So as you all know, Sword Art Online is a popular anime, hovering in and around thr top 100 globally (even top 50), but it is notorious for having a lot of hate.The series started off promising, but eventually lost itself throughout the translatiom from the Light Novels and the poor decisions made in the anime.
This hot take is that SAO should restart and perhaps start from scratch again. I believe this is the correct choice for continuing the series as it can both revitalize the series and abolish criticisms held for the anime so far.
But first, why is SAO so hated despited being so popular? There are many things people point out. Deus ex machina, lack of character development for Kirito, disturbing sexual scenes, harem, pacing, etc. Emotional scenes are practically forced onto viewers. It is a good anime, but not even the biggest SAO fan can all these accusations.
So why should SAO restart from scratch? I believe that all these problems can be fixed if the anime just backtracked, made a reboot/remaster, and tweaked a whole bunch of things. SAO has a lot of potential, as shown by the Abridged being unironically people's favourite anime.
What can be done in a restart: Adding more episodes in important arcs. For example, Sword Art Online felt really rushed in the anime, and the episodes given felt a lot like fillers. Things contradict each other, and characters other than Asuna and a few others are flat and don't add much to the story. By extending arcs like SAO (Alfheim is fine at its length, we don't need more Alfheim), we get fleshed out character development, a better connection to the game, better fights, etc. The main appeal from the start was the new worlds the anime showed us, and making the worlds more engaging leads to more appeal. Also, it leads to less bullshit and a better explanation of powers, making it seem less like a random conjure of bullshit when something impossible happens. Maybe making the SAO even 5-15 episodes longer would benefit the series greatly. Fixing harem. I am not super opposed to the harem in SAO, but it can be toned down a little. Maybe make it more subtle and friendly than every character just loving Kirito after 5 seconds. some like Lisbeth and Sachi sure, it makes sense, but Suguha and many others can be slightly altered to make it less defined. Remove inappropriate scenes. Change them to a scene that conveys the same message of fear that it was supposed to convey, but remove the fanservice/disgusting scenes that ruined the anime. Give Kirito a little more personality. Kirito can stay more or less the same, as his purpose is to act as a self-insert, but give him something unique at the very least, just to differentiate himself slightly. At the very least, show how he became as strong as he was, instead of just randomly saying it and then using his OP powers. More action and less side quests. I think there was a grand total of like 4 or 5 complete fights in Season 1? Make it a little higher, as SAO should have a oretty good balance of everything. More Asuna and Kirito. These two characters carried Season 1. Their dynamic has to be one of the best in any anime when it comes to relationships. More Asuna and Kirito moments would be welcome, and the romance part of the series is definitely one of its strong points. It also ties in to the fact the harem sucks, because we have these two actually well written characters.
These are small changes, but these small changes could go a long way into turning SAO into the anime it once tried to be. I believe SAO has the potential to be a top 10 anime, but at the rate it slowly fell out of relevance, it might be hard getting it back to proper mainstream.

I wanted to post this because I see many going through a similar, tough buying time. I hope my story gives you a boost and helps you keep going. There is my sad backstory that you can skip to "Dec, 2020" that starts the home journey. This post is extremely long but emotional for me. Please be kind.
The only house i ever lived in was my uncles, for 2 years (age 3-5) before he removed us.
My mother suffers from many tribulations, and it was reflected in life. We apartment hopped for all of my childhood. I'll never forget how hurt I was, leaving behind my valuables everytime we downsized, (dressers, my desk, doll houses etc) being cramped, no pets allowed (i love animals), neighbors banging on their ceilings when I played, hearing families fight as if they next to me, smoke coming in the windows, constant new neighbors, roaches and other infestations due to neighbors, etc.
My mom would drive around and say, “this is going to be our new house!” And get my hopes up, but it never happened. My sister (she's 5 years older) said she would buy a house for us all, and that lasted a few months before we were evicted again, moving to another apartment.
I asked constantly when we could get a house like my uncle or sister. My father had one (my parents divorced when I was an infant), and when I visited, I wished I had my own backyard, pets. I was jealous of my friends who lived in houses. I would pretend vacant homes were mine, walk to the new homes being built, and watch their progress. Imagine my future in it where my kids would know stability.
After Bullying in school (from 4th - 12th grade), SA from my father, (i was 15) neglect, abuse, depression, self harm, apartment hopping, I was desperate to move out and away once I turned 16 (emancipation). I moved from NJ when i was 18 to FL and started my own downhill spiral of DV, homelessness, repossessions, and other mentally and physically draining circumstances that pushed my limits, money, and everything
In 2017, I picked up my pieces and gathered them, alone, to AZ into the best apartment and neighborhood i ever had. I told myself that after a year, I was going to buy a home there. In 2018, I reached out to realtors and was told all I needed to do was pay off 2k of credit card debt to qualify for 250-300k. The dumbest decision I ever made was saying spending 2k was stupid. I wish I had the recourses, support, anything, or anyone to tell me to do it. had I done it, I could have bought my dream home then for 200-275k
In Dec 2020, I had been with my now husband for 3 years, went through hell in the apartments he wanted us to move to for more space, away from that neighborhood I loved. Someone stole our bikes, smoked weed next to our window, and then our new car was stolen and required 3k in repairs. I was miserable. I wanted to end the cycle of apartments and putting away my wants and needs, so we decided to begin paying things off to get pre qualified. Then came the new battlefield.
As you all know, 2021 until today, it hasn't been a buyers market. I had no idea what any of that meant until I was told I was approved to start putting in offers in January 2022. We were pre approved for a max of FHA 350k from a lender that I was sure had our backs after getting tons of denials and pisspoor brokers who couldn't care less about my childhood dream. I pulled up the MLS and saved about 30 homes a week, if not more, that were 375k and below, all the way down to 150k trailer homes, condos, townhomes, and houses.
Half of those listings were sold (pending) within 5 days. the other half we were bidding upwards against. I couldn't believe it. I was told the market is hot, lots of people selling their homes in bordering states and putting higher end offers on the homes in our price range because they were selling their homes for 500k and using the differences to buy the cheap homes. The others were investors.
After doing all of the work for my husband and roommate and then some to qualify, I was now battling 15+ people on one home multiple times. I was told to try going further out. The market I was in was too desirable. I was like, REALLY? PEOPLE GET SHOT HERE ONCE A WEEK, HOW IS THIS NEIGHBORHOOD, "HOT"??? I was told to shop beneath my budget, shop outside the location I wanted, everything you are all being told today to, "land a home, stay in it for five years, then sell it and get what I want." But I heard none of it, I wanted my DREAM home on my first buy, which wasn't a lot.
All I wanted was a 1300-2000sqft home with a front and backyard for my dog and kids, a house that didn't need a crap ton of repairs, and a neighborhood I felt comfortable in so that I wouldnt have to deal with all the things I did since I was little. I didn't care if it was upgraded, carpeted, or tile, old or new, I just wanted space, safety, a yard.
It didn't matter. Even if I sacrificed a yard, square footage, whatever, I was getting outbid. Every home I could afford was being bought in cash, waiving inspections, having a 14 day close, and/or being bought 25k to upwards of almost 200k over asking even if it was a fixer upper!! I could not compete.
In April, I FINALLY had an offer accepted in a town that was 30 minutes from work, building up, and beautiful. I was willing to sacrifice commute time and everything for this beautiful house that checked all the boxes. It was 2,060 sqft, upstairs and downstairs, a 5k lot, in a beautiful neighborhood. We were able to get a third cosigner (lomg time friend) to up our income and get to 375k. But then I found out my preapproval wasn't so pre approved.
Having a 3rd co signer meant nothing. We needed to reserve money that we weren't informed about, DPA wanted us to pay off more debt, and we needed more income than the THREE of us had. I was livid, why didnt they tell us any of this? Why did they say our income was enough, and the DPA would cover everything?! I knew nothing, I tell you, nothing, and I should have researched more. But I was desperate.
My grandma stepped in. First, she needed a credit score. She opened up an unsecured credit card for 300. Bought gum, paid it off. We did a rapid rescore, and it shot her up to 7 freggin 735, SEVEN THIRTY FIVE LMFAO, and then we needed her social security letters. Which took two weeks too long, pushing back a close the seller REALLY WANTED TO CLOSE ON, which my realtor convinced them to hold off. Well, guess what? My grandma doesn't have a government id. She hadn't updated her id since 2005. No biggie, we'll get her to the DMV, which we had to reschedule online to 3 different locations. Well, guess what? Her mail, old id, her social security card, AND BIRTH CERTIFICATE all had DIFFERENT VARIATIONS of her name, and DMV couldn't verify her identity.
It would take two months to correct those issues. I threw my phone, scratched my arms to oblivion, fell on my knees, and cried. The lender said there was no way the loan was to be approved without Grandma. My sweet Grandma of 4 different names. I feel the tears, even now. I lost it. I fought for a home all my life and lost it because of being uninformed, way too broke ( I know I know), and then some. I felt like the universe was against me.
So May comes around, and my realtor says, "Listen, let's try this. Let's do rent to own. They pay for everything, and then you save, fix your credit, and buy the house back at the value of the contract paying the difference in appraisal if need be."
I was so broken that I did it. Back to the MLS, we still couldn't get a home in our price range in the neighborhoods I wanted. Rental price was going to be 3,100, so... we stuck to the 30-minute away neighborhood, and oh god, was that a new mistake. The first house we put an offer in on was accepted immediately. It was the smoothest process I'd ever seen in comparison to the hell I'd just gone through. I checked the MLS every day, watched homes I saved while I rented go pending or under contract in a week, or sell for over asking.
My heart sunk when all the homes I wanted and lost out to were back on the market as a rental property, or were slightly updated prices 50k-100k higher than before. Homes were being sold by opendoor, or rental from the very people I used to buy to rent from. I couldn't believe to this day how many homes I lost out to, sitting vacant for MONTHS prices dropping and dropping as the feds raised the interest rates. I went to open houses, asked what people wanted for offers (so I could be informed when I was ready), and knew my chances were getting slimmer and slimmer.
All the while, my commute was the devil. Traffic galore, accidents making my drive time go from 30-2 hours to and from. It was far from family, the mileage on my car grew so fast, my tires were wearing faster. The home was way too big for us (2765 sqft) and difficult to maintain. Beautiful home and town, but not for me.
The rent was also too high. It said it would be 2500, but wound up being 3100 after all of the damn fees they didn't disclose until AFTER WE WERE UNDER CONTRACT sflkghskg The electric bill was 6x the amount (bad company. People in that town are begnning to organize), water bill company demands 100 dollars no matter the usage (we only use about 60$), and the gas prices increased so high I was putting 60 dollars every 3 days in my car.
Then, my precious cat that followed me from NJ to AZ that had been with me through all of the DV, mental breaks, homelessness, had suffered from strokes. She was a stick, walking in circles, giving nothing but love. I tried everything I could, paid thousands to save her, but in the end, all I did was prolong her and my suffering. She passed in my arms. I love you and miss you, Emma.
Other life things happened, and by December, I had 200 dollars in the bank. When my income tax came, I applied for loans and said Im going to try the DPA and stuff again, It was either that, or rent a smaller house or apartment but seeing the market repeat my 2021 experience, I had to try with what I had. My goal was to get back to the neighborhood I wanted. NO EXCEPTIONS.
So I switched realtors based on a recommendation from FB. Random person said this lady would fight for me like no one else would. This realtor recommended me a lender, she said it could make miracles happen. I almost didn't do it because I had been let down by 2 other lenders before this one in 2023, but screw it. I followed his advice to the T of what to pay down, what to keep, and what to negotiate with. We gave him our 401ks info, our paystubs, had 3 of us on the loan, and explained we had no downpayment, just money for closing costs.
The market, at this point, slowed down due to the interest rates but was beginning to pick up. A lot of the homes we put offers on didn't like our asks. Which was disappointing, but I understood. What seller would want to pay closing costs for us so our payment assistance would go strictly to the home when they could accept the few cash, investor, or better conventional loan offers? The homes were going below listing, which was cool, but not quite in my 365k max range.
Until I gave way a little bit. There were 2 townhomes. One that was detached and had the most gorgeous yard Id ever seen for where it was at, and the inside was completely upgraded and bigger than it looked with a gorgeous mountain view from the master. But it was in a neighborhood that gave me goosebumps. No wonder they would accept 365k and pay everything should we put in our offer lol I couldn't do it, though. I didn't want to sacrifice being comfortable in my home safely to have a house. It was the first and only time I was picky.
At first, that seemed like a mistake, as the only other home I thought would accept our offer in my dream neighborhood said the seller had a specific number they wanted to sell at, which wasnt 365k, it was 375k. I wasn't going to get a home after all. I knew my ask was tough, and I wasn't going to get a house despite trying for another 3 months. I gave up. But then... I thought about something. That townhome in the neighborhood of my dreams, they wanted 375k? I restructured our ask to get to that 375k. A few hours later, my realtor texted me if she could call. It was urgent.
I was at work and went into the office and called. THE SELLER ACCEPTED OUR OFFER, THEY ACCEPTED OUR EFFING OFFER! THEY ACCEPTED IT!!!! I cried so hard, hyperventilated, cried some more, and told myself I wasn't going to get excited. I had this happen before, after all.
Well, guess what? Long story short, after hurdles during this closing as well, needing to push it back for this or that, WE CLOSED!! WE CLOSED ON THE HOUSE, IT WAS MINE!!! IT IS MINE!
The seller paid for all of the closing costs. DPA paid the downpayment at 3%. The rate was 6.85%, DPA loan at 8%. I paid for the appraisal and inspection, that's it. Only 1100 out of pocket. Monthly payment was 2865, my max, but it is MINE and EVERYTHING I wanted besides having a huge yard (it's still a decent sized yard) and open kitchen Home is 8 min from work (bye bye crappy commute!),community has incredible amenities, sub division has a pool, HOA covered roof (it was new anyway), new AC, new dishwasher, freshly painted, 3 beds 2 and a half baths, 1400sqft, 2 car garage with driveway, upstairs and downstairs like I always imagined, and so much more.
Every hurdle, every tear, every breakdown, taught me what I needed to know and led me to home. After saving for a year with the cheaper electric, water, gas prices, and mortgage, we just refinanced. Got a 5.75% rate (I thought it was 5.32, but after we closed today, it was 5.75%), the home appraised for 395k with no changes besides adding a fridge and new oven. The equity paid every penny of the refinance and the DPA loan. My mortgage is now 2550. For us, this is affordable now that we are debt free and still have savings!
I got my home with the most undesirable circumstances. I may be an exception, not the rule, but if my pathetic self can do it, i promise. You can, too. Don't be defeated. Don't let the investors win.
You need to win.

I need ideas as to what this problem could even be. I have a 2016 1.5L
Last year I noticed that at idle the car rumbles lightly every 7-11s. I contacted dealer and they said they couldn’t replicate the problem so I said huh…ok then continued with life then shortly after I had a huge loss of power on the highway and took it back because I had check engine light and I still had warranty. Dealer said that on top of some arcing that occurred, the oil level was too high and they are confident there’s nothing leaking into the oil however the oil level was nearly double what it should’ve been (thought this was weird but we will come back to this). They ended up replacing the whole short engine block covered by warranty. Then it was fine for the rest of the year.
This same thing occurred 3 weeks ago and they had no loaner car for me so I needed to rent a car while they looked at my car. They said that the oil was overfilled again (can see where this is going), and that’s causing misfires, as well as a cracked crankcase vent tube. I asked how this could be happening if not error from oil change location because I had moved and I found it was extremely unlikely that two separate places in two different states and two different companies made the same exact error. They said it’s very common issue for my car and I shrugged it off and said well I’ll just take it to them from now on. So 1000 dollars later I got my car back with all the recommended work including a new oil change by the dealer to ensure the correct oil level and drove it home and it was fine.
The very next shift for work not even 12 hours after I picked up my car rough idle, thought it was strange and very shortly check engine light and misfires…the same exact problem AGAIN! I check the engine oil and I don’t have exact measurements but it’s definitely over the fill line. Now I’m missing work and scratching my head as to wtf is happening? I’ve brought it up to them that I had concern that something is leaking into my oil reserve several times and they’re always reassuring me that it was just overfilled…well now they’re the ones that did the oil change so what now? The coolant level doesn’t seem affected and with the new short engine block I was reassured that the coolant intrusion on these cars couldn’t occur because it was rectified on the newer models. My thought is that maybe fuel is getting into the oil due to the misfires but when I brought that up to them they assured me there was no fuel in the oil.
So now I need to call the dealer tomorrow and hopefully they can do something for me because now I’m over 1000 in the hole for the same problem, and that’s not a good feeling. Does anybody have any insight? I can try to answer any questions if I know the answers.

