have stayed trapped in for….he didn’t know. But a curt throat clearing by another girl pulled them out of the moment.
The girl was taller than Vicky. Blonde. With slight curves. Vicky addressed her bewildered and gobsmacked, and perhaps a bit embarrassed. “Tina?”

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satisfy, sauce, save, saving, say, scale, scandal, scare, scatter, scenario, scene, schedule, scheme, scholar, scholarship, school, science, scientific, scientist, scope, score, scream, screen, script, sea, search, season, seat, second, secondary, secret, secretary, section, sector, secure, security, see, seed, seek, seem, segment, seize, select, selection, self, sell, Senate, senator, send, senior, sense, sensitive, sentence, separate, sequence, series, serious, seriously, servant, serve, service, session, set, setting, settle, settlement, seven, several, severe, sex, sexual, shade, shadow, shake, shall, shallow, shape, share, sharp, she, sheet, shelf, shell, shelter, shift, shine, ship, shirt, shock, shoe, shoot, shooting, shop, shopping, short, shortly, shot, should, shoulder, shout, show, shower, shrug, shut, shy, sibling, sick, side, sigh, sight, sign, signal, significant, significantly, silence, silent, silver, similar, similarly, simple, simply, sin, since, sing, singer, single, sink, sir, sister, sit, site, situation, six, size, ski, skill, skin, skirt, sky, slave, sleep, slice, slide, slight, slightly, slip, slow, slowly, small, smart, smell, smile, smoke, smooth, snap, snow, so, so-called, soccer, social, society, soft, software, soil, solar, soldier, sole, solid, solution, solve, some, somebody, somehow, someone, something, sometimes, somewhat, somewhere, son, song, soon, sophisticated, sorry, sort, soul, sound, soup, source, south, southern, Soviet, space, Spanish, speak, speaker, special, specialist, species, specific, specifically, specify, speech, speed, spend, spending, spin, spirit, spiritual, split, spoil, sponsor, sport, spot, spray, spread, spring, square, squeeze, stability, stable, staff, stage, stain, stair, stake, stand, standard, standing, star, stare, start, state, statement, station, statistical, status, stay, steady, steal, steel, steep, stem, step, stick, still, stimulate, stimulus, stir, stock, stomach, stone, stop, storage, store, 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temporary, ten, tend, tendency, tennis, tension, tent, term, terms, terrible, territory, terror, terrorist, test, testimony, testing, text, than, thank, thanks, that, the, theater, their, them, theme, themselves, then, theory, therapy, there, therefore, these, they, thick, thin, thing, think, thinking, third, thirty, this, those, though, thought, thousand, threat, threaten, three, throat, through, throughout, throw, thus, ticket, tie, tight, time, tiny, tip, tire, tissue, title, to, tobacco, today, toe, together, toilet, token, tolerate, tomato, tomorrow, tone, tongue, tonight, too, tool, tooth, top, topic, toss, total, totally, touch, tough, tour, tourist, tournament, toward, towards, tower, town, toy, trace, track, trade, tradition, traditional, traffic, tragedy, trail, train, training, transfer, transform, transformation, transition, translate, translation, transmission, transmit, transport, transportation, travel, treat, treatment, treaty, tree, tremendous, trend, trial, tribe, trick, trip, troop, trouble, truck, true, truly, trust, truth, try, tube, tunnel, turn, TV, twelve, twenty, twice, twin, two, type, typical, typically, ugly, ultimate, ultimately, unable, uncle, undergo, understand, understanding, unfortunately, uniform, union, unique, unit, United, universal, universe, university, unknown, unless, unlike, until, unusual, up, upon, upper, urban, urge, us, use, used, useful, user, usual, usually, utility, utilize, vacation, valley, valuable, value, variable, variation, variety, various, vary, vast, vegetable, vehicle, venture, version, versus, very, vessel, veteran, via, victim, victory, video, view, viewer, village, violate, violation, violence, violent, virtually, virtue, virus, visibility, visible, vision, visit, visitor, visual, vital, voice, volume, voluntary, volunteer, vote, voter, voting, wage, wait, wake, walk, wall, wander, want, war, warm, warn, warning, wash, waste, watch, water, wave, way, we, weak, weakness, wealth, wealthy, weapon, wear, weather, web, website, wedding, week, weekend, weekly, weigh, weight, welcome, welfare, well, west, western, wet, what, whatever, wheel, when, whenever, where, whereas, whether, which, while, whisper, white, who, whole, whom, whose, why, wide, widely, widespread, wife, wild, wildlife, will, willing, win, wind, window, wine, wing, winner, winter, wipe, wire, wisdom, wise, wish, with, withdraw, within, without, witness, woman, wonder, wonderful, wood, wooden, word, work, worker, working, workout, workplace, works, workshop, world, worried, worry, worth, would, wound, wrap, write, writer, writing, wrong, yard, yeah, year, yell, yellow, yes, yesterday, yet, yield, you, young, your, yours, yourself, youth, zone.

Been using GeforceNOW for a while now, it's an absolute game changer on the Steam Deck and I've been using it to play Destiny 2 a lot. Most of the time it's fine. But every now and then, when I die, the 'Y' button is auto pressing sending me to Orbit. Really bizarre behaviour but it seems as though something is causing the 'Y' button action to be auto firing on occasion. I can't reliably recreate this issue consistently and I've not yet tried using GeforceNOW on other devices to ascertain whether this is something specific to the SteamDeck control implementation. Has anyone else seen this?

Recently, I gave some advice about playing the Lannisters, and someone asked for further advice because they struggle to play Lannisters. It’s hard to do something like that in a concise package, but luckily, I like to write. I do it recreationally, and will write about subjects I'm interested in, delete the works afterward because the writing helps me put my thoughts on paper. I happen to have some such essays analyzing the Lannister army!
Mileage varies, and how you feel about some units or strategies in this game is going to depend a lot on how you feel towards reckless gambling. This is most true of the Lannisters, who revolve so much around unreliable mechanics that I earnestly think at this point that it’s part of their doctrine. It seems to me, that the idea behind the Lannisters, is that they’re broken. They’re full of abilities that don’t work, or that only work when you get lucky, or that only work if your opponent does something stupid. It’s up to you, as the person building the list, to figure out how to take those mechanics and make them function in spite of themselves. The way I see it, you can play the Lannisters as Cersei, by throwing dice at ridiculous odds that only rarely turn up in your favor, or you can play as Tywin, by making safe, calculated choices that will achieve the specific results you want.

• The Cards

Potential Fixes: Always run Tyrion, Giant of Lannister
The first problem we run into with all Lannisters is that their main card deck is bad. People will jump in and tell you that some other deck is worse. I’m not saying the Lannisters are necessarily the worst deck, but I am telling you that you could play five unique Lannister cards in a single round, and not see any results. They can all fail via random dice rolls. In my opinion, in a tactics game where a single turn makes a huge difference, in a card game where a single card changes the flow of the game, that is pretty bad. That’s not a situation you want to find yourself in if you like winning games, or even if you just like having fun.
So five cards. That’s half of your deck. That means that at the start of the game, the odds are pretty good you’re going to draw one or two cards that might not provide any benefit at all. The only thing you can do about this is get rid of them. Don’t wait for the perfect timing to play Hear Me Roar. If you keep it in your hand until you opponent is down by two ranks and you can sink in a unit with Vicious so as to maximize your odds, that card might be blocking up your hand for three to six rounds, and then your opponent might still roll boxcars. Play it, discard it, just get rid of it. You do not want those cards wasting space in your hand.
Four cards always need to go right away: A Lannister Pays His Debts, Hear Me Roar, Bribery, and Subjugation of Power. These cards all have the chance of either doing nothing, or are so weak they may as well be nothing. If they stay in your hand, they’re inflicting an opportunity cost – that is, there’s another card waiting behind Hear Me Roar to be drawn. If you keep these cards in your hand, you are preventing yourself from getting the better card, so always get rid of these cards, either by playing them, or by discarding at the end of the round. You may find some nice spots to play them – and that’s great! Bribery, in particular, can be noted as a lifesaver if Wealth has already been covered and you need to slow down a hard-hitter. However, that’s part of the trap: these cards can be good in the right circumstances, but it’s difficult to create the circumstances in which they are useful, so if those circumstances don’t exist now, you should get rid of the cards and look for better ones.
You may notice I said there were five cards that can do nothing. The fifth one is Counterplot, and its design is… elective, to seek a kindly neutral word. It’s a counter-card, which means it is useful, but they designed it so that it has a chance to fail on a dice roll of 1 or 2. You can mitigate that by holding Wealth and Crown, but that’s a tactical askance, and your opponent could play a powerful card on the first turn, so in reality you don’t have very much control over the success of this card. To be blunt, that makes Counterplot a very weak card.
People get up in arms if you say it, but it is. It’s a weak card. First, it’s reactionary, which means it only works if your opponent does something to trigger it – playing a card – which means your opponent has more control of it than you do. Second, the card can only be as valuable as the card it blocks, which means if you use it to block something lame, then Counterplot was also lame. That means you might feel compelled to hold the card until you see a very powerful card, such as Assault Orders, but if you do that, Counterplot creates an opportunity cost that isn’t caused by Assault Orders. Assault Orders is a very powerful card which so good, most players will use it in the round that they draw it, whereas you’d be holding Counterplot, blocking your own hand, for as many rounds as it takes for your opponent to draw Assault Orders. Finally, because it has a failure chance, you might wait for Assault Orders, fail your Counterplot roll, and then be hit by the enemy card anyway, which meant Counterplot weakened you by wasting space in your hand, and then didn’t do anything. That is a bad card.
So you need to play Counterplot earlier than later. You may want to use it on Assault Orders, but you have no control over that, and you can’t know when your opponent is going to draw it. You don’t want your hand to be blocked by Counterplot for multiple rounds, waiting for the ideal opportunity, and you definitely don’t want to do that and then roll a 1. Just play Counterplot on any card that would reasonably benefit your opponent. If they play Assault Orders right afterward, then c’est la vi; you cannot know what cards they’ll have, nor when they’ll play them, nor if Counterplot will even work. Just don’t hold on to Counterplot long enough that the card begins to hurt you.
The fix for this? Always play Tyrion, Giant of Lannister. It’s an attachment that lets you discard two cards and then search your deck for any specific card you’d like. In a deck like the Lannisters, where half your cards have a chance to do nothing at all (and those odds of achieving nothing are close to 50% on the Panic-related cards), you will frequently find yourself with two cards in your hand that might not do anything. Tyrion lets you discard those, and then draw a useful card that does do something. For the Lannisters, that is huge. Without Tyrion, you find yourself suffering through multiple rounds with dead hands, where none of the cards do anything, and your opponent will be pounding you with their own deck. With him, it’s not up to luck, you know your hand will contain at least one good card each round, for as long as Tyrion is still on the field.

