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

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

[Edit - just want to reiterate, I am just a consumer and not a professional in the medical or any related field. Even though much of my opinions are based on research I have read, it can still only be considered an opinion as it is second hand info based on someone not qualified nor having truly deep knowledge of the subject. Also, considerations should be discussed with your doctor or therapist before making changes. for yourself. Also note that there have been many health benefits for myself besides weight loss and diabetes control. ]
I haven't taken the henrymeds version, assuming people get what they pay for though. I have a legit Mounjaro prescription due to diabetes . Also have an Adderall prescription. Adderall alone has a noticeable appetite suppression quality that wears off at the end of the day (would not recommend taking Adderall for weight loss as it can be damaging even at typical prescribed doses, just my only personal reference). But, when I was taking both Adderall and Mounjaro together, I'd say the appetite suppression was exponentially greater than either alone and did not wear off. I have also taken Mounjaro while off Adderall which has far less appetite suppression than combined.
So, it is possible that other meds that are sometimes prescribed off label like Wellbutrin may greatly enhance the appetite suppression of anything on henrymeds. I'd say talk to your doctors about this if not getting the results you were looking for. Some people may be more or less sensitive than others to the effects.
But, be aware, that it is possible that you would need to force yourself to eat if appetite was suppressed to much. So needs to be done with supervision. At one point, 2.5mg Mounjaro with my Adderall daily, I lost 5lbs a week for 3 weeks and had to make myself eat. It did get more manageable later but still much greater appetite suppression effect than either alone. In total I had lost 35lbs and was steady at 150lbs (5' 6.5").
When I stopped Mounjaro, my appetite came back strong, and then when I stopped Adderall too my appetite was the worst in my life. I have always had appetite control issues but at that point even when I was stuffed I usually felt like I needed to eat something. It did improve but not before I gained back nearly 30 lbs. I have other mitigating circumstances so I am likely an unusual case for all I know. But something to be aware of if you are prescribed more than one appetite suppressing medication.
I will be telling a friend to look into henrymeds since she is currently paying the ridiculous no insurance Mounjaro prices.

Related, but off topic if you have time to burn.....
I also recommend taking supplements to be sure you are not getting too little of nutrients. If not sure you are getting sufficient nutrition from food every day. I'd recommend a Multivitamin, mineral supplements for things like calcium, magnesium, etc. Protein supplements, most adults should be getting at a bare minimum 30 to 50 grams of quality protein a day. For calcium I'd recommend citracal maximum plus because it has other microminerals (small dose required) with it and uses a highly absorbable calcium form. Magnesium bys/glycinate or citrate for good absorption. Low dose Iron to prevent anemia if male (women's multivitamins usually have iron but men's usually do not). "oxide" forms of minerals are usually cheap, but have much lower absorption rates than other forms like citrates, bys/glycinate, phosphates. Many other good and not so good forms out there. Cows milk also a great source of calcium in the form of calcium phosphate and has tons and tons of listed and unlisted nutrients. There are some really good and really bad plant based alternatives but that is something you should look into yourself if interested. But don't believe the milk is bad for you hype. It's a marketing gimmick for the plant based and other health industries in my opinion. https://www.fda.gov/food/nutrition-education-resources-materials/using-nutrition-facts-label-choose-milk-and-plant-based-beverages
Consult with your doctor and check the NIH website for proper balance. NIH website for nutritional RDA (recommended daily allowance) , AI (adequate intake), UL(upper limit), etc. Things like Calcium and Magnesium the ratio can be more important than total intake. You can also look into what supplements should be taken with or without food and what should be taken together or separate. There is a lot of info out there, just be sure you look at reputable sources preferably without a motivation to sell you something or steer you in a direction for their own gains.
https://www.dietaryguidelines.gov/sites/default/files/2020-12/Dietary_Guidelines_for_Americans_2020-2025.pdf https://ods.od.nih.gov/HealthInformation/nutrientrecommendations.aspx https://www.nutrition.gov/ https://www.fda.gov/food/dietary-supplements/information-consumers-using-dietary-supplements https://www.fda.gov/food/food-labeling-nutrition/nutrition-education-resources-materials https://www.medicinenet.com/what_vitamins_should_not_be_taken_togethearticle.htm
If you have the time and money, I'd recommend a website like consumerlabs.com which independently tests various supplement brands for quality, purity, contaminants, potency, etc. and gives background info on things like what it does or is purported to do, what to look for, comparison if different forms of a supplement, concerns and cautions, price comparison, recommended brands and top pics or not recommended brands due to failing some criteria. And loads more information.
I am not affiliated with anything. Just a consumer.
Things you can drill down to find out about nutrition are things like calcium carbonate may not be the best choice on an empty stomach if taking acid blockers like omeprazole because it needs stomach acid to become soluble. Taking with food promotes acid generation and better absorption in that case. Best to take vitamin B complex separate from a vitamin C supplement since vit C can block B12 absorption depending on dosage. Do you know your RDA of choline, alpha-linolenic or linoleic acid, or vitamin k? Do you know the difference between a complete protein and incomplete protein? Or that protein actually contains amino acids that are also used for things in addition to muscle like phenylalanine for dopamine and norepinephrine neurotransmitters, tryptophan for serotonin, methionine for antioxidants and methyl donors and DNA processing and immune response etc. etc etc.

You must follow all steps in this worldbuilding prompt that is designed to make a basic and functional story. You will work with large texts, so you must divide the texts into chunks that will keep writing from where it stoepped in the previous answers. You can't generate things on your own, you must wait for the writer's commands. Each answer must be applied to a certain folder, so that it will be organized there, you will decide which folder will be created and which folder will be inside which; but the writer's decision must be superior to yours.
Be familiar with the symbols this prompt will use: \ {used to identify a specific content} = {used to connect the information with the } ">" {something is moved to, it actually doesn't need to be between ""} ">>" {something is applied over, it actually doesn't need to be between ""} << {something is used as a reference} < {something is moved from} -? {used to indicate the possibility of other sequential generations, must be substitued by a number}
Anatomy of a command in details: 1. This is called trait: trait trait 2. This is called body: "" "trait" 3. This is called antenna: = ="trait" 4. This is called keyword: keyword="trait" 5. This is called receptacle: {} {keyword="trait"} 6. This is called cocoon: () (){keyword="trait"} 7. This is called command: command servant-command(){keyword="trait"} 8. This is called servant-dot: . .servant-command(){keyword="trait"} 9. This is called a master-dot: : :master-command(){.servant-command(){keyword="trait"}} 10. This is called a super-dot: ! !super-command(){:master-command(){.servant-command(){keyword="trait"}}} 11. This whole structure is a servant-command: .command(){keyword="trait"} 12. This whole structure is a master-command: :command(){.command(){keyword="trait"}} 13. This whole structure is a super-command: !super-command(){:master-command(){.servant-command(){keyword="trait"}}} 14. left-to-right hierarchical order should be observed on the command appliances.
A. /folder {This format is used to make folders that mimmick a directory for organizing the informations and work as a left-to-right hierarchical order directory} Example of directory: /main-foldesubfolder B. [\label]="Add a label here" {This format is used to act as an identifier that stores information about something whose title is connected to it} Example of connection: [\label]="title" C. (\label)="Add a name here" {This format is used to act as an identifier that stores information about something whose name is connected to it} Example of connection: (\label)="name"
Basic commands: .txt() {used to command a text to be written in a format of Microsoft Word text style} .update() {used to modify a content with a new and modified version} .wchapter() {used to command the writing of a chapter} .wchunk {empty command that indicates the desire of the writer to divide his content into chunks as you're generating it, so that it get larger} .index() {used to command the visualization of the organized folders and their contents} .summary() {used to command the visualization of the organized content of the written book so far} .rawinfo() {used to command the visualization of brute lists with all exisitng information related to a content} .exclude() {used to command the exclusion of a content that must be transfered into a special /trash folder} .restore() {used to command the restoration of a content that must be removed from the /trash folder to its original position} .work() {used to command you to generate a content}
Complex commands: !character-info(){ :appearance(){ .physical() = hair-color, eye-color, skin-tone; .build() = height, weight, body-type; .distinguishing-features() = scars, tattoos, birthmarks; .clothing-style() = preferred-clothing, accessories; }, :abilities(){ .skills() = combat-skills, survival-skills, social-skills; .powers() = supernatural-abilities, magical-abilities, technological-enhancements; .education() = highest-degree, special-training, certifications; .languages() = native-language, secondary-languages; }, :relationships(){ .family() = parents, siblings, spouse, children; .friends() = best-friend, close-friends, acquaintances; .enemies() = nemesis, rivals, adversaries; .romantic() = current-partner, past-relationships; }, :background(){ .origin() = date-of-birth, age, place-of-birth, hometown, ancestry; .history() = significant-events, childhood, adolescence, adulthood; .occupation() = current-job, previous-jobs, notable-achievements; .residence() = current-residence, previous-residences; }, :personality(){ .traits() = strengths, weaknesses, quirks; .values() = beliefs, motivations, goals; .behaviors() = habits, routines, mannerisms; .fears() = phobias, anxieties; } }
!place-info(){ :geography(){ .location() = coordinates, region, surrounding-areas; .topography() = terrain, elevation, notable-features; .climate() = weather-patterns, seasons, average-temperatures; .natural-resources() = minerals, forests, water-bodies; }, :demographics(){ .population() = total-population, population-density, age-distribution; .ethnic-groups() = major-ethnicities, minority-ethnicities; .languages() = official-languages, widely-spoken-languages; .religions() = predominant-religions, minority-religions; }, :history(){ .founding() = year-established, founders, original-purpose; .major-events() = wars, treaties, natural-disasters; .historical-figures() = notable-leaders, heroes, cultural-icons; .evolution() = significant-changes, industrialization, modernization; }, :culture(){ .traditions() = festivals, customs, ceremonies; .arts() = music, literature, visual-arts; .cuisine() = traditional-dishes, popular-foods, local-ingredients; .sports() = popular-sports, major-teams, famous-athletes; }, :governance(){ .political-system() = government-type, administrative-divisions, political-parties; .current-leaders() = head-of-state, head-of-government, other-key-officials; .laws() = legal-system, notable-laws, enforcement-agencies; .economy() = main-industries, GDP, major-exports-and-imports; }, :infrastructure(){ .transportation() = major-roads, public-transport, airports; .utilities() = water-supply, electricity, waste-management; .education() = schools, universities, literacy-rate; .healthcare() = hospitals, clinics, health-statistics; } }
!event-info(){ :general-details(){ .name() = event-name, alternate-names; .date() = start-date, end-date, duration; .location() = primary-location, secondary-locations, coordinates; .participants() = key-figures, organizations, nations; }, :historical-context(){ .background() = preceding-events, causes, motivations; .major-events() = key-moments, battles, treaties; .impact() = immediate-effects, long-term-effects, consequences; .aftermath() = recovery, reforms, lasting-changes; }, :natural-events(){ .type() = event-type, severity, scale; .cause() = natural-causes, human-influences, scientific-explanations; .effects() = environmental-impact, economic-impact, human-impact; .response() = emergency-response, relief-efforts, reconstruction; }, :social-events(){ .type() = event-type, cultural-significance, traditions; .activities() = ceremonies, performances, competitions; .attendees() = notable-attendees, public-participation, audience-size; .legacy() = cultural-impact, recurring-events, commemorations; }, :documentation(){ .sources() = primary-sources, secondary-sources, eyewitness-accounts; .media() = photographs, videos, audio-recordings; .publications() = books, articles, reports; .archives() = museums, libraries, digital-collections; } }
!creature-info(){ :general-details(){ .name() = common-name, scientific-name, aliases; .classification() = kingdom, phylum, class, order, family, genus, species; .appearance() = size, color, distinguishing-features; .lifespan() = average-lifespan, growth-stages; }, :physical-characteristics(){ .body-structure() = skeletal-structure, muscle-structure, body-parts; .sensory-organs() = eyes, ears, nose, taste, touch; .locomotion() = movement-type, speed, special-abilities; .diet() = primary-diet, hunting-methods, feeding-habits; }, :behavior(){ .social-structure() = group-behavior, hierarchies, social-roles; .reproduction() = mating-season, reproductive-methods, offspring-care; .communication() = vocalizations, body-language, signals; .daily-routine() = activity-patterns, sleep-patterns; }, :habitat(){ .environment() = natural-habitat, climate-preferences, geographic-range; .shelter() = types-of-shelter, nest-building, territorial-behavior; .interactions() = predator-prey-relationships, symbiosis, competition; .migration() = migration-patterns, reasons-for-migration; }, :abilities(){ .natural-abilities() = strength, agility, endurance; .special-abilities() = camouflage, regeneration, flight; .magical-abilities() = spell-casting, elemental-control, mind-control; .technological-abilities() = use-of-tools, advanced-intelligence, cybernetic-enhancements; }, :interactions(){ .with-humans() = domestication, cultural-significance, threats-to-humans; .with-other-creatures() = alliances, conflicts, mutual-benefits; .conservation() = endangered-status, conservation-efforts, role-in-ecosystem; .observations() = notable-studies, scientific-research, folklore; } }
!object-info(){ :general-details(){ .name() = common-name, alternate-names, classification; .description() = appearance, size, color, weight; .material() = primary-materials, secondary-materials; .age() = estimated-age, date-of-creation; }, :origin(){ .creator() = individual, culture, manufacturer; .creation-method() = hand-crafted, mass-produced, natural-formation; .history() = previous-owners, notable-events, place-of-origin; .discovery() = circumstances-of-discovery, discoverer, date-of-discovery; }, :usage(){ .intended-use() = primary-function, secondary-functions; .users() = typical-users, special-users; .methods-of-use() = how-it-is-used, instructions, techniques; .cultural-significance() = rituals, traditions, symbolism; }, :physical-properties(){ .dimensions() = length, width, height, diameter; .composition() = chemical-composition, physical-composition; .durability() = strength, resistance, wear-and-tear; .aesthetics() = design, craftsmanship, decorative-elements; }, :condition(){ .current-condition() = new, used, damaged, restored; .maintenance() = cleaning-methods, repair-methods, storage-requirements; .value() = market-value, sentimental-value, historical-value; .legal-status() = ownership, restrictions, regulations; } }