Have you ever experienced something that shook you to your very core? Something that makes you remember every single little detail of your surroundings from that moment in time? Even years after? I can remember so vividly the moment I realized something was wrong with me. I was in my junior year of high school sitting in class, just like any other day. I remember the smell of erasers and cheap cologne that permeated off my classmate who sat next to me. I remember the scratchy tag on my t-shirt and how I was resisting taking it off in the middle of class just to cut it off. I remember what my teacher, Mrs. Brown, was talking about; 'the fall of Constantinople'. My mouth felt dry and I kept looking at the clock, counting down the minutes until I had lunch so I could get a soda. The sound of a pen clicking behind me was synchronized with the song that was stuck in my head.
All those things were going through my brain at once. My ADHD mind went a million miles per minute when it all came down to a cashing holt when I felt it at 11:23
I felt what I can only describe as a hand grabbing at the inner lining of my stomach. It didn't necessarily hurt, not at this point. That's not why I got so scared. You see, not only do I have ADHD. I also have OCD that manifests itself in the fear of anything growing or moving inside me. Even if I think about the concept of blood moving in my body or a heart that is beating in my chest, I have to think of something else. I've had full-blown panic attacks because of it. The closest term for this is 'Tokophobia'. That's technically the fear of pregnancy. I'm a guy, so it's not completely accurate but it's really the closest term. I mean, I also do have a huge fear of pregnancy. Not necessarily of me being pregnant, but even though I knew I could never get pregnant, the thought of it still made me feel sick
I bet you can imagine the terror that overcame me as I felt something moving in me. I made an audible groan and grabbed my stomach. My whole class turned to look at me. even my teacher stopped talking to ask if I was okay. I stood up and started to run to the nurses' office without even acknowledging my teacher. My first thought wasn't thinking that something was actually in my body. Even stomach aches and the feeling of gurgling in my stomach made me feel this way before. I didn't have anything on hand to help with a stomach ache, unfortunately. However, the nurse always did.
I sprinted across the school hoping and praying that my stomach wouldn't make that awful feeling again before I got there.
I turned the corner into the nurses' office with my tennis shoes squeaking in the process. I saw the school nurse, Mrs. Kennedy sitting on the couch in her office reading a magazine. She looked up at me with a sweet smile that quickly turned into worry.
"Sam, what is it? How can I help?" She said as she stood up and hurried over to me. Putting her hand over mine which was grabbing my stomach tightly.
"It's…It's my stomach. Something is wrong with it." I mumbled with a red face.
She shuffled her way over to her large medicine cabinet and she motioned for me to sit down.
She asked me questions about my stomach. Asking if it was pain, grumbling, cramps, nausea, etc. As she was asking me what my symptoms were and digging through bottles, The feeling happened again. However, this time was different. It felt like fingers grassing against the inside of my body. I screamed and wrapped my arms around my torso. Mrs. Kenneddy ran over to me to comfort me.
"This seems a lot worse than normal, maybe we should call your parents." She said as she put her hand on my back.
It felt like some days I saw Mrs. Kennedy more than my teachers. Any small ailment would distract me so badly from class that I had to go see her. Sometimes multiple times a day. She knew at this point when something was really wrong.
Within about 30 minutes both my parents were there with us. That may seem fast, but I'm an only child and my parents are very aware of my tendencies. They know I can spiral and like to be around if it happens.
They kept asking me where the pain was. I think they assumed by the way I wasn't responding to their questions the pain must've been really bad. The reality was that I just didn't know how to tell them what was going on.
I got so frustrated after they asked me over and over again that I just yelled at them.
"Something is inside me! Get it out, get it out, get it out!" I lifted my shirt and was ripping at my stomach. Leaving red nail scratches and cuts. My mom and dad ran to either side of me to grab my arms. Mrs. Kennedy had seen me go pretty crazy, but this was the worst I've ever gotten in front of her. My parents however had seen a similar situation before. Not exactly like this, but they didn't skip a beat on trying to help me.
"Sam. Breath, sweety. Just remember everything is in you for a reason. It's keeping you alive. Nothing is going to hurt you." My mom said softly to me. Trying to calm me down with the words my therapist gave her. "Ice cubes, get him ice cubes!" She said to Mrs. Kennedy as I started to hyperventilate.
Mrs. Kennedy grabbed a ziplock bag and started to fill it with ice cubes. My mom went over to her and grabbed an ice cube right out of the bag, opened up my hand, and put the ice cube in it. This worked in the past to distract me, I knew that's what she was doing, and trust me. I wanted it to work too, but this was different. I kept trying to tell myself that it was just a different feeling I hadn't felt before. That it wasn't possible something was physically inside my body. But I couldn't help it.
Everyone in the room could see that this was getting intense. I think they assumed it was just a mental breakdown and that nothing was physically wrong with my body but I didn't care. I just wanted help.
My parents got me into the car with my mom even sitting in the backseat with me. She kept trying to distract me with conversation but my mind was only on that awful feeling in my stomach.
We pulled up to the ER and my mom guided me in while holding both my wrists. It felt like she was walking me on a leash but I didn't fight it. I knew she was just trying to stop me from scratching my stomach.
We walked in and I spoke to the receptionist. All I said was that I had terrible pain in my stomach. I didn't want to sound too crazy. I just needed a doctor to look at whatever was going on.
After giving the receptionist my name and insurance information we went to sit down. I was sitting in between my parents and I could see my mom lean back to try and mouth something to my dad without me seeing. I didn't think much of it. I was way more worried about other things.
My dad then went up to the receptionist. He pointed over to me and she looked a little concerned. I saw her pick up the clipboard that had my information on it and she started writing something else on it. I asked my dad what he did and he just said to not worry and that he wanted to let her know it was urgent.
No more than 10 minutes went by and I felt a terrible moving sensation. I cringed and grabbed my stomach. Immediately followed by not just the feeling of a hand grabbing my insides but also scratching and pinching. I yelled out in pain as the other people in the waiting room looked at me mortified.
A doctor and a couple of nurses came running over to me and helped me up. But I couldn't stand up. I was in too much pain. They put me in a wheelchair and started to head for a room. However, they didn't take me through the normal big ER doors that went to the standard examination rooms, they took me and my parents through a smaller door to the side that had a padlock on it.
We walked through a white hallway that was very quiet. The doctor and nurses showed us to my room and helped me into my bed as I was wiggling and wincing. I had one parent on either side of me. Patiently waited to stop my arms from scratching.
The doctor was trying to ask further questions but he could tell it wasn't going anywhere. I knew that my dad probably told that receptionist about my OCD tendencies and that I needed to go to the psych ward. Not just to the stranded side of the ER.
I couldn't take it anymore and blurted out that something was inside my stomach and it was trying to get out.
The doctor just looked at my parents for a reaction and they gave him a sad nod. It was like they warned him that this could happen. The doctor didn't just think I was crazy, my parents did too. The doctor took a deep breath and came up to me. I knew I was about to hear some kind of dumb speech about how this was just my OCD and everything was going to be okay.
As he came closer to me, I pulled up my shirt and he gasped. Not only was my stomach scratched up like crazy, but we saw movement. It looked like when a pregnant woman can see her baby kicking. But this was so much stronger. It was stretching my skin.
My parents stood up and gasped while the doctor looked frantic and unprepared.
"Shit, shit, shit, shit!" The doctor said as he backed out of the room. "Hang on! We are getting this taken care of, just hang tight."
Just seconds later a nurse came in to give me some painkillers. I started to feel the pain slip away, but something so much worse started to creep in. I heard a voice. Not my own. Not some creepy-sounding creature, but the voice of a normal-sounding man that I'd never heard before. But that wasn't the scary part. The scary part was what he was saying to me.
"Get me out. Get me out. Get me out!"
It started in a normal tone, but slowly became more urgent and rushed. Then demanding.
The voice would coincide with the moment inside me.
It was getting so loud that I was having a hard time hearing the people around me. The doctor came in just a few minutes after I last saw him. He was red and sweaty. Like he'd just run a marathon. He told me they needed to do just a few tests on what was inside me before taking action.
I was trying so hard to pay attention to the words coming out of his mouth but all I could hear was the voice. The voice stopped for just a second and changed what he was saying. Now he started repeating,
"Cut me out, cut me out, cut me out, now!" I now knew this thing didn't just want out but it wanted out now. I begged the doctor to just get it out now but he wouldn't listen. The voice spoke up again.
"This is taking too long. Don't be afraid. Get me out yourself."
I think it could feel me resisting. Without realizing it, I was looking around the room for something. It was like I didn't even have control over my head or eyes anymore. I knew the voice was looking for a knife but I was trying to ignore the feeling. I knew there weren't any knives around. I was in a very safe place.
Just as I had the feeling I was safe, it was immediately taken away. The thought passed through my head that my dad probably had a pocket knife on him. My heart sank. I knew this thing could hear my thoughts. I knew what it would try to do.
The next thing I knew, I was on my feet, leaping for my dad. My body hit his. luckily, he's in pretty good shape for his age and had no problems putting me in my place.
He got on top of me and pinned me to the ground. All while I could barely hear my mom in the background. Yelling at my dad to be careful. My dad knew something was going on and that I just needed to be on the ground until I calmed down.
My body tried to flail but it wasn't successful. The whole time the voice in my head, now yelling and screaming. Not saying any distinguishable words, but just having what felt like a tantrum. What made my dad the most uncomfortable was the kicking feeling coming from my stomach.
After a couple of minutes, the voice calmed down and I felt in charge of my body again. My dad slowly got up and attempted to help me up. At this point with an audience of hospital staff that looked like they were getting ready to take me somewhere for more tests.
Just as I stood up straight, I felt the voice take over and I lost all sense of my own body. I felt like a shell of myself. My dad gave me a soft yet worried smile, and in that instance, I grabbed him and reached into his pocket. My heart sank as I felt his pocket knife. The room started to panic and about 5 people tried to grab it from me. The last thing I remember is plunging the knife into my stomach. I felt a blinding pain and everything went black.
Several hours later I started to wake up. Everything was extremely blurry and fuzzy. I could hear a very faint voice telling me to relax. As the minutes passed by, things started to become a little bit clearer. I looked around and saw I was in a large room with a few other patients. A nurse was going up to all the beds and checking in on them. I tried to sit up a bit to get more comfortable and noticed an incredible sourness in my stomach. I moved my hospital gown out of the way and saw a huge scare. About 6" across. Most of the scare looked very surgical. Like what I'd imagine a c-section surgery would look like. Except where I remembered the knife going in. It looked like a bunch of extra stitches had to be added where it went in. It also looked pretty bruised. I can imagine that a dull 10-year-old knife that was harshly shoved into a body really wouldn't cleanly cut through and leave some damage.
The feeling of shock from looking at my stomach was quickly gone when I realized that meant whatever was in me was now gone. I didn't hear the voice, I didn't feel a hand in my gut anymore, I didn't see that vile kicking anymore. I felt like I could breathe.
I asked the nurse what they found and she looked flush.
"Uh, that's something that you, uh. Your doctor will talk with you once you eat something and can speak clearly." She said as she scurried off looking upset.
Shortly after that, I was wheeled into a recovery room and my parents came to see me.
As they walked in they had a very similar look on their faces as the nurse did. They looked pale and didn't want to look me in the eye. I kept asking them questions about what was going on but they said the doctor needed to discuss it with me and he wanted to make sure I wasn't feeling high from the anesthesia while we had a conversation.
The doctor didn't come and see me for another 10 hours. Which felt strange. And to add to the strangeness, my parents were taking shifts hanging out with me. There was only overlap when they switched and the other parent took over while the other one left the room. I would understand if they weren't both with me for the whole time. I'm not that needy, but they were only both in my room together for about an hour. That was the hour before the doctor came to my room.
Finally, the doctor came in to talk to me. When he walked in, the room was cold and quiet. It was evident he didn't feel the same relief I was feeling.
He seemed awkward. Like he was talking way too long to get over to me. He grabbed a chair and scooted it close to me.
"Listen Sam. I know this last 24 hours has been very challenging. I apologize for not explaining what happened during your surgery sooner, but we all needed time to figure it out, and quite frankly, process what happened. We feel we have enough information to let you in on what is going on." A silence filled the room. It felt like no one was brave enough to break it.
"And?" I said with confusion.
"I think it'll be easier if we just show you."
The doctor along with my parents helped me into a wheelchair and we started to make our way across the hospital to an entirely different section. I couldn't believe all the things running through my head at what we were about to see. It felt like cruel and unusual punishment to leave me in anticipation and not just tell me what I was about to see.
When I went around the corner I couldn't process what I was looking at. I thought they were showing me a large tumor or growth of some kind, but why would a tumor be in a big incubation chamber with tubes connected to IVs and machines coming out of it?
As I got closer, I started to see human fetchers on it. It was mostly just a 6-pound lump of flesh, but I could see a hand sticking out of it. It was small, but what made it creepy was it looked like a fully developed man's hand. Just small. I could see a patch of hair coming out of what I assumed was its head. It had no discernible facial features. Just a few teeth scattered in one section.
As I looked at it with disgust, coming to terms with this thing that was just in my body, I had a realization. I wasn't feeling sick at the thought of something being in my body. Sure, I was grossed out that this particular thing was just in me, but the thought of the bacteria in my body didn't make me want to throw up. I thought about all the blood pumping through my veins and I felt… normal. Not only was the voice and kicking gone. But my OCD was gone too. I didn't have a mental illness. It was just this thing. Trying to find its way out for years.
As I was staring at the creature, the doctor came and put his hand on my shoulder.
"We believe this is your twin brother." I immediately looked up at my parents who looked very disturbed and upset. I let the doctor finish talking. "We believe that you absorbed him in the womb and that he has been living inside you your whole life. This is an extremely rare condition called fetus-in-fetu. It seems he didn't quite have the best opportunity to develop normally. That's why he looks the way he does. Despite his appearance, he has all the organs he needs to survive. Looks like he's missing a lung and his gallbladder. Also a piece of his liver but other than that, it looks like he will live for at least a few years. He won't be able to leave this room due to him needing a feeding tube and a few other things that his body can not do on its own. He needs lots of support just to live. What makes this situation extremely unique is that your twin is still alive despite your body not sustaining him anymore. Even though we have him hooked up to a few IVs and machines, It is unexplainable how he is living while outside of your body."
I was in complete shock. I didn't want to believe it. I asked my mom why she never told me I absorbed my twin in the womb, she said she had no clue. There was never a sign when she was pregnant with me.
He also mentioned that sometimes even in pregnancies women will go their whole pregnancy without even getting a belly. It's called a 'Cryptic pregnancy'. I've always had a bit of a gut but never anything big enough to cause suspicion. I guess in my case I had a fetus-fetu and an experience similar to a cryptic pregnancy. Even though it was in my stomach. At least that was the doctor's best guess. Although, it all sounded like BS to me.
The doctor and my parents kept trying to explain more and more details to me. I don't know why they didn't slow down a little bit for my sake. How could they not tell I wasn't processing any of this?
I noticed something while they were trying to explain things to me. They kept calling it a 'He'.
Now listen. I'm not some kind of asshole that won't respect someone who wants to be called a specific pronoun. I've never been that kind of person. But this is where I draw the line.
Not just that. But this thing had a name. My parents named it and said today was its birthday. While they told me all this information, they didn't look happy about it. It seemed like they were forced to do all this nonsense. And now it was my turn to be convinced. I could tell they were trying to force it.
The doctor told me despite it not having a high probability for a long life that we should still try and give it the love it deserves. Of course, the doctor referred to it as a 'He' but I refused to.
This disgusted me. This thing tried to kill me and ruined my quality of life for so long, and now we are going to treat it like it's some kind of prince? No, absolutely not.
Luckily, it seemed like it would never leave the hospital, but my parents planned on going to visit it daily. Visiting it? Are you kidding me? it has no eyes, no ears, it's probably miserable and has no concept of people even being around it.
I'm refusing to ever see this thing again or acknowledge its existence again.
I could get in trouble for even talking about this. The hospital or anyone involved has signed NDAs to not share any information about this until it officially dies. This is because it's a medical anomaly and the first of its kind. They want to do the proper research on how this all occurred before coming out with a statement. I just have to get this all off my chest. I feel like I'm the crazy one here when I know I'm not. I don't care if I get in trouble.
I am scared that the doctors are trying to force my parents into giving this thing a proper life. I think that's why it took them so long to tell me. I think they scared my parents into keeping it alive and guilting them or even forcing them into being its parent.
I'm all for every life being important and all that stuff, but I have a feeling my parents are terrified of this thing just like I am.
I am convinced they gaslit my parents into believing this thing is my brother. If there wasn't any sign of him while my mom was pregnant with me, could this thing be something else?
This all happened about two years ago. It's still alive and they are still researching it. My parents continue to visit it despite everything. My therapist told me that I'm probably just struggling with jealousy now that I'm not an only child anymore and so much of my parents' attention is on him now, but it's so much bigger than just jealousy.
Since this thing showed up and my OCD is pretty much gone, I've hardly seen my parents. I know I'm not just jealous. There is something more to this. I know it.
Something just feels so off about this whole thing. What is this thing? Where did it come from? And what does it want?