• The Units

Having mentioned Tyrion, Giant of Lannister, it’s worth noting he only costs one point. During a casual conversation between players, one of them asked, “Why is Tyrion only one point? Counterstrategy is really good, and Battle Plan changes how they play their deck.” The response from the Lannister players was, in a nutshell, “My infantry sucks, bro.”
A lot of Lannister infantry sucks. They’re very frequently broken to start with because they’re given unreliable abilities, and to get them working, you have to attach something specific to them. Tyrion, Giant of Lannister would be amazing in a unit of Silenced Men, but he does nothing to fix the boondoggle that is the Honor Guard, so it’s hard to get Tyrion to the front lines and have the unit be functional at the same time. As a result, as good as Counterstrategy may be, you often find it stuck in something holding objectives at the back of the field.
That is the core essence of building Lannister army lists. Once you understand that your objective is to fix a broken and screwed up army, everything comes together better. You have to expect you won’t get what’s printed on the unit’s card, unless you take an attachment or specific commander who makes the unit work, and that’s what we’ll focus on in this section.
Gregor, the Mountain that Rides
Potential Fixes: NA
Starting with the cheapest units, Gregor is often taken because he’s only four points, and he can pack a surprising wallop if you’re lucky with the dice. With only three attacks, sometimes he flubs them all, sometimes he punches above average. He dies easily, he will die, but he will give your opponent plenty of reasons to want to kill him. Unfortunately, he’s not viable against Free Folk nor Night’s Watch, because siege units can instantly kill him on round one from across the board, so if you play competitively, make sure he’s not in both of your lists.
Poor Fellows
Potential Fixes: No
Poor fellows are just cheap bodies. They stand on an objective and try to stay out of the fight, and that’s it. They can’t really fight, their armor is paper thin, but because they can heal themselves, they will bounce back from minor harassment and won’t be chipped to death. The best way to run them is naked, or not at all.
Stone Crows
Potential Fixes: No
These guys are an alternative to Poor Fellows that might weather direct attacks a little better, but that will die more quickly to Panic. You can put Tyrion, Giant of Lannister in them for “free”, but it’s like a JC Penny discount where the sale never ends, because it’s not really a sale and the cost of Tyrion is obviously built into this unit. Putting anything besides Tyrion in them would be a pointless disaster.
Lannister Guardsmen
Potential Fixes: Mandon Moore
When new players look at Guardsmen, usually the first thing they note is “Lannister Supremacy” and think about how much damage that might do. Don’t focus on that – it’s an unreliably ability. Instead, look at their 4” movement and their six attacks with a 4+ to hit. This unit is excruciatingly passive. They can’t proactively threaten anything, they can’t easily get to a good position (which means it’d be hard to get them on a center objective), and finally, their ability only kicks off if the opponent was foolish enough to attack them with something that couldn’t wipe the Guardsmen out.
There’s not really anything practical you can do to fix this unit, because they’re really not reaching a five-point value in the first place, and they’re too slow. I’ve seen less experienced players recommend putting Assault Veterans in them to make the Panic Test from Lannister Supremacy more effective, but that doesn’t solve the issue of the Guardsmen being passive - of them being more under your opponent’s control than your own.
However, for kind of a fun fix, you can put Mandon Moore in them, and at that point they have Sundering, they’re hitting on a 3+, have 3+ armor, and archers won’t want to pick on them. It’s not competitive because Mandon compels you to run Joffrey, and Joffrey is a point too expensive, and the unit will still be slow, and they don’t have a great attack profile, but it is kind of fun to have some bargain bin Honor Guard on the field.
Lannister Halberdiers
Potential Fixes: None needed
This is one of the few Lannister units that comes pre-assembled with working abilities and everything. You don’t have to fix them! For that reason, if you’re not shy on points, this is one of the units many players will put Tyrion in.
I think one of the most notable facets of the Halberdiers is that they illustrate how much a good offense creates a good defense. Other players don’t ever seem to respect Guardsmen because the Guardsmen aren’t going to initiate anything on their own, but most players try to avoid running their light cavalry directly into a unit of Halberdiers. They’d take wounds on the way in, and if the Halberdiers haven’t activated, they’ll be wounded again when the Halberdiers attack. If you put Kevan or Bronn in these guys, then that’s even more opportunities to punish any would-be charge.
Basically, if you want a defensive unit, Halberdiers are your best friends. Lannisters have many “defensive” options to choose from, but this is one of the only choices that is actually good at defense rather than being simply passive.
Gold Cloaks
Potential Fixes: No
Kind of like Guardsmen but easier to kill, this is another passive unit with reactive abilities that mostly only benefit itself, if it benefits anything. The main draw for them is their “Laws of the Realm” Order, which reduces the number of ranks the enemy can use to attack. If this ability were long range, they’d be reasonable – of course, it’s not.
Gold Cloaks are pretty fragile, and their abilities are short range; “Oppressive Peacekeeping” incidentally requires controlling Crown, which makes it a tactical dud. Regardless, having a bunch of short range abilities necessitates that this unit be as close to the front lines as possible, where it absolutely cannot survive. A 4+ save, with only 7+ morale, makes these guys a pretty good target for a free victory point. Unfortunately, there’s not really anything too practical that can be done about this, because adding to the cost of this unit is generally only going to make it worse.
On the note of free victory points, I sometimes see players saying things like, “If the enemy attacks my useless units, then I win, because they have wasted their turn.”
This is pretty poor tactical thinking. You should assume that if your opponent kills your Gold Cloaks, it’ll be for a good reason. You can also assume they’ll be very easy to kill, because they are.
Mountain’s Men
Potential Fixes: Roose commander, Assault Veterans, Addam commander, Redcloak assistance, Daario commander, Bronn
Mountain’s Men might be one of the more famously non-working units the Lannisters can field, but unlike Guardsmen or Gold Cloaks, they’re at least not passive dead weight. The main problem with them is that their good abilities – Critical Blow and hitting on 3+ - are conditional.
They also have Vicious and Prey on Fear, and I can see how somebody thought this was a strong combination in theory. In practice, Vicious is the weakest keyword in the game, affecting the outcome of an attack only about 20% of the time. Even with Vicious, the odds of an opponent failing their Panic Test is roughly 50% or less, and I’ve had plenty of games with these guys where their attacks never gained them any wounds back. To make matters worse, once they lose one rank, they only have five attack dice. On turns when they have less ranks than the enemy and the enemy passes their Panic Test, Mountain’s Men are closer to being worth four points than they are to six. All those words on the card don’t count for much when they don’t do anything!
Luckily, there are some things you can do that make Mountain’s Men fun to play with, though not competitive. First, you can lean into the Panic stuff, which is only pragmatic here because Vicious and Prey on Fear are the abilities you know the unit will always have. An Assault Vet can help with this, but isn’t ideal because it increases the price of the Mountain’s Men when they’re already struggling to be worth their value. Instead, you can run Roose as a commander and place him in them. Unfortunately, the Panic approach still relies a lot on luck, and even with the extra -1 on all Panic Tests, you can’t guarantee you’ll get healing when you need it, as the -3 penalty will only impact about a third of any Panic Test.
If you run Red Cloaks alongside the Mountain’s Men, you can increase the odds of getting a benefit from Prey on Fear. Doing this with Roose attached means inflicting an extra wound of damage and increasing the odds of success, but you’ll need to lead very aggressively with the Mountain’s Men to make sure they’re the ones primarily engaged, rather than the Red Cloaks. Red Cloaks are also suboptimal in a lot of ways – but we’ll get to them in a second.
Your alternative here is to try to increase the general fighting effectiveness and survivability of the unit. Since Bronn increases the defense and morale of a unit while you hold Wealth, he can increase the Mountain’s Men to a 3+ save with 5+ morale. Though that is nice, it is also the case that most 7-point units already have 5+ morale by default, along with a better overall profile than the Mountain’s Men have, so once again, adding cost to the unit is only making it worse at the same rate it makes them better. For that reason, you can try adding Daario to the unit, and can use Daario’s “Sellsword Negotiations” card to keep them up to ranks. Additionally, Daario lets them attack with all seven attacks when you hold Wealth. Finally, you can try putting Addam Marbrand in the unit, which will make the Mountain’s Men a little tougher to kill off while also letting them use cards like Valiant Example to get them immediately back up to higher ranks.
None of these fixes are good. The problem with most of them is that they add cost to the unit, require a suboptimal commander, or suffer from adding more conditional complexity to the unit. However, some of these fixes are at least fun and patch some of the problems the unit has… a little.
Crossbowmen
Potential Fixes: Sparrow commander, Bronn
Lannister Crossbows are a perfectly fine ranged unit. They do exactly what you’d expect: shoot enemies. Their only real flaw is that they have 7+ morale, which seems quite fair given they have 4+ armor – which is a lot for a ranged unit. Many players like to run Bronn in these guys, which raises them to a 3+ save with 6+ morale when you claim Wealth. In fact, this combo and the ease of finding targets for your Crossbows make them the most optimal place to put Bronn.
Sparrow also provides a +1 to morale, which means that Crossbows are a fine place for him to sit if you prefer not to place him somewhere else. Sparrow’s “Incite” ability is basically nothing, so it’s not missing out on much to ignore it, and his cards can be applied to any unit on the field.
Red Cloaks
Potential Fixes: Mandon Moore, Gregor commander
Red Cloaks are like a multi-role unit that forgot it was supposed to have more than one role. They can inflict a Panic Test on anything in long range by taking an action, and this occurs every time they take an action, which is a neat mechanic, but it’s also the only thing they do by default. It sounds powerful, but it’s important to remember that attacking a unit will inflict a Panic Test, so if you shoot a unit with a crossbow, they’ll first take damage from the crossbow, and then take a Panic Test. When you factor in the revelation that Red Cloak Panic Tests only succeed a little over half the time, and that only when the Red Cloak unit is at full ranks, you realize they’re just not that good.
People occasionally think to put Preston Greenfield in these guys, but the answer to the problem isn’t to use more activations to spam more Panic Tests. What you need, is to give the unit a second role – that is, melee combat ability, and you can do that by putting Gregor or Mandon Moore in them. Once the unit can actually fight, you can throw it into combat, force a Panic Test before their attack, do a decent amount of damage, then force a Panic Test after the attack.
Although this does patch one major issue with Red Cloaks, they still have a few things going on preventing them from holding up. For one, their attack profile isn’t great: when they lose a rank, they fall to five attacks and their Panic ability weakens. They also only have a 4+ to hit by default, which makes Mandon the more appealing fix since he’ll get them to a 3+, though that does make them cost more. Additionally, the entire unit winds up being wrapped up in needing Crown to function at all, which forces you to play Joffrey ahead of anything they do, and that’s a massive liability.
The Crown liability is one problem you just can’t get around. Needing to play an NCU ahead of the unit to make it worth more than four points in value makes them clunky in a way that a lot of other units don’t have to deal with.
City Watch
Potential Fixes: No
What we’re looking at with the City Watch is a unit that has pretty much the same profile as the Lannister Halberdiers, but they can only get Sundering for one turn and they don’t have Set for Charge. If you want what the City Watch is doing at this price, then you’re better off taking Halberdiers and adding an attachment to them. These guys are easily no more than a five-point value, and even then they’d be outclassed by a lot of other five-point units. For example, a cheaper replacement for these guys is to take some Stormcrow Mercenaries and choose an attachment that grants Sundering.
House Clegane Brigands
Potential Fixes: None needed