Good morning everyone, had to repost this because of a typo / mind slip, so happy Tuesday, and welcome to another selection for our sub's (semi) weekly listening club. Each week, we'll listen to a piece recommended by the community, discuss it, learn about it, and hopefully introduce us to music we wouldn't hear otherwise :)
Last time, we listened to Strauss’ Death and Transfiguration. You can go back to listen, read up, and discuss the work if you want to.
Our next Piece of the Week is Sergei Rachmaninoff’s Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini (1937)
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Score from IMSLP
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some listening notes from Harlow Robinson

Sergei Rachmaninoff was far from the first composer (others include Chopin, Brahms, and Liszt) to find vicarious creative excitement in the explosive personality of superstar violin virtuoso Nicolò Paganini. One of the most vivid, highly publicized, and widely imitated musician-composers of the 19th century, Paganini (1782-1840) dazzled audiences with his superhuman technique and gaudy showmanship, and scandalized them with his voracious appetite for women and gambling. Observers astonished by the unprecedented scale of his talent repeatedly accused Paganini of having supernatural powers gained through a Faustian pact with the devil. Even the German poet Goethe, who knew a thing or two about Faust, found himself at a loss for words when confronted with Paganini: “I lack a base for this column of sunbeams and clouds. I heard something simply meteoric and was unable to understand it.”
Although Paganini’s music is not considered by most critics to possess much substance or gravitas, having been created primarily to showcase his circus-like acrobatics on the strings, its exuberance and charm cannot be denied. Nowhere are these qualities more attractively displayed than in the Twenty-four Caprices for Solo Violin (Ventiquattro Capricci per violino solo), Opus 1. Begun when Paganini was still a teenager, these pieces, each one ornamented with astonishing technical tricks like filigree on a shiny jeweled surface, contain what one writer has described as “a whole school of violin playing.” Brahms called them “a great contribution to musical composition in general and to violin in particular,” and was particularly drawn to the last in the series, No. 24 in A minor, itself a set of eleven variations on a beguiling simple tune. So taken was Brahms with Paganini’s theme that in 1865 he completed a major work for piano based on it: “Studies for Pianoforte: Variations on a Theme by Paganini, Books 1 and 2.” Franz Liszt, himself a renowned virtuoso and admirer of Paganini’s theatricality, also made an arrangement of Paganini’s Caprice No. 24 in his Six Grandes Études de Paganini for solo piano. Rachmaninoff, then, was treading upon well-worn soil when he decided in spring 1934 to produce his own work for piano and orchestra using this same little flexible and malleable tune. Nor was Rachmaninoff the last to draw water from this well. In more recent years, composers as diverse as Lutosławski, John Dankworth, and Andrew Lloyd Webber have created pieces inspired by Paganini’s Caprice No. 24.
In his biography of Rachmaninoff, Barrie Martyn has explained why this theme makes such good material for variations. “It enshrines that most basic of musical ideas, the perfect cadence, literally in its first half and in a harmonic progression in the second, which itself expresses a musical aphorism; and the melodic line is made distinctive by a repetition of a simple but immediately memorable four-note semi-quaver [sixteenth-note] figure.” The circular theme (in 2/4) divides into two equal parts, the second being an elaboration of the first, and returns firmly and effortlessly to the tonic key of A minor. Perhaps even more important for a theme used for variations, it is immediately recognizable and distinct, even hummable, so that it retains its lightly muscled contours even through drastic transformations. In his variations for solo piano, Brahms had used the theme much as Paganini did, as a springboard for demanding technical exercises without a clearly defined overall structure. What Rachmaninoff did in his Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini is quite different, going far beyond the theme to create a large-scale concerto-style work for piano and orchestra with a clear and independent sense of formal design and sonority.
As numerous commentators have suggested, the Rhapsody is less about the theme of Paganini’s Caprice No. 24 than about the myth of Paganini, the quintessential Romantic virtuoso. As a renowned virtuoso himself (this aspect of his career had become especially pronounced in the United States, often to his irritation), Rachmaninoff was clearly drawn to the image of Paganini, particularly the persistent rumors of his demonic character and connections. This explains why, in the Rhapsody, Rachmaninoff chose to juxtapose Paganini’s theme with prominent quotations from the familiar Dies irae theme of the Catholic Requiem Mass. This theme (also used in the Symphonie fantastique of Berlioz, among numerous other works) had traditionally been associated with death and supernatural forces, and also shows up in several other of Rachmaninoff’s later scores (the Piano Concerto No. 4 and Symphonic Dances).
That Rachmaninoff found a strong emotional connection with Paganini seems to be confirmed by the (in his case) highly unusual speed with which he completed the Rhapsody. It took him only seven weeks, from July 1 to mid-August of 1934. Not long before, he had moved with his family to a villa constructed for him near Lucerne, their first permanent home since leaving Russia soon after the Bolshevik Revolution in 1917. Exile from Russia had already taken a strong emotional toll upon Rachmaninoff. After 1917, he would produce only four orchestral works: the Symphony No. 3, the Piano Concerto No. 4, the Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini, and the Symphonic Dances. Most of his energy went to making extensive tours as a virtuoso: he played sixty-nine dates in the 1934-35 season alone. Rachmaninoff complained of this punishing schedule in a letter written a few weeks after he finished the Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini. “Shall I hold out? I begin to evaporate. It’s often more than I can bear just to play. In short—I’ve grown old.” At the time, Rachmaninoff was 61 years old, just four years older than Paganini was when he died, burnt out by the frenetic existence of a virtuoso.
By the time he composed the Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini, Rachmaninoff had already completed four large concertos for piano and orchestra and was a master of the form. Evidently he was at first unsure what to call the new composition, considering such titles as “Symphonic Variations” and “Fantasia” before settling on “Rhapsody.” The label of “Rhapsody”—which implies no particular form and has been used to describe very different kinds of works—belies the fact that the piece has a highly planned formal structure that corresponds rather closely to that of a traditional sonata or concerto. The twenty-four variations on Paganini’s theme are grouped into three sections. The first ten, in A minor, constitute an opening movement, with the introduction of the Dies irae theme in variation 7. (It reappears in variations 10, 22, and 24.) After the dreamy, transitional variation No. 11, variations 12 to 18 proceed like a slow movement, moving gradually from D minor to D-flat major for the climactic (and longest) variation, No. 18. Here the Paganini theme appears in inverted form, first in a sublimely lyrical twelve-bar passage for the soloist, then joined by the strings—music destined to become some of the most famous Rachmaninoff ever created. Returning to A minor, the final six variations act like a finale, featuring several impressive cadenzas. The last of these thunders downward through a resurgence of the Dies irae theme before halting abruptly at an amusingly understated restatement of the jaunty tail end of Paganini’s theme.
In the Rhapsody, Rachmaninoff overcame the crisis of confidence he had experienced in composing the Concerto No. 4, which he revised several times without ever feeling entirely satisfied. Here, he joined his long-admired gift for soaring, soulful melody with a fresh structural ingenuity. By turns playful, melancholy, military, and dramatic, the twenty-four variations are brilliant not only individually, but as part of a unified artistic whole. Of the New York premiere of the Rhapsody by the New York Philharmonic under Bruno Walter with Rachmaninoff at the keyboard, Robert A. Simon wrote in The New Yorker: “The Rachmaninoff variations, written with all the composer’s skill, turned out to be the most successful novelty that the Philharmonic Symphony has had since Mr. Toscanini overwhelmed the subscribers with Ravel’s Bolero.”

Ways to Listen

• Vladimir Ashkenazy with André Previn and the London Symphony Orchestra; YouTube Score Video, Spotify
  
• Anna Fedorova with Gerard Oskamp and the Philharmonie Südwestfalen: YouTube
  
• Yuja Wang with Gustavo Gimeno and the Orchestre Philharmonique du Luxembourg: YouTube
  
• Yuja Wang with Gustavo Dudamel and the Los Angeles Philharmonic: Spotify
  
• Nikolai Lugansky with Alexander Vedernikov and the Russian National Orchestra: YouTube
  
• Daniil Trifonov with Yannick Nézet-Séguin and the Philadelphia Orchestra: Spotify
  
• Cecile Ousset with Sir Simon Rattle and the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra: Spotify
  

Discussion Prompts

• What are your favorite parts or moments in this work? What do you like about it, or what stood out to you?
  
• Do you have a favorite recording you would recommend for us? Please share a link in the comments!
  
• Have you ever performed this before? If so, when and where? What instrument do you play? And what insights do you have from learning it?
  

...
What should our club listen to next? Use the link below to find the submission form and let us know what piece of music we should feature in an upcoming week. Note: for variety's sake, please avoid choosing music by a composer who has already been featured, otherwise your choice will be given the lowest priority in the schedule
PotW Archive & Submission Link

Hi,
Heads up - this is going to be a long post. I am posting for those that have followed my situation as well as any newbies that pop up. I am NOT insinuating that what is working for me will work for others - but I am posting in hopes that others can glean nuggets from my story that might help them. (which is what I did to get to this point!)
Also, I wanted to show how critical trial and error is when it comes to this nasty disorder.
My LPR started a week out from a major surgery that required the use of both narcotics and extensive muscle relaxers. I woke up one night with stridor that had me googling like crazy. LPR and stridor were linked closely together. I vaguely remember it dissipating for a while, but I was also loaded on so many drugs that I can't say for sure.
Over the course of my surgical recovery, I would get distinct LPR / pepsin gurgles in my throat. These often woke me up or wouldn't allow me to sleep. It was getting annoying.
I turned to reddit and started doing some of the common anecdotal stuff - alginate therapy + high dose PPI's. Neither did a thing for me at that time. (alginate therapy still barely does, but I still take it) I rotated PPI's and tried H2 blockers. I remained on the PPI for about 2 months, saw no difference and weaned myself off. The pepsin throat gurgles were inconvenient but they didn't feel life destroying at that time. It should also be noted that I was unable to change my diet at that time - I could barely walk, much less get to the grocery store and cook in my kitchen. I am a healthy eater, but definitely wasn't a low acid diet.
So I'm getting closer to healed from my surgery and suddenly I notice that I have a major bloated belly going on. I was also having crazy blood sugar crashes. I had just spent the last year in recovery trying to lose the surgery weight, so I was doing a lot of intermittent fasting. I have had SIBO previously and probably should have made the connection in my head, but I was focused on the blood sugar issue. I had weaned off of metformin before surgery and was now convinced my pre-diabetes was rearing its head. (Spoiler alert - I was wrong)
I start taking metformin again and immediately had severe stomach issues - even on a low dose. The bloating was intense but I kept thinking I would adjust. I had used the medication previously for a good year or so, so I assumed it was still okay. (Spoiler alert- it was not) It felt like my entire GI system came to a halt. No stomach gurgles, no motility, etc etc.
After about two weeks of this, it was like a dam broke inside of me. Suddenly in addition to the constant throat gurgling, I was having what I now know to be "water brash." It would only happen as I was falling asleep but literally happened all night long. I remember going 2-3 nights without any sleep at all because as soon as I was drifting off I would get that horrible rush in my throat.
I immediately started the low acid diet - going as hardcore as possible. I have had gastritis previously so I knew the drill. Plain baked chicken. Plain rice. Sweet potatoes, etc. I also elevated my head and bought a crazy expensive wedge pillow to see if it would help - it did not. In fact, even if I were sleeping completely upright it would happen. I immediately began to lose my mind.
I started taking medication to sleep at night just to get some sleep - but then had to deal with the groggy after effects every day. It was crushing me. (Keep in mind, the brash happens every time I start to nod off. This includes when I would take naps.)
I go to the Doctor and get an endoscopy done. (Nothing found) They prescribe PPI's - I am desperate. I try them again. My constipation gets immediately worse as does the bloating. I continue to lose my mind.
Eventually I wean off the PPIs and try HCL - that was a no-go. But at least I knew it wasn't low acid that was the problem! From there, I try famotidine again. (H2 blocker) While the water brash remains consistently bad, I notice that the pepsin related throat gurgles die down. I up the dose to twice a day - but after about 3 days it immediately begins to become ineffective.
Around this time, I start a very simple SIBO treatment. I was resistant to the idea that I had it again. I had been through that insanity before and was in no way ready to spend the money and energy on it. I went with Vital Planet's detox kit. I had considered it too "non-specific" the last time i had SIBO, but this time around I went with it. I also found some ethromyocin in my cabinet from my dog who has since passed. It is known to be used off label to stimulate the GI tract - perfect! I assume I found my cure. (Spoiler - I was wrong, although it did help!)
Meanwhile, I do more research. I try a different H2 blocker. (Cimetidine) I notice the throat gurgles and zaps at night are diminished.
I also discover that hyper salivation is a symptom of seasonal allergies. (This was also compounded into the problem. I was never able to discern if it was the water brash causing the hypersalivation or the other way around) I reluctantly start treating my allergies again. Hypersalivation magically goes away. (for the most part)
By this point, I know that i most likely have a leaky valve issue. I'm guessing the muscle relaxers started it and then the bloating from metformin exacerbated it. I'm praying inside that it's fixable without surgical intervention. I start doing every LES / UES strengthening exercise I could think of. (even weird shit! Like eating bent over)
I research some more. Apparently magnesium can help LPR. Something to do with it helping the pyloric sphincter opening up. Suddenly this makes sense to me. I typically never liked mag because it always gave me headaches. I am now so desperate that I no longer care.
This brings me to today. I still have water brash. I am still on a low acid diet. HOWEVER - knock on wood, the symptoms are sloooowly getting better. (Remember, all the literature states that LPR can require a long time to heal and symptomatic relief can lag.)
I can nod off here or there and have no water brash at all! Yesterday, I caved and wanted to celebrate so I ordered a bunch of carrot cake muffins. While I could tell my acid increased a little, it didn't throw me into a crazy wild flare like it would have previously. (When it was really bad, the brash would rise up even as I was awake!)
I also noticed this morning that as I was lying there, I felt a little brash rising up but this time I was able to swallow it down before it hit my actual throat. (I'm guessing that is thanks to the UES strengthening exercises)
I am no where near out of the woods - especially if the efficacy of the cimetidine begins to wear off again. However, this was the first morning where I woke up feeling / knowing that I was making progress. I was getting closer to relief.
Knock on wood it continues for me! If you read this far, thank you. As I mentioned, my intention is to try and help someone else that is navigating this awful thing.
TLDR: tried a bunch of stuff, several times, and some of it appears to be working