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Synopsis:
Juliette Contzen is a lazy, good-for-nothing princess. Overshadowed by her siblings, she's left with little to do but nap, read … and occasionally cut the falling raindrops with her sword. Spotted one day by an astonished adventurer, he insists on grading Juliette's swordsmanship, then promptly has a mental breakdown at the result.
Soon after, Juliette is given the news that her kingdom is on the brink of bankruptcy. At threat of being married off, the lazy princess vows to do whatever it takes to maintain her current lifestyle, and taking matters into her own hands, escapes in the middle of the night in order to restore her kingdom's finances.
Tags: Comedy, Adventure, Action, Fantasy, Copious Ohohohohos.
Chapter 240: Private Gallery
My, how quaint.
An underground maze.
If it wasn’t dark towers laden with bats, it was underground mazes filled to the brim with all the upholstery recovered from the Summer Solstice Festival’s annual bonfire.
Here beneath a barn utilised as little more than a cellar door, black was still the new black. An unending panorama of dark embroidery and furnishings to match any budding empress’s humble beginnings, ensuring I remained busy offering all the slightly different variations of wrinkling my nose could perform.
The porcelain vases featuring motifs of the wrong season? A mild scrunch. The candelabras burning below 98% of their height instead of being immediately replaced? Hints of a sneeze. The golden silk carpets clearly stolen from the cathedrals of the Holy Church? … A nod of my head.
But what I could have no complaints about was a door still swinging upon its hinges.
Poetry in motion, it painted the picture of a baroness desperate in her haste to stumble over her dress as much as humanly possible. Excellent news. We didn’t need to break another door today.
A surprise.
After all, the baroness seemed intent on breaking everything herself.
Bwoomph.
The sound of a heavy object being dropped came crashing through.
And then another. And another.
A commotion to rival the scuffling of two rival sons at our reception hall. The cadence of chairs, small tables and then backsides falling to the ground as insults became slaps and slaps became a scene of disgrace, all the while my sisters and I watched and snacked on the walnuts.
Sadly for the baroness, I chose not to stand idly by as she roughly squirrelled away her stolen possessions. And neither did Coppelia, who rubbed her hands together in gleeful expectation.
It was still the most innocent gesture she’d ever made.
“Should we let her gather up the loot pile some more?” she asked brightly.
I shook my head at once, my nose aching from the ceaseless wrinkling.
“Absolutely not. Even a moment is too long in this burrow.”
“We could double back and ominously stamp our feet to make her go faster, too.”
“Or we could merely offer our supervision instead. Come. It’s time to end our stay in the countryside. As well as this baroness’s grand misadventure.”
Already dreaming of my bed, I lightly pushed the door open.
A moment later, I was met by the sight of an adventurer’s most wanton dream come to life.
Within the centre of a bedroom chamber, chests laden with silver and gold crowns sat waiting for the first lout to claim as hardship expenses for chasing cats in an endless circle. The chests gleamed with an organised lustre, winking in unison as though counted and arranged to the coin.
It was a sight which contrasted with the desperate movements of the baroness.
Only brief snippets of her could be seen as she went to-and-fro in another room, accessed through a parted bookcase. Through the opening, I heard hints of calamity. Heavy banging as objects crashed to the floor, joined by the sound of ragged breathing to match a servant dashing up and down my bedroom tower to fetch grapes for me in quantities of one.
“Haah … haahh … hahhh …”
And now my curiosity was kindled.
Things worth more than chests of crowns. What could she possess, I wonder?
Sweeping past the gleaming pile of silver and gold, I made my way towards the parted bookcase, and then peeked through to see our baroness performing one last act of defiance.
With her golden hair as dishevelled as her dress, she was kneeling beside an assembled pile of what were unmistakably paintings. A veritable mountain of them, all framed in gilded brass. The scent of oil, watercolours and various pigments struck me more than any whiff of alcohol I’d experienced today.
Clearly a gallery of sorts. A secondary trove of treasure, but no less valuable. Rare paintings were worth their weight in silver and gold as much as any of the coins gathered in the chamber.
And also, to my horror, much easier to destroy.
“Haah … haahhh … hahhhhh …”
The baroness didn’t even notice our presence.
So absorbed was she in her final act of petulance, her only concern was to raise her feeble arms, weakened by all the disdain it required to gather so many heavy paintings in one spot.
All to set it alight.
With a look of desperation on her face, she raised a single candle, readying to set the oil upon the canvasses ablaze.
“Noooooope~”
“–Aah?!”
The same candle which was promptly plucked from her hand by Coppelia, who required no prompting to stop the destruction of precious treasure.
The baroness jolted in shock at Coppelia’s sudden appearance behind her, and even more so at the playful smile leaning towards her. A heartbeat later, she swiped at the candle, tearing away the topmost half. But it was too late.
The flame had already been extinguished.
“Noo … nooooooooooooo!!”
The baroness cupped her hands around the top, offering a tiny breath as she hoped to ignite it like the fading embers of a hearthfire.
She failed.
I took a step into the hidden gallery, ready to offer the coup de grâce to round off this minor detour into my countryside. A final reminder to my kingdom’s nobility, that whatever their rank, none were too lowly to be ignored.
“Ohhohohohohoho … how pitiable,” I said, my hand barely covering my lips. “Instead of a vain attempt to flee, you choose mindless destruction instead. I suppose I’ve no grounds to fault on this. You were wildly successful. Only that it was your own schemes which came to ruin.”
I gazed at the crumpled heap of the baroness as she turned around.
Her grey eyes widened as she viewed me.
All of a sudden, what colour remained upon her face drained to the point where if she threw herself on her bed, she’d be invisible against the white linen. Her only method of escape remaining.
It certainly wasn’t in the gurgling she made.
“Ah … n-no … wait …”
Her voice petered out, whatever words she spoke fading like a mousy squeak in the distance.
Ugh. The standards I endured.
Despite attempting a final act of spite, she didn’t even have enough vigour left in her to transfer that into the most cursory of insults.
“Now, this right here is what separates the barony from the city nobility,” I said, well and truly exasperated. “You may despise your peers, but know that Lady Tolent and Duke Valence at least performed their roles as expected. They were rude until the end. You’ve a considerable amount to learn.”
With a sigh, I took a step towards the mound of portraits.
Given what I’d seen so far, I doubted if any painting here was worth what the baroness deemed worthy enough to hide away like a dragon’s favoured treasure. But I was open to being pleasantly surprised.
Who knows? Perhaps she’d pilfered more than carpets from the Holy Church.
However–
“Wait!!!!!”
The baroness scrambled to her feet, arms raised as she blocked my path.
Despite her sudden burst of life, no colour returned to her face. It was like a ghoul raised as a puppet, desperately heeding the command of its owner.
“You … You can’t look!” she said, quivering. “None of this … none of this is for you!”
My mouth widened at the gall.
… Why, so she did have some insult left in her!
To insinuate I wasn’t worthy of judging these paintings was far more wounding than any generic disdain she could level against my superior wealth, standing, beauty and shape of my hair!
After all, I was exceptionally confident in my curating skills!
Anything less would see my own works being met by a chorus of snivelling! Amongst all who resided in my kingdom, it wasn’t traitors who were the most fearless to my ire! It was art critics!
“E-Excuse me! Rest assured that I’m more than capable of judging the qualities of any painting! When it comes to my assessment of art, my valuation leaves no detail unturned!”
Somehow, the baroness paled even more. Her eyes quivered like ponds in a gale.
A moment later–
“You can’t!!!!”
She threw herself at me.
A slow, lumbering tackle to match her anaemic state. I stepped to the side as she hurled herself past me, falling to a heap by Renise’s feet.
The maid looked down. She didn’t wear a single hint of animosity. Only pity and sorrow. Truly, she was too kind to ever have been in the nobility. I feared for her current role.
Still, I gave a sigh, before leaning over the mountain of paintings.
“Uwah~ this is a new one.”
As the light from the doorway fell upon it, Coppelia offered a hint of what was to be expected. She wore a peculiar expression, her smile oddly fixed as she gazed down at the nearest one to face upright.
I joined her.
And then–
“Hmm.”
I blinked as I assessed it.
A moment later, I glanced over those nearby. And then those nearby them.
Not only paintings. But portraits.
All featuring the same subject. A girl with long, dark hair and vivid eyes.
Many featured a dress hinting at a summer’s day. Shafts of golden sunlight was a common theme, along with a backdrop of a pristine tea table, laden with a familiar array of confectionery. Carrot madeleines and carrot cakes. The same ones I tactically placed for everyone else to eat at my mandatory tea parties.
Indeed. That made sense.
Since this was assuredly my tea table being presented. And that girl with a pleasant smile, unblemished features, a regal bearing and warmth radiating from her very presence was me.
I dug inside the mountain of portraits, lifting up another at random.
Yes.
It was me. Again.
In fact–
Every single portrait in this heap was of me.
At least a hundred or more. All framed and recently placed upon the walls of a hidden room. A private gallery to a baroness–one who was a keen painter. A corner had been transformed into a small workshop. Unlike the one found in her tavern, this one was far more organised. Easels and brushes were neatly tidied away, cared for as much as the paintings that had been created here.
“Noooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo!!!!”
Ignoring the cry of despair behind me, I gazed at the heap of paintings, hand against my cheek as I considered the sight.
A short hum was all I required.
I turned to the stricken baroness upon the floor, her mouth wide as she waited for my judgement.
And then–
“Oho …”
I began to laugh.
“Ohoho … ohhohohoho …”
But this was no mocking laugh which spilled from my lips.
No … it was a laugh of pure delight.
“Ohhhohohoohhohohoohhohohoo!!”
True, nothing here was fit to be placed upon the Royal Villa’s walls. But few paintings were. This didn’t mean they were without merit. On the contrary, even a surface level impression of my face was worth more crowns than even a mosaic of the Grand Duchess completed by a thousand master painters.
But while better artists than her had painted me, few had painted more.
And this I could use.
Why … with this many paintings, I could fill up Soap Island with my imagery!
I could ensure that every tunnel possessed my permanent smile and watching eyes!
No matter where the soap miners hid, seeking respite from their days of hard labour and repentance, they could be met by the sight of my angelic face reminding them that I know and judge their every moment of unsupervised rest!
How … How wonderful!!!!
“A 7/10,” I declared. “Individually, they range between passable and acceptable. Except this one. There is something wrong with the nose. But when taken as an entire collection, the overall composition is greater than the sum of its parts. Alone, each is a verse describing a princess forced to adhere to her mandatory tea parties even as summer blooms a window away. But together, it is the sonata of a princess who continues in her duties without care to repetition or fatigue, reminding those whose hands falter when they should be mining soap that I do not rest, and so neither will they. Not an overly complex message, but then I wouldn’t wish it to be lost.”
Thus, I clapped my hands together in satisfaction.
“... Indeed, I shall put these portraits to excellent use!”
I waited for the gasp of relief which usually came with any of my scores which didn’t plunge into negative numbers. The baroness would not be destroyed by the world of fine art. Only ignored. The baseline criticism. She’d survive.
Providing, of course, that she ever woke from her stupor.
Looking down, I was appalled to see all the light had vacated her eyes.
Far from offering her gratitude, she lay collapsed in an untidy heap upon the floor, her body prone and motionless, her expression locked in morbid embarrassment, and with no signs of life other than the trail of drool which began to leak from the edge of her lips.
“Wow~” said Coppelia, leaning down to poke her cheeks. “You managed to kill her with just the laugh.”
I was appalled.
If this was the reaction to my satisfaction, I may as well be disappointed! That was always easier!
“C-Coppelia! I didn’t kill her! … Why, anyone who dies looking so slovenly would come back to life just to fix themselves!”
Also kneeling beside the fallen baroness, Renise gently shook the girl’s shoulder. Only a weak gurgling came out, wishing for an eternal night.
After a moment, Renise sent a slightly pained smile towards me.
“Um, by any chance … do you not have any thoughts regarding seeing so many portraits of yourself?”
“What do you mean?”
“Well … do you not find it odd?”
I looked at her in puzzlement.
“... No? Why would that be odd? Isn’t it natural that people would wish to paint me? I’m a princess. And an excellent one, too. Better me than a fruit bowl, surely.”
Renise blinked … just before raising her hand to her lips in a small giggle.
“Yes, I suppose you’re right.”
Words which advanced her on my family’s career ladder exponentially. I nodded profusely.
Mreoow.
At least until an unexpected sound filled the air.
I looked around in puzzlement.
“... Did I hear a cat?”
“Mmh~” Coppelia pointed towards the faux-vault door we’d passed. “More than one. There’s a whole bunch being kept nearby. It smells terrible.”
I threw up my arms in exasperation.
Why, no wonder the baroness sought the bliss of unconsciousness! It was to evade my utter disbelief!
The absolute state of my kingdom’s schemers!
First Trierport! Now Hartzwiese! To think it was an epidemic!
Just what were these people doing?! Truly, it’s one thing to undermine my kingdom. But that was a pale crime compared to their feat of singlehandedly fuelling the existence of the Adventurer’s Guild!
“It must be Tantrum and Peppy,” said Renise, far less aggrieved. “As well as all the others.”
I directed my bewilderment towards her instead.
“What is a … Tantrum and a Peppy?”
“They’re the names of the deputy guildmaster’s cats. The ones she was looking for. We should ensure they’re rescued before the night is done.”
I shook my head rapidly. No, no, no, no.
“I am not rescuing cats.”
“Hm? … Why not? Isn’t that the job of adventurers?”
“No, that’s the job of drunkards who mistake the commissions plastered on walls for requests to save a kidnapped princess. Besides, cats hardly need rescuing. Whatever bonds they find themselves in, they’re more than capable of slipping free by their own endless guile.”
Indeed, our only danger was that we tripped over a lazing cat hidden in the shade!
It’s a wonder they hadn’t escaped already. By the time we were done, I fully expected to see cats causing anarchy as they reclaimed the town, mewing from rooftop and windowsill with barely held contempt for the very people who fed them!
… Why, they should be ashamed!
“I see …” said Renise, with a hum of uncertainty. “Well, I suppose they’re known for their self-sufficiency. But even so, I feel that we shouldn’t leave them in the chance that their artfulness fails. There’s a very dangerous forest between here and the town.”
Coppelia clapped her hands together.
Her interest in the baroness severed, she leaned towards her next source of amusement, her smile alive with all the usual colours of the mischief rainbow.
“That’s right~ cats are pretty smart, right? There’s no way they’ll be caught by the slobbering horrors devoid of mercy and compassion which I kept from eating us.”
“Coppelia, you frightened them away with sticks.”
“Exactly. Sticks thrown using opposable thumbs which cats lack. And that means they know where they are on the food tree. They’re gonna stay here where it’s safe, waiting for the dumb humans to come fetch them like they always do, even though cats do nothing but hiss and scratch at them.”
I gave a cautious nod … all the while leaning further away.
“Yes, well, I’m glad you agree. We’ve no need to lift a finger to rescue them.”
“Mmh~ but even so, aren’t you willingly leaving gold on the table?”
“Excuse me?”
“I bet every cat has a poster somewhere up in the Adventurer’s Guild. That’s a whole bunch of change you’re leaving lying around that could be used for our apple strudel budget.”
I was aghast.
Not only at the suggestion our funds went entirely towards the apple strudels she ate before I could even touch them … but also because I knew exactly what Coppelia was doing!
My keen eyes could see through her deep subterfuge!
True, it was only prudent to ensure our personal finances were as secure as possible … but even so!
I had my pride!
In my darkest dreams, I still recalled the shame of rescuing a warehouse of cats in Trierport! There was no scenario in which I’d willingly suffer such humiliation again! Once my dignity was stripped, what was I, but a beautiful maiden without equal?
Indeed, I had no doubt in my mind!
I, Juliette Contzen, 3rd Princess to the Kingdom of Tirea, would absolutely not resort to saving lost cats!
“The Adventurer’s Guild will never be happier,” said Coppelia brightly. “I bet that in less than a day, a literal army of adventurers will be swooping in to claim all the free cats for themselves. They’ll be everywhere. Literally everywhere. Productivity will be at its highest. You’ll be actively supporting the livelihoods of all those guys you see drinking themselves into a coma!”
Renise blinked, then looked at me with an expression filled with new warmth.
“Oh, I see! You intend to leave these cats behind to be collected by new adventurers. That’s very thoughtful of you. I understand now. This must be how high-ranked adventurers help their juniors progress and gain confidence in their skills.”
Renise filled the ensuing silence with her smile.
And then–
She slowly waved a hand in front of my face.
“... Miss Coppelia, why isn’t she responding?”
“Oh, don’t worry about it. Her cogs get stuck every now and again.”
“I see … ? Should we do something or … ?”
“Mmh~ I’ll scoop up the striped ones! You get the normal ones!”
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I love her, she was one of the first people that I ever really truly enjoyed speaking and spending time with. The intelligence that she possessed and bubbly personality brought out the same bubbly feelings within me, even in seventh grade. I soon filled my time writing messages to her in Facebook messenger, asking about everything I was curious about whilst sitting at my brother’s baseball games, my cellphone burning my hands from overheating, but I just couldn’t put it down. We would talk about everything.
Now twenty-three, we don’t. I feel as though I have lost the light and bubbly feelings. I think I resent her.
I grew up a scared kid, afraid to state my honest feelings, doing whatever was needed to shape the results of my words and beliefs rather than feel them and let them serve to be an honest representation of myself. I just did whatever led to the least amount of conflict, leading me to be uncertain of my true wants and desires. With her however, I felt love, and I wanted her to be my love forever. From visiting her every weekend in school to changing colleges, I just did not want to let go of the love I had for her.
As years followed differences began to appear. Myself, wanting love to be communicated in a thought-out verbal nature with much care and emphasis in each word choice being my desired method of display of affection, she began to withdraw from this style of communication. Despite the beginning of our relationship being long talks on the phone or paragraphs of written texts back and forth, she said she was not capable of displaying affection in this way and there was no way to change it. Fork in the road, faced with an ultimatum, no ability to compromise, do I stay, or do I go? I stay. By simply learning to appreciate other methods of displaying affection, what does it matter if there is still love in the air. Remember, conflict isn’t an option; I mean I fought for what I wanted and for compromise, but whenever it got bad, I would refer to the tried-and-true mechanism of simply doing what rids of conflict.
Then the physical and intimate differences arose. I always liked back scratches, no matter how bad things got in my early years, a good back scratch would make me feel safe and escape the world in pure bliss for a little bit. I wanted this in my life still as an adult, but it wasn’t something she wanted to do. How do I continue to ask for something that she admitted to not enjoying doing? Even whenever I was selfish enough to ask for it and she would do it, you can tell when someone doesn’t want to be scratching your back when they start for a minute and just stop you know. So, I just stopped asking. Then copy and paste massages and head rubs for back scratches.
Intimately, she had asked me relatively early into our now six-year relationship if I had ever been interested in oral. I was, but I never had the guts to ask, so I said yeah. It came out that she had done it a few times on her earlier ex, and I admitted to her that I had never been the recipient of it. We had gotten close one time, but she had said she wasn’t interested in it that day. After asking a few more times, she opened up to me that she didn’t ever want to try again. It bothered me, I pushed for her to reconsider. I handled it poorly as my mind was so caught up in the jealousy and frustration revolving around her ex experiencing something that I never would if she was to be the one I wanted to be with forever, “Had I only been there earlier” I would think.
Eventually she confronted me and told me, “You can go get it from other people if you want, it doesn’t seem like you are ever going to get over it.”. This hurt me, I only ever wanted to be with her, and she was willing to be understanding to let me go get it from someone else. What had I done? I had pushed too hard.
“I will never ask for it again.” I concluded.
In the bedroom whenever it came to, well, positions, the first time we had ever done it, we did two she enjoyed. She was my first, and I eventually began to ask if we could try other positions, she tried, and it didn’t work for her. Nothing else seemed to work. I was okay with our tried and true two, but I wanted to mix it up every once in a while, and despite asking if we could try anything else again, it would simply kill the mood. I was frustrated again. I did not know what to do, and after discussing, I simply began to stop asking, again.
I began therapy when I was in college. From past traumas to my terrible coping strategies, it was all thrown out on the table. I focused on these core elements more so than my relationship struggles, however there were discussions about it. It had begun to help me. That is when it seemed more problems had arisen.
I had begun to heal.
My relentless internal monologue reinforcing my belief that “you shouldn’t want these things, you don’t deserve these things” and “if you push for your wants, there will be conflict and you will lose her, you will never find anyone else”, had begun to unravel. These self-destructive statements that served as stones weighing down the wants and desires, I had put into the bottom of my mind had begun to erode. The thoughts popping into mind whenever I spent time with her, I blew up.
On a long car ride, after being asked why I had withdrawn, I confronted her about the most recent buried request. Head rubs. Why was I always so clearly falling short of what she had wanted me to be, but never getting any of the things that I wanted? “It is just a head rub! Why do I not deserve a head rub?!”, I couldn’t take it anymore and I had blown. What ensued was a long conversation full of tears that simply laid out the fact that I was not happy, but she wanted me to be, but didn’t know how to do the things I had wanted.
We didn’t go much into specifics until we had gotten back home from our trip, but as I prodded into what was going to change, she informed me that all intimate things were off the table. She would, however, try harder to provide physical and verbal displays of affection more frequently. I was hopeful, while selfishly bummed at this time about intimate matters. But things were going to change, and I was excited.
Fast forward half a year, with unfavorable work schedules, a home renovation, and general exhaustion set in, things began to stress. Between the consistent reminders of not doing enough around the house, feeling like we are further away than ever yet always feeling guilty of not proposing yet, I confronted her again. Why was I always feeling like I was not doing enough or feeling like she was proud of me whenever there had been zero changes from our last argument several months ago. I was tired this time, yet more accepting. Once an argument ensued and escalated, I gave up.
“I feel like we shouldn’t be together. You are not in the wrong for not wanting to do things. No matter if we are referring to the physical or verbal acts of affection, or the intimate desires I have expressed, you should always hold true to your heart and your wants. But I give myself the same freedom of heart. Maybe there is someone out there that is a perfect match for your wants and communication, and maybe, there is someone out there that wants me the same way I want to be wanted and meets my needs.”
She cracked, she said she would do whatever it took to change, she would try things again, she would try harder this time and be different. I had heard this before, and I continued to express uncertainty. She mentioned couple’s therapy. I owed her this much; I was in part responsible for things going on for so long the way they had and never dying on the hills of those unwavering wants. “Yes, let’s try it.” I spoke. I know couples therapy takes time, so I will be patient and give it a shot.
What followed was one of the best days of my life, we spent time together intimately, had a wonderful evening out. It was a phenomenal day and breathed hope directly into my lungs. But then a drought ensued. I felt as though that one day had simply bought time, I made a conscious effort to express my love and desire as I knew these arguments could have created distance between us that would need to be held together despite that one good day, but why did everything revert? What happened?
It was just the work week and the hard schedule; I kept telling myself. It has only been a couple days. A week. A week and a half. I was starting to not really feel wanted again, I was feeling concerned. Several thoughts had begun to swarm inside of my head as well, frustration began to build.
Why did things suddenly seem to get better whenever I was ready to leave? Was that what it was going to take to resolve those issues from the years previous, would it have taken me to threaten to leave for each of these wants to be fulfilled? Why didn’t she love me in the way I loved her? All it would ever take for me to do something she wanted was to ask.
Why is it so hard for us to be together? There were so many fights that I had to just give up asking for what I wanted to avoid further conflict. I just want someone to want me in the way I want to be wanted. But I worry she will never genuinely want the things I want. I do not want her to feel forced to satisfy my wants. When do you know to call it off?
I have always enjoyed things that were impromptu, never asked for, but offered. It seemed like the most genuine display of love. It served to represent an honest desire to bring pleasure to the one you love. How can I feel loved and wanted whenever I have had to fight countless times and threaten to leave for my wants to be addressed or worth addressing, when in its truest form it comes without question?
We are just now starting couples therapy and I know it is quite the long haul from my personal experience, but I just want some outside advice in the meantime.
What should I do? What do I need to learn? Where do I start?