Light cavalry. It works! They are a bit fragile, but given their solid maneuverability, this is best dealt with by player skill rather than by slapping any attachments on them. That’s not to say there’s anything wrong with throwing attachments on them, as all the options work perfectly well on these guys. There are only three, after all, but they’re all solid attachments. Their Panic-related ability is going to be as flaky as those things always are, so when you decide to charge a unit, do it based on the performance you expect from their basic attack, not on what you hope might happen if the enemy fails the Panic Test.
Pyromancers
Potential Fixes: Bronn, Sandor, Addam commander, Kevan commander
Here’s a unit I would have no idea how to balance! Every attack ignores armor, and they have both melee and short ranged options to do this, with seven attacks at a 3+ to hit and a profile of 7, 7, 4. Positively every unit in the game has something to fear here, and yet, with only a 6+ save, the Pyromancers have something to fear from every other unit on the field. Dangerous to any one unit, and in danger from four or more units at a time. That means the odds are usually against them, since the opponent has quite a lot of incentive to kill these guys off, and anything on the board generally has the wherewithal to do that.
Using Bronn increases the unit’s armor while giving them a valuable extra attack, with the extra attack being the most notable thing you can do since a “DPS race” is pretty much one of the only options this unit has. Kevan is also valuable for the same reason, and his Wealth of the Rock card can be thrown out for a little extra defense. If you can combine Bronn and Kevan’s card, then for at least two attacks, the Pyromancers can have 4+ defense! That is, of course, a highly situational play that you can’t depend on. Placing Kevan in them and using Crown for a free charge is liable to produce better mileage, as it leaves open a bit more room to safely maneuver.
Addam also does alright in the Pyromancers thanks to a smidge of added tankiness, some healing from his cards, and the potential to play Lash Out when the unit takes a really bad hit (which is all the more wounds the enemy can’t stop). Normally, Addam’s biggest problem is that the enemy will try to ignore whatever he’s in to avoid triggering his nonsense, but they can’t ignore Pyromancers.
Sandor has some potential in these guys, but doesn’t do enough. He might heal two or three wounds after the Pyromancers attack, but as soon as the opponent shoots everything they’ve got at the unit, it’ll be dead before Sandor can heal them again. Plus, Sandor doesn’t work when they make a ranged attack, and his “vulnerable” effect is a bit wasted when the unit he assaults doesn’t get armor saves anyway. Ramsay Snow breaks on the exact same failure point of too much damage, not enough healing, only he costs more, so I don’t rate Ramsay even as a casual fix. The Panic stuff is not reliable and isn’t worth considering.
Still, no matter what you do, this unit is going to draw a ton of attention, and short of straight up killing whatever’s turned on it, it’s not going to survive what comes to destroy it. “Horrific Visage” is a wet paper bag that’s going to miss about half the time or more, and a 50% shot at a Panic Test is a minor risk to getting the Pyromancers off the field.
While not common, it is worth noting that the Pyromancer attacks “do not permit armor saves”, but they are not instant wounds. That means abilities such as Hardened or Resilient can still block or reduce damage dealt by Pyromancers.
Warrior’s Sons
Potential Fixes: Sparrow commander, Daario commander, Addam commander, Champion of the Faith, Sandor, Gate Warden, Mandon Moore, Bronn, Gregor commander
This is one of the units that I like for certain competitive lists, and that I think make the Lannisters stand out in terms of their faction picks. The trick with them is, they are unreliable, like a lot of Lannister infantry, but it’s on the basis of whether or not they have enough of their “Faith” resource. There are commanders and attachments that help them get more Faith, and as long as you’re using the correct stuff, Warrior’s Sons are pretty good.
The obvious commander here is Sparrow, because every single one of his cards is a morale test, and when you pass them, you can add one more Faith Token to the Warrior’s Sons that took the test. This is great! Because it allows you to use the Warrior’s Sons defense while relying on attachments to give them more kick and survivability. Wrath of the Warrior lets them attack with Sundering and +1 to hit while racking up a Faith Token for later use. Mercy of the Mother brings them back and keeps them going. Protection of the Father buffs their defense by re-rolling armor. If you use Tyrion, you can mill-draw these cards each round and make sure your Warrior’s Sons do what you need them to do.
As long as you have those tokens, you can run Sandor or a Gate Warden to maintain their survivability, or you can run Bronn to occasionally increase their armor and take a free attack. So far so good, but what if you don’t want to run Sparrow? Well, things get a little trickier now.
Addam is a common pick because he makes the unit even harder to kill, but he doesn’t have any good morale-at-will cards. He does have Charismatic Leadership, but it’s reactionary and your opponent would have to make the mistake of targeting the Warrior’s Sons with something to trip it off. Frankly, Addam in the Warrior’s Sons means they’re liable to be ignored. If they don’t generate Faith Tokens, their attacks are a bit mediocre for their cost, so you have a problem there.
Daario has a surprising amount of potential. You can mill-draw Sellsword Bravado to produce Faith Tokens while making the enemy weaker at the same time. Afterward, you can use Faith to get some good attacks, or, if you can claim Wealth, Daario gives the unit’s attacks Sundering. Therefore, any time you hold Wealth, this a pretty strong fighting unit. But wait, there’s more! Sellsword Negotiations can restore the health of the Warrior’s Sons while also having you count as holding Wealth, which is a lovely combo for a front-line unit like this, and I think it makes Daario, Stormcrow Captain the leading candidate to be in a unit of Warrior’s Sons. It is also worth considering that when you play Reckless Strikes, Faith will let you re-roll your attacks, so there’s some potential there, but I don’t recommend it, because the card can also auto-wound the Warrior’s Sons, which undermines their function as a scary, offensive wall.
If you still want to use these guys but don’t want to use Sparrow or Daario as your commander, you can put Mandon Moore in them, and at the drawback of needing to field Joffrey as well, they become a powerful fighter and defender both. They’ll run into trouble on the occasions that they fail their Panic Tests and lose their Faith Tokens, so to mitigate that, it’s usually good to avoid spending Faith while they’re at full ranks. You can wait until they’re on the second or last rank, at which point the Faith tokens have higher value, and spend them then.
Champions of the Faith do generate more Faith Tokens while handing out Vulnerable Tokens, or, if you like gambling, Panicked Tokens. Naturally, there’s also always Gregor, who doesn’t highlight the best parts of the Warrior’s Sons that well, but it does do all the bonkers, this-and-the-kitchen-sink cheese that commanders like Gregor do.
This unit is still okay without any attachments, but mainly just for standing on an objective, which is not the best use of seven points. If you’re going to invest that much, it should be to violently and noisily take something from somebody. The other reason I personally prefer Daario for this is because it won’t cost anything extra to place him in the unit.
Casterly Rock Honor Guard
Potential Fixes: Gregor commander, Daario commander, Meryn Trant, Mandon Moore
It’s so depressing to see so much text on a card, knowing you won’t use any of it. Honor Guard trade Condition Tokens for one-off effects that aren’t better than the Condition Tokens. They expend weakness to get Sundering, which is something most units of their cost might already have. They expend Vulnerable to recover wounds, conditionally based on whether or not the enemy lost a rank. They expend Panicked to remove a unit’s abilities for the turn, and though this one is useful if you’d for some reason put a Panicked Token on the board (probably explicitly for this unit’s ability), it’s not an ability that’s universally valuable because not everything has a defensive ability, and it’s hard to guess if your opponent has a card you want to block.
When you use the ability, the token goes away, so you not only have an issue with needing to set up the effect, but it’s ephemeral. Using NCUs to get the tokens is a problem because that necessitates playing the NCU first, likely broadcasting your intent, and giving your opponent an opportunity to respond. There are attachments that generate tokens, but they only do it once per round, and it’s an opportunity cost to generate a token just to quickly take it away.
In my opinion, the only good attachment that makes this unit work is Gregor as a commander. The unit has decent armor, a decent attack profile, and good morale, so once you give them two automatic wounds, immunity to Weakness, Sundering, and all of Gregor’s cards, they are an imminent threat to everyone. That’s not to say they’re actually good. It’s just that Gregor’s so jacked up that he rescues it.
Meryn Trant can be used as a fix for the Honor Guard because he consistently generates Weakness and Panicked tokens before each attack. You could skip the token thing entirely and go for Mandon Moore, though I think Meryn is better since it gets the ability nullification along with attack re-rolls. However, neither of these choices are great because they increase the cost of the unit, force-include Joffrey, and introduce the Crown confound, where you have to play an NCU before you can play the Honor Guard.
Daario can also pick this unit up with Sellsword Bravado, which will generate Weakness and Panicked before an attack, and while you control Wealth, the unit will have Sundering. However, I think Daario works a bit better in the Warrior’s Sons, because the Warrior’s Sons tend to be tougher on defense and sustain for longer when you’re using Sellsword Negotiations to keep them alive. Warrior’s Sons also have more flexibility with how you expend their Faith tokens, and when they use Sellsword Bravado, they can benefit from their Faith abilities without consuming the Weakness and Panicked tokens. Honor Guard destroy your tokens from the card, Warrior’s Sons construct on the morale test and leave the tokens intact.
Knights of Casterly Rock
Potential Fixes: None Needed
Essentially the premiere unit of the Lannisters, the Knights of Casterly Rock are fast, well-armored, and brutal. There’s not much more to say about them! “Lannister Supremacy” makes them a bit risky to shoot at with archers, and when they attack a unit that isn’t as good at fighting, it can give some nasty shocks, but really it’s the basics that make the Knights as good as they are. Generally it’s not a great idea to run attachments on them because they’re already an eight point unit, and the best thing a player can do for them is provide support.
Notable Neutrals
Though I won’t go into detail on all the Neutral options, there are a few things that deserve to be pointed out.
Bolton Cutthroats are doing basically what the Mountain’s Men are but without the stupid caveats, so if you put Sandor in them to give them Fueled By Slaughter, they cost the same, get 3+ to hit default, have a better attack profile, and heal when they attack instead of when an enemy fails a Panic Test. Not a great unit, but it’s more stable and achieves a similar goal without needing you to also run Red Cloaks, Joffrey, and whatever else.
Stormcrow Mercenaries do well with a few different attachments from the Lannisters. Tyrion most notably, who should really be in these guys if you need a nice, affordable place to put him. The Stone Crows have no advantages over the Stormcrows. It’s not even close, the Stormcrows are better.
Lysense Sellswords can bounce back from a lot of damage if you put Sandor in them. Once they’ve got two pillage tokens on them, every attack is going to restore between three to six wounds. Not bad for six points!
Stormcrow Dervishes with Sandor can also be very resilient. Because they can attack on Wealth, they can make up to three attacks per round (or more if you have Assault Orders), and each attack will heal the unit. Since they can retreat, if you still have your activation, you can take an attack from the Tactics Board, retreat, then charge as your activation, which inflicts Vulnerable from Sandor. That’s just one option – this unit is also no slouch when led by Kevan, who can charge when claiming Crown, retreat, then charge again as his activation. In my opinion, this is the best seven point unit the Lannisters can get if your commander isn’t supporting Warrior’s Sons because the Dervishes have the same armor as most of your options, but unlike your units, these guys are reliable and have consistent abilities.
In Summary of Units
To make this really simple, if you want a competitive list, you should probably be using Halberds, Knights, and Crossbows. You can use Warrior’s Sons if you’re set up for it. Brigands are also alright as light cavalry, but you should be very careful with them since they’re so fragile. Beyond those options, Neutrals are probably a better bet, because Neutrals have abilities that are more stable and will require less set-up.
You might have also noticed a few comments like, “When you play this card, this unit really benefits from it.”
Stuff like that is why Tyrion, Giant of Lannister should be in almost every list you make. Some units are going to be bad no matter what commanders or attachments you put in them, but they do get better and are more fun to play if you combo them with specific cards. That doesn’t work if those cards are at the bottom of your deck and you’re stuck drawing dysfunctional duds like Hear Me Roar.