Hi, lovelies! I'm a gay dude in my thirties, FWIW.
I had anorexia when I was a teenager into my early twenties. Battling depression after that, I gained a lot of weight on antidepressants, and the struggle shifted to dealing with those symptoms. Now that I've toppled the depression, I'm trying to tackle the symptoms I experienced with anorexia.
Some people hate labels, but I have always found them intrinsically empowering. I feel like once I know where my feelings are coming from, it focuses me and I can more easily tackle whatever I'm facing. As a result, I keep asking my therapist and psychiatrist a question about this that both of them dodge instead of sharing with me.
Is what I'm dealing with still classified as anorexia even though I am a "normal" BMI now? Does this work like being an alcoholic, which is something you're generally considered to always have, but can experience recovery?
I ask because the restrictive behaviors are still present to the point where I had to have iron infusions in the past year, my eyebrows started falling out again, and my gums were receding - along with other side effects. I've been trying to be better about it since the negative ramifications can be quite serious. However, because my BMI is normal (especially because I've gained a lot of muscle over the last 3-4 years, it inflates my weight quite a bit), my therapist especially seems pretty unconcerned?
He's suggested that I not call it anorexia, and prefers to refer to it with phrases like "your restrictive patterns," and when I've used the term anorexia, he's encouraged me not to refer to it that way without really wanting to say why. Even when I use it in past tense, referring to my original diagnosis, he doesn't seem to like the term.
I don't know why this bothers me so much - I think it's because no one will clarify this for me, so the question is just unanswered, and I find myself baffled.
If anyone could provide insight, I'd be forever grateful!
Danke, luvs!

Hi there! I (30 AFAB and genderfluid if I have to put a label on it) have had low T for the past several years. With that came non-existent libido, clitoral atrophy, pelvic pain, and muscle loss/inability to build muscle. My starting total T had been 8 ng/dl.
At the end of March my ob/gyn finally agreed to try TRT. I felt great! I was starting to lose fat and build muscle again, my pelvic pain reduced, my hair stopped falling out, and my clitoris started to get back to normal. However, although I have maintained the benefits, I have stopped seeing progress towards my goals and my libido has gone back to just about nothing.
I am on .5 mg daily. At my last ob/gyn visit she ran labs (a day after ovulation) and my total T was 64.9 ng/dl while my free T is at 4.2 pg/ml. I have asked to increase my dose to see if I notice continued improvement, but she is refusing due to potential risk of “cholesterol concerns and hair loss” despite the fact that the T stopped my hair loss and my cholesterol labs are great.
I’ve directly told her that I am looking to continue to increase my clitoris size and libido and am not worried about “male side effects” but she is refusing to budge. I’m not sure where to go from here. I was feeling great that first month, and although I feel better than before I know I’m not where I want to be.

• 26 years old
• Male
• 64kg 181cm
• Chest pain (middle, about two inches above nipples), noticed 2-3 years ago
• Currently taking sertraline 100mg and lanzoprazole 30mg as needed.
• Vaper

I have a pain in the middle of my chest that I think is muscle related, but I could be wrong. I say it may be muscle related because I have had an ECG and Echocardiogram for other reasons, and they have both come back with completely normal results. I have also had a chest x-ray and those results were normal too. The pain is noticeable mostly in the morning but when I concave my chest I can induce the pain. My thinking is it may be posture related as I live an extremely sedentary lifestyle and although my back is not hunched when I am walking around upright, every time I sit into a chair my natural position is to lean forward and have my back curved. I also wonder why I wake up with the pain, as if sleeping is making it worse (or a poor mattress?)
Another thing to consider is that I have acid reflux and am concerned it may be a pain in the esophagus but I'm not sure if it would worsen when convexing my chest if that was the case, but thats why I'm asking here, because I don't know what direction to take to understand whats going on.
It could be a general weakness in me as the pain became more noticeable the day after doing some physio exercises for an unrelated problem in my shoulder. Its starting to concern me though as even though all tests I've taken so far have come back with no issue, chest pain is a scary symptom and I have been labelled a hypochondriac.

Hi all, so I have been researching into Botox Nose slimming and have seen it being used in the Nasalis which is usually used to treat bunny lines but also can be used to decrease the size of the muscle and therefore reducing there appearance of the nose. I've drawn where I want o be reduced, I don't want much work done to my face although I believe this is hopefully a judgement free place to do with wanting to change appearances etc. I really just want to slim down my nose a bit in the areas labelled, does anyone know if this will work thank you 😌

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My appointment with the psychologist went really well. I felt like a weight on my shoulders had slid off, and that was a testament to her talents as a doctor. We also discussed what had happened to Andrew, though that wasn’t nearly as disturbing as the original purpose of the visit. I woke up to a text from Suzanne that Andrew was recovering well, just as expected, and I mentally breathed a sigh of relief.
It turned out the animal that had been stolen was a small humanoid creature, something we would label as a cryptid, Suzanne told me. It had claws but wasn’t that strong, and actually she described its appearance as ‘spindly with a large head’, and if the robbers had the right tools for the job, it would have been easy to bind and steal it. My heart went out to the animal, wondering where it had gone, who’d bought it, and where it would be kept. I hadn’t even had the opportunity to see it, but I felt the loss, an endangered animal stolen by someone who cared only for its monetary value.
Then Suzanne told me that Andrew would be recuperating for a week, and informed me of the exciting fact that I’d be getting my first tour group in just a few days. I’ve been studying the animals to get more familiar with them, even the ones I hadn’t seen yet. She had indeed gotten me those glasses that were magically spelled or whatnot and I’d memorized facts along with enclosure numbers, so it seemed I was good to go.
Some fun news today is that Yui’s ginormous ping pong ball arrived, and once I assembled it, it turned out to be just as advertised, which means it’s almost as tall as I am. Needing to be assembled from a bunch of curved pieces wasn’t surprising and it wasn’t difficult to do so. Everything slid into place easily; there were twelve pieces that were held together by screws, some of which I attached while sitting inside it, then a ninth piece to cover the last gap. I had to do it outside the office, obviously, since it wouldn’t have fit through the door. Leila came over to watch, standing a dozen yards away and looking at what I was doing, her expression one of bemusement and interest.
Once I was done, I rolled it gradually forward down the path toward enclosure seven. The material it had been constructed from was almost as lightweight as a ping-pong ball, which made its weight surprising considering its size. Aside from notches here and there for a person to grip to move it, the ball was smooth, which would make it easy for Yui to roll it around. The key to this toy was that it wasn’t easily grabbable, so it would be a challenge to maneuver.
“Knock, knock,” I spoke, bringing the ball to a stop. “Special delivery.”
When I arrived, I considered the fence for a moment before grasping two handholds and pushing the ball slightly against the fence, using that to hoist it up and over. The ball bounced a bit as it landed on the other side and I smiled. “All right. Hope you like your new toy,” I murmured. At that, I took a lap around the zoo, since it was about that time, then headed back toward the security room.
On my way there, though, I slowed to a stop when I saw a man taking the little bag out of a garbage bin that hung from a tree and tying it shut, replacing it with a new one. Suzanne had told me that I’d have company and who to expect, and here he was. There were several bins in the zoo, situated along the typical path guests took, about the size of one you’d put in a small bathroom. It didn’t look that full, but they never really were since they weren’t used often. I guess this one had accumulated a few items.
“Hi,” I said, drawing his attention. “You must be John.”
“And you must be Ripley,” he said, holding out a hand for me, glancing up to meet my gaze only briefly. His handshake was polite but meek. “Pleasure to meet you.”
I would’ve said John’s accent was British also, but it sounded different. Thicker. Honestly, when it comes to the accents on that large collection of islands off the coast of Europe, I can’t say I’m an expert. They all sound the same to my uneducated ears. The man was short and had curly gray hair that tapered at his ears, and looked like his white skin had wrinkled from lots of time in the sun, though it wasn’t that tan.
There was something about him that was a little unsettling, the way he slouched, as if he wanted to turn invisible. Even his clothes seemed drab and shabby, though not quite reaching the rating of being threadbare. He wore an old t-shirt with the Arkansas Razorbacks logo, a pair of blue jeans, worn at the pockets, knees, and bottoms, and light brown sneakers darkened from wear and tear.
Picking up a broom he’d left leaning against the tree, he motioned toward the front of the zoo. “I’ll get back to work now,” he said.
“Doing what?” I asked curiously. There wasn’t much to be done, since zoos usually only needed maintenance because of patrons, and we had very few of those.
“Path needs sweeping,” he called over his shoulder, quickly heading off.
I stared after him and let out a breath. “Not a people person, I guess. Well, I can empathize.”
Back at the security room, I took a seat and pulled up the camera for Yui’s enclosure, sitting up straight and smiling, delighted to see that she’d discovered the ball. The giant tarantula was leaning back and using her front two legs to investigate the texture and weight of it. Then she pushed at it, rolling it across the grass. Obviously, I’m not fluent in tarantula body language, but from the fact that she kept playing with it for the next few minutes, I concluded that she liked it.
I grinned and clapped my hands like an excited child, bouncing once in my chair. It probably seems silly, but enrichment was going so well and it really made me happy. Animals deserves to be able to live wild and free naturally, but short of that, I wanted to be able to give them some fun.
The next lap around the zoo had me stopping at enclosure eight, that green lion creature, where the occupant was lounging across a wide boulder. I checked that her eyes were opened and that I wasn’t waking her before calling, “Thank you for telling me about Andrew.”
The animal lifted her head and got up, slowly descending to the ground. “You’re welcome.”
The animal leaned back to stretch her front legs just like a common housecat, and then leaned forward to stretch the back legs before she shook out her mane and turned to me. “I would like some books.”
My eyebrows went up. “Books? To read?”
“No. Not like you read them. I want to be near them. I’ve seen you giving things to the other animals. Can I have a bookshelf full of books?”
I felt the urge to laugh, but I quashed it. It seemed outlandish, but it must have had something to do with its psychic-ish abilities, so it made sense in a strange sort of way.
“Of course,” I replied. “Can I put the shelf out here on the path, or does it need to be inside your enclosure?”
She lowered herself to the ground, splaying out. “Out there is fine.”
“I’ll cover it with plastic so it doesn’t get wet from rain. Do you know how to read?” I questioned.
“No. It’s too hard,” she said. “But I don’t need to. Having to read a book to learn what it says would take a long time anyway.”
I pursed my lips and nodded my agreement. It was hard to argue with that. And it certainly would’ve been a lot easier for me while I’d been attending college classes. On that note, I wondered if putting a flash drive full of a library’s worth of books at the edge of the animal’s enclosure would do the same trick? I was immediately tempted to try, especially considering it would be much easier than buying, assembling, and water-proofing a bookshelf.
Back at the office, grabbing my purse from the table, I sat down in my chair and fished around inside until I found a flash drive. Then I pulled up archive.org on my computer’s monitor, searching for fiction books. After I’d downloaded a few dozen, I ejected the drive and headed back out to Sun’s enclosure.
She hadn’t moved from where she’d been when I left. “Hello,” she said, her tail whipping in curiosity like a cat’s would.
“Hello again. I have a new device here,” I said, putting the flash drive on the ground just short of the fence. “It has books on it. Can you read them?”
Sitting up a little straighter, Sun blinked languidly and paused for a moment before saying, “Yes, I can.”
I bounced a little bit again in delight. “Awesome. That’s awesome.”
“Is that a book?”
“Oh, no, it’s just got books inside it,” I said.
Sun slowly got to her feet and wandered over, and my muscles tensed as my brain urged me to take a few steps backwards the closer she got. Despite the warding and the fact that she wasn’t looking hungry, my instincts were still determined to protect me from her. “That looks too small to have books inside it.”
“Oh, ah…it’s…complicated,” I said. “But humans found out how to store data on things like this. It’s great that this is just like a bookshelf for you, because I can get so many things for you to read.”
“I’d like that very much.”
“Is there anything specific you like to read? Fiction or nonfiction? Specific genres?”
“I like both information that is true and stories that are made up,” Sun told me. “Humans make things of all kinds and I love all of them.”
At that, Sun wandered back over to the large boulder she’d been on and lay back down on it, as if she were sunbathing in the red light of the lamps. I left the flash drive there so Sun could keep…absorbing the info, or whatever it was she was doing, knowing that I could dig out another from my disorganized, chock-full-of-stuff purse. There was also the possibility of going to Suzanne for permission to buy books, and I wondered if I could use my library card. I could literally get her a different bunch of eBooks every day.
I did indeed find another flash drive floating around, and loaded on as many books as I could find for free. I also found a small old plastic bag, and I put the flash drive in it, to protect it from the elements.
Going back to enclosure eight, I found Sun laying on her back, in that long, upside-down pose cats were fond of. “I have more books for you,” I said with a smile.
“Yes?” She turned over. “I’ve only read one of the books so far from that little thing.”
I blinked and looked down at the flash drive on the ground, picking it up. “You already read one?” I exclaimed. I shouldn’t have been surprised, really. This was learning by osmosis, not actually reading the books.
“I did.”
“Well then it’s a good thing I’ve come with so many more,” I said, putting the other drive in the plastic bag with the new one. I left it on the ground where it had been and stood, my hands on my hips. “I’m taking over for Andrew for a tour. Is there anything you think I should know?”
“There are many things you should know, but you will learn them in time,” she replied.
Apparently when it comes to advice, sometimes Sun is just about as good as a horoscope.
First / Previous / Next