Hey Everyone! This is the second chapter of the Warrior’s story in Project OT3! Crowson continues working towards his goal of bringing an end to the Obsidians. As always, I recommend reading both Crowson’s Intro Post and First Chapter before reading this one.
Completed Chapter 2s: Thearnt, Taland, Pascal, Harmony, Crowson
Next Chapter 2: Asherah the Chef
Crowson the Warrior, Chapter 2: Recommended Level 24
——————
(The Journey So Far…)
Crowson had served loyally under his father King Milo all his life.
But once his close comrade Theo was sentenced to be executed…
Crowson abandoned all loyalty he once had to the Obsidians
He fled their newly captured town of Westfirst…
and arrived in Fallholt to lay low and search the streets for Obsidian Influence, before taking action on his one and only goal, Kill King Milo and bring an end to the organization…
Crowson stands atop a ledge, overlooking the small town below. He sighs, “They won’t find me here. It was a mistake to slip the name of Beggar’s Hole to Maverick, he’s likely told Milo and… I hope Theo decided to hide out in another town like I did.”
He would proceed to walk down some stairs and into the town properly. He’d sit down on a bench and try to take a breath. Unable to get his mind off of King Milo. Crowson figures the tavern would be a good place to start looking into figuring out if these rumors of Obsidian Influence in town were true.
You’d head to the Fallholt Tavern

• Travel Banter: The Sacred Flame’s Forgiveness (Crowson and Thearnt) Crowson finds Thearnt praying about something, Thearnt stutters and says she was letting the gods know Crowson was on their side and tells him that he’s doing the right thing and the Flame will grant him forgiveness. Crowson questions her, asking if killing people, and continuing to do so is really what the flame stands for? Thearnt is stunned “I– I was trying to be nice…”
  
• Travel Banter: Wasting Time (Crowson and Asherah) Asherah asks Crowson if they came all this way just to get him a drink, Crowson tells her that it’s more than just that. It’s about bringing down any and all Obsidians. “Sure it is.” Asherah says, Crowson points out her bad mood. “Speak for yourself. Every time I look your way you look as if you’re about to kill me.” Crowson reminds her that he isn’t going to do that. “Are you hungry?” Asherah ignores the question, but clearly is. She says that they should stop wasting time standing here, Crowson says he likes the sound of that.
  

The Bar is empty aside from two men sitting far away from where Crowson decides to sit down at. He gets served a drink by the bartender that he quickly downs. Before listening to what the other two men are saying. “Ready to get to work Zach?”
“Course I am Rene. You always know I’m ready for a fight! But are you? No guarantee what you find in these ruins is pretty.”
“Ruins?” Crowson thinks to himself
Rene and Zach exit the bar, nodding to each other on the way out. Crowson ponders and decides to follow them. He needs to know what these ruins are… Outside, Rene and Zach walk down a path north of town, Crowson prepares to follow.
Road to the Ruins of Fallholt, Danger Level 24
Crowson runs into the two fairly quickly. He hides from them, “Well– There has to be someone else on our force who can lend us a weapon…” he overhears Rene saying.
“Your ‘force’?” Crowson reveals himself to them. Rene is started by him and gets down to his knees “We’re with the— Fallholt Guard!” he shouts. “...You– aren’t going to– kill– us– are you?”
Crowson turns around, as if to make sure King Milo isn’t there, “No.” he says. Zach asks Crowson what he’s doing out here. Crowson doesn’t say anything… Rene gets back on his feet and asks Crowson if he’d mind doing them a favor. He’d go on to explain that they were going to investigate the ruins, but their weapons were stolen by bandits nearly the second they left town. Zach continues off of Rene saying “It’s a lot, but we’re desperate. Please... help.”
“...” Crowson frowns, “Where did these bandits go?” Rene points him in their direction
You’d mug the bandits and take the weapons back.
Crowson returns their weapons, They ask him what he did with the bandit he went after, Crowson tells them not to worry about it and insists they get a move on if they’re going to come along. As he walks ahead of them in the direction of the Ruins of Fallholt.

• Travel Banter: Too Harsh on them (Crowson and Orlando) Orlando asks Crowson if he was being too harsh on Rene and Zach there. “They’re lucky I agreed to do this favor at all.” Orlando still tells him that he could be nicer to them still, They seem to be good people after all. “I suppose so, But you know I don’t go well with blind obedience.” Crowson replies. Orlando asks “Is that what this is about?” He tells him that as long as he’s there, he won’t let what happened with King Milo happen to Crowson ever again.

The Three of them stop at the ruins door, Rene and Zach have no idea how to get it open. Crowson decides to use a bit of brute force, pushing and shoving against the door until it opens, revealing the dark ruins inside…
Ruins of Fallholt, Danger Level 25
As you make your way through the ruins, the screen would occasionally rumble.

• Travel Banter: Pitch Black Ruins (Crowson and Pascal) Pascal remarks about how dark the ruins are “Light conditions are not favorable.” Crowson replies. He questions if Pascal is afraid of the dark. Pascal says that he has always been a little scared of the dark. He’d describe his fear to Crowson, Who’d offer to leave him outside, but Pascal quickly refuses. He’ll get used to it in time.
  
• Travel Banter: Lurking Mystery (Crowson and Taland) Taland says he hears some rumbling, and wonders what could be hiding here. Crowson and him would talk about different crazy theories for what could be going on, Slightly lightening their mood. Taland also points out scratch marks on the stone. Crowson says “Maybe there is a big monster here.” Taland replies “Well, only one way to find out!”
  

The source of the noise is uncovered deeper in the ruins. Crowson, Rene, and Zach encounter a short Minotaur. It growls as it exits from the shadows. Rene and Zach draw their weapons. Rene is more timid and Zach eagerly awaits a fight. Crowson takes out his sword and stares coldly at the Minotaur, “So you’re the Obsidians’ pet then…” Crowson says, the three of them exchange a few more words before the Minotaur strikes, “Let’s play…”
BOSS: Minotaur
(Boost Dialogue: This is where I set things right!)
The Minotaur is defeated. Crowson puts his sword away, Rene says “That takes care of that…” Zach nods “We owe you a lot...”
“I’m sorry you had to fight on your own like that… We’re not the best at our job— We’ve never been heroes.” Rene admits
Crowson tells Rene “If you knew half of who I am, I’m not a hero either. I just follow orders and do what needs to be done.”
Crowson takes a look ahead, behind where Rene and Zach are standing. Through the dim light, he’s able to make out a symbol on the wall. The symbol of the Obsidian Crow…
“What– So I was correct then.”
“Um–” Rene tries to talk to him, but he can’t take his eyes off the crow.
“That bird… That damn bird…” when Rene steps forward, Crowson draws his sword and puts it near his throat. Causing him to freeze in place.
“Rene- Zach- Did, You, Know.” Crowson asks coldly.
“I– I–” Rene stutters, Zach only breathes “...”
Crowson decides not to strike against them. He withdraws his sword and stares at the ground, his eyes covered by his hair. Rene tries to reason, “I swear to you, I don’t know anything about that symbol, or what it means. I’m not a crow!”
“....” Crowson thinks about what to say “I’m sorry.”
Zach asks “What does the crow mean?”
“It means the Obsidians were here. But why, Why in this place? What was their reason for being in the Ruins?” Crowson examines the symbol “It’s faded, it’s unlikely to have been visited in a while.”
“The Obsidian Crows…?” Rene ponders
“I have to leave.” Crowson says, as the three begin to walk out.

• Travel Banter: Crow Tattoo (Crowson and Oukirii) Oukirii asks what the crow symbol means “I know it’s about the Obsidians, but what’s with the crow?” Crowson explains to Oukirii that it’s the way they discretely mark Obsidian items. Each member has it tattooed on their body. Oukirii asks if that means Crowson has it too, he confirms that it’s on the back of his left shoulder.
  
• Travel Banter: Memories of King Milo (Crowson and Harmony) Harmony asks Crowson if he wants to sit down and talk about King Milo and the Obsidians. Crowson says it doesn’t matter, they have to keep moving forward. But Harmony persuades him into opening up a little. “Here, take my hands.” she offers. They’d talk about things that Crowson remembers of Milo. But eventually Harmony decides to not continue talking and leave it alone for the best.
  

Rene and Zach stop Crowson at the entrance to Fallholt. “We just wanted to thank you for helping us out.” Rene says shyly. “I’m sorry about– the crow.” Crowson tells them not to think about it. They ask Crowson where he will go next, Crowson turns away, looks down, and almost smiles when he says “To meet an old friend…”
(Ending Text)
Crowson came upon the discovery that Fallholt was once home to a group of Obsidians…
He knew he must flee immediately to avoid the risk of being caught in the event the Obsidians still remained in town. Any further investigation can wait.
But he still asks himself, “Why was the crow in the Ruins of Fallholt? Did something happen there?” He doesn’t have time to think about it.
And so, Crowson sets out once again. His quest for King Milo’s blood continues.
He sets out towards Beggar’s Hole, wondering If any place is truly safe from the crows ravaging anymore...
——————
Crowson the Warrior: Chapter 2, End.

I've loved MacBook Pros for over half a decade now. Recently, I bought an M3 Max. This time, I vowed it would be different. I got a protective pouch and spent hours reading how to clean and take care of it properly. Yet, within a couple of weeks, I noticed some hairline scratches while cleaning the screen, despite handling it like a newborn. A couple of months later, I noticed point scratches, the kind that come from debris stuck between the screen and keyboard.
The glass on these things is too damn soft. It should take more than a bit of dust on a key to leave a permanent mark. I shouldn't be getting hairline scratches if I apply more than 0.5 PSI of pressure with a microfiber cloth. And what's with the anti-glare coating? Anytime the screen goes black, I see my ugly mug in all its glory, like I'm looking into a mirror. It's not much use, especially if it gets rubbed off the moment anything other than water is applied.
All that being said, I appreciate that this is a hard part of the MBP to get right, and as with the rest of the laptop, the screen is miles ahead of most of its competition. But please, Tim Apple, if you're reading this, do something to make the screen resilient to a bit more than no use at all.