I just recently finished Ghosts of Saltmarsh from 1-13 on a straight (no multi-class) Reborn Aberrant Mind Sorcerer and thought some might find my experiences useful when deciding on whether to play one or not. I'll toss my final spell list below as that's one of the more important things in differentiating sorcerers and other full casters from one another, but feel free to skip as I talk about the notable options below.
Cantrips:

• Fire Bolt
• Minor Illusion
• Light
• Mage Hand
• Mind Sliver (Psionic)
• Prestidigitation
• Mending

Level 1 Spells:

• Absorb Elements
• Mage Armor
• Shield
• Disguise Self (Shadow Touched)
• Dissonant Whispers (Psionic)
• Hex (Psionic)

Level 2 Spells:

• Scorching Ray
• Web
• Invisibility (Shadow Touched)
• Tasha’s Mind Whip (Psionic)
• Suggestion (Psionic)

Level 3 Spells:

• Fireball
• Fear
• Enemies Abound (Psionic)
• Sending (Psionic)

Level 4 Spells:

• Dimension Door
• Polymorph
• Evard’s Black Tentacles (Psionic)
• Summon Aberration (Psionic)

Level 5 Spells:

• Wall of Stone
• Synaptic Static
• Modify Memory (Psionic)
• Telekinesis (Psionic)

Level 6 Spells:

• Disintegrate

Level 7 Spells:

• Teleport

Metamagics:

• Careful Spell
• Twinned Spell
• Heightened Spell

How it handled

The Good

• Dissonant Whispers is crazy good. It's not great damage on its own, but using it to trigger opportunity attacks and saving allies from damage was clutch in a lot of occasions. It'll even get you out of a grapple which worked out for me a couple of times. I used it almost as often as Shield.
• Tasha's Mind Whip is situational, but that situation comes up a fair amount. It's an easyish to land spell that does ok damage, but can cost certain enemies a turn assuming your allies don't just run up to that particular enemy instead of targeting something else for the round. No, I'm not bitter that that happened repeatedly. Still, it's a good control/blast when you're concentrating on something else and Twinning it was something that happened often.
• Fireball almost feels like it's not worth mentioning, similar to how I won't go into just normally good spells like Web. I'm tossing it out here though because it sometimes gets a bad reputation from optimizers beyond level 8 or so where the damage impact drops off. What I'll say is that while the impact of a single Fireball does drop off, you do get a whole lot more spells slots to drop them with and multiple Fireballs stack up the damage fast. And you can make your allies auto succeed on saving throws. My Shield Master Fighter and Rogue got a lot of Fireballs dropped on their heads that they didn't even have to roll to save on thanks to Careful Spell.
• Dimension Door. OMG Dimension Door. This has officially entered my "If you can take Dimension Door, you take Dimension Door." status. The Warlock and I got into a really bad spot, completely surrounded by big enemies. I was low on initiative, but we survived long enough for my turn to come around and then... everything was just fine. The final fight I popped 3 Dimension Doors that allowed the Druid and I to catch the escaping underwater big bad, get myself eaten by them, retrieve the exploded remains of our digested Warlock from inside of it, and Dimension door back out with an armful of his guts so that we could resurrect him. Our Sun Beaming Giant Octopus Druid caught him because he took the time to eat me and was able to finish him off.
• Evard's Black Tentacles came up a few times, and with that encounter that Dimension Door got the Warlock and I out of a bad situation, I was able to turn around and drop that on the horde of enemies coming back at us. The auto damage adds up over time, the restrained condition is amazing, and it got us through what would otherwise have been a really bad fight as one player didn't show and 2 PC's got chain stunned. It does damage, it locks down enemies, it makes them easier to hit, and makes them have a hard time hitting you. Especially in tighter quarters this was a game changer.
• Summon Aberration was the go-to I-just-need-to-deal-damage-over-multiple-encounters spell. Lasts an hour, can do range, and upcasts amazingly well. A must have.
• Telekinesis was one I almost got rid of when I was mapping out my spell list initially. I am crazy glad I didn't. The key thing is that it's not a Saving Throw for the enemies. It's an ability check. That means that legendary resistances don't mean squat. In one fight against two major bad things, I basically force choked one to the ceiling where it couldn't do anything while the rest of the team worked down the first, then they just ranged down the one that couldn't escape my mind grapple. In the final fight I held one of the big bads stationary inside of a Blade Barrier, and a big part of why the remaining bads ran was because once my turn came again I was going to mentally grapple them and do the same. This is a really big answer to the question of how to deal with Legendary Resistances.

The Mid

• Fear + Careful Spell is really good... when the opportunity comes up. When it did it changed combats and even straight up ended an encounter with 10 corrupt guards who all failed the saving throw. I was surprised to note that the opportunities weren't as many as you'd think. Having enemies run away isn't always the best thing for you, even if you can freely cast it over your allies. Many times Concentration was used on something else which was just better or more flexible for the situation. I was still glad to have it in my pocket though.
• Enemies Abound, Twin Cast, was awesome when it came up. It's most useful when there are 4-5 biggish enemies in a good enough position to where the two you target will most likely attack the others. Being able to turn 2 against the others is a tide turner that you need Twinned Spell to accomplish. The mid part is that that perfect situation doesn't come up as often as I'd thought it might. It was huge and memorable when it did, and I'd take it again, but I didn't get to use it as much as I'd have thought. I could see it coming up more actually in a campaign that was a little more Role Play heavy.
• Wall of Stone oddly never really came up as the go-to move to separate enemies. Instead I used it to bury a portal to hell under a 5' thick slab of stone and halted the retreat of a bad guy. So utility wise it was amazing as we didn't otherwise have answers to those problems. It was just that the normal use case scenarios didn't really come up or I had better options. Would still absolutely take it again, maybe even over a Force Wall as the utility of being able to make it permanent was clutch.
• Disintegrate I got late so I didn't have a ton of opportunities to use it, but as a Sorcerer I had two things over anyone else using this. In the fight where I force choked one of two big bads to the ceiling, I'd first gone in heavy and Twin Cast Disintegrate on both of them hitting for over 70 damage which was major in that fight. I also had the ability to impose disadvantage on a check against a single target. Lastly, just knowing I had the ability to obliterate a 10' cube (or 20' with Twin) of anything was a comfort even though the situation didn't come up. I originally just looked at it as a damage spell, but having that destructive utility was really nice.

The Disappointing

• Hex + Scorching Ray was supposed to be my big boss nova option. Takes a round to set up, but upcasting Scorching Ray for 3d6 extra damage per upcast seemed like a solid option. Unfortunately chunks of the campaign were underwater where fire wasn't great, and when bosses did show up my concentration was generally tied up on other options and they didn't have enough health that it was worth transitioning over to this combo. The couple of times I tried it I missed on some bolts so it wasn't as impactful as I'd hoped. I never really got to showcase this and it took 2 spells selections and would cost a round. I might try it again in a campaign where water didn't make it a bad option, but I could easily see myself looking for a different damage option too.
• I had such dreams around Modify Memory on this build. Free Subtle spell by casting with sorcery points instead of a spell slot, then Heightened Spell to impose disadvantage on the saving throw. Sadly, by the time I got it, the opportunity just never came up. I still think it has amazing potential behind it, but my DM for this campaign is more RP light.

Thoughts on the subclass

I like to spread myself out to experience different subclasses, but Aberrant Mind is one I'd absolutely try to play again, especially in a more RP heavy campaign (ideally in one without so much underwater and psychic resistance). It's just that good. It's got a lot of solid options that can be used creatively in different ways, and a good enough mix of Concentration and non-Concentration spells with some that last a good while that I'd run low but not be out of spell slots at the end of most adventuring days which is a good balance to hit.
With regard to the Metamagic/Sorcery points... I picked my metamagics carefully based around the spell selections I was planning on. Careful Spell, even though it didn't stop all damage, was still useful. It made dropping Fireballs and Synaptic Static on the party a solution worth entertaining and highly valuable in a lot of circumstances. For Fear it made the spell usable in a lot of extra situations. Twin Spell is every bit as good as it looks on the tin. Twinning Dissonant Whispers for 1 sorcery point is massive value.
Being able to trade in sorcery points for spells kept me able to keep the cost of casting Shield reasonable, and in the late game I was getting back high level spells when they were most important (triple Dimension Dooring in one fight). Being able to cast some spells for straight sorcery points as a subclass feature got used a lot and was a great savings on both sorcery points and spell slots. It also let me subtle cast psionic spells for free as well as adding another metamagic into them. It helped that I had a Bloodwell Vial to get 5 points back on a short rest.
I'll say that coming from classes that were more specialized in single target damage (or could at least do well with it), I did at times feel the lack of it here. Hex + Scorching Ray were supposed to fill that requirement but it just didn't play out like I'd hoped. I had moments of it, like twinning (and landing) Disintegrate, and the Summon Aberration spell eventually helped, but I wasn't ever really even in competition for star of the show for single target damage and that was new for me. All of the utility, control, and AoE blasting made up for it though.
My one real complaint is how stingy the game is with Metamagics. Going through most of the game with just 2, fun as they were, felt very meh. I had to choose the absolute top options for my spell list, which meant that more niche options were never in real consideration. Being able to Transmute my spells or hit them with Distant metamagic on occasion would have felt great, still used my resources, and not broken the game. Sorcerers should definitely get 2 more at level 6 or 7, then 2 instead of 1 at level 10 to really make them masters of their magic.
Finally, I'll say that while other classes excelled in combats that were chained back to back or more medium encounters, I really felt that this build shined the most when things were at their worst. I had answers to problems that no one else did and creative use of those solutions kept us from TPKs and even rescued (the dead body of) one of our teammates who otherwise would have lost their character at the apex of the campaign. I may not have always been the highest DPR contributor of a fight (although I did hit that mark on occasion), but I pulled asses out of bad situations regularly and changed how a lot of fights played out.

Hello all, as a hobby I film motorsports with a cheap, secondhand, Canon Legria HF M52. I will upgrade some time in the future, but I have noticed on some occasions when I have recorded extremely loud cars, it seems like my microphone (Canon DM-100) dampens the audio as it is too loud, with as soon as the car has passed the audi jarringly returning to normal. That is an awful description, so I have left a video with an example in this post.
My camera has a "Mic. Level", that can be set to auto or manual. The manual setting is by default on 90 out of 100. I'm not completely sure what his setting does, but will raising or lowering the mic level allow my camera to more cleanly record extremely loud sounds? Thanks
https://youtu.be/VKVvsQFvI54?si=d4O-L5hYQEbckExL timestamp is 1:00

Hello all, as a hobby I film motorsports with a cheap, secondhand, Canon Legria HF M52. I will upgrade some time in the future, but I have noticed on some occasions when I have recorded extremely loud cars, it seems like my microphone (Canon DM-100) dampens the audio as it is too loud, with as soon as the car has passed the audi jarringly returning to normal. That is an awful description, so I have left a video with an example in this post.
My camera has a "Mic. Level", that can be set to auto or manual. The manual setting is by default on 90 out of 100. I'm not completely sure what his setting does, but will raising or lowering the mic level allow my camera to more cleanly record extremely loud sounds? Thanks
https://youtu.be/VKVvsQFvI54?si=d4O-L5hYQEbckExL timestamp is 1:00