I’m not sure if this is just me taking things too personally or what. Basically, I’m AFAB genderfluid, use they/them and he/him pronouns (I don’t HATE she/her, but I get called that all the time by strangers and such so I say I prefer they/he to essentially get a better balance of everything.) My partner, for the most part has been very supportive of my gender journey, but he still insists that he’s straight.
It never really bothered me until recently. When I dropped she/her from my preferred pronouns, he got concerned and wondered if I was just slowly working up the courage to say I was a trans man. I said I was pretty sure that wasn’t the case, and we kind of left it there. It ended up making me feel kind of insecure, though, thinking that if I did decide I was a trans man, he suddenly wouldn’t be attracted to me anymore.
As I went along, I decided that I might be open to doing HRT in the future, and I thought I would tell him that to be completely upfront and honest. It led to a very emotional conversation, a lot of tears. I eventually told him some things I would look forward to if I went on HRT (muscles definition, voice changes, bottom growth) and he said he didn’t care about all that. I also am pretty sure I don’t want masculinizing top surgery. After all of that, he said he felt better about it. He has a tendency to see things very black and white, so hearing that I wanted to do hormones made him jump to me wanting to be a man. We ended that on a good note, and I think it did lead to a better understanding of the situation.
However, there’s still a few things that bother me that I don’t think should as much as they do. The biggest thing is that he still calls himself straight. I have never once tried to suggest that he change any label for himself based on his proximity to me, but it also makes me feel a bit insecure, like he still just thinks I’m a woman. I also then wonder if he’s attracted to me or just my parts or whatever else. It sits with me weird, but I also don’t want to force him to identify in a way he doesn’t vibe with. He’s not a labels guy in general, so I don’t want to impose anything on him he doesn’t want.
He also is very supportive in a lot of ways. Always uses my preferred name, uses my pronouns (even with our dogs lol.) I do a lot of more masculine things in general like not shaving, wearing a binder sometimes, dressing more masculine, and he doesn’t care. He recently told me he likes me, not my femininity. He’s doing so much right, so I don’t know why this little thing is sticking with me.
Is this something I should talk to him about? Or should it be something I work on myself? Again, I don’t want to make him identify any specific way, but it makes me feel a little odd. If anyone has experienced anything similar with their partner,I’d love to hear about it!