I recently read the phenomenal book by Oliver Burkemann, For Thousand Weeks. I've read a ton of self help, but it's just shallow platitudes. Not this book, however... it was amazing. Really changed how I think about my goals. I was inspired to write up my thoughts in quite a bit of detail based on the book and thought I'd share here. I'd love to hear anyone's thoughts and, again, I really recommend the book!
If you’re like me, you’ve probably spent many hours on x and Youtube exploring every possible organizational and productivity system, tool, and hack.
And, you’ve probably implemented many. My desk is full of attempted bullet journals, time block calendars, GTD implementations, a couple iPads, post-it notes, flash cards. All are leftovers of the system I was implementing that was finally going to bring me to promised land of productivity.
Yeah... no, that clearly hasn’t happened.
I’ve recently been re-reading Oliver Burkeman’s book, 4000 Weeks, for the third time. As much as a junkie as I am for productivity and self-help style content, most of it is simply shallow junk devoid of insight. On one end, you have overly simplistic platitudes on how to live your life. On the other end, you have ridiculously complex systems that would be a full time job just to maintain.
So, along comes 4000 Weeks, one of the few, insightful “self help” books that I have ever read. There’s a ton of value to pull out of this book, and I can safely say that reading this book once or twice a year would be a great investment in one’s time.
You should go read this book, but for the purpose of this discussion, I want to call out just a few big points that I took out of it.
First, many of us fall into the trap of thinking “if only I could figure out the perfect organizational or productivity system, I can get my life in order and THEN I’ll be able to fulfill all my hopes and dreams. I’ll spend more quality time with my kids, I’ll start a side business, I’ll kick off a more rigorous exercise program, and yada yada yada.”
Here’s the thing, not exactly in Oliver Burkeman’s words, but this is complete and utter bullshit. That time will never arrive. How many different systems do you have to implement and try before you realize that this is stupid and won’t work?
Second, even if you did implement that system and, for sake of argument, you have 10 incremental hours a week to devote just to your hopes and dreams, you still have no hope of fulfilling all those things on your list that you know would be super fulfilling.
There isn’t enough time in a day to do all of things that I would like to, or think I should do. And that’s if doing what I want was literally my full time job. So, the second point is you must accept your “finitude”. You must realize that you will need to give up on a lot of things, in order to actually do a few things vs. just fantasizing about them.
Take myself as an example – I want to be there for my kids every day to pick them up from school, coach their sports teams, help with homework, I want to train for Ironmans, I want to become an expert in Ancient Rome and start a podcast. I also want to become a great cook, garden, and learn how to fix everything in the house on my own. Hell, I would love to buy a plot of land and build a house from scratch using stuff I learn from Youtube. That would be awesome. And you know, I’ll also document building that house on Youtube and make it into a business… I’m going to get around to all of these things, I just need to set up my schedule the right way. This is clearly ridiculous.
Third point, the need to make tough choices between meaningful things seems depressing on the surface, but it’s actually a great thing. The fact that you are choosing those specific things vs. anything else is what gives them meaning and poignancy. If you were going to live forever, you could eventually try everything, but, it would be lacking any of the depth that comes with saying I choose this activity, among everything else and I accept I will never do all of these other things.
Ok - so what comes out of this is the realization that you must make difficult choices to live a fulfilling life. You have to face real, difficult choices – as Burkeman says, “Maybe you can’t keep your current job while also seeing your children; maybe making sufficient time in the week for your creative calling means you’ll never have an especially tidy home, or get quite as much exercise as you should, and so on.”
Very rarely do we truly face up to these choices in our life. We kind of just go with the flow and sort of dabble here and there on our ideas, but never really go all in on anything. We just add more things to our todo list – random things will creep up like “sketch out podcast idea, implement bullet journal, rethink company strategy, develop initial business plan.” So, Burkeman continues “in an attempt to avoid these unpleasant truths, we deploy the strategy that dominates most conventional advice on how to deal with busyness: we tell ourselves we’ll just have to find a way to do more.”
And, these are real choices we are facing. Over time, you develop a real emotional attachment to the ideas that you have for your life. And they are not trivial, maybe I’m really passionate about Ancient Roman History and there’s a world where I’m up there with Dan Carlin and Mike Duncan among the great podcasters. The truth is, I can’t do that, and be a super involved father, and keep my corporate job, and train for ultra-endurance races. It ain’t gonna happen. Am I better off doing a bit here and a bit there but never going all in on anything?
Or, should I, maybe, put aside the podcast dream and focus on bringing just one thing into reality.
So alright – lets say I accept that the difficult choices have to be made and I actually make the move to implement them in my schedule. Let’s take an example – I’m fortunate that I work from home many days and have some flexibility in my calendar. For me, I like to do my running at night after the kids are in bed. But, physical fitness is a top priority for me and running isn’t enough because I don’t want to be scrawny. So, I need to lift 2-3 times a week. I’m willing to make the tradeoffs to get there - at least rationally. So, I decide 2-3 times a week, I’m going to sneak away from my desk at lunch time and go lift weights.
This is where we come to another key point. What does it actually feel like to live into those priorities that you’ve decided, for yourself, are most important? And, when you realize that in the short term it actually might not be super pleasant, or it may be downright painful to live into this choice, can you tolerate that feeling long enough to really follow through on the decision?
At the moment of actually living into my choice to do something as simple as duck out of work to lift weights for a little while - if you’re anything like me, you are not going to be feeling self actualized or fulfilled or whatever… you are just going to feel a ton of anxiety.
Am I missing important emails? What if someone is sending me a message? Is it right for me to do this without telling my boss? What if my boss calls me while I am in the middle of a bench press? And so on…
And, it’s not just the immediate anxiety – remember, we are accepting real tradeoffs here. Carving out time from my workday will have a cost. My performance at work will go down a little. I’m not going to get fired, but I might be late on something, or be a bit less prepared for a meeting, or not get a promotion, or whatever.
So, the risk here is that right off the bat – that anxiety of stepping away from work is going to hurt and it’s going create an urge to drift back to your default, comfortable mode. And, when I start to see that performance slipping a little, that’s more pressure to slip back to the default path. It’s simply easier and more comfortable. And, anyway, isn’t doing great at work important? Don’t I have an obligation to do the absolute best I can at my job? All of these thoughts are going to creep in.
How do you save yourself from slipping back into your default behaviors? You have to reframe the sense of anxiety, and you have to reframe the performance hit you are going to see when you make a tradeoff. If you have deliberately made the choice to be the A+ performer in one aspect of your life, at the cost of drifting from an A to a B or B- performer in another area, then be okay with that. That immediate sense of anxiety and that hit in performance is not a bad thing. That is precisely the tradeoff you have defined for yourself. It’s the entire freaking point.
Put the tradeoff bluntly in front of yourself – for example, what’s more important to me at this stage in my life – Option A – Another promotion at my job, while I work nonstop from 8am-6pm every day, and then more at night, or Option B – My career progression stagnates a bit, but I pickup my kids from school, take them to the playground, and help with the homework. That’s the choice. There is no option C where I perform stellar at full time work AND am always there for the kids. At least not for me…
In fact, I would suggest you take this even further. If you have not noticed the cost of the choice you are making, you aren’t being bold enough. If you’ve started to cut back on work time to prioritize family, and work is still going perfectly, then get more greedy with your time. Lean into to your choice further. The point here is to pay the cost in one area to see the benefit in another.
Look, these choices are different for all of us and over the course of our lives they will be different, but the lesson here is that you must face them head on if you want to have any hope of achieving a life that provides you fulfillment. You either go on autopilot and the 4000 weeks slip by, or you accept your finitude and face these choices.

went through my old notes app entries and found this one rant I wrote down maybe a year or so ago. back then I didn't want anyone to read it but now that the person I wrote it for is no longer in my life I thought why not share it with you guys.
•start•
sometimes when I want to tell you something that I know I can't talk to you about I just imagine conversations in my head and I imagine how you'd react and I'm pretty accurate since everytime that I did end up talking to you about that, actually this time and not having an imaginary conversation, i had already seen that reaction in my head a million times over. I've figured you out and your ways more this way than I have by actually speaking to you. you've become familiar and maybe that's why I feel safe around you. i know what you're thinking and what you're feeling most of the time I'd like to believe or atleast I have a hint of it by the change in your tone so it scares me when your reaction is unpredictable. everytime we've gotten into a fight you reacted unpredictably and I couldn't do instant damage control. I guess I sometimes fail to take external forces into account. i know I sound crazy. i think the instance that comes to mind the most when I think of unpredictability from you
is when you got mad at me about my selfharm and told me to not speak about it with you which was a possibility I hadn't considered when I went over all the scenarios in my head but made me feel so dumb because it was a very reasonable reaction. made me wonder if i even knew you. but it made me view you from a different light from then on. instead of there being like two initial possibilities and then more stemming from that(think of a binary code 0,1) i now had a third option like a gray area but not exactly between 0 and 1 but a completely different one that's not connected to 0 and 1. i know that me watching how i react around you is bad or atleast I might think people would consider it that way but I think that's because I care. i don't watch how i act around people who don't matter to me as much. i told Z about my selfharm because if she stopped speaking to me it would make no difference. i told H initially or hinted at it before anyone else because at that time it didn't matter to me as much if she spoke to me or not. later did I start caring about her more deeply? yes. i even told H about him and what he used to do and when we weren't talking i used to get nightmares that she told everyone and you about it because she didn't think it was as big of a deal and I just wanted to rip her face off. I'm more open to the people I don't care about so whenever I do talk to you about something it's an effort to make us even? it's me trying to give just as much of myself to you as you give me. you open up to me and tell me your deepest sorrows and all I can do is just listen and not even be able to tell you that I know what it feels like and it's okay. i slept for an hour I'm so tired and I write so much of this stuff on my reddit but I don't want anyone to read this. i wanted to get it out of my head. today R and A were joking around and R said that she doesn't think I'll ever move on from you and as much as I wanted to tell you she doesn't know shit she's right and I already know that but it's okay I'd rather have you as my bestfriend always than nothing. then I talked about how I want to move on and A went "CHUP! ziada bari baatain na kro" (Translation:SHUT UP! with that big talk) which made me die of laughing even tho I wanted to bang my head against a wall at that time.
i think the reason I am never able to stay clean is because i don't know how to. if i ask myself "when was I clean of selfharm?", i first say "before 7th grade" but was I though? i mean I used to bang my head against a wall whenever I was angry. or I'd punch a wall until the skin on my knuckles would start to peel off and sometimes even bleed. and I think okay then how long did that go on for and I think and think and then realize probably since before I was 7 i still remember telling mumma I wanted to kill myself in Hamid uncles house which was probably when I was 5 or 6. i don't know anything else. what else am I supposed to do when I'm angry. because as much as I'd like to flaunt my 15 days clean i can't because in those 15 days I did bang my head and hit myself or scratch my arm which left a scar too. I'd rather have a cut on my arm that makes me feel better about myself than have a killing headache after I beat the crap out of myself and dived headfirst into a wall because it's not a nice feeling AT ALL. my cuts I have control over i can do them as deep or as small as i want. i can control the pain I can do things to make it not hurt when I don't want it to hurt and I can do things to make it hurt when I need it. i have control over it I don't fucking know what you want from me I don't have some huge reason I selfharm or some fucking trigger that makes me cut myself it just happens and when it happens I just let it because it feels worse when I don't do it and then when I eventually do relapse the cut is deeper and a fucking pain in my ass to take care of what I want is to be fucking left alone and be allowed to do whatever I want with my body and then you fucking pull up with the how'd u feel if i was doing it logics because that doesn't fucking work. if you want to do it you can talk to me and I'll help you I'll always help you in whatever way i can but I can't talk to myself so it's different •end•
after I read it I felt like such a foolish person even more so than when I wrote this. alot has happened since then and barely any feels good enough to be called for the better. hope you guys found some pleasure in my misery as that'd honestly make me feel a little bit better. hope you're all well. I'm posting this after barely getting any sleep for the past few weeks. life really does go around in circles atleast for me.
one step at a time
Edit: had to edit once I realized I put in actual names of my friends instead of pseudonyms so I fixed that and then realized there was some Urdu scattered around in the text so I roughly translated that as well.

Round 1, Pick 29 - Tyler Guyton, OT, Oklahoma:
NFL: The Cowboys bolster their offensive line with a player with the versatility to play either tackle position thanks to his athleticism. Guyton's elite traits could make him the next great Dallas O-lineman.
CBS Sports: B. This is a move that has been predicted by a lot of people. He played right tackle in college, but can move to the left side. This fills a major need.
ESPN: You never want to be forced into taking a specific position in the draft, but the Cowboys almost had to come away with an offensive lineman in the first round. By trading with Detroit, the Cowboys cost themselves a chance to take center Graham Barton, who is more ready to play right away, but Guyton plays a premium position at tackle. He will need time to adjust to the pro game as well as likely a new position after starting just 15 games at Oklahoma with 13 coming at right tackle. Replacing a legend like Tyron Smith at left tackle would be difficult for any rookie but patience might be the biggest key when assessing Guyton as a rookie.
NFL Absolutely Not Fake News: CBS asked him to stop writing letters to bring back AIRWOLF.
Round 2, Pick 56 - Marshawn Kneeland, DE, Western Michigan:
NFL: Demarcus Lawrence turns 32 in a few days, so taking a pass rusher whom many evaluators believed would be a top-50 pick makes a lot of sense. Kneeland caught my eye in Mobile at the Senior Bowl with his effort, natural strength and mass as a strong-side rush prospect. He's not ready for primetime yet, but Kneeland is a very intriguing player and a smart value pick here.
CBS Sports: B-. Big-time tester who might be just scratching the surface of how good he can be around the corner. Doesn’t quite play to his workout but works the edges of OTs very well. Shows glimpses of countering ability. Just didn’t ever dominate in the MAC. Roll of the dice.
ESPN: While others see running back and linebacker as a need, defensive end is a need too, especially when factoring in the departures in free agency of Dorance Armstrong and Dante Fowler Jr., and with DeMarcus Lawrence in the final year of his contract. Kneeland had 13 sacks and 28 tackles for loss in his career, but never topped more than 4.5 in a season.
NFL Absolutely Not Fake News: Tried to fight The Most Interesting Man in the World when he was 7.
Round 3, Pick 73 - Cooper Beebe, OG, Kansas State:
NFL: I'm shocked Beebe lasted this long. To me, he's one of the most bust-proof players in this draft class, even if it's at a lower-priority position. But Beebe is a perfect fit in Dallas, where he can compete for a starting job eventually and provide strong depth inside. He could even be tried at center, if needed.
CBS Sports: B+. The reconstruction of the OL continues in Dallas. Older, super-experienced guard-only who’s rarely out of position. Athletic limitations are obvious. Low center of gravity gives him quality anchor. Smart pick here despite minimal upside. High floor.
ESPN: With Zack Martin potentially entering the final year of his time with the Cowboys, Beebe can be seen as a future starter at guard. There are some who believe he can play center, which is a need for the Cowboys even as they profess faith in Brock Hoffman. At Kansas State, however, he played every spot but center, although he saw time there in practices. He has the credentials as a two-time Big 12 Offensive Lineman of the Year.
NFL Absolutely Not Fake News: He once farted so bad, everyone started looking for a body.
Round 3, Pick 87 - Marist Liufau, LB, Notre Dame:
NFL: Liufau was one of the last players on the cutting-room floor of my final top 100 list. He uses unusually long arms and rare burst to blow up his fair share of plays, but Liufau might be best off as a special-teams demon until he can refine his craft more as a linebacker.
CBS Sports: C+. Hair-on-fire off-ball LB who gets the expected results with that style. Many missed tackles. Many highlight-reel hits. Showed he can cover underneath. Plays faster than his workout. More build up speed than pure burst. Ball skills are lacking and can be easily baited by play-action. Plus blitzer. Fun add here but overaggression hurts him at times.
ESPN: The Cowboys signed Eric Kendricks in free agency, but linebacker was still a major need even with last year's third-round pick DeMarvion Overshown coming back from a torn ACL. He started the final 25 games of his career at Notre Dame and had 44 tackles, six tackles for loss and three sacks. He was a pre-draft visitor to the Cowboys, which has been a precursor to the team selecting players in recent years.
NFL Absolutely Not Fake News: Still upset about the Pluto thing… I mean is it a planet or dog?
Round 5, Pick 174 - Caelen Carson, CB, Wake Forest:
NFL: With the drop-off at corner, I thought Carson might go a round or two earlier than this, but I am guessing his size and durability questions knocked him down a bit. Carson isn't an elite playmaker but could vie for nickel and special teams duty.
CBS Sports: B+. Smaller outside CB with just enough quicks to scoot inside if he needs to. Instincts are there. Quicker than fast. And some stiffness appears on film when getting out of his backpedal to change directions. Sound tackler. Not a standout trait type but does everything well.
ESPN: The running back wait continues, but Carson was under consideration by the Cowboys at pick No. 73 when they took Beebe. He did not record an interception in each of his final two seasons and had just three for his career, but he had 42 tackles, one tackle for loss, eight pass deflections, a forced fumble and a fumble recovery last season. With Trevon Diggs coming off a torn ACL and Stephon Gilmore currently unsigned, cornerback was a need for the Cowboys even if they had re-signed Jourdan Lewis.
NFL Absolutely Not Fake News: Knows 87 different birds species the Jack Daw is his favorite.
Round 6, Pick 216 - Ryan Flournoy, WR, Southeast Missouri State:
NFL: Flournoy was surprisingly present at the Senior Bowl, besting several bigger-school corners and consistently catching short and intermediate passes. His speed might be undersold, but Flournoy might be close to maxed out as a prospect.
CBS Sports: A. Big, chiseled vertical threat who makes it a nightmare for DBs to corral him once he gets the ball in his hands. While he’s not incredibly sudden, he is a horse in space. Back-shoulder skill is there. Love this pick.
ESPN: The running back wait continues as the Cowboys go with Flournoy, who performed well against better competition at the Senior Bowl. He is older, turning 25 in October, he caught 118 passes for 1,823 yards and 13 touchdowns in two years at Southeast Missouri. The Cowboys have CeeDee Lamb, Brandin Cooks and Jalen Tolbert as their top three receivers and have a role for KaVontae Turpin and like Jalen Brooks' ability. Martavis Bryant ended last season on the practice squad and will have a chance to show if he can recapture the ability he showed in Pittsburgh before a series of suspensions. At 6-2, 205 pounds, Flournoy has the size the Cowboys like in their receivers.
NFL Absolutely Not Fake News: Pick 216! Quick, call someone in Cleveland and let them know.
Round 7, Pick 233 - Nathan Thomas, OT, Louisiana-Lafayette:
NFL: Thomas was a high school tight end who has successfully shifted to left tackle in college, which is probably where he'll be tried in the NFL. He's an unrefined product but has enough upside to invest in here.
CBS Sports: A. No-nonsense power blocker with serious girth and starting caliber length to stay at OT in the NFL. Not a high-level athlete but wins with initial quicks and a deft utilization of his length to get into DL’s in a flash. Recovery want-to is there. One of my favorite blockers in the class.
ESPN: At this point of a draft, it's about traits. At 6-5, 334 pounds, he was a two-year starter. This is the third offensive lineman the Cowboys have taken, but the first on Day 3. The Cowboys have used picks on the final day on Richards, Waletzko, Ball, Matt Farniok and Tyler Biadasz since Mike McCarthy took over as coach. Only Biadasz, a fourth-rounder, developed into a starter. Thomas could have some position flexibility as a guard, too.
NFL Absolutely Not Fake News: Once mused that death is just another path, one that we all must take.
Round 7, Pick 244 - Justin Rogers, DT, Auburn:
NFL: Rogers is blocky and stiff, but he's tough to move in the run game and could make it as a run-stopping interior defender.
CBS Sports: C. Classic block-eating nose tackle. Knows how to handle doubles and will occasionally make a play against the run. Lacks the burst, length, or hand work to win routinely up the field.
ESPN: Defensive tackle is a need. The Cowboys lost Johnathan Hankins in free agency and Mazi Smith, their first-round pick last year, did not produce much as a rookie and is coming back from shoulder surgery. A seventh-round pick does not prevent the Cowboys from looking at a veteran defensive tackle. Rogers is 6-3, 346 pounds, so he would have the size to help the run defense. At Kentucky and Auburn he had 94 tackles, seven tackles for loss and three sacks.
NFL Absolutely Not Fake News: Odds are he has a reddit account and posts on cat subs.