This is the second half of my list for Oklahoma's execution roster. As mentioned in the first part, I broke it in half to comply with reddit's character limitations. For the link to part 1, please click here.
The currently executed 124 offenders, cases 63-124:
63. Robert Knighton (~1960s-2003, lethal injection): In 1973, after being released from a 1968 armed robbery conviction, Knighton went on his first major crime spree. He stabbed and strangled several men and women during many robberies and home invasions. The only victim that was killed, 32 year old Coffier Day, was shot dead while Knighton was arguing with him in his home. Coffier's father, 53 year old Claude, was also injured in the shooting. Knighton's first crime spree ended when he kidnapped a married couple and their 6 year old daughter. They escaped when the wife and mother of the family attacked Knighton with a knife to protect her husband and daughter. The family then notified the police of their abduction. Knighton managed to secure a 30 year manslaughter conviction and a 10 year armed robbery conviction with a plea deal, and was released to a halfway house in 1989. There, he began dating a female addict and befriended a teenage boy. The trio embarked on a nationwide robbery spree together. In Missouri, they shot and killed 59 year old Frank Merrifield and his 40 year old stepson Roy Donahue while robbing their home, and stole guns and money from them. In Oklahoma, the trio fatally shot a couple, 64 year old Virginia and 62 year old Richard Denney, while carjacking them. Their rampage ended when a woman in Texas grow suspicious of them circling a neighborhood. Knighton had a long history of theft convictions dating back to his childhood, and joined the Aryan Brotherhood in prison. Behind bars, he frequently attacked black and Native American inmates out of racial hatred for them.
64. Kenneth Charm (1993-2003, lethal injection): Charm and his teenage cousin lured a family friend, 14 year old Brandy Hill, into their car. They raped Hill and tried strangling her with a towel. When that failed, the cousins bludgeoned her to death with a sledgehammer.
65. Lewis Gilbert II (1994-2003, lethal injection): Gilbert and his teenage accomplice committed at least 4 robbery murders in Missouri, Ohio, and Oklahoma, but he was executed for the killing of 37 year old Roxanne Ruddell. They ambushed and kidnapped Ruddell while she was fishing alone. She was robbed of $3 and her truck, tied to a tree, and shot to death. The pair also fatally shot Ruth Loader, a 79 year old Ohioan woman, while abducting her from her residence, and gunned down a Missouri couple, 86 year old William and 76 year old Flossie Brewer, in their home. Gilbert was also sentenced to death for the Brewer murders by the state of Missouri, but was incarcerated in Oklahoma State Penitentiary’s death row.
66. Robert Duckett (~1980s-2003, lethal injection): After breaking out of prison, Duckett was picked up hitchhiking by John Howard, a 53 year old store owner. Howard agreed to let Duckett stay with him until he could find a job. The pair soon had a failing out, and Duckett was evicted by his host. He retaliated by tying Howard up with wire and then beating him to death with a fireplace poker. Duckett made off with his car after he switched the license plates, and took several bank bags from his store. He had a long violent criminal history, which included several incidents of assault and robbery. One of the incidents involved the beating of an 83 year old man. Allegedly, Duckett was previously gang-raped by other inmates, and suffered from PTSD from the incident. His attorneys claimed that Howard’s sexual advances trigged those memories, and he was killed as a result of Duckett lashing out at them. However, the prosecution shot the argument down, citing that the murder happened after Duckett was evicted from the apartment.
67. Bryan Toles (1993-2003, lethal injection): Toles and his two accomplices forced themselves into the home of the Franceschi family, and shot and killed the family patriarch, 39 year old Juan, in a struggle. Juan's son, 15 year old Lonnie, was also murdered "execution style" out of fear that he could identify Toles and his accomplices. The only survivor of the attack was Norma, Juan's wife and Lonnie's mother, who escaped by hiding in her older daughter's bedroom.
68. Jackie Willingham (1994-2003, lethal injection): Willingham was a door to door salesman selling perfume in an office building. One women, 62 year old Jayne Van Wey, he tried to solicit rejected him despite his repeated offers. Angered by her "rude behavior", Willingham attacked Van Wey when they had a chance encounter near the building's restroom. He dragged Van Wey out of a stall after following her inside, slammed her head against the bathroom wall several times, and kicked her head. Reportedly, Van Wey choked to death on her own blood.
69. Harold McElmurry III (1999-2003, lethal injection): While under the influence of meth, McElmurry and his wife Vicki broke into a home that a WW2 veteran, 80 year old Robert Pendley, shared with his wife, 75 year old Rosa. Robert and Rosa were both quickly subdued and physically restrained by the couple. McElmurry clubbed Robert to death with a pipe in front of Rosa, who was forced to watch by Vicki. Vicki then held Rosa down as McElmurry stabbed her several times with scissors. After killing the Pendleys, the McElmurrys fled with $70 in cash, a pair of guns, and the victims' car. A few days after the murders, they were captured by border agents while trying to cross into Mexico.
70. Tyrone Darks (~1990s-2004, lethal injection): Darks rammed his ex wife, 26 year old Sherry Goodlow, off the road as she was driving with their 2 year old son. After Goodlow crashed, Darks pulled their son out of the wreckage, shot her to death, and then drove away with him. Just before she succumbed to her injuries, Goodlow managed to call and notify the police about her son’s abduction. The police confronted and arrested Darks at his home, and they found the boy unharmed in their search. Darks and Goodlow’s former marriage was marred with violence, and he was arrested on numerous occasions for assaulting her. On death row, Darks was involved in a scheme to defraud a foundation for 9/11 survivors.
71. Norman Cleary (~1980s-2004, lethal injection): While burglarizing an upper class home with an accomplice, Cleary shot and killed a housekeeper, 44 year old Wanda Neafus, and took her purse and a cane that her employers purchased from the Smithsonian Institution. Cleary had a long criminal history and was previously convicted of beating an 87 year old woman in her home.
72. David Brown (~1983-2004, lethal injection): For several years, Brown violently harassed his ex wife and her family. In one incident, Brown abducted his ex wife and 11 of her customers from a beauty saloon she owned, and held them hostage until he surrendered to police. He was able to leave custody on bond and went into hiding. A few years after the hostage crisis incident, Brown broke into his ex wife's family home and gunned down her father, 47 year old Eldon McGuire.
73. Hung Thanh Le (1992-2004, lethal injection): Le crept into the apartment of another Vietnamese refugee, 34 year old Hai Nguyen, and found him watching TV on the couch. He struck Nguyen from behind with a weightlifting bar, and continued stabbing him with a meat cleaver when he screamed his wife for help. Nguyen's wife phoned the police, and Le fled with the couple's safety deposit box that contained $36,000 and their wedding ring.
74. Robert Bryan (1993-2004, lethal injection): Bryan shot and killed his estranged aunt, 69 year old Mildred, dumped her body on his parents' property, and forged a $1,800 check to himself under her name.
75. Windel Workman (~1980s(?)-2004, lethal injection): Workman beat his girlfriend's daughter, 2 year old Amanda Holman, to death while babysitting her in their home. His ex wives reported that he had a history of child abuse and often violently spanked their children during their marriages.
76. Jimmie Slaughter (1991-2005, lethal injection): Fearing that she was going to tell his wife of their affair, Slaughter stabbed and shot his ex girlfriend, 29 year old Melody Wuertz, and their daughter, 1 year old Jessica. According to court documents, Slaughter mutilated both of their bodies, and he carved an "R" on Melody's stomach. He tried pinning the murders on a black man, but the investigators and the courts dismissed his allegations.
77. George Miller Jr. (1994-2005, lethal injection): During the robbery of a hotel, Miller attacked the auditor, 25 year old Kent Dodd, with a hedge shear and paint cans, and took $122 from the register. Dodd was severely beaten, had muriatic acid shoved down his throat, and was left to die. Just before he died of his injuries, Dodd gave a description of his attacker to the police that matched Miller. A massive amount of circumstantial evidence, such as wearing shoes that resembled the bloodstained footprints next to Dodd's body, a microscopic drop of blood found on his shoes that was tentatively linked to Dodd, his wife's testimony of his unaccounted absence from their home during the murder, and what appeared to be Dodd writing Miller's alias that he knew him by in his own blood, convicted him. Miller’s friends also reported that he was broke and begging them for money a day before the murder, and his wife mentioned him giving her the same amount of money that was stolen from the robbery a day after it happened.
78. Michael Pennington (1991-2005, lethal injection): Pennington shot and killed a clerk, 20 year old Bradley Grooms, while trying to rob a 7-eleven grocery store. He left empty handed when the register failed to open.
79. Kenneth Turrentine (1994-2005, lethal injection): Under the belief that they were stealing money from him for drugs, Turrentine shot and killed his sister, 48 year old Avon Stevenson, and his girlfriend, 39 year old Anita Richardson, during confrontations in their homes. He also gunned down Anita's two children, 22 year old Tina Pennington and 13 year old Martise.
80. Richard Thornburg Jr. (1996-2006, lethal injection): A month after he was shot by an unknown assailant, Thornburg and his accomplices sought revenge by abducting 5 men that he thought was responsible from a trailer. Three of the hostages, 51 year old James Poteet, 39 year old Tery Sheppard, and 24 year old Kieth Smith, were gunned down on the spot, and Thornberg forced the fourth to shoot the fifth with the threat of killing him if he didn’t comply. They then burned down the trailer with the wounded fifth victim still trapped inside, but he managed to escape with his life. Despite being forced to put all the blame on himself in exchange for being spared, the fourth hostage still went forward to the police.