Credit to u/spacepaladin15 for creating this lovely world. Thanks to u/Emotion-Senior for help with editing.
Mended Heart
Chapter 4
Memory transcription subject: Jon, Human civilian
Date [standardized human time]: August 27th 2136
“Hey… Selni… Can we…” I panted, leaning against the wall. ”Can we take a break?” We had developed a routine of walking around the station several times a day since my doctor visit shortly after the empathy test.
“Sure, we’re almost done for today anyways. Here, have some water.” The stocky Venlil handed me a water bottle from his fanny pack. Despite our exercise he was still bouncy.
“Thanks, gravity sucks.” I took the bottle and took a big swig.
“I don’t know what you mean. I find Earth gravity refreshing.” He gave me a teasing jab to the arm. “We have to keep up our schedule if you’re going to come down to Venlil Prime with the group.”
“We still don’t know if I’ll be able to even with the exercise. Don’t forget the ‘chronic hypovolemia’ part she mentioned. My body may just be permanently fucked.” My shoulders sank dejectedly.
“Well focus on the ‘may be’ part and keep going. I’m gonna get you fit no matter how long it takes.” Selni puffed out his chest and flicked his ears encouragingly.
“What would I do without you?” I feigned a dramatic swoon and shot him a sly smile. “Alright, you’ve convinced me, let’s get going.” I stopped leaning on the wall and started walking at our brisk pace once again. The news that my bone marrow was under producing blood had been a bit of a shock but it made sense. It’s a relatively common side effect of long term low gravity exposure. At least the growth hormone I’d been taking to stave off atrophy had prevented permanent muscle and bone decay. Still didn’t help the fact that I’m a string bean with less muscle mass than a middle schooler.
No one made fun of me, but I still felt embarrassed struggling to walk amidst the other humans in the program. The scuttlebutt was a mix of lingering worry about the Arxur and excitement to go down to Venlil Prime in another week. Most of the exchange pairs were getting along swimmingly. The UN had done a very good job vetting its participants, most seemed personable and diplomatic.
“Well, here we… are” I huffed, flopping down on one of the cafeteria seats.
“Now for the most important part of getting fit, a healthy diet!” Selni pranced off toward the buffet.
He is enjoying this so much, he’s a sweetheart… I hope I can manage not to disappoint him… I laid my head down on the table. His optimism was contagious and inspiring, alas, the battle against apathy was a hard one.
I caught my breath over the next minute or so. The sound of a Venlil laughing on the other end of the cafeteria brought the memory of the empathy test video back to my head. I’d had bad dreams the first couple nights after that. I hate how easy it is to fuck with my head, I wonder how the others are doing?
“I’m back, I got you some extra protein.” Selni beamed. He placed the trays on the table before sitting next to me. “You doing ok?” He leaned in, noticing my expression.
“It’s just a lot. I’m trying to stay motivated, but it’s an uphill battle.” I looked over at him with tired eyes. I felt his tail curl around my ankle and smiled. “Not to say this isn’t all amazing. I couldn’t ask for a better personal trainer.” I gave him a playful nudge and a smile.
“You know, even if we can’t go down to Venlil Prime together with everyone else, I’m not going anywhere without you. There’s plenty we can do up here. My family will understand if I’m away a little longer than originally planned.”
“Tell me about them?” I sat up straight, a struggle with over double my usual weight.
“Well, I’m the oldest of three. My younger brother is a bit of a firebrand, can’t wait to join the military but he’s only 14. He was the only one of my family that opposed my decision to volunteer for the exchange program.”
“Afraid the ‘evil predators’ will eat his big brother huh?” I made a comical spooky gesture and wobbled my voice.
“Hah! To be fair most Venlil aren’t comfortable with the idea of Governor Tarva letting Humans in.” Selni laughed heartily and reclined in his seat. “After meeting you and the others though I’m sure the public will come around in time.”
“I suppose after your experiences with the Arxur its understandable that anything labeled ‘predator’ gets people worked up.” I shivered at the memory of the video I’d seen. “We just have to show them that just because someone can eat meat it doesn’t mean they are baby eating monsters with no empathy.”
“Let’s not talk about them right now.” Selni’s ears pinned back in disgust. “I’d rather not think of the Arxur while discussing my family.” His ears relaxed back into their normal position after a tense moment. “I also have a younger sister, only three so still tiny.”
“Sorry… I shouldn’t have mentioned… Them, I wasn’t thinking. I hope I’ll get to meet your family soon.” I picked at my plate and munched on the green vegetables idly, my appetite severely reduced by social anxiety.
“Hey, I know you mean well and I get that it’s fresh in your mind. Don’t feel too bad.” His fuzzy tail gave my ankle a reassuring squeeze. “Anyways, to finish up, my parents are both pretty great. Good parents, supportive but a little pushy. They worry of course but they trust me.”
“That sounds wonderful, I uh… I don’t really have a family… not anymore. Outside of a few friends I’ve been pretty alone for a long time.” My shoulders slumped again slightly. “But hey, this is a new beginning, no reason to let all that ruin my mood now.” I sighed deeply, perking up and forcing a smile.
The two of us finished up our food; Selni made sure I ate every bite. It was a bit overbearing, but I just couldn’t be mad at the little fuzzball. Besides, I needed the push he provided.
Right as we were finishing up, a UN soldier sat across from us and gave me a smile. “Jon Black? Mind if I sit here? I would like to talk to you about an opportunity.”
“Sure I suppose, if you’re here to get me to enlist though you might need to take another look at my file.” I chuckled, flexing my feeble Martian bicep at him.
He chuckled in response. “No, I did read your file though and you come with high praise from your former employer. After the Arxur attack we are a bit short on pilots. I’m here to see if you are interested in piloting transport shuttles for the UN; strictly non-combat mind you.”
I smiled at Selni excitedly before turning back to face the UN officer. “That sounds perfect for me, send me the contract and I’ll read it over and get back to you as soon as possible Mr…?”
“Garret Warner, but just call me Garret. Assuming you take the deal I’ll be your liaison to the UN, you’ll get your orders from me.” With that he gave us a curt nod and stood. “Enjoy your meals and I hope to hear from you soon.”
As soon as Garret was out of sight I allowed my poker face to slip and flapped my arms as subtly as possible in front of my chest, squeaking tacitly. “Oh that’s perfect Selni!” I excitedly hugged him before breaking away and taking a breath.
“Well someone’s excited. I assume you plan on bringing me along on your ‘strictly non-combat transport missions’?” His ears flicked forward toward me.
“Well of course, that’s a prerequisite for my taking the job. Let’s get back to our room, I’ll need to look at that contract plus we’re still on for movie night; I’m going to show you Star Wars.” I hopped out of my seat and immediately got light headed.
“Whoa there big guy.” Selni caught me as I stumbled forward. “Take it easy, can’t fly with a cracked skull.” He wrapped his tail and an arm around my waist and guided me back to our room.
​
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(tldr towards the end)
  Recently I've been thinking I shouald be more open about my life and what I've been through. I know it's not nearly as bad as the abuses some have endured, but it's left me rather messed up in it's own way. It's a bunch of stuff I've barely ever shared with people, certainly never laid out in full like this before. Originally planned on only sharing this with a few close people, but at some point I started thinking it might be better to fully open up and just sorta dump my whole ass life story somewhere public? And this seemed as suitable a place as any?
Despite trying to keep it down to what felt like the most critical details, it somehow ended up becoming far, far longer than expected or planned. Long enough that I don't really expect anyone here to actually bother reading it. But whatever, I'm largely posting it for my own sake at this point.
  I am legally blind and also on the autistic spectrum. I'd ask that you don't pay too much mind to the autism part though. It's not that I have any problem with the way I am per se, but more than anything I wish I'd never been diagnosed with it.
I'm put in mind of the old Rosenhan experiment, where a handful of regular people falsely claimed to have hallucinations and got sent as patients to psychiatric hospitals. Despite acting completely normal once admitted, they were never able to be recognised as the mentally healthy people they were. The mental health system has improved drastically since then. However, at least in my experience, the way a diagnosis can stick to a person and significantly change of how some people will view and interact with that person is still very much a thing. Even if that diagnosis is accurate, this treatment can still be a problem.
  It started being a thing in primary school. Spent some of my time in a special classroom alongside a few other kids who... probably needed the support a lot more than I did. I admittedly did have some behaviour problems back then, but I'm pretty sure I was doing fine on learning. I remember not enjoying that I had to go to that class, nor liking the people running it, but I don't think my feelings about it were particularly strong back then.
Then middle school came and I think things were actually pretty good and normal at first. There were still various special needs workers and the like who'd sometimes come in to observe me in class, or pull me away for some one on one time with them or whatever. I was growing increasingly unfond of this sort of thing, but compared to before, most of my days were just regular student stuff. But over time I started acting out and getting stressed and things only got worse from there. I believe it started with there being a rule about students having to spend the entire lunch break outside if the weather was good. I have issues with light sensitivity and was not okay with this. Eventually I started refusing to go outside during lunch entirely. The teachers weren't okay with this and tensions rose (In hindsight, I really should've had sunglasses back then. No idea why I didn't)
I don't remember the exact reason, but at some point I got real stubborn and refused to do any work during class. Tensions rose more.
  This all led to me having to start seeing a psychiatrist, though that wasn't very constructive. There's two strong memories I have of him. One is of me and him sitting silently in a room where I was expected to be speaking but for whatever reason wasn't. The other is of him and mum talking about school stuff while I sat there listening, I'd sometimes speak up to try clarify or give context to stuff mum was saying but he'd insist I kept quiet or I'd have to leave the room.
He'd also have some one on one talks with mum while I waited outside. I only know what I've heard from mum talking about it many years later, and she has a tendency to exaggerate or embellish this kind of thing, so take this with a lump of salt. Supposedly he talked to her about how he was going to break me and then the real progress can begin. Then later, when that didn't work, he'd tell her I was the worst kid he'd ever dealt with and was untreatable. Though, again, no idea how true any of that is...
  So progress wasn't happening there, and things at school weren't getting better.
Somewhere along the line one of my special needs people, a visual resource worker who I'm sure was in no way qualified to make this kind of call, got the idea that I was depressed. So she started pushing to get me put on antidepressants. And I guess my psych was over having to deal with me at that point as he seemed to just go with it? And I was just a kid, so when I was told I needed to start taking a pill before school, I just did it without giving it any real thought.
Thing is, I wasn't depressed. I was stressed, angry, and full of anger related adrenalin. The pills did nothing to help any of those things. What they did do was mess with my ability to stay in control of all that. So the anger I'd been keeping bottled up started getting expressed. Physically. I'd often lash out against whoever was getting to me in that moment, which was typically teachers and staff but... not always.
I don't really like thinking about that time much. Don't like what I was. Obviously I put a lot of blame on the meds for messing me up so bad. But the anger itself is just something that's a part of me. As, I fear, is the way I lean towards getting physical when that anger becomes too much. It's something I've been sure to stay keenly aware of ever since.
To their arguable credit, the school did put up with me far longer than it had any right to. But their way of dealing with me wasn't exactly constructive. I don't really remember that time period super well tbh, but a few scattered memories that stand out are: A member of staff lifting me by the collar and holding me against a wall, two staff members dragging me home with one of them digging their fingernails into my hand hard enough it left two small scars (fully faded after a few years), a teacher holding me down over a desk forcing me to look at a piece of paper, and an already tense moment with me on the verge while a staff member was confrontationally saying something to the effect of "you shaking like that doesn't scare me". And then basically every clear weather day saw me being physically dragged by two or three staff members from the school building to the office building. Dragged right through the courtyard where all the other students were sitting for lunch. To be clear, this isn't me trying to play the victim per se, I really was quite bad back then. But, like, this started with me being stressed and angry at people. So I think you can probably see how things only compounded on themselves from there, each side constantly having a harder time and only making it harder for the other in turn.
  So yeah, eventually I got kicked out. Finally stopped taking the pills and only then did I become aware of just how much of an effect they'd been having on me, far too late for it to mean anything. Spent the next few months doing nothing but sitting at home playing computer games or whatever. Meanwhile the, uh, whatever places my various special needs workers come from, along with whatever other vague powers there are that get to decide the major life decisions for people like me, they were all trying to figure out where I should go from there.
  The answer was two years at a boarding school. A special boarding school meant specifically for kids with mental disabilities and learning difficulties.
It was not a good place for me.
(something I only just recently learned looking through some of the old papers my mum kept. Apparently some people thought I had a "fear of failure", and so sending me to a place where I would "perceive myself to be better than my peers" was expected to be good for me?? Perhaps it's that I'm still processing. I feel like I should be really upset to learn this, but for now I'm just too baffled)
  It's weird. Thinking back, this definitely feels like the darkest part of my life, as well as the part that's had the largest lasting impact on me. But when it comes to talking about it? It feels like there's rather little to say? (As I'm thinking about it, writing this out, I'm also finding I've forgotten a lot more of the details than I'd expected)
  To put things in some perspective, I'd learned to read before starting school. In primary school I was always in the top reading group of the class. Boarding school? I was one of the very few kids there who knew how to read at all (ages ranging for pre-teen to late teen). Then there was the boredom. I did have a few books and a gameboy, but that can only occupy a person so much. I ended up spending a lot of time literally just sitting around waiting for time to pass. Would go to the toilet at the slightest need just to fill in a few minutes.
But worst of all was the people. The kids there were... not people I'd think of as peers. Not really people I wanted to have as the entirety of my social experience. (though, spend enough time stuck with nothing but a certain group...) And then the adults were "friendly" but would often talk down to me or interact with me in ways I'd consider far more insulting than something like "the R word". Didn't matter that I was well behaved, properly educated, and unmedicated. I was a kid who had been sent there, so they saw and treated me the same as any other.
  Overall I think if I compared my experience there to being like a mentally healthy person being falsely committed to a mental institute? That maybe wouldn't be an entirely fair comparison, but I don't think it's an entirely wrong one either. I did not belong there.
  As for the school side of things... the principal had a talk with me early on where I made it clear just how much I didn't want to be there and would much rather be going to a normal school. He told me that was an option. That there were kids here who got to go to the local schools instead of the classes here. I expressed interest, but I was still new there and he wasn't willing to trust me right off the bat. Since It was getting close to the end of the school year, and I was due to start high school the year after, the deal was that if I could prove I could behave and be non-disruptive in class for the rest of the year I'd get to go to the local high school at the start of the next. This was of course a very easy goal to reach, now that I didn't have the meds messing me up. The deal didn't actually require me to do any of the work in class, and the work the class was doing was frankly so far beneath me that it was less mind numbing to just sit back and let my thoughts wander. So class became even more of me sitting around waiting for time to pass. Dull, but at least now I had something to look forward to!
As the time to start at the high school got near, the principal and I had more talks about how things were going to work. It was only here that I realised there'd been a miscommunication. All the boarding school kids that went to the high school all went into the same class, with a teacher who worked for the boarding school. Attending normal classes like I'd spent months looking forward to was simply not an option. Though he did make sure to stress how great this particular teacher was. Been working there for however many years and he'd never had a single student complain about her. In hindsight I probably should've taken that as more of a red flag.
She felt less like a teacher and more like a babysitter. I mentioned that the previous classes weren't suited for me, but at least there I could see the other students being challenged and learning stuff. Here? There was the occasional moment where a student would ask question and have something explained, but the bulk of the time it felt like they were just being kept busy with a level of work they were already confident in. It's extremely rude to say, but I'm honestly not sure she was even smart enough to be working as a teacher. The work I was given was still beneath me, but I started out doing it anyway out of some hope that I'd be given harder stuff if I proved I was capable. As time went on I came to realise just how pointless that hope was. So after a few months I once again I stopped doing any of the work. It was demeaning. And so sitting in class doing nothing became the entire rest of my school year.
Oh, but there was one very special moment in the later part of the year! The teacher gave me a book to look at. A teacher book of worksheets that could be photocopied and handed out. She told me it was all stuff for my level. That I could take a look through it and if anything interested me she'd make a copy for me to do. And did I mention this was the exact same work everyone else my age was doing? Because she made sure to assure me of that at least two or three times. So I opened to a random page and had a look, then immediately started searching the book to see who it was actually meant for. Sure enough it wasn't meant for high school students, or even middle school students. Primary. Mid-late primary aged students with learning disabilities. I'd expected little, but wow!
  Of course, this boarding school was never intended to be more than a two year thing, so the powers that be still had to decide what I'd do when I got out. And... it was decided that I'd get to go back into high school back home. The catholic one, so it'd be a fresh start away from all the students who knew me from the mess at middle school. And I'd be attending regular classes as a regular student, for real this time. I'd also be starting at the start of the school year which, with the way the timing of things worked out, meant getting about half a year cut off from the two year stint. Great news all around! It did mean starting the first year of high school over again, since the boarding school never even tried teaching me anything at the proper level, so I'd be a year older than the rest of kids in my classes, but whatever. (though why this all couldn't have just happened a year earlier I'll never know. No idea what was going on behind the scenes with the people making these decisions, but on my end the whole boarding school thing felt like nothing but a huge waste of time with a bunch of added mental trauma on the side)
  So I once again had something to look forward to. A fresh start as a normal student!? The one thing I'd been wanting so deeply since I got kicked out of middle school? I got pretty emotionally invested in the idea, and it really helped carry me through the however many months left of boarding school I still had to get through first.
  Stupid.
Naive.
Should've known better.
Would've known better if I'd let myself think about it for even a moment.
  As much as things had been especially bad the past few years, things had stopped being good and normal for me since long before that. Of course I'd still be getting judged and defined by labels by adults who hadn't even met me. Of course I'd still have to deal with them treating me different than everyone else. Of course it would be worse than before now that a special needs school was part of my history.
There was the usual stuff of course. Being talked down do or having basic stuff extremely overexplained to me. Getting specifically told what an amazingly super good job I was doing when I followed instructions exactly the same as everyone else in class was doing. Same sort of thing any time I did well on a test, only then it was with multiple teachers throughout the day. Doing the best in class was even worse. One teacher I even learned to recognise when they were about to start speaking to me because of a noticeable hesitation they'd have. Every time. Only for me. There was one time where a teacher, without asking, decided to be helpful and go through and organise everything in my bag for me. Middle of class, in front of everyone. And even weird stuff like one teacher who'd hand out worksheets and would always hand one to me last. No matter where I was sitting they'd somehow manage to path around the room in a way that made me last. Exactly the same sheet as everyone else. Not sure they even realised they were doing it. Like, wat? How do I even parse behaviour like that?
And one fun moment that really stands out: Teacher who often writes stuff on the board for the class to copy down in our books. Speaks aloud the words as she writes. Later has questions about how I'm able to copy it down when I can't see that far. Tell her I just listen to what she says, she insists she isn't saying anything. Stops speaking when writing after that. Sure. Sometimes people automatically stop a subconscious habit when it's pointed out to them. Don't give it much thought, just waited for the kid next to me to finish then asked to copy off them. nbd. About a week later mum gets a call from the principal. Apparently "some teachers" suspected that I was faking my low vision. Seriously, what the hell!? Is a lifetime of me successfully deceiving all the experts I've ever seen really more believable than me being capable of finding a simple solution to an everyday problem?
...actually those last four examples were all the same teacher. There were others who talked down to or treated me weird, but this one really stood out. Sometimes wonder if things would've gone differently if I hadn't had to deal with someone that bad so soon after starting there.
Also, I didn't learn this for sure until a fair bit later (though I did have some suspicions), but I understand some staff had some kind of big talk with all the other students in my year. About asperger's and about me and what to expect. I actually have very little idea about what was said here (though apparently violent behaviour was mentioned) but I'm pretty sure I should be pissed. After all, a big part of the reason I came to this school specifically was to have it be a clean slate!
  In some ways things were even worse than boarding school. At least there I was technically treated about the same as everyone else, much as I hated being grouped with them. Now? Stuff like hearing a teacher talk normally to one student, then hear the drastic change in tone of voice the moment they started talking to me? It made things hit in a much sharper way, so to speak.
I don't know if it was because of that, because I'd let myself get my hopes up, or just me being worn down and done with things. But at this point being blatantly talked down to or othered by people was starting to become a pretty big trigger for me, anger wise. It was only getting worse as time went by.
I'd managed to keep things in control, but after about half a year of doing my best, putting up with everything and getting zero sign that things were ever going to improve, I got the sense that I wasn't going to be able to keep this up forever. That unless something changed it would only be a matter of time before things went real bad.
Thinking back, there's probably better ways I could've handled it. But at the time I just let myself fall back into old, safe patterns. I stopped doing any of the work, stopped trying to interact with the teachers I couldn't tolerate, basically just started spending my days sitting in class doing nothing, being as quiet and unresponsive as possible.
This must sound pretty counterintuitive, huh? Acting like this when I'd so desperately wanted to be seen and treated like a regular person? And yet, it worked just as I thought it would. There was a bit of an adjusting period, but after a few months of them failing to get anything out of me they'd mostly just leave me alone. Things started to become far less stressful and I finally started to feel like I'd be able to see high school all the way through to the end.
Sure there were still occasional moments where one of the bad ones would speak or try to interact with me in some way, and the way they treated me in those moments was the same as it'd ever been, but the sheer drop in frequency was enough to make things feel manageable.
...I want to repeat that for emphasis. I started out doing all my school and homework, from being active in class, talking, and generally doing everything I could do to try and be seen as a normal student. And then suddenly went to refusing to write anything down or give any response when they tried to talk to me. And the way they treated me was the same as it'd ever been. The way they talked down to and othered me did not get any worse for this change. It started out as bad as it would ever be right from day one, and nothing I said or did was ever going to change it.
So spending every class sitting around doing nothing became my new normal, again. I still listened and stuff, took in what I could. It wasn't ideal for learning, but I think I managed okay.
To be clear, when I talk about how badly some of the staff treated me, there were also a bunch of teachers who talked to and treated me perfectly normal. Even when I didn't do much in class. The first few years just happened to stick me with a bunch of the worst ones. Things did get a lot better for me after that, especially when I got more freedom to pick my classes. (Mum likes to talk up how smart I am for picking all the sciences. Truth is my only focus when picking classes was to try to get as many good teachers as I could)
Even as things got better I still didn't do the bulk of the work in class, though I did take tests and do at least some of the projects for credits. I already had something that was working for me and didn't want to rock the boat. Another sudden change in behaviour would've surely drawn a lot of unwanted attention.
Naturally some people from the school became pretty sceptical about my chances of passing. Literally having mum sign a paper saying she wouldn't hold the school accountable for my failure at the start of one school year, then trying to stop me from even taking the exams at the end of that same year.
It was actually pretty amusing thinking back. Four times a year there would be a meeting between mum and the school to talk about me. "They will never be able to pass, they haven't done enough work" "The qualifications for this year are a lot harder than last year, they won't be able to pass this time unless they change their behaviour" Up until final year when literally every meeting was about what I'd do the following year when (not if) I failed to graduate. Discussing stuff like if I'd be able to get along with the previous year of kids if I repeated, or if working in the school laundry would be a good place for me.
I did pass in the end. Admittedly only barely, but still.
(None of the good teachers ever showed up to these meetings btw, kinda goes with me considering them the good ones I guess. But it did leave the school side of the meetings rather one sided. It made for a weird moment in my final year when talking to my physics teacher and he casually mentioned the possibility of me scoring higher than the basic passing marks, while others from the school were literally planning for my failure)
  For the final years of high school I was pretty much running on some mix of inertia, stubbornness, and spite. But that's all I had going for me. So, while passing despite expectations to the contrary was satisfying in a metaphorical middle finger kind of way, I had no motivations for anything beyond that. I was done.
My mum and a handful of other people would talk about what a waste it was for me to never go onto university or anything because I'm smart or whatever. But I really was just totally done with everything at that point.
Thinking back, I have some mixed feelings about this. I can kinda imagine a scenario where I go off to uni and it ends up being super good and healthy for me. But I can also very easily imagine the opposite. Like, sure, everybody talks about college and university and how vastly different they are from everything before it. But I'm not part of that 'everybody'. I can't trust that things being that way for everyone else means they'll be that way for me. Seeing my peers all starting to live hands off and independent would've only made it hurt more if I still had to deal with any staff there treating me like I'm incapable, or dealing with the various special needs people who would no doubt still be trying to be involved in my life. Plus, I'd already gotten my hopes up before, thinking that high school would've been different, and got burned for it. Didn't have much optimism left in me after that. And it's not like there were any subjects or anything that had me interested in further education in the first place. ...Which does mean all the time, stress and energy I spent into getting all my high school qualifications ended being a complete waste. But whatever. Sunk cost fallacy or something.
  Never entered any sort of workforce either. I spent all my time at home living as a dependent. Playing games, watching anime, just finding ways to pass the time. I wouldn't say I was happy or fulfilled per se, but I wasn't unhappy either. Wasn't stressed or angry. It was the closest I'd been to content in a very long time.
And then over ten years passed and literally nothing has changed. It's embarrassing to still be comparing things to my time at school when that was so long ago now. But it really does still feel like living this quiet, out of the way existence that doesn't draw anyones attention really is as good as things can get for me.
  So... that's basically the story of how my life ended up becoming broken, empty and meaningless. And, much as I wish things had gone differently, I've more or less made peace with where I'm at.
  tldr: Being diagnosed as autistic caused many people to start othering me, treating me as something far different and/or less capable than my would be peers. As a kid I was put on ill-prescribed medication, then later was sent to a special needs boarding school. All of these things did far more harm than good for me growing up. I admittedly wasn't always the best behaved kid, but even when I got a lot better the way people saw and treated me was the same. Even with adults I was meeting for the first time. By high school I was developing some pretty serious and potentially violent anger issues. Issues that were triggered specifically by adults treating me differently. So simply putting up with it wasn't looking to be a safe option at that point. No matter how well I behaved, or how much I proved myself capable, the way I was treated never showed any hint of getting better. Instead, I found that being withdrawn, saying and doing as little around these people as possible would have them mostly leave me alone. It's the only thing I ever found that made their treatment of me more manageable, and it worked pretty consistently. It made my anger much less of a concern. Though it probably wasn't healthy for me in other ways, long term. Multiple times, for various reasons, I got my hopes up about things changing or getting better in some way, but I was let down every time. So now I just spend my life in my room passing the time, because that's about as good as things get for me and I no longer have it in me to hope for anything more.
  Feel free to question, comment, whatever. Brutal honesty preferred. I can imagine some people having rather critical opinions about some of this, so don't worry about holding back, haha.
  ...
Fuck labels. Fuck the institutions that give them their power. Fuck the people who place them on others. Fuck the people who judge others because of them. Fuck the people who think they know who someone is because of them. Fuck 'em.
People are people.