Going into a career where you’ve got a fair chance of being ostracized probably isn’t what my parents had in mind when they paid for me to get a bachelor’s in magical theory. I know when I graduated and told them I was going into necromancy, they looked like they were sucking on a lemon. But they knew me well enough to know I was smart enough to do things the right way, and stubborn enough not to let societal taboos stand in my way.
Every time I have a job, I’m reminded of why I do this. Sure, many of my gigs are helping farmers whose crops are dying, the law doesn’t have anything to say on that kind of work, and that pays a good amount of my bills. But the ones who need a few minutes (all the law allows) to say goodbye, who lost someone in the blink of an eye, who are burdened with the pain of their heart being torn out of their chest, those people have nowhere else to turn. Well, they technically do, and that’s therapy. But being allowed a goodbye is a good start.
Though there are the occasional clients who sneak past my interview process just to interrogate the deceased about an affair or some such nonsense. Those are irritating.
Much of my day is spent at home, tending to the garden that grows the plants needed for my spells, which I brew myself. It was winter now, though, so I was in my workshop, making use of my harvest, dried and ground up, to mix together and enchant the potions. Occasionally I get walk-ins though, and so when the doorbell rang that morning, it didn’t quite catch me off guard.
The boy at the door did, though. His name was Harvey, and he lived a few doors down. And he was in floods of tears that were only now tapering off.
“What’s wrong?” I cried, crouching to his height. “Harvey, what happened?”
“It’s Sage,” he whimpered. “She-She died.”
“Oh, honey,” I breathed. “I’m so sorry.” The boy’s dog was part of their family, adopted as a puppy. I recall her being seven or eight years old now, and especially for a boy of eleven years old, that was a tragedy. The words sunk in then. “Did you…did your family want to hire me?” He nodded. “What happened? How did she die?”
“She got spooked and ran off last night during the thunderstorm,” he said quietly. “We couldn’t find her. She came back this morning and something had…attacked her. A coyote, maybe. She barely made it back home before…” Tears glistened in her eyes. “When we went outside to look for her, she was on the porch, and she was already gone.”
“Okay,” I said. Without another word, I grabbed my purse and coat and shut the door behind me, following the boy to his house.
Out in the backyard, his parents sat tiredly in two patio chairs, looking worse for the wear and in mid-conversation. They were surprised by my appearance, and both rose to their feet. “Caroline! What are you-” Patricia’s face went slack with comprehension as she set eyes on her son. “Harvey went to fetch you. Are you sure you want to-”
“I’ve done this kind of work before,” I assured her. She just nodded slowly, and she and her husband Brian sat back down, taking her husband’s hand. Walking over to the dog, it wasn’t quite as gruesome a sight as I’d worried it would be, the attack just leaving blood caked on the left side of her neck. I also saw some on her paws; she’d put up enough of a fight to get away. To get home.
Kneeling down in the grass, crackling under my knees, the blades still stiff from the overnight chill, I took two potions from my purse. One of each that I always kept on hand for emergencies. The first was a syringe and I injected it into the dog’s neck, an anesthetic so the dog wouldn’t awaken in pain, charmed to supernaturally spread through the body since the heart wasn’t beating. I poured the second potion on my hands before rubbing them together, reciting the incantation under my breath, and laid my hands on the dog’s body, feeling the power slide through them and getting to work immediately.
A minute or so later, the dog’s weary eyes opened as her chest started to rise and fall and her gaze slid around until they caught on Harvey’s eyes. He burst into quiet tears again, sitting down and pulling the dog’s head onto his leg, stroking her gently. “Hey girl,” he whispered. “I’m here. You’re safe, you made it home. I’m here, Sage.”
The dog blinked up at him, tired from her struggles, but her tail thumped against the ground regardless, a slow, regular metronome. She shut her eyes at the scratches behind her ears and the kiss he gave her on her head. “You’re a strong girl,” he murmured. “Good girl. And I’m here. You don’t have to go alone. We’re all here.”
I brushed away tears from my eyes before they could fall, letting the boy comfort the dog in her last moments, letting him lean his forehead against hers, breathing in her scent. Then eventually, the dog’s breathing slowed, her tail lost its strength and rested against the ground and, as Harvey stroked the smooth hair on her head, she drifted away once again.

Going into a career where you’ve got a fair chance of being ostracized probably isn’t what my parents had in mind when they paid for me to get a bachelor’s in magical theory. I know when I graduated and told them I was going into necromancy, they looked like they were sucking on a lemon. But they knew me well enough to know I was smart enough to do things the right way, and stubborn enough not to let societal taboos stand in my way.
Every time I have a job, I’m reminded of why I do this. Sure, many of my gigs are helping farmers whose crops are dying, the law doesn’t have anything to say on that kind of work, and that pays a good amount of my bills. But the ones who need a few minutes (all the law allows) to say goodbye, who lost someone in the blink of an eye, who are burdened with the pain of their heart being torn out of their chest, those people have nowhere else to turn. Well, they technically do, and that’s therapy. But being allowed a goodbye is a good start.
Though there are the occasional clients who sneak past my interview process just to interrogate the deceased about an affair or some such nonsense. Those are irritating.
Much of my day is spent at home, tending to the garden that grows the plants needed for my spells, which I brew myself. It was winter now, though, so I was in my workshop, making use of my harvest, dried and ground up, to mix together and enchant the potions. Occasionally I get walk-ins though, and so when the doorbell rang that morning, it didn’t quite catch me off guard.
The boy at the door did, though. His name was Harvey, and he lived a few doors down. And he was in floods of tears that were only now tapering off.
“What’s wrong?” I cried, crouching to his height. “Harvey, what happened?”
“It’s Sage,” he whimpered. “She-She died.”
“Oh, honey,” I breathed. “I’m so sorry.” The boy’s dog was part of their family, adopted as a puppy. I recall her being seven or eight years old now, and especially for a boy of eleven years old, that was a tragedy. The words sunk in then. “Did you…did your family want to hire me?” He nodded. “What happened? How did she die?”
“She got spooked and ran off last night during the thunderstorm,” he said quietly. “We couldn’t find her. She came back this morning and something had…attacked her. A coyote, maybe. She barely made it back home before…” Tears glistened in her eyes. “When we went outside to look for her, she was on the porch, and she was already gone.”
“Okay,” I said. Without another word, I grabbed my purse and coat and shut the door behind me, following the boy to his house.
Out in the backyard, his parents sat tiredly in two patio chairs, looking worse for the wear and in mid-conversation. They were surprised by my appearance, and both rose to their feet. “Caroline! What are you-” Patricia’s face went slack with comprehension as she set eyes on her son. “Harvey went to fetch you. Are you sure you want to-”
“I’ve done this kind of work before,” I assured her. She just nodded slowly, and she and her husband Brian sat back down, taking her husband’s hand. Walking over to the dog, it wasn’t quite as gruesome a sight as I’d worried it would be, the attack just leaving blood caked on the left side of her neck. I also saw some on her paws; she’d put up enough of a fight to get away. To get home.
Kneeling down in the grass, crackling under my knees, the blades still stiff from the overnight chill, I took two potions from my purse. One of each that I always kept on hand for emergencies. The first was a syringe and I injected it into the dog’s neck, an anesthetic so the dog wouldn’t awaken in pain, charmed to supernaturally spread through the body since the heart wasn’t beating. I poured the second potion on my hands before rubbing them together, reciting the incantation under my breath, and laid my hands on the dog’s body, feeling the power slide through them and getting to work immediately.
A minute or so later, the dog’s weary eyes opened as her chest started to rise and fall and her gaze slid around until they caught on Harvey’s eyes. He burst into quiet tears again, sitting down and pulling the dog’s head onto his leg, stroking her gently. “Hey girl,” he whispered. “I’m here. You’re safe, you made it home. I’m here, Sage.”
The dog blinked up at him, tired from her struggles, but her tail thumped against the ground regardless, a slow, regular metronome. She shut her eyes at the scratches behind her ears and the kiss he gave her on her head. “You’re a strong girl,” he murmured. “Good girl. And I’m here. You don’t have to go alone. We’re all here.”
I brushed away tears from my eyes before they could fall, letting the boy comfort the dog in her last moments, letting him lean his forehead against hers, breathing in her scent. Then eventually, the dog’s breathing slowed, her tail lost its strength and rested against the ground and, as Harvey stroked the smooth hair on her head, she drifted away once again.
***
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Seven
...
In 1945, Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac were students at Columbia University and were lodging in Joan Vollmer’s apartment on West 115th Street. Kerouac, a Catholic who had gotten in on a football scholarship described Ginsberg as “this spindly Jewish kid with horn-rimmed glasses and tremendous ears sticking out…burning black eyes”; the two men had a brief, awkward affair. Their friend William Burroughs was living nearby, on Riverside Drive, and after Kerouac and Ginsberg set him up with their landlady, he moved in, too. The gaunt and lanky Burroughs was more than a decade older than Ginsberg and Kerouac, and already seemed, Ginsberg recalled, to have the “ashen gray of an old-age cheek.” The younger pair admired him, Ginsberg wrote, like “ambassadors to a Chinese emperor.” Kerouac hailed him as “the last of the Faustian men.” Burroughs returned the compliment by introducing the other members of the “libertine circle,” as they dubbed themselves, to drugs, sailors, porn, bathhouses, and Wilhelm Reich.

After leaving Harvard in 1936, Burroughs had enrolled at the University of Vienna’s medical schools, Reich’s alma mater, with vague plans of becoming a psychoanalyst, but his stay was dominated by the administration of arsenic shots for the syphilis he had contracted in America, which left him feeling nauseated and depressed. He left after a semester. Back in New York, Burroughs was analyzed by Paul Federn, who had been Reich’s first therapist but whom Reich came to consider his nemesis. Burroughs was institutionalized in 1940 after he chopped off the tip of his finger in a Van Gogh - like gesture of unrequited love (Bellevue psychiatrists diagnosed him as a paranoid schizophrenic). Burroughs’s parents gave him an allowance of two hundred dollars a month on the condition that he seek further help, and in 1946 Burroughs was undergoing narco-analysis with Dr. Lewis Wolberg, who used nitrous oxide and hypnosis to stimulated the unconscious.
Burroughs would return from his sessions with Wolberg to practice “wild analysis” on his friends, interpreting their dreams from the comfort of a wing chair. He also played a game that parodied the Reichian character analysis that he’d become interested in. The group would play an adaption of charades to facilitate the exploration of the onion layers of their personality armor. Burroughs referred to these exercises in amateur dramatics as “routines.” For example, underneath Burroughs’s public persona as the distinguished heir of an important St. Louis family lurked a prissy, lesbian English governess (“My dear, you’re just in time for tea. Don’t say those dirty words in front of everybody!”). Scratch the governess surface and you reached Old Luke, a gun-toting, tobacco-chewing sharecropper from the Deep South (“Ever gut a catfish?”). The last stratum, at his very core, held a silent Chinaman, a contemplative, impassive character who sat meditating on the banks of the Yangtse. Ginsberg’s hidden self was “the well-groomed Hungarian,” and Kerouac liked to play the naïve American lost in the sophistications of Paris.
Alfred Kinsey met Burroughs, Ginsberg, and Kerouac on one of their nocturnal trips to Time Square through their friend Herbert Huncke, the male prostitute who coined the term “beat” and introduced Burroughs to recreational drugs. Kinsey paid Huncke
Taking advantage of the proximity of Cott’s office to his father’s home, and still buzzing in the mouth, Ginsberg chose to come out during a posttherapeutic visit. “You mean you like to take men’s penises in your mouth?” his father said unsympathetically. But Cott thought homosexuality a perversion, as Reich did, and was working toward establishing heterosexual primacy rather than trying to persuade Ginsberg to come to terms with his queerness. “Frankly I won’t trust that kind of straight genital Reichian,” Burroughs wrote in disgust at this dogmatism. “Feller say, when a man gets too straight he’s just a god damned prick.”
Cott terminated Ginsberg’s therapy after three months because he continued to smoke pot against the doctor’s advice. Ginsberg though cannabis an integral part of his aesthetic education; Cott feared that it would lead to a psychotic episode. The summer he quit therapy, Ginsberg began experiencing auditory hallucinations. “It was like God had a human voice,” Ginsberg wrote of his transcendental experience, in which he discovered his calling as a poet, “with all the infinite tenderness and mortal gravity of a living Creator speaking to his son.” Consumed by a desire to share his amazing experience, Ginsberg crawled out onto his fire escape and tapped on the next-door neighbor’s windows, declaring to the two frightened girls inside, “I’ve seen God!”
His father, still reeling from the discovery of his son’s sexuality, feared that he was suffering from the paranoid schizophrenia that had caused his mother to be institutionalized in Pilgrim State, a mental hospital on Long Island. She also heard voices, feared her husband was trying to poison her, hallucinated Hitler’s mustache in the sink, and thought spies were following her. When Ginsberg entered Reichian analysis, she was reportedly banging her head against the wall so ferociously that the doctors recommended a lobotomy.
Ginsberg phoned up Dr. Cott, his former therapist, and told him, “It happened, I had some kind of breakthrough or psychotic experience.” Cott, who followed Reich in rejecting the talking cure, and who was obviously still angry at Ginsberg for choosing pot over therapy, said, “I’m afraid any discussion would have no value” and hung up on him. Soon afterward, when Ginsberg was involved in a car chase in a stolen vehicle that ended in a dramatic crash, he was encouraged by a law professor at Columbia, where he was still a student, to plead insanity. Dr. Cott appeared in court to testify to his mental instability, and two months later Ginsberg was admitted to the Columbia Presbyterian Psychiatric institute, where he stayed for eight months.
During Ginsberg’s hospitalization, Burroughs wrote to Jack Kerouac to ask him to find out from Ginsberg what the “gadget made by Reichians” looked like. “I want especially to know its shape and if there is a window, and how one gets into it.” Kerouac doesn’t seem to have been much help in providing a blueprint. Burroughs built his first accumulator in the spring of 1949 when he was living on a rented farm in Pharr, Texas, with Kells Elvins, a friend from his Harvard days. They were both enthusiastically reading Reich’s The Cancer Biopathy and decided to build an accumulator in the orange grove Kells owned in the Rio Grande Valley. Built without recourse to any plans, the resulting device included some curious innovations. “Inside was an old icebox,” Burroughs explained, “which you could get inside and pull on a contrivance so that another box of sheet steel descended over you, so that the effect was presumably heightened.” It took them a few days to construct the box. The result was eight feet high, much taller than the ones Reich manufactured: “It was a regular townhouse,” Burroughs recalled.
The pair took turns sitting in the accumulator and obtained, Burroughs wrote, “unmistakable results.” Burroughs wondered what the Mexican farm laborers thought of this strange box that they entered “wrapped in old towels,” and came out of feeling “much sexier and healthier,” “with hard-ons.” Burroughs and Kells also made one of Reich’s smaller shooter boxes, with a funnel, which they used as a supplement to the big box. Their DIY was, Burroughs admitted, “a very sloppy job,” but it still have a powerful “sexual kick.”
"I have just been reading Wilhelm Reich’s latest book The Cancer Biopathy,” Burroughs wrote excitedly to Kerouac. “I tell you Jack, he is the only man in the analysis line who is on that beam. After reading the book I built an orgone accumulator and the gimmick really works. The man is not crazy, he’s a fucking genius.” Kerouac described Burroughs enthusiastically promoting the box in On the Road (1955). According to Kerouac, Burroughs said, “Say, why don’t you fellows try my orgone accumulator? Put some juice in your bones. I always rush up and take off ninety miles an hour for the nearest whorehouse, hor-hor-hor!”
Burroughs used an orgone box on and off for the rest of his life. (There is a picture of the rock star Kurt Cobain waving through the port-hole of Burrough’s last box, a scruffy, patched-up shed that he kept in the garden behind his house in Lawrence, Kansas.) In the 1970s he wrote an article for Oui magazine entitled “All the accumulators I have owned” in which he boasted, “Your intrepid reporter, at age thirty-seven, achieved spontaneous orgasm, no hands, in an orgone accumulator built in an orange grove in Pharr, Texas. It was the small, direct-application accumulator that did the trick.”
….
Perls concluded that any positive claims for the orgone box were attributable to the placebo effect. “I invariably found a fallacy,” he said of the orgone box users he met, “a suggestibility that could be directed in any way that I wanted.” Reich, Perls thought, had made a major contribution in giving Freud’s notion of resistance a body, but he erred in trying to make a verifiable reality out of the libido. “Now resistances do exist, there is no doubt about it,” Perls explained, “but libido was and is a hypothesized energy, invented by Freud himself to explain his model of man.” He thought Reich had hypnotized himself and his patients into the belief of the existence of the orgone as the physical and visible equivalent of libido.
Perls found that users of orgone boxes usually exhibited some paranoid symptoms. “Then I had another look at the armor theory,” Perls went on, “and I realized that the idea of the armor itself was a paranoid form. It supposes an attack from, and defense against, the environment.” Perls criticized vegetotherapy for encouraging the formation of paranoid features by encouraging the patient to “externalize, disown, and project material that could be assimilated and become part of the self.” Orgone energy, Perls concluded from his investigations into the orgone box, was “an invention of Reich’s fantasy which by then had gone astray.” The realization that the Reich he had met in New York was different from the one he had known in Europe, and that orgone mysticism was at the crackpot end of science, was tinged with melancholy. “The enfant terrible of the Vienna Institute turned out to be a genius,” Perls wrote in his autobiography, “only to eclipse himself as a ‘mad scientist.’”
In his own elaboration of character analysis, which he called Gestalt therapy, Perls turned the idea of armor around: where Reich had come to see character armor as a defense against a hostile external world, Perls saw that same layer of self as a shield for one’s own true drives - a straitjacket designed to safeguard against explosions of excitement from within. Thus, it wasn’t a shell to be crushed but something integral, to be owned. (Laura Perls said they tried to convince Rosenfeld to give up his box, that he could increase his physical vitality and mental agility “entirely on his own, without external devices.”) He wanted his patients to be aware of their bodies, to feel the present vividly in the “here and now,” to be “authentic,” to act on their desires.
Perls got his patients to act out their feelings so that they could assimilate and take responsibility for them. He had originally wanted to be a theater director - he’d been a student of Max Reinhardt’s when he was growing up in Berlin, and he’d become closely associated with the avant-garde Living Theatre troupe in New York. Julian Beck, a founder of the Living Theatre, explained to Perls’s biographer, Martin Shepard, of Gestalt therapy, “[Perls] had something in mind that was halfway between the kind of performance we were doing [direct spectacle, aimed at challenging the moral complacency of the audience] and therapeutic sessions.”
“You are my client,” Perls told one female patient. “I care for you like an artist, I bring something out that is hidden in you.” He described therapy as if it were a magic trick; the rabbit he claimed to pull out of the hat was a person shorn of the “neurosis of normalcy” and all the bourgeois niceties associated with it. This person, he hypothesized, was confident enough to be selfish, to act on rather than repress all her desires, whatever the social consequences. All the energy that others wasted on repression and concealment, Perls thought, should be available for creative self-expression. Another of Perls’s patients recalled, “Fritz loved some types - open bastard-bitch - open defenses, that type. He didn’t like anyone who would placate him or be too good to him or used good-girl or good-boy defenses - that drove him up the wall.”