81. John Boltz (1984-2006, lethal injection): To spite his estranged wife following an argument, Boltz attacked her son, 23 year old Doug Kirby, with a knife. Kirby was stabbed a total of 11 times, and he received several fatal wounds to his chest, stomach, and neck.
82. Eric Patton (1994-2006, lethal injection): Patton forced his way into the home of 56 year old Charlene Kauer after she refused his pleading for money. After dragging her around the house as he searched for valuables, Patton stabbed Kauer several times with many different blades objects at hand such as scissors, barbecue forks, and kitchen knifes. Although he confessed to the murder, Patton blamed it on alleged demonic possession and his cocaine addiction.
83. James Malicoat (1997-2006, lethal injection): Malicoat slammed Tessa Leadford, his 13 month old daughter, against a dresser. After she died from the beating, he tucked her into bed, and waited until his daughter's mother returned from work to take her to the hospital. The doctors found that Leadford had been dead for several hours at the time of her arrival, and discovered several injuries such as broken ribs, bite marks, abdominal bleeding, and facial bruising on her body. By his own account, he had abused Leadford on a daily basis. For her role in enabling her boyfriend's treatment of their daughter, Leadford's mother was convicted of first degree murder and given a life sentence.
84. Corey Hamilton (1992-2007, lethal injection): During the robbery of a restaurant, Hamilton shot and killed 4 employees, 26 year old Sandy Lara, 24 year old Stephen Williams, 19 year old Ted Kindley, and 17 year old Joseph Gooch, and made off with $2,000.
85. Jimmy Bland (~1975-2007, lethal injection): Bland shot his boss, 62 year old Doyle Rains, in the head over an argument regarding a borrowed car and dumped the body in a creek. He was previously convicted of killing a soldier, Raymond Prentice (age unknown), and abducting the man's wife and son at the age of 19. Bland served a 20 out of 60 year sentence, and murdered Rains a year after he was released.
86. Frank Welch (~1987-2008, lethal injection): In 1987, Welch attacked 28 year old Jo Cooper, who was 4 months pregnant with her second child, in her home. She was tied up with leather straps, raped and violated with plastic toys, and strangled to death. Cooper’s body was found laying near her infant son by her husband. Another woman, 32 year old Debra Stevens, was also bound, raped, and strangled to death in her home in a near identical fashion a few months later. Although both murders went unsolved for several years, Welch abducted and raped a woman in 1994, and he received a 45 year sentence for it. His DNA samples was collected and filed after his abduction conviction, and linked to both Cooper and Stevens’ murders in a 1997 test.
87. Terry Short (1995-2008, lethal injection): In an attempt to kill his ex girlfriend, Short blew up her apartment complex with a firebomb. She and her family managed to escape, but the blast killed Ken Yamamoto, a 22 year old Japanese exchange student. Yamamoto had no connections to the targeted ex girlfriend's family beyond him having the misfortune of residing in the same apartment.
88. Jessie Cummings Jr. (1991-2009, lethal injection): Cummings was a polygamist that had married and lived with two wives. Under his orders, Cummings’ wives shot and killed his estranged half sister, 46 year old Judy Mayo, and kidnapped her daughter, 11 year old Melissa. He bound his niece to his bed with handcuffs to be raped, and stabbed her to death.
89. Darwin Brown (1995-2009, lethal injection): While robbing a grocery store with three accomplices (including Billy Alverson and Michael Wilson), Brown tied up the clerk, 30 year old Richard Yost, with handcuffs, and then bludgeoned him death with a metal baseball bat. The killing was caught by security cameras, and the footage was used by the prosecution to secure the convictions of Brown and his accomplices.
90. Donald Gilson (1995-2009, lethal injection): Gilson routinely physically abused his live in girlfriend's 5 children (who were all between the ages of 8 and 12 years old). The youngest, 8 year old Shane Coffman, was beaten to death with a board for defecating on the living room carpet. He and his girlfriend then hid the body by stuffing it in a freezer. The body was kept inside it for 6 months until it was discovered by a sheriff's deputy investigating the family's abuse allegations. Gilson's girlfriend was spared the death penalty with a plea deal, and given a life sentence without the possibility of parole for her part in her son's abuse and murder.
91. Michael DeLozier (1995-2009, lethal injection): While camping with his friends, DeLozier ambushed another pair of campers, 60 year old Orville Bullard and 54 year old Paul Morgan, and shot them to death. They stole Morgan and Bullard's generator, pick up truck, and other camping gear. To cover up their tracks, DeLozier and his friends set their victims' campsite on fire, and severely burned the bodies.
92. Julius Young (1993-2010, lethal injection): For breaking off their relationship, Young beat his ex girlfriend, 20 year old Joyland Morgan and her 6 year old son Kewan, to death with a baseball bat in their apartment.
93. Donald Wackerly II (1996-2010, lethal injection): Wackerly and his wife ambushed and gunned down Pan Sayakhoummane, a 51 year old Laotian immigrant, while he was fishing in the Arkansas River. After he placed Sayakhoummane's body in the man’s own truck, he pushed into a river, and stole his fishing gear. A few months after the murder, Wackerly’s wife turned him in to the police.
94. John Duty (~1970s-2010, lethal injection): Duty was given a life sentence for abducting, raping, and non fatally shooting a female store clerk during a robbery. While incarcerated, he tricked a fellow inmate, 22 year old Curtis Wise Jr. into allowing himself to be tied up as a part of a hostage ruse, and then strangled him to death with shoelaces. At the time of his murder, Wise was serving a conviction for burglary and contributing to the delinquency of minors. Duty's execution caused some controversy for the use of pentobarbital, a drug more commonly utilized by veterinarians to euthanize pets.
95. Billy Alverson (1995-2011, lethal injection): Alverson assisted the above mentioned Darwin Brown and Micheal Wilson in the beating death of Richard Yost while robbing a convenience store.
96. Jeffrey Matthews (1994-2011, lethal injection): Matthews and his accomplice shot and killed his great uncle, 77 year old Otis Short, while robbing the man's home. In the robbery, they stole Short's truck, his .32 calibre pistol, and $500. The pair also slit the throat of Short's wife, but she survived her injuries.
97. Gary Welch (~1993-2011, lethal injection): During a fight over a drug shipment, Welch and his partner stabbed another dealer, 32 year old Robert Hardcastle, to death with broken glass bottles. He was previously convicted of battery with a deadly weapon, and was off on probation at the time of Hardcastle's murder.
98. Timothy Stemple (1996-2012, lethal injection): Stemple conspired with his girlfriend to murder his wife, 30 year old Trisha, for her life insurance policy. With the help of his girlfriend's 16 year old nephew or cousin [sources vary], Stemple beat Trisha with a baseball bat, and rammed her to death with his truck.
99. Michael Selsor (~1975-2012, lethal injection): Selsor and his accomplice went on a crime spree and robbed several convenience stores. During their robberies, the pair shot and killed two clerks, 55 year old Clayton Chandler and 20 year old Ina Morris, and injured two others in shooting and stabbing attacks.
100. Michael Hooper (~1992-2012, lethal injection): Hooper kidnapped his ex girlfriend, 23 year old Cynthia Jarman, and her children, 5 year old Timothy and 3 year old Tonya, from her boyfriend's residence. He shot all three of them dead, and buried the bodies in a rancher's field. According to court documents, Hooper was hyper-violent towards Cynthia in their year long relationship.
101. Garry Allen (1986-2012, lethal injection): Allen shot and killed his fiancee, 24 year old Lawanna Titsworth, during an argument at a day care she worked at. He fought with the responding officers trying to arrest him in an attempt to provoke a "suicide by cop" outcome. Despite the officers' best efforts to avoid harming him, Allen lost his eye from an accidental discharge. Due to claims of him having schizophrenia, Allen's execution was a source of controversy.
102. George Ochoa (~1993-2012, lethal injection): A Southside Locos gang member, Ochoa and another hoodlum shot and killed a couple, 38 year old Francisco Morales and 35 year old Maria Yanez, while burglarizing their home. The murders were witnessed by the couple's 14 year old and 10 year old children and stepchildren, who then phoned the police after the shooters' departure.
103. Steven Thacker (~1980s-2012, lethal injection): Thacker kidnapped 25 year old Laci Hill during a botched robbery of her home, and took her to a remote cabin to be raped. She was then strangled and stabbed to death. He fled to Missouri, fatally stabbed 24 year old Forrest Boyd while carjacking him, and used his car to hide out in Tennessee. After the stolen car broke down, Thacker called a tow truck to pick him up. When the driver, 52 year old Ray Patterson, found that he was using a stolen credit card, Thacker stabbed him to death as well. As a teenager, Thacker committed several acts of auto thefts and burglaries. He also engaged in inappropriate relationships with underaged girls, and was released from a Florida prison after serving time for a bad check conviction months before his murders.
104. James DeRosa (2000-2013, lethal injection): DeRosa and his accomplice tricked a couple, 73 year old Curtis and 70 year old Gloria Plummer, that he worked for on their ranch, into letting them inside their house. After they stabbed the Plummers and slit their throats, DeRosa and his accomplice stole $73 and drove away with their truck.