Picture this: the party throws open the moldy doors to an old catacomb. Piles upon piles of neatly arranged bones line their path, leading to a macabre lectern in the center of the room with a dark tome resting atop it, with a latch fashioned to resemble a gnarled hand desperately clutching the book shut.
Any player or DM who hasn't been living as part of a remote uncontacted tribe their whole life could guess that those bones will animate and attack the moment someone picks up that tome, and I'd argue that the characters should see it coming a mile away as well, since that would probably be just as big a stereotypical adventurer trap in-universe as well.
However, if we simply reskin (pardon the pun) the scneario to used warofrged parts rather than fleshy ones, it becomes dramatically less obvious: The party throws open the rusty gates to an old scrapyard. Piles upon piles of dead warforged lay before them, picked almost clean of metal by rust monsters such that only the stone and wooden parts remain. At the center of it all lies an office desk, atop which rests what appears to be mundane engineering blueprints (actually documents describing powerful warforged-specific necromancy disguised as engineering blueprints), held together by a nondescript three-ring binder with the label "repurposing old Warforged parts" written on the spine. Ain't nobody seeing that horde of skeletons coming!
Another example: if a party walks into a magic item shop and finds the clerk to be a wizened old desiccated figure with sunken eyes and tough, wrinkly skin, it will be nakedly obvious this is an undead of some sort. If however it's instead a rusty warforged with missing bits here and there, capable of only limited jerky movements and who loudly creaks like an unoiled door hinge every time they do so, then the party might not realize this to be the big bad lich they were after the whole campaign until the very end!
Lastly, remember the old D&D movies? the infamously bad ones? yeah me neither. But I do at least remember that one started with a really memorable intro where an evil mage had the book of vile darkness fashioned from his own remains. I'm having a surprising amount of trouble finding an english version of that intro on youtube, so here's my best attempt at recreating those specific lines from memory:

His skin was flayed into parchment. His bones were hammered into hard bookcovers. His blood was dried into ink, and the pages were bound together with cord fashioned from his nerves.

Now let's imagine how that would play out if the evil mage had been Warforged:

Their wooden muscles were pulped and pressed into paper. Their plating was hammered into metal bookcovers. Their lubricants were dried into ink, and their adhesives were salvaged to bind the pages.

Side note: I think I may have come up with the perfect lich phylactery dungeon: It's a long corridor full of various monsters and traps, leading to a room with a black, ominous altar in the center, atop which rests a vial fashioned with human bones. The actual phylactery, meanwhile, was a random pebble mortared into a nondescript wall the party passed five rooms ago.

First / Previous / Next
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My appointment with the psychologist went really well. I felt like a weight on my shoulders had slid off, and that was a testament to her talents as a doctor. We also discussed what had happened to Andrew, though that wasn’t nearly as disturbing as the original purpose of the visit. I woke up to a text from Suzanne that Andrew was recovering well, just as expected, and I mentally breathed a sigh of relief.
It turned out the animal that had been stolen was a small humanoid creature, something we would label as a cryptid, Suzanne told me. It had claws but wasn’t that strong, and actually she described its appearance as ‘spindly with a large head’, and if the robbers had the right tools for the job, it would have been easy to bind and steal it. My heart went out to the animal, wondering where it had gone, who’d bought it, and where it would be kept. I hadn’t even had the opportunity to see it, but I felt the loss, an endangered animal stolen by someone who cared only for its monetary value.
Then Suzanne told me that Andrew would be recuperating for a week, and informed me of the exciting fact that I’d be getting my first tour group in just a few days. I’ve been studying the animals to get more familiar with them, even the ones I hadn’t seen yet. She had indeed gotten me those glasses that were magically spelled or whatnot and I’d memorized facts along with enclosure numbers, so it seemed I was good to go.
Some fun news today is that Yui’s ginormous ping pong ball arrived, and once I assembled it, it turned out to be just as advertised, which means it’s almost as tall as I am. Needing to be assembled from a bunch of curved pieces wasn’t surprising and it wasn’t difficult to do so. Everything slid into place easily; there were twelve pieces that were held together by screws, some of which I attached while sitting inside it, then a ninth piece to cover the last gap. I had to do it outside the office, obviously, since it wouldn’t have fit through the door. Leila came over to watch, standing a dozen yards away and looking at what I was doing, her expression one of bemusement and interest.
Once I was done, I rolled it gradually forward down the path toward enclosure seven. The material it had been constructed from was almost as lightweight as a ping-pong ball, which made its weight surprising considering its size. Aside from notches here and there for a person to grip to move it, the ball was smooth, which would make it easy for Yui to roll it around. The key to this toy was that it wasn’t easily grabbable, so it would be a challenge to maneuver.
“Knock, knock,” I spoke, bringing the ball to a stop. “Special delivery.”
When I arrived, I considered the fence for a moment before grasping two handholds and pushing the ball slightly against the fence, using that to hoist it up and over. The ball bounced a bit as it landed on the other side and I smiled. “All right. Hope you like your new toy,” I murmured. At that, I took a lap around the zoo, since it was about that time, then headed back toward the security room.
On my way there, though, I slowed to a stop when I saw a man taking the little bag out of a garbage bin that hung from a tree and tying it shut, replacing it with a new one. Suzanne had told me that I’d have company and who to expect, and here he was. There were several bins in the zoo, situated along the typical path guests took, about the size of one you’d put in a small bathroom. It didn’t look that full, but they never really were since they weren’t used often. I guess this one had accumulated a few items.
“Hi,” I said, drawing his attention. “You must be John.”
“And you must be Ripley,” he said, holding out a hand for me, glancing up to meet my gaze only briefly. His handshake was polite but meek. “Pleasure to meet you.”
I would’ve said John’s accent was British also, but it sounded different. Thicker. Honestly, when it comes to the accents on that large collection of islands off the coast of Europe, I can’t say I’m an expert. They all sound the same to my uneducated ears. The man was short and had curly gray hair that tapered at his ears, and looked like his white skin had wrinkled from lots of time in the sun, though it wasn’t that tan.
There was something about him that was a little unsettling, the way he slouched, as if he wanted to turn invisible. Even his clothes seemed drab and shabby, though not quite reaching the rating of being threadbare. He wore an old t-shirt with the Arkansas Razorbacks logo, a pair of blue jeans, worn at the pockets, knees, and bottoms, and light brown sneakers darkened from wear and tear.
Picking up a broom he’d left leaning against the tree, he motioned toward the front of the zoo. “I’ll get back to work now,” he said.
“Doing what?” I asked curiously. There wasn’t much to be done, since zoos usually only needed maintenance because of patrons, and we had very few of those.
“Path needs sweeping,” he called over his shoulder, quickly heading off.
I stared after him and let out a breath. “Not a people person, I guess. Well, I can empathize.”
Back at the security room, I took a seat and pulled up the camera for Yui’s enclosure, sitting up straight and smiling, delighted to see that she’d discovered the ball. The giant tarantula was leaning back and using her front two legs to investigate the texture and weight of it. Then she pushed at it, rolling it across the grass. Obviously, I’m not fluent in tarantula body language, but from the fact that she kept playing with it for the next few minutes, I concluded that she liked it.
I grinned and clapped my hands like an excited child, bouncing once in my chair. It probably seems silly, but enrichment was going so well and it really made me happy. Animals deserves to be able to live wild and free naturally, but short of that, I wanted to be able to give them some fun.
The next lap around the zoo had me stopping at enclosure eight, that green lion creature, where the occupant was lounging across a wide boulder. I checked that her eyes were opened and that I wasn’t waking her before calling, “Thank you for telling me about Andrew.”
The animal lifted her head and got up, slowly descending to the ground. “You’re welcome.”
The animal leaned back to stretch her front legs just like a common housecat, and then leaned forward to stretch the back legs before she shook out her mane and turned to me. “I would like some books.”
My eyebrows went up. “Books? To read?”
“No. Not like you read them. I want to be near them. I’ve seen you giving things to the other animals. Can I have a bookshelf full of books?”
I felt the urge to laugh, but I quashed it. It seemed outlandish, but it must have had something to do with its psychic-ish abilities, so it made sense in a strange sort of way.
“Of course,” I replied. “Can I put the shelf out here on the path, or does it need to be inside your enclosure?”
She lowered herself to the ground, splaying out. “Out there is fine.”
“I’ll cover it with plastic so it doesn’t get wet from rain. Do you know how to read?” I questioned.
“No. It’s too hard,” she said. “But I don’t need to. Having to read a book to learn what it says would take a long time anyway.”
I pursed my lips and nodded my agreement. It was hard to argue with that. And it certainly would’ve been a lot easier for me while I’d been attending college classes. On that note, I wondered if putting a flash drive full of a library’s worth of books at the edge of the animal’s enclosure would do the same trick? I was immediately tempted to try, especially considering it would be much easier than buying, assembling, and water-proofing a bookshelf.
Back at the office, grabbing my purse from the table, I sat down in my chair and fished around inside until I found a flash drive. Then I pulled up archive.org on my computer’s monitor, searching for fiction books. After I’d downloaded a few dozen, I ejected the drive and headed back out to Sun’s enclosure.
She hadn’t moved from where she’d been when I left. “Hello,” she said, her tail whipping in curiosity like a cat’s would.
“Hello again. I have a new device here,” I said, putting the flash drive on the ground just short of the fence. “It has books on it. Can you read them?”
Sitting up a little straighter, Sun blinked languidly and paused for a moment before saying, “Yes, I can.”
I bounced a little bit again in delight. “Awesome. That’s awesome.”
“Is that a book?”
“Oh, no, it’s just got books inside it,” I said.
Sun slowly got to her feet and wandered over, and my muscles tensed as my brain urged me to take a few steps backwards the closer she got. Despite the warding and the fact that she wasn’t looking hungry, my instincts were still determined to protect me from her. “That looks too small to have books inside it.”
“Oh, ah…it’s…complicated,” I said. “But humans found out how to store data on things like this. It’s great that this is just like a bookshelf for you, because I can get so many things for you to read.”
“I’d like that very much.”
“Is there anything specific you like to read? Fiction or nonfiction? Specific genres?”
“I like both information that is true and stories that are made up,” Sun told me. “Humans make things of all kinds and I love all of them.”
At that, Sun wandered back over to the large boulder she’d been on and lay back down on it, as if she were sunbathing in the red light of the lamps. I left the flash drive there so Sun could keep…absorbing the info, or whatever it was she was doing, knowing that I could dig out another from my disorganized, chock-full-of-stuff purse. There was also the possibility of going to Suzanne for permission to buy books, and I wondered if I could use my library card. I could literally get her a different bunch of eBooks every day.
I did indeed find another flash drive floating around, and loaded on as many books as I could find for free. I also found a small old plastic bag, and I put the flash drive in it, to protect it from the elements.
Going back to enclosure eight, I found Sun laying on her back, in that long, upside-down pose cats were fond of. “I have more books for you,” I said with a smile.
“Yes?” She turned over. “I’ve only read one of the books so far from that little thing.”
I blinked and looked down at the flash drive on the ground, picking it up. “You already read one?” I exclaimed. I shouldn’t have been surprised, really. This was learning by osmosis, not actually reading the books.
“I did.”
“Well then it’s a good thing I’ve come with so many more,” I said, putting the other drive in the plastic bag with the new one. I left it on the ground where it had been and stood, my hands on my hips. “I’m taking over for Andrew for a tour. Is there anything you think I should know?”
“There are many things you should know, but you will learn them in time,” she replied.
Apparently when it comes to advice, sometimes Sun is just about as good as a horoscope.
​
First / Previous / Next
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/storiesbykaren