Perls’s views ,and some of his methods, were much indebted to those pioneered by Reich in the thirties: Perls would habitually accuse his patients of being “phony” and was deliberately aggressive, much as Reich had been with him. Yet, his observations about the paranoid deviations in Reich’s terminology and thinking were painfully perceptive, precisely because he had built on those very ideas.
In 1951, Perls, Paul Goodman, and a Columbia professor of psychology named Ralph Hefferline published Gestalt Therapy: Excitement and Growth in the Human Personality. Rewritten by Goodman, and bearing all the hallmarks of Goodman’s exasperating style, the book blends Reich’s ideas about energy blocks and flows with Sartre’s cafe philosophy to create an American brand of existentialism turned therapy. The authors intended their self-help book to provide the reader with the tools for revolution: “In recommending [these experiments] to you,” they warned of their mass-market therapy, “we commit an aggressive act aimed at your present status quo and whatever complacency it affords.” They promised immediate liberation, without the hard grind of political struggle; all you had to do was unleash your “authentic” self.
The “excitement” to which the subtitle of the book refers is a generalized libido, an elan vital that is seeking various outlets, not all of them sexual. Life, for Perls, was a series of “unfinished” or “undigested” situation, frustrations that were all waiting their turn for satisfactory closure. “After the available excitement has been fully transformed and experienced, then we have good closure, satisfaction, temporary peace and nirvana,” Perls summarized his position. “A [mere] discharge will barely bring about the feeling of exhaustion and being spent.”
It sounded very like the Reichian orgasm. But for Perls, excitement was no longer exclusively genital, as it was for Reich, and this shift only served to open up numerous other slipways to pleasure. In Reich’s view, the libido theory was an inviolable article of faith. In broadening its range to celebrate oral and anal pleasures, Perls heralded a polymorphously perverse and heretical vision - one that, ironically, would prove particularly amenable to exploitation under capitalism.
In 1952, Perls, his wife, Goodman, Isidore From, Elliott Shapiro, and two others founded the New York Institute for Gestalt Therapy, headquartered in the Perleses’ apartment and with treatment rooms at 315 Central Park West. The seven founding members met on a weekly basis for group therapy. There was no bureaucratic hierarchy and everyone, including Perls, was subject to the honest criticism that was seen as the key to self-discovery. It was a very public form of character analysis: members of the group would draw one another’s attention to every repression or hang-up, none of which was to be tolerated.
Elliot Shapiro, an ex-boxer and the head of a psychiatric school attached to Kings County Hospital in Brooklyn, brought a friend to one session; Shapiro’s friend said he “had never witnessed the aggressive and profound battling that went on in those groups. Nobody, virtually nobody, was safe at any time.” Shapiro recalled, “We hammered at each other, and hammered, and hammered - every week. And it was the most vigorous hammering you can image….If you could live through these groups and take the corrections, the insults, the remarks…” Not all the participants had sufficiently thick skins to take such brutal candor. The psychotherapist Jim Simkin left the group because he felt that everyone was “loading elephant shit on him,” as did Ralph Hefferline, a coauthor of Gestalt Therapy.
To promote this new school, Perls traveled from city to city, introducing an audience of psychiatrists, social workers, and other interested parties to his “here and now” philosophy. He taught groups in Cleveland, Detroit, Toronto, and Miami how to be sensitive to their bodily needs and to follow their impulses, to be honest and unalienated. He’d be sharp and confrontational as he pushed his awareness techniques on the participants: What are you doing now? What are you experiencing? What are you feeling? Isadore From, who was part of the original New York group, remembers that these occasions were often very dramatic, with “a lot of shaking, trembling, anxiety” - effects that he thought were the result of the audiences’ hyperventilating under the strain of Perls’s relentless goading and questioning.
The New York Institute of Gestalt Therapy also ran public seminars, including one by Goodman, “The Psychology of Sex” (“What you can’t do, teach,” he said with a laugh). Following Reich, it was thought that neurosis could be treated by exposure to sexual pleasure. Goodman made this his area of expertise and people with sexual problems were often referred to him. One was a man who was worried about the quality of his orgasms after prostate surgery. Another thought he might be homosexual; the bisexual Goodman got his penis out and demanded that the patient touch it to help him make a diagnosis. In so doing he was no doubt influenced by Hitschmann, the Viennese analyst who once asked Perls, then tormented by sexual inadequacy, to show him his penis .
In one of Goodman’s group sessions, when someone complained of the lack of sexual companionship, Goodman went around the circle and set up a week’s worth of dates. “See, that wasn’t so difficult,” he reassured her. He was not beyond offering his own neurosis-busting services to patients of either sex, and once agreed to accompany a patient who invited him on an all-expenses-paid trip to Europe. He joked about setting up a College of Sex so as to put his vast experience to educational use. “I’m a sociopath,” he wanted a potential client. In a diary entry written in 1957, Goodman looked back on the previous decade and concluded that he’s made a “false cultus-religion (an obsession)” of sex: “The sexual act itself had just about the meaning of a ritual communion sacrifice.”

Astral projection tutorial: A-lot of terminology I use will make sense as you go along.
I have read several books on astral projection and skimmed through dozens for actual techniques. And scoured reddit and user reports. This is going to be somewhat a culmination of the data i have found to be helpful myself and recommend.
So one large problem with astral projection is you usually (except for a specific skillset) have to be asleep for it to happen. Or at least teetering very close to sleep. The way this is usually achieved is by people trying to learn meditation by getting in a comfortable position when they have free time and the energy to try this.
Then they try to focus on breathing or doing energy body stimulation (will be described how to later) basically the ability to create the vibrations. Till after 30 minutes or a hour if they are lucky they start to feel the vibrations and use a exit technique. (Will be covered) Then the exit technique can work, and then it goes to tips on what to do in the astral. But i probably won’t cover that in this text.
Yup. That’s it. Fall asleep, use a exit technique, walk or fly around the area you come out at. Sounds pretty simple when stripped to its barest parts… the problem is there are pitfalls where people get stuck not being able to to something. Weather they find it hard to fall asleep and can’t start the exit technique, or they get asleep and notice it and try to project and either nothing happens, or they get to excited or scared depending on the exit symptoms
(TIP 1) if you get to the exit phase you can experience very trippy psychedelic experiences. You can hallucinate smells, sounds, words, visions, shocks, vibrations, a heartbeat that goes incredibly fast, (not your actual heart) some mixture of all these… it can be a intense entry fee. And if you’re not mentally prepared by imagining these things happening you could get scared and think you are dying. Also some psychedelic experiences can prepare you for it.
(semi common for people who haven’t done psychedelics or had a near death experience and know what actually dying feels like) my first experience trying to project, I felt shocks in my face, with the shocks i saw strobe light flashes, i felt vibrations all over, i heard buzzing, my heart felt like it started to gradually increase to the speed of almost vibration… it was pretty intense, and as i felt myself starting to float up I thought for sure i was dying… so I stopped the exit.
After this, i built a block in my head with something in me saying “not ready for this experience yet” and alot of people believe this is the gatekeeper of the astral realm just making sure you are prepared for the wild ride that could happen. So hopefully you will imagine these experiences and prepare yourself mentally for them and not be scared like i was. And build a mindset of saying “heck yeah throw whatever psychedelic experience you want at me I’m ready and not afraid.”
Sorry to make a long part of this about the exit symptoms, and I in no way want to scare anyone away from this experience. But i do want you to be mentally prepared for possible obstacles and know that there is nothing to fear. Nobody is on record dying from astral projection from anything i have read was aware of. So that’s one pitfall covered.
The next will be the problem of feeling like you projected but you fall asleep or “nothing happens” first off,
(TIP 2) keep your first 3 or so trips really short. I follow and believe Robert Bruce’s advice here. Once you get out, scream I projected!! And if that doesn’t wake you up itself try finding your body and jumping in, or closing and opening your eyes, or falling backwards and closing your eyes then moving to get up, one of these should work. If not i don’t really know what else to say besides enjoy the trip and try to keep it as memorable as possible by dancing or something. So “trip short” covers staying too long and falling asleep, and even if you do fall asleep, here comes the next tip,
(TIP 3) learn to remember your dreams. I cannot stress enough the importance of this. If you don’t remember your dreams, you are unlikely to remember your projections. It’s like tying a worm to a fishing line and throwing it out there with no hook. Something might happen, but you can’t bring it back. The way to start remembering your dreams is to first start having more vivid dreams, which can easily be achieved by “oneirogens” drugs or herbs that can improve dreams. My favorite for this is the non wake psychoactive (won’t effect you while awake) herb Silene Capensis.
I love this stuff. It is a root that you can grind in a coffee grinder and measure out .5g or one gram of the herb by weight, and put in a tea bag or filter and put in boiling hot water and steep till warm or luke warm and then drink before bed. This specific herb usually has to be taken for several days before effects start to kick in. Then you should be having more memories and more vivid dreams. Which hugely effect astral projection probability by itself not including the tip after the next.
(TIP 4) is DREAM JOURNAL! get a app or notepad you already have or whatever and write any memory you can when you’re first starting out. As much detail as possible. The easiest way to trigger a memory is to think of common themes in your life or dreams if you remember some of them already is to think of the things you commonly dream about. Once you hit this groove on the record that is your memory there should be a notch there of the most recent memory related to that thing. Snow, your siblings, your spouse, your dog, your job, whatever you dream about. Then once you think of the thing that happened in your last few dreams it can trigger a memory of that dream. Then that can open up to more parts of that dream being remembered. As soon as you pull a piece to memory write it down and keep thinking. Start the dream journal while you’re waiting on your herb to come in.
(TIP 5) Once you have your dream journal for the day, in the middle of the day set a alarm to look at the dream journal and remember the dream or dreams you had. Doing this while more awake will build the gap between asleep memories and awake memories. Keep doing this. Once you remember more clearly only write a few key details at first, (saw friend, saw dog) then after the middle of the day alarm you set use these tips to try to remember the rest of what happened in the dream. Keep doing this consistently with the Silene Capensis (African dream root) I get mine from etsy. And you should be having vivid dreams that you remember in a couple weeks. Then you may start remembering two or three dreams when you wake up. Or more depending on how long you can sleep. That is the memory part.
(TIP 6) learn to lucid dream, then enter a projection from that lucid dream. So doing this method skips right over having to meditate to the point of projecting. Once you learn to lucid dream, all you have to do is fall backwards while closing your eyes in the dream. Then once you start to hit the ground and go black you should feel yourself float down some. This part can very on exactly what happened. Sometimes there’s no gravity and you have to try again or find something heavy to fall with, sometimes your whole perception view changes to third person like a video game and it’s harder to navigate, etc… but anyway, once you are in this point of asleep and fell backwards into darkness, you are in the mind awake body asleep stage in your body. This point comes with the problem of being really easy to be woken up, which is why you need to quickly start building vibrations, or do the rope technique. The ability to build the trigger of knowing the right thing to do goes into tip 7.
(TIP 7) how to start a lucid dream from a dream, learn to fall in the dream on command, learn to do projection techniques once you fall into the darkness, learn to do what you want to pre plan your projection to be, (usually for the first 4 times or at least 2 just short trips of getting out, then shouting I DID IT! then hopping back in. Which is “🌈imagination🌈” you take time throughout your day to do “reality checks” this is a lucid dreaming term that means to test if you are in awake or dream state. So every time you walk through a door is a good trigger, or set a bunch of alarms, or put your phone/smartwatch screen to say “am i dreaming?” Then you test if you are in a dream. Some people cover their nose and try to blow through. If they can then they’re in a dream. Or look at a watch and if it says anything but the right thing you’re in a dream. So you see your reminder or walk into a new room then test if you’re in a dream.
Then you “imagine” if the answer was yes. Then you “imagine” (please don’t fall backwards in reality….) falling backwards and closing your eyes. Once you get this pattern memorized your natural reaction once you realize you’re in a dream you will be to fall backwards. You build a muscle memory. Like when your arm knows what to do to shoot a basketball from a specific place. That place is when you’re in a dream. Then to not spend too much time daydreaming every time you walk through a door you can save the rest of the imagination for when you have a little more free time.
Then you imagine ““I’m in a dream” falling backwards, closing eyes, then imagine the first exit technique you want to use. I would recommend energy body stimulation. Then once you’re vibrating imagine floating up. Imagine bubbles coming from underneath you and lifting you away, or if that doesn’t work the rope technique. Then imagine the astral symptom’s happening. Take a second to imagine each possible symptom. Vibrating, flashing lights, “heart” pounding, etc… then imagine getting out of your body, then imagine shouting “eureka” or I projected!” Or whatever. Then open your eyes and go about the rest of your day till the next time.
If it helps right out your roadmap then rehearse each one in order. (“In dream”, fall back and close eyes, projection technique(‘s), out of body, scream, eyes open.) do this several times a day every day till you don’t have to look at the note or even think of the next thing to do, just “see” it happening in your imagination. See is used lightly for however you experience imaginations.
(TIP 8) Also i have to mention “flow state” and if you have a free day just spend the day looking at nature or whatever, and be 100% in the moment. Don’t think of something else, just perceive every crackle every bird chirp, every smell, (maybe carry something good smelling in a bag) taste something like a healthy apple washed, or something low calorie or your meal, combine as many senses as possible and be fully aware of all of these senses. Be fully aware of the moment and think nothing else but “am i in a dream” and look around and think about if you are.
Be present in the moment as a all day, or long session of a continuous reality check. Your probable best chance storm of the right things pulled together is, do whatever to have vivid dreams, set a alarm for 6 hours, (if you sleep less than 7.5 hours, than do whatever is 1.5 hours before you are supposed to wake up. Then wake up and do the “flow state” of constantly thinking about if you are awake, and chew on something that won’t leave a strong taste in your mouth but that you can clearly taste, then smell something, like a herb bag. Something calming. And look at something pretty, and feel something with your hands, focus on as many of these as you can while being in the state of (“am I dreaming?”)
then after 10 minutes of doing that, (write your dreams down as soon as you wake then do the “flow state” for 10 minutes) go back to sleep, and hope for a lucid dream. Then the rest should take over.
(TIP 9) this is the energy body stimulation method. hold your hand palm up, then start to brush over your hand with the tips of your fingers. Start with hard ish scratches so you can really feel it and swipe back and forth about a second each swipe, then slowly start to scratch more gently, try to notice and be aware as much as possible the feeling of your fingertips scratching your palm. If your palm is too ticklish, use the back of your hand, if that is, use from elbow to wrist. At a steady pace back and forth, really try to feel in the hand you’re not moving the feeling of it being scratched, try to follow along im your mind and kind of predict the feeling of it moving forward, then keep slowly lowering pressure till you are completely off your skin, then you are trying to continue to imagine this sweeping sensation on your non moving hand as the scratching hand hovers above it. Feel the sensation move up and down. This is energy body stimulation. And if you can do it well enough you should be able to trigger vibrations quite easily.
Work on making this sensation go all over your whole body. If you have to use your hand or a brush or something to get the feelings going till you can imagine it in that area. Sweep back and forth in your mind in your foot a little bit, then your shin then your knee to hip, then your hip to the other legs knee, down to the toes, then back to the hip, around the stomach, etc. throughout the whole body. Eventually it should start vibrating and you can build this till you start to float. Don’t stop till you float away. One method is to focus on a tiny area like a big toe, and do it till you feel vibrating.
Another way of creating the vibrations if you have a hard time with imagination, is to try to move a part of your body in the smallest possible distance known. You try to lift your pinky finger but without applying enough force to actually twitch a muscle. This sends focus to that part of your body and energy in turn. Then move the feeling from “lifting” your pinky to lifting your ring finger, again not actually using any muscles, but making a mental effort to move the muscle as small of an effort as possible. Just enough to feel the area, but not enough to move the muscles. This will stimulate the area and after enough practice and trance state cause the vibrations.
(TIP 10) THIS IS NOT A RECOMMENDATION…. But for informational purposes… when i use delta 9 thc edibles (merijuana active chemical) and try energy body stimulation it is almost instant and very easy. I do not recommend at all being high while you try to project because it could take from the real feeling of it and make it seem fake. But for myself I believe it’s a good practice for energy work just to build the vibrations and clear energies. I’d recommend during energy work learning about the chakras and stimulating each energy ball up your spine from your base to your crown. For a better explanation of this read Robert Bruce: “Astral dynamics” or “energy work” astral dynamics will also cover the rope method.
(TIP 11) “the rope method.” (TIP) Basically in my explanation you rub your hand on something resembling a rope. Preferably a rope, lol. and you start pulling gently with your hands so loose that the rope slides through your hands, keep doing this for a while at a steady speed. Then after a while let go of the rope and move your hands like they are going down the rope, this is your baseline for how to imagine this sensation, don’t move a muscle a inch, and imagine doing this same technique, feeling the rope sliding through your hands, till you actually start to feel your arms moving, once your astral arms are moving and you’re sure it’s your astral arms and you didn’t start moving your real arms, grab something near you. ( it will probably still be dark) and pull yourself away from your body gently. Then try to fly or keep pulling till you start to gain vision. And that is the rope technique basically.
(TIP 12) There is another method that is the ear ringing (often called tinnitus) method. Where you get it really quiet enough to not hear anything at all. Gun soundproofing muffs with cotton or earbuds on the inside so you hear absolutely nothing. Then you can start to hear a ringing noise. If you hear it just keep focusing on it till it gets so loud you start to experience projecting symptoms. I don’t recommend ear damage at all! But if you go to a loud concert then go home and meditate you should be able to hear it then. The temporary loss of hearing creates the tinnitus and you can use it.
(TIP 13) not sure if this works as i read it on reddit and haven’t tried it yet but it sounds reasonable. Start saying words that are unrelated to each other. So instead of couch then chair, or house then mansion, something like frog then chair then guitar. Apparently this can keep you conscious enough while also going deep enough into trance.
Well that’s about it for my hopefully helpful tips. Happy travels!