105. Brian Davis (2001-2013, lethal injection): Davis went searching for his girlfriend and their daughter when he found them missing from their home, and called his girlfriend's mother, 56 year old Josephine Sanford, about their whereabouts. Sanford dropped by the couple's residence after failing to find her daughter and granddaughter. At her arrival, she was raped, beaten, and stabbed to death by Davis. He then left the body in the house, drove off with Sanford’s van, and injured himself in a car accident. As Davis was high while driving, he was arrested for being under the influence. The detaining officers weren’t aware of the murder until Davis’ girlfriend returned to the home later that night, and called 911 after finding her mother’s corpse.
106. Anthony Banks (~1978-2013, lethal injection): In 1978, while robbing a grocery store, Banks shot and killed a clerk, 22 year old David Fremin. A year later, he abducted Sun Travis, a 24 year old South Korean immigrant, from a parking lot. He then sexually assaulted Travis in his car and shot her in the head. Although he was captured and convicted for Fremin's murder, Travis' killing went unsolved until a 1997 DNA test. Banks was originally sentenced to death for Fremin's murder, but it was lifted in favor of a life sentence. He was condemned for a second time after his conviction for Travis' murder.
107. Ronald Lott (~1980s-2013, lethal injection): A sexual predator of elderly women, Lott broke into the homes of 93 year old Zelma Cutler and 83 year old Anna Fowler after cutting off their power. They were tied up with cloth, anally penetrated, beaten, and suffocated to death with pillowcases. The case attracted controversy when another man was erroneously condemned for the murders, and he spent 11 years on death row until a 1997 DNA test linked the murders to Lott. At the time of the discovery, Lott was serving time for two rape convictions.
108. Johnny Black (~1984-2013, lethal injection): Black, two of his brothers, and two other men went looking for a man they feuded with for a fight. While they were crusing on the road, the group encountered a rancher, 54 year old Bill Pogue, and mistook him for their target due to them driving similar vehicles. They forced Poque off the road, pulled him out of his car, and stabbed him a total of 10 times. Pogue's son in law was also dragged out and attacked, but he managed to escape with his life. Black was previously convicted of manslaughter for shooting 49 year old Cecil Martin dead in an argument.
109. Michael Wilson (1995-2014, lethal injection): Wilson was the third participant in the above mentioned beating death of Richard Yost to be executed.
110. Kenneth Hogan (1988-2014, lethal injection): Hogan stabbed 21 year old Lisa Stanley to death while she was babysitting his children. According to autopsy reports, she was stabbed at least 25 times. Stanley had previously accused him of sexual misconduct, and prosecutors believed that she was killed during an argument over the allegations.
111. Clayton Lockett (~1992-2014, lethal injection): Lockett, his cousin, and another accomplice kidnapped 23 year old Bobby Bornt, 18 year old Summer Hair, and Bornt's 9 month son after burglarizing a home. After tying them up with duct tape, they forced their captives to lure a friend, 19 year old Stephanie Neiman, with a phone call. Neiman was also bound and initially survived getting shot multiple times. Out of frustration, Lockett buried her alive, and she succumbed to a combination of suffocation and her injuries. Lockett and his accomplices also gang-raped Hair and beat Bornt, but spared them on the forced condition of their silence. His execution was controversial, as Lockett convulsed for 45 minutes after being injected, and then died from a heart attack. He also had a long criminal history, and was first arrested for burglary as a teenager.
112. Charles Warner (1997-2015, lethal injection): Warner raped his girlfriend's daughter, 11 month old Adriana Waller, and shook her to death. His execution sparked outcry, as the wrong fatal drug was administered by mistake, and Warner complained of "burning pain" as he was being injected. With the botched executions of Lockett and Warner back to back, the state of Oklahoma delayed further executions until 2021.
113. John Grant (~1970s-2021, lethal injection): While serving a 130 year sentence for armed robbery, Grant stabbed a prison cafeteria worker, 58 year old Gay Carter, to death. He had a long criminal history dating back to the age of 11, had several previous convictions of theft and armed robbery, and frequently fought with and assaulted other inmates behind bars. Due to reports of "adverse reactions" to the lethal drugs, Grant's execution was scrutinized by a number of national media outlets.
114. Bigler Stouffer II (1985-2021, lethal injection): Stouffer shot and killed his ex girlfriend, 35 year old Linda Reaves, in her boyfriend's home for breaking up with him. Reaves' boyfriend was also seriously injured in the shooting.
115. Donald Grant (2001-2022, lethal injection): During a robbery of a hotel, Grant fatally shot, stabbed, and bludgeoned two employees, 43 year old Felicia Smith and 29 year old Brenda McElyea, and ran off with $1,500. He spent $200 of the stolen on paying for his girlfriend's bail.
116. Gilbert Postelle (~1998-2022, lethal injection): Postelle’s father was badly injured in a motorcycle accident, and they suspected that 57 year old James Anderson, 56 year old Terry Smith, 49 year old Donnie Swindler, and 26 year old Amy Wright were deliberately involved. Out a desire for vengeance, he recruited Postelle, his other son, and another man to kill them. All four victims were fatally gunned down in what was described as a “blitz attack” on their trailer. He was an addict and had several arrests for drug possession and manufacturing dating back to the age of 12.
117. James Coddington (1997-2022, lethal injection): After robbing a grocery store, Coddington went to the home of a friend and co worker, 73 year old Albert Hale, to ask for money. When Hale turned him down, Coddington retaliated by beating him with a claw hammer. Coddington stole $525 and went on to rob 5 more grocery stores. Hale was left alone with his injures for nearly an entire day until he was discovered by his son, and died in the hospital a day later.
118. Benjamin Cole Sr. (2002-2022, lethal injection): Out of anger that her crying interrupted his Nintendo game, Cole beat his daughter from his second wife, 9 month old Brianna, to death. He was previously convicted of abusing his son from a different marriage in California.
119. Richard Fairchild (1996-2023, lethal injection): Fairchild got into a fight with his girlfriend’s 17 year old daughter after making drunken sexual passes at her, and was enraged that she left with a cab driver. He took his anger out on the girl’s younger brother, 3 year old Adam Broomhall, and scalded him with a wall heater. He then repeatedly hit the boy, threw him against a table, and fatally hemorrhaged his head. Bromhall received over 26 blows during the beating.
120. Scott Eizember (2003-2023, lethal injection): Eizember snuck into his ex girlfriend's house to lie in wait for her. However, her roommates, 76 year old A.J. Cantrell and his 70 year old wife Patsy, arrived home earlier then she did. He shot and beat them both to death and then fled the scene.
121. Jemaine Cannon (1995-2023, lethal injection): Cannon was put in prison for assaulting an unidentified woman. He managed to escape and stabbed his girlfriend, 20 year old Sharonda Clark, to death in her apartment.
122. Anthony Sanchez (1996-2023, lethal injection): Sanchez kidnapped 21 year old Jewell Busken from her apartment complex, and then raped and shot her to death. He amassed a following from the anti death penalty movement for claiming that his father was responsible, but such notions were debunked following a 2023 DNA test that concluded Sanchez’s guilt.
123. Phillip Hancock (~1982-2023, lethal injection): In 1982, Hancock shot a drug dealer, 27 year old Charles Warren, dead in a dispute over stolen jewelry and was given a manslaughter conviction for it. He was released after serving a 2 year term. About 17 years later, he shot and killed 58 year old James Lynch III and 37 year old Robert Jett Jr. in a drug house. Despite an eyewitness account describing Lynch and Jett begging for their lives, the case attracted scrutiny when Hancock's attorneys claimed that the shootings were done in self defense.
124. Michael Smith (~2002-2024, lethal injection): A member of the Oak Grove Posse gang, Smith was responsible for two separate fatal shootings on the same day. In one of his murders, he killed Sharath Pulluru, a 24 year old Indian immigrant that worked as a clerk, while robbing a gas station. The other murder occurred when he tried to confront a gang member that he thought was a police informant in his apartment, and gunned down the target’s mother, 40 year old Janet Miller-Moore, when she refused to give away her son’s location. Smith was also given a life sentence for delivering a gun to a shooter that carried out another gang killing.

A little back story: My (17f) boyfriend (18m) is graduating this year on the 24th of May. I don’t graduate until May of 2025, and he is super excited to propose to me after I graduate. We have been dating for almost 2 years, and I love him more than anything. He is a brother of a family friend and we grew up together.
I have recently figured out that I want to continue education to get a bachelors in Forest Conservation/Rehabilitation, and he is enrolled in an auto mechanic program at his tech school. I want to eventually move out to Washington State and study the forests there. I am completely content here for now, but he said he will not move to Washington as his and my families are here in Wisconsin (which I totally understand, I am kind of scared, but moving out there is and has been my dream).
Over the past year of our relationship, he has become increasingly excited to get married straight out of high school, and he wants to build a life with me, which I also want, but not the marriage right after HS. I am worried that this will cause a strain in our relationship, and I have talked with him about it on several different occasions. He is understanding but is still planning on getting married ASAP (aka right after I graduate).
I know we are young, and I really hope our relationship lasts, I am just not sure how to approach this difference. Any advice would be greatly appreciated from you redditors, thank you.