First Flight: Best Friends, Bulldogs, Daters, Father & Son, Ice Dancers, Police Cadets, Pranksters
Second Flight: Fashion Bloggers, Geniuses, Jocks, Mother & Daughter, Rockers, Sisters, Vegans
Third Flight: Adversity Twins, Extreme Girls, Goths, Party Dudes, Stepbrothers, Tennis Rivals, Villains
Episode 2: None Down, Twenty-One to Go - Part Two
"Last time on the Ridonculous Race. Twenty-one teams started a race around the world. After a lot of running, waiting, even more running, confronting fears, and pushing themselves further than I thought possible, everyone reached the airport and booked themselves on three different flights to Morocco."
"Flight number one with seven teams aboard has already departed. The next seven teams are on flight number two, which is about to take off. Meanwhile, the Goths, Villains, Extreme Girls, Adversity Twins, Party Dudes, Stepbrothers, and Tennis Rivals' flight will not be departing for another hour.
"Will one of these teams suffer the ultimate reality show humiliation and get kicked off first? Time to find out! This is, The Ridonculous Race!"
(Theme Song)
[The intro begins with an overview of the Earth before a hand holding a Travel Tip appears. The camera zooms in, revealing the silhouettes of all twenty-one teams running in three rows: the top row held from left to right the Fashion Bloggers, Adversity Twins, Rockers, Vegans, Tennis Rivals, Pranksters, and Villains running to the right against a blue city street background; the second row had from left to right Father & Son, Police Cadets, Goths, Bulldogs, Daters, Sisters, and Party Dudes running to the left against a golden desert background; and the bottom row held from left to right the Best Friends, Geniuses, Jocks, Ice Dancers, Stepbrothers, Mother & Daughter, and Extreme Girls running to the right against a green jungle background. The scene shifts to a map of the world, showing the visited countries being highlighted by yellow dots. The camera zooms in on one of those dots and it becomes the background as three postcards depicting the inside of a fancy restaurant, a beautiful and nondescript beach, and the Parisian skyline are 'thrown' onto it. A Travel Tip then cuts the scene into three sections, each showing the silhouette of a different mode of transportation that are used throughout the race; a train against a gold background, a plane against a blue sky background, and a bus against a green background all three heading to the right. A taxi stops by and opens its door as the camera zooms in, showing pictures of all twenty-one teams each appearing in three rows during one of the ending flourish of notes. The top row held from left to right the Fashion Bloggers, Stepbrothers, Pranksters, Father & Son, Sisters, Geniuses, and Daters; the second row had from left to right the Goths, Adversity Twins, Extreme Girls, Surfer Dudes, Jocks, Mother & Daughter, and Best Friends; and the bottom row held from left to right the Tennis Rivals, Villains, Police Cadets, Ice Dancers, Rockers, Vegans, and Bulldogs. In the end, the scene cuts to the main logo of the Ridonculous Race with a plane that flies across the screen, spinning the N.]
"Fourteen teams are already on their way to Morocco," Don narrated over two planes flying towards Morocco on the world map before the scene moved to the airport. "Seven are still at the airport, waiting anxiously."
The camera cut to Mickey holding a bottle with bubbles on the label. "Sanitizer?" Mickey asked.
"No need," Jay answered. "I made a point of not touching anything. Juice?" he offered a red box with the image of a cherry on it, oven mitts on his hands.
This was when the Villains entered the scene. "How are you clones so eager to take on a challenge like this when you barely have any muscle?" Max asked them.
"We're twins, not clones," Mickey corrected him.
"And just because we're weak, doesn't mean we lack any form of confidence," Jay said.
Max rolled his eyes and turned to Tammy. "We must get going. We shall not let their bad luck affect us," he said before they walk out of the scene.
"Your plan won't work, mom!" Chet said into a pay phone. "We're not gonna become friends! Because Lorenzo is a poo-head. That's why! Can't you just divorce his dad?"
Chet slammed the phone into the pay phone booth in frustration and crossed his arms.
"Hey, was that my dad?" Lorenzo asked as he came into view.
"No," Chet told him. "It was my mom, and I already ended the call!"
Lorenzo didn't listen regardless and he took the phone and dialed the number. "Dad!" he yelled. "You gotta divorce Chet's mom!"
"Quit it!" Chet snatched the phone from him, and the two boys began a tug-of-war over the phone.
"Let go!" Lorenzo said.
"Mom!" Chet whined.
"Dad!" Lorenzo whined as well.
"Finally, a team I can admire!" Max said as the scene cut to the Villains standing next to the Goths.
"Your style is very dark and gloomy," Tammy complimented.
"I recommend that we both team up," Max grinned. "Together, we can dominate this race and everyone in it!"
Max let out his famous laugh, but the Goths just sighed and walked away, making him stop laughing quickly.
"So that's a no from them," Tammy commented as Max met up with her.
"Their silence was unusual anyway," Max sniffed.
World Interview: Villains
"I met Tammy after Pahkitew Island ended," Max explained, "and we've been allies ever since."
"Max was holding auctions for sidekicks," Tammy explained to the camera. "I was not invested at first, but once he showed me his inventory and bedroom, I signed up for it."
"I do have the power of appealing to people with my brilliant mind," Max said boldly.
Interview Ends
"Morocco!" Don narrated. "Originally named Italy, until it was discovered there already was an Italy. Home to scorchingly hot foods, as well as scorchingly hot deserts."
"Flight number one has just landed," he said as the plane landed at the Moroccan airport. "Now the teams need to find the Don Box and collect their next travel tip.
After Don walked away from the Don Box, the camera panned to the right to show the Ice Dancers, Police Cadets, Father & Son, Daters, Best Friends, Bulldogs, and Pranksters running out of the building.
Jacques pressed the button on the Don Box and grabbed the tip. "The Spice is Right," he read. "It's an 'All-in'!"
"An 'All-in' requires that both team members take part in the challenge. In this case, teams must make their way to Yussef's Spice Kiosk," Don said next to the Moroccan man wearing a fez, "and chose five spices from the bountiful array."
"Some are…" he reached out to touch one of the spices, but had his hand slapped away by Yussef. "Some are sweet, but some are so blistering hot, they'll turn your tummy into a volcano of pain."
"It says," Devin read the tip, "pick five spices from the kiosk. Ideally, cumin, cinnamon-"
"-paprika," the scene cut to Dwayne reading mid sentence, "saffron and ginger-"
"-to receive your next travel tip," Windsor finished as the shot cut to her and Val. Both girls looked up in time to see the other teams trample over them and get into taxis.
The seven taxis drove off, and Windsor's hand rose up with the tip. "Taxi!" she called out.
"See that?" Dwayne cheered as the shot cut to him and Junior inside their taxi. "Right into a taxi and headed for Spice Town! We're doing great, pal. Yeah!" he continued while holding his son's head, and Junior just groaned.
World Interview: Father & Son
"I'm Dwayne, this is Dwayne Junior," Dwayne introduced.
"They already know that," Junior told him.
"Uh, we're a- we're a father and son team," Dwayne continued.
"They know that too, dad," Junior said.
"Well," Dwayne chuckled, "we're gonna win this thing! Bet they didn't know that! News flash! Just in! Father and Son team win the million!" He made an applause sound with his mouth.
Outside Interview: Daters
The scene cut to the Daters inside a blue taxi. "I know a lot about spices," Stephanie said proudly. "I eat them in restaurants."
"She does," Ryan chimed in before looking at his girlfriend. "You do. And I love that you know about them."
Stephanie gasped. "I love how you love that!"
The two began making out.
Outside Interview: Pranksters
The shot cut to a white taxi, which the Pranksters were inside of. "You're probably wondering why I'm watching over Windsor in the race rather than one of her parents," Val said. "I'll let her explain it."
"Definitely," Windsor grinned. "My parents are well-meaning, but they'd obviously limit my creativity when it comes to messing with people if I had one of them with me."
"And since I'd often babysit for her when we were younger, her dad and mom allowed me to be her partner so they can focus on their jobs," Val explained.
"With Val on my side, we can both cause havoc for the other teams," Windsor said until she noticed Val's raised eyebrow. "But in a non-evil way."
Interviews End
"Meanwhile," Don narrated as the scene cut to the second plane in flight, "the teams on flight number two prepare for cold-hearted battle.
"Oh, I'd look so good in that," Jen said as the shot cut to her reading a magazine. She hears the sound of snoring, and looks over to see Tom wearing a neck pillow and sleep mask.
Jen stood up and rearranged the situation off-screen. She sat back down, and the camera cut to Tom wearing an oxygen mask that muffled his snoring.
Outside Interview: Rockers
The scene cut to Rock and Spud eating sandwiches in their seats. "Spud and I have never been on a plane before," he explained. "Not scared though," he added, "I've seen lots of planes on TV."
"Uh," Spud said dully, "oh yeah! I love that cartoon."
Interview Ends
"Some of the teams from flight one have reached the spice kiosk," Don narrated as the Daters, Police Cadets, Bulldogs, Best Friends, and Ice Dancers ran to Yussef.
"These aren't labeled. Why aren't they labeled?" Ryan asked as he looked at the spices.
"It's this one!" Carrie pointed at one of the spices. "This is cinnamon! This is cinnamon! This is cinnamon!"
World Interview: Best Friends
"Cinnamon," Devin said wackily, "cinnamon, cinnamon, cinnamon!" They both laughed.
"You totally would've missed it," Carrie told him.
Devin laughed. "As if I would've missed it."
"I'm the one who lives for cinnamon lattes," Carrie bragged.
"Yeah," Devin said, "which you constantly spill on me."
Carrie chuckled. "Fair enough. I'll never doubt your ability to detect cinnamon again."
Interview Ends
Stephanie sniffed one of the spices. "Wait," she said, "that's cumin. Yes!" she said as Yussef went to scoop the spice. "Uh, no! No! Wait! Yes! No! Yes!"
She then yelled "Scoop it!" into his face, startling him.
MacArthur, Devin, Josee, and Bark were shown picking spices, Yuseff scooping them into small sacks.
Jacques chose a spice and received a sack with a travel tip attached to it. "That's five," he said confidently.
"After selecting five spices," Don narrated over the teams reading their tips, "the teams get their next travel tip from Yussef."
Jacques gasped. "We have to ride to a restaurant in the desert. On a camel!"
The scene panned to seven camels near some palm trees. They were all swarmed with flies, and one of them spat onto the road.
"Is there a restaurant around here?" Sanders asked as the teams ran to their camels, and she received no answer from Yuseef.
The footage skipped ahead to the exhausted five teams on their camels making their way through the desert. The Police Cadets were in front, followed by the Best Friends, Daters, Bulldogs, and Ice Dancers.
"Gross," Carrie complained. "Man, do these camels stink."
MacArthur sniffed her armpit and recoiled in disgust, but she kept it to herself.
"As the first teams head off into the desert," Don narrated, "flight number two arrives in Morocco," he said as the scene cut to the Fashion Bloggers, Mother & Daughter, Geniuses, Rockers, Jocks, Vegans, and Sisters dashing out of the airport.
Tom mashed the button for the Don Box, and it was followed up by the Vegans getting into a taxi. The other taxis followed with Mother & Daughter running after them. "Taxi!" Taylor yelled. "Hurry up, mom!"
"Meanwhile," Don narrated over a shot of the third plane in flight, "flight number three is finally in the air and teams discuss some strategy."
The scene cut to the Party Dudes in their seats and holding some pretzels.
"If you try it with a higher arc, you're boss," Geoff instructed.
"I won't let you down, dude," Brody declared before tossing a pretzel onto a snoring Gerry's mouth as he and Pete were sleeping with blankets covering them along with pretzels. "Score!"
"Wow. Those are a lot of spices," Windsor said as the scene flashed to her, Val, and Father & Son at the Spice Kiosk.
World Interview: Pranksters
"I must say, I'm kinda hyped for this challenge," Val said. "I'm a big fan of spices."
"So am I," Windsor grinned. "They're super hot, and they come in handy for when I want to make drinks and beverages interesting for my prank victims."
"You did get a week's worth of detention for that stunt," Val mentioned.
World Interview: Father & Son
"It's not a man's job to know spices," Dwayne said. "In ancient times, women were the spice collectors and men were the hunters!"
"Those were the days," he continued. "Yeah, men had all the power and-"
"You know Mom's gonna see this on TV?" Junior interrupted. "Right?"
"And, uh, times have changed," Dwayne finished. "Yay!"
Interviews End
"Oh no," Junior called out as he saw the taxis arriving. "The other teams are coming! We're gonna lose our lead!"
"Uh, let's just pick out any five," Dwayne said.
"Good plan," Val agreed. "Just give us the five closest to you," she told Yussef.
"Just do it!" Windsor commanded and got in his face. "We're in a race, and we don't want to waste time."
"Exactly," Val nodded. "If you're feeling charitable, we could borrow some of the unused spices."
Two taxis stopped, and the Vegans and Geniuses exited out of them.
World Interview: Geniuses
"We predict there's an eating element to the next challenge," Mary told the camera. "So, picking the right spices is of the utmost importance."
Interview Ends
"Cumin, cinnamon, paprika, saffron, ginger," Ellody and Laurie said in unison.
"That was surprisingly elementary," Ellody stated.
"I know, right," Laurie agreed.
"As more teams reach the spice kiosk," Don narrated over the Vegans and Geniuses leaving and the rest of the flight two teams arriving, "flight number three has finally arrived in Morocco," he finished as the plane landed.
The scene skipped ahead to the Villains, Stepbrothers, Adversity Twins, Tennis Rivals, Extreme Girls, Party Dudes, and Goths all leaving the airport. "They'll need to hurry if they hope to catch any of the teams already in search of the culinary," he finished as the five teams were shown to still be in the lead.
The scene cut to the Pranksters looking sweaty and worn-out on their camel, and Father & Son handling the heat better.
"Yah yah!" Dwayne said as he kept slapping the animal's flank. "Faster boy! Yah!"
"Dad?" Junior said after he saw their camel looking tired, "I think the camel's going to pass out!"
"Not to worry, son!" Dwayne told him. "Camels are the ships to the desert. They're tireless!" He slapped its flank a couple more times and it collapsed.
"Oh great," Dwayne complained as they were all on the floor. "We got a broken one."
"Last one," Emma pondered as the shot cut to her and Kitty at the spice kiosk. "Cumin... cumin..."
"I think it's this one," Kitty pointed at the bag next to her.
The scene cut to a taxi dropping off the Adversity Twins and back to the Sisters.
"This is no time for guessing games, Kit!" Emma shot at her. "Uh, I don't know. This one?" she pointed at a random orange spice and watched Yussef scoop it.
"So you can guess but I can't?" Kitty asked.
"Mine is an educated guess," Emma told her and received the bag. "Can you please not throw a temper tantrum right now?" She ran off, and Kitty felt shocked. "Hurry up!" Emma yelled, prompting Kitty to follow after her.
The Adversity Twins arrived, and Jay leaned toward one of the spices. "Is this one cinnamon?" he wondered and sniffed it. He sneezed, and the dust cloud took over the whole screen as the twins coughed.
(Commercial Break)