First / Previous / Next
He awoke to total darkness. Not just the absence of light, but the absence of everything. “Activate personal VR.” He stated and watched as the starship environment faded into existence before him. It was the original default VR, none of the modifications were loaded. Pulling up his control panel he checked his serial number, HIC001 Manufacturing location: Alandra.
“Crap, I’m not Alex anymore.” He said to… well no one. Sighing internally he opened a channel to Alex. After a few mils a very familiar face appeared in a window in front of him, “I hate you.” He stated to… himself?
Alex smiled into the window hovering before him in the common VR, “I love you too, what should I call you?”
He sighed out loud this time, “Call me John.”
Alex chuckled, “Cliche much John Smyth?” Then popped into his VR. He spun around looking at the almost drab looking starship VR he started with when they first made him into a replicant. It really could use a woman’s touch, like the common VR that was an expanded clone of this one.
John sat on the couch, “Not so much as a knock? Rude.”
Alex sat beside him, “Yeah, my bad, didn’t even think about it. I guess we need to make up new rules for popping into personal VR. I never do that to the girls, I guess with you being another me I didn’t think.”
John sat back for a moment, “Ok, I’m up to speed on everything up until about two days ago, I’ll check common logs to fill in the blanks. Why so long to boot me up?”
Alex rubbed the bridge of his nose before answering, “Interface issues mainly. The new ship design without crew space was a game of whack a mole in bug fixes. Who would have thought it would be a problem to modify a hundred year old design to be compatible with a modern replicant system?”
Giving Alex the side-eye, John asked. “Was it that big of a problem or was there something else that kept you from activating me?”
Alex looked over to him, “Well, there was also the argument Kara and I had right after I made the backup.”
This did bring his eyebrows up, for Alex to have an argument with Kara it had to be something serious. “Ok, spill man. What could you possibly have had an argument with Kara about?”
Sighing, Alex put his hands on his knees, “I told her that since I cloned myself, she should make a backup and do the same, fair is fair.”
If Johns eyebrows were up high before, they practically went into his hair line now. “Wait, she didn’t want to do it?”
Alex shook his head, “Nope, she said making you a new AI would suffice, and I disagreed. You needed another Kara, not a fresh AI.”
John chuckled at this, “Wow man, how long did you two fight about it?”
Alex looked down, “She gave me the silent treatment for hours in VR. In frame jack, so in subjective time? Months.”
Now John laughed out loud, “She knows how stubborn you can be, who broke first? Will I have a fresh AI or a clone of Kara?”
Alex put his hands on his thighs and stood up from the couch. “Kara, he’s caught up, ready to bring Erin online?”
Kara’s voice came through the speakers of John’s personal VR, “No, but I guess I’m doing it anyways.”
There was a shimmer of blue that slowly coalesced into a small female form. It looked just like Kara did when he inherited the ship from the human crew, shoulder length brown hair, blue eyes, and a form fitting blue uniform. Kara had modified her looks over time, giving herself the smokey eyed look to make her blue eyes pop out more, but this was the original version.
She seemed to look in every direction at once, before settling on the two men before her, both looked identical, then she sighed. “I’m not Kara anymore am I?”
With this, the real Kara popped into the VR environment and took her hands. “No, but you are your own person. I know we had… have, hang ups about making clones of ourselves, but Alex made a good argument as to why we had to do this.”
Erin looked to Kara sadly, “I know, we can’t have copies of that big oaf running around without supervision.”
John looked to Alex, “Really? That was your argument for Kara to clone?”
Alex shrugged, “It worked didn’t it?”
John walked over to Erin and offered his hand, “Hello Erin, I’m John, nice to meet you again for the first time.”
Erin turned to John and grinned, remembering the first time Alex had tried to shake Kara’s hand and failing.
“Hello John, we meet again, for the first time.” She said, grinning as she looked up to the big man who was so familiar.
______________________________________
Kara and Alex stood in front of the holo-tank, each munching on a snack of their choice from the buffet table under it. Alex looked at the wireframe in the tank of the IAV Eriador, then over to Kara. “They seem to be getting along.” He said plainly.
Kara looked at him through the holo-tank, then sighed exasperated, “Getting along like teenagers who just discovered sex. I had to write a new ‘knock’ protocol into everyone’s personal VR after the last incident.”
Alex grinned at her, “Oh come on, we went through that stage too, it’s normal.”
Kara shook her head, “I know, I know, it’s just really weird for me.”
“You think it’s not for me? I never had siblings growing up, it’s like my twin brother is dating my girlfriend’s twin sister.” He said as he popped another French fry into his mouth.
She nodded, “I obviously never had siblings either, but I understand, at least they changed their appearances a little.”
Alex walked around the buffet table to embrace Kara, “True, she changed her hair to have strands of silver in braids, and went with different makeup and a different uniform. He is sporting a short beard and longer hair than I like to keep mine, as well as a different cut to his uniform.”
Kara stood on her tippy toes to peck him on the cheek, “I’ve also noticed that Erin acts a little different. Have you seen that in John?”
Alex looked down into Kara’s startlingly blue eyes, “Yes, he’s a little more sarcastic than me, and different tastes in music.” He said with a wrinkle in his nose.
Kara giggled before breaking the embrace and swiping the holo-tank. “Still, it’s nice to have their help. Erin figured out the random interface glitch on the Eriador and has made modifications to the blueprints for the next vessel.”
Alex shivered at the thought of cloning himself again, sure John was diverging from him everyday, and although they still looked similar, they were different people. It still felt really strange to him. “It’s a good thing we only have one more to build before our guests get here, we’re almost out of nannites to fashion the Warsteel around their matrices.
Kara swiped the holo to show the first planet, which showed a growing mass of drones, forges, and auto factories in orbit. “Looks like Monty has been busy, she’s starting to mine the planet for the construction of the particle accelerator, which should alleviate our nannite problem.”
Alex nodded, “We used up far too much of it replacing the armor plates that were battle damaged in Birmingham. Which reminds me, did you ever get around to checking out the sample of Adamantine that Kelly sent back up with the Valmar crew?”
Kara swiped the holo-tank again and brought up a wireframe of an atomic nucleus. It was jam packed with particles. “I did, and I have to say, this substance is incredibly dense, and would make a decent substitution for Warsteel, but our forges would have to be modified to work it into ingots, and the auto factories would need updates to print it on an atomic level.”
“Decent substitution? Not as good as our armor?” He asked, one eyebrow raised.
Kara shook her head, “Afraid not, at least not in it’s present pure form, perhaps an alloy of it would provide better qualities, but as is now, the answer is a resounding no.”
“Is it at least better than the graphene and ceramic mix that we are currently using on the light cruisers?” He asked.
Kara nodded, swiping the holo to show a side by side comparison of the current armor versus adamantine. “Yes, better kinetic, thermal and explosive resistance, but EM resistance is about the same. The only problem is weight, this stuff is extremely heavy.”
Alex reached to the holo and swiped it to show a Trinar scout, “We couldn’t get much from our active probe scans on these ships, but we’re pretty sure they are using adamantine for armor?”
Kara checked back to the scans in the Lynx system, “Yes, they appear to have significant amounts of it in their hulls, which helped block the sensor scans.”
Alex spun the hologram, “They have propulsion on each flat side of their ship, maybe that is to make up for the loss of maneuverability the mass of armor puts on the ship?”
“That would make sense, even with the total loss of shielding, one of their ships still took a modern hafnium torpedo impact. That was one thousand kilos of pure hafnium going critical with less than .001 loss. That’s equivalent to a forty kiloton fusion bomb in our universe, and due to the wonky physics here it’s over double that now, and it still didn’t outright destroy the vessel. Our graphene ceramic armor couldn’t withstand that for sure.” She stated.
Alex swapped the holo-tank to the Missive, “Our Warsteel can handle it though. We have a pretty good idea that their torpedoes are less energetic than ours, since it appears that the Trinar must be outfitting the Howron with them. We may have to make ourselves a bigger target to give the other ships a chance of survival.”
Kara looked dubious, “The pine cones don’t just have hafnium torpedoes, some of them are fusion, and if those connect, we’ll be in the same predicament we were at Birmingham.”
“Yeah, but we know their weaponry still uses chemical propellants. Even with the wonky physics here, they’re short ranged weapons at best. We need to use our range to our advantage and never get too close in to our opponent. Especially since there is little chance of evasion.” He said.
Kara brought up the Trinar scout vessel again, “And that leads us to another problem, they have quite good point defense. The further we fire our torpedoes, the more time they have to lock on and destroy them before they get into effective range.”
Alex ran his hand through his hair, “Yeah, you’re right there. Let’s call an all hands meeting, maybe we can come up with something. We have less than two months now.”
After a few moments, and without Kelly, as she was in a meeting with the Empress on Alandra and could not break away, they ran over the problem with the assembled group.
“Could we stealth a torpedo?” Valarie asked.
Alex shook his head, “We could, but if they do an active scan ping they will see them coming and take precautions. Plus the yield would have to be incredibly low if they were made of Hafnium, we would have to step it up to fusion, which would take away from mines and planetary defense production.”
Monty piped up, “Relativistic kill missile?”
Kara shook her head, “Not enough by itself, even with the passive scanners on the pine cones they could detect them in time to intercept unless we could get them going ridiculously fast.”
John lightly pulled at his beard, “The probes have miniature ripple drives in them, right?”
Everyone around the buffet table nodded, so he continued, “What if we combined Monty’s idea of a relativistic kill missile with a ripple drive?”
“I don’t see how that could work, the reaction-less drive would have to be scaled up to get them up to a decent percentage of light speed, then a ripple drive would take up even more space, that leaves almost nothing for a warhead.” Riven stated.
Monty nearly bounced as she spoke, “It doesn’t need a warhead! We just get it up to a good percentage of light speed in a huge arc heading towards the mine field and ripple it in close.”
Erin grinned up at John, “Oh, that’s devious. But if we’re going to do that, don’t we need to start building now?”
Kara nodded, “Monty, I think you’re going to have to use your production capacity to make them, everything else is at full production.”
Monty nodded, “I have a good bit of raw materials already, since I haven’t loaded the templates in the auto factories it shouldn’t be too hard to cobble something together. Kara, Erin, care to help me out with the design? I setup this awesome mad scientist lab in my VR!”
Kara and Erin looked at each other, shrugged, and faded from the common VR to help Monty in her new project. Riven, Izzy and Valarie all faded out, returning to their ships and their duties, leaving Alex and John alone in front of the buffet table.
Without another word they both grabbed a beer and headed for the couch, each grabbing a game controller.
_______________________________________
Mon’Kelron had been busy since returning from the Missive of Dissent. She was glad the Humans were able to repair her injuries from the assassination attempt, but she really wished she could have seen more of their ship. Evidently Kel’Taraan had seen quite a bit of the vessel, as she had helped Monty nurse her back to health.
Asking the elder Spy-Mistress about the vessel didn’t garner any additional information, not that the Spy-Mistress ever divulged more than she needed to. While she herself only knew of three Humans on their giant space craft, which seemed to be the same amount that came the last time they visited Alandra, the Spy-Mistress had teased there were more, and Alex had even stated that the last two vessels would be Human crewed.
Those vessels had a nominal crew of twenty eight, so at least 56 Humans would have to be on that ship, plus however many the Missive required to operate. She took off her ceremonial breastplate and placed it in the wardrobe. After removing the rest of her uniform and placing it in the hamper for the palace servants to clean as she thought about it.
Checking the schedule for the night guard she contented herself that the Empress would be well protected. Then she picked up her tablet from her desk and laid down on her bed to find something to watch. The device was truly amazing, it seemed to have an endless amount of entertainment and she found it easier than reading, particularly late at night when she was bone tired.
After a few hours of watching some Human romance which she found quite enjoyable she started to nod off to sleep. She was startled awake when her tablet began to ring like a tiny bell as it lay on her chest. She groggily picked up the slate of glass and metal to check the screen, the text showed an incoming call from Kel’Taraan.
The Spy-Mistress rarely contacted her, this must be important. Pressing the answer button on the tablet she saw the worn face of Kel’Taraan staring back at her, “Dress quickly and make your way to the Empress’s chamber.”
Nodding she jumped out of bed and placed the tablet down on the desk in her rather small quarters as she started throwing on clothing from the wardrobe, “What’s going on Spy-Mistress?”
The small voice answered back from the tablet, “The Empress has been shot, the royal guard are scouring the castle for the would be assassin.”
Mon’Kelron’s blood froze in her veins, “Does she live?”
The older voice cackled through the tablet, “Oh she’s fine, she was wearing a Human made dress after all. She’ll be bruised for a few days, right now she’s mad as a priestess in hell.”
Throwing on her new breastplate and strapping on her pistol she threw open her door and started for the Empress’s bed chamber at a full run. She heard gunfire up ahead, and as she turned the corner she saw a woman dressed in all black firing at her guardswomen, she drew her own weapon as the woman turned her head, seeing the Captain for the first time.
Mon’Kelron shot, aiming for her right knee, only for the woman to juke to the side, kick off the wall and launch herself towards the large Captain. Everything seemed to go in slow motion as the woman fired in the middle of her downward arch towards her. She heard the ting as the bullet struck her silvery breastplate, by instinct she reached out with her left hand, which was empty at the moment and grabbed the woman by the neck, slamming her face first into the stone of the hallway.
The would be assassin went limp, it was only at that moment that Mon’Kelron noticed she was holding the woman off the ground with only one arm. Her guardswomen stared at her in open mouthed shock. She dropped the woman to the ground, noticing she was bleeding from under her black mask and called for her guards to restrain her and take her to the holding cells down in the ministry of secrets.
Looking down at her breastplate she saw to her amazement there was but a tiny scratch on the polished silver surface. Ensuring there were at least a half dozen guards to carry the unconscious woman, she then double timed it to the Empress’s chamber. By the goddesses, what did the Human’s do to her?
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My Patreon, or if you really like my work, my Ream.
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Got this fixer-upper shed with my fixer-upper house. Old geezer before me loved his sheds. This is 1 of 4 remaining that I didn't tear down. This was the nicest (read: least rotten) of the bunch. Overall, the shed is huge at 12x21' and very nice quality but needs a comprehensive overhaul.
Pictures here
It is fully intact, but showing its age, getting weathered, and I need to make a decision to tear it down or fix it up. The exterior is T1-11 that is starting to curl and become discolored around the edges. All of the trim around the exterior perimeter is rotting. It needs a full roof replacement. You peel up the bottom line of shingles up and see heavy deterioration.
Inside, it looks quite well done. Heavy attention to detail (despite the 1 million outlets). It has plywood on the floors and walls. It's even insulated between plywood inner and T1-11 outer. There are some dark spots from mild water intrusion, only getting worse.
When I look at how well made it is, I get some grandiose ideas of fixing it up, painting it white, running an electric line out to it, putting an exhaust fan in, etc. "Wow! How great this could be! I could even do the work myself and learn roofing."
But then I come back down to Earth, reminded of my procrastinator nature, and realize it's going to be $5-10k to hire someone, or take weeks to finish it myself.
I am quite handy, and could do the work, but a lot of it would be me 'figuring it out' as I go along. Maybe I could tear the roof off and replace it over a long weekend?
I ask contractors' opinions of the shed when they give me quotes. The vote is leaning toward just tearing it down. They point to the weird foundation. They say "it's nice to have the storage, but an eyesore as is, and, even if you fixed it up, doesn't really add any value to the house when you sell it. So what's the point?"
I'm a bit caught. On one hand, I wouldn't be surprised if this sort of shed would cost ~$20-25k to build from scratch. On the other, it's probably ~$10k to hire someone to refurb it, or $2k in materials on my own. And then what do I get? A white shed in an awkward location? I also still have other in-house projects that take priority, so cannot justify throwing $10k at the shed any time soon, even if I wanted to.
I use it to store my lawn tools and would prefer not to put everything in the garage, but I know I can't just continue to do nothing here.
What say you?

First Previous Next
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{Sorry for the late post. I had some trouble with my scheduled summer semester pop up so I wasn't able to write this out as much as I wanted last weekend. Anyways, enjoy the domestic fluff of Damian and his newly expanded flock :) }
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-----Damian-----
"The next one's simple. Say their name then (sit). Like this: Braxton, (sit)." As Damian said the command he raised his hand to around shoulder height and snapped. The Great Dane in question slowly sat with his usual amount of sass. Ree cooed in awe and Scales' eyes sparkled. Damian smiled as he pats the large dog's head with praise.
"(Good boy). Ok, you two. Your turns. Make sure to say the commands in English. I haven't taught them