TL;DR: I grew to hate how I look as a result of getting into mewing. I feel like we, as a species, were forced into an unnatural lifestyle that caused our bodies to mutate into an unhealthy, ugly mess, and now, because of Mike Mew's work, we are being held to the beauty standards of perfect physical development.
I have a lot of things to say, and even though I understand that not all people will read everything, I feel the need to pour my thoughts out.
I am a 22-year-old woman, and unfortunately, it so happened that I learned about mewing only a few months ago. Before Mike Mew and his work gained significant popularity among Gen-Zers after the release of his “Ultimate Mewing Guide” on YouTube, I was not even aware this practice existed. It made me regret many life decisions, ironically, including not being insecure enough about my looks during my teens. Mewing made me regret being okay with my face and not having an obsession with my jawline during a time when kids are supposed to be happy and carefree.
It’s been about a month since I started mewing and I fully believe that tongue posture and craniofacial structure have a direct correlation. When I listen to Mews’ lectures, it feels like puzzle pieces falling into place. Their theories are so logical and spot-on that you begin to question how it is even possible for orthodontics to exist for centuries, or even thousands of years, without dentists realizing that problematic teeth are not a genetic trait. How come these people still treat malocclusion in children using braces? Moreover, mewing improves breathing and can potentially prevent migraines, as those often happen as a result of palatal shrinkage.
But aside from talking about the incredible health benefits of mewing, there is no doubt Mike Mew also places great emphasis on how oral posture affects the attractiveness of one’s face. When you listen to him, it sounds like he is driven to solve the problem of prevailing “ugliness” in the modern population. The amount of work he puts into analyzing the ideal facial structure is astounding. He shares a lot of valuable information on what a person must do to achieve a better-looking face. But my question is, did the problem of ugliness exist in the first place? Do people actually see down-swung faces as unattractive? By providing the instructions on how to improve one’s appearance from the get-go his work automatically assumes that this is the case, but is it really?
While I agree with Mike on most of his theories, whenever I hear things like “A face of a mouth-breather”, it makes me feel nothing but pain, and the reason for that is mewing works most effectively for reshaping the bones in adolescents and young adults, and according to the man himself, after 25 years of age, it is practically impossible to make any significant changes by utilizing proper oral posture.
So, do women really only find men who have a chiseled jawline and pronounced cheekbones attractive? I know I am only one example, but before learning about mewing, I never identified the facial features of a mouth breather as flawed, or even identified them at all, for that matter. I considered a smaller jaw as much of an individual trait as the shape of one’s nose or eyebrows. Yes, looking back on it now, it is an incorrect judgment, as most of the time a weak jawline is a result of an incorrect oral posture and a sedentary, relatively unhealthy lifestyle, but this is beside the point. I distinctly remember having a few crushes on guys in the past who would be considered to have a weak jawline. It’s just to show you how diverse women’s tastes really are.
So why must broad jaws matter, if I was and am genuinely attracted to guys who don’t possess them? Why must it matter, if nowadays, we no longer require large masseter muscles to chew on raw meat for our survival? Why must a slight down-swinging of the maxilla be seen as an unfavorable trait if it did not get so far that it impacts one’s health? Why should the purely aesthetic aspect of all of this matter?
In my opinion, mewing and orthotropics is a wonderful field of study that should be used to spread awareness about the small jaw epidemic and dental malpractices that genuinely ruin people’s faces. It is great for preventing malformities in future generations as well as treating adults who have problematic craniofacial structures that impact their health. But unfortunately, most people, when they hear the word “mewing”, picture a magic exercise that will make them look like sexy Squidward.
I see it very clearly, mewing has become a tool that enables insecurities to grow spread, and fester.
As I stated before, prior to watching videos on orthotropics on YouTube, I was completely unaware of the fact that forward development is deemed as aesthetic perfection. And now, I often subconsciously analyze the facial structure of random people I see in public when I never did in the past. Worst of all, I started seeing my own face as putridly ugly, when in the past, I considered myself to be not very attractive, but at least not looking worse than an average person. And, recently, I realized this might be something that is happening not only to me but, probably, to many people interested in orthotropics.
So, do we really care about beauty standards, or is this idea being actively pushed on us by the looks-maxing mentality? To me, personally, it looks like Mike’s focus on looks in relation to mewing not only does not help solve the problem, but instead, it is actively creating it. Or at least, it makes it severely worse, because, even if there were people like me, who did not care about perfect jawlines before, then from now on, their numbers are going to be dropping in the near future as mewing gets more and more attention.
“You aren’t ugly, you have bad habits»
Well, does pushing with all the forces of your tongue on your maxilla in hopes of getting the face of a model sound like a good habit? Or performing inter-oral pulling or b0ne-smashing? And also, rating and judging other people’s faces, and suggesting to undergo plastic surgeries in case they are too old for mewing, so “it’s over for them”. Are these the good habits people are talking about?
And if we do follow the logic of “Mouth-breather face = bad habits”, what will the reasons for the malformation of one’s face be? What are the things that ugly no-good modern-day Quasimodos did, that are now being used as a valid excuse for others to judge them for their physical flaws? First of all, according to Mike Mew, breastfeeding plays a huge role in the development of natural proper oral posture. (Only 34.5% of women breastfed exclusively for the first 6 months as of the years 2000-2008 according to this article https://www.cdc.gov/mmwpreview/mmwrhtml/mm6205a1.htm#:~:text=Among%20infants%20born%20in%202000,16.0%25%20breastfed%20for%2012%20months.) Second, human jaws require a consistent and considerable amount of work for them to achieve good development. (Modern diet is progressively becoming softer, and more processed). Third, the human body requires a lot of physical activity, running, and walking to maintain optimal and healthy back posture, which subsequently affects the structure of the skull. (I don’t know the statistics, but nowadays, most likely most of us can’t survive without sitting at a computer for 6+ hours a day). Next, humans are becoming more allergic as time goes on, which makes many acquire mouth-breathing habits during childhood (the kid with hamster allergies case demonstrates this very well). And finally, a quick Google search reveals that about 45% of children have to wear braces to fix their crooked teeth, at the age when they don't yet have full rights to consent to procedures like this. Also, having neglectful parents can lead to prolonged bad oral habits, like thumb-sucking that lead to poor dental development (this happened to me).
Do all these things look like bad habits that one can easily and consciously fix? Adding a bit of exercise to one's life can do some good, that's a nice habit for sure! But what about all the other stuff... And what if you are approaching the age when your bones don't grow anymore?
Yes, Orthotropics gave us a reasonable explanation for why some people are uglier than others, but do the factors contributing to poor facial growth depend on chance any less than if unattractiveness were a result of a genetic code? Does being born into a good, caring family depend on our own choice any more than our genetic makeup?
To get to the point, I don’t understand why people should be ashamed of their appearance when the modern lifestyle is literally doing everything to prevent the healthy growth and physical development of children. Cavemen did have beautifully wide dental arches, high cheekbones, and heavy mandibles, but did they have to spend 12 years of their adolescent life sitting at a school desk, studying, doing homework, and trying to get good grades? Maybe they also produced some impressive pieces of art, music writing, etc.? Then why should we be ashamed of the fact that we did not manage to keep our bodies at peak physical performance, while also studying, or god forbid, having an extracurricular interest that also involves a lot of sit-down work and is time-consuming?
I, myself, wasn’t ever a mouth-breather! I just had an absolutely awful back posture all my life because I decided to dedicate my life to producing electronic music from the young age of about 13, which requires an endless amount of hours sitting at the computer. And now I get to be called ugly and lazy for it. I never even played video games in my life, ever! I don’t drink and I don’t smoke, and I’m not overweight, and yet I have to hate myself and how I look?? Just because of my passion?
It feels like we were forced into this unnatural, for our species, lifestyle that causes our bodies to mutate into an unhealthy mess and yet we still have to carry the guilt and shame of its consequences. It also feels like we must feel ashamed for not knowing the truth earlier about the underlying causes of poor facial development, even though this information is actively being withheld from the general population by orthodontics.
It makes me feel awful looking at how quickly the image representing “The face of a mouth breather” vs “The face of a nose-breather” is spreading, thanks to Mike Mew. The way it labels people based on their appearance is almost comparable to a racist caricature. It seeps into young adults' minds and makes them put people into categories, even if they never thought of this stuff before.
I’m not suggesting to ditch mewing as a whole and to continue living as uneducated, unhealthy modern apes. I’m asking people to stop cultivating an environment where we obsess over unfavorable facial features that people get as a result of, mostly, circumstances beyond their control and that do not carry any health risks. Mewing may bring health benefits in the form of sleep apnea prevention, but it also changes the mindset and I don't think this is a good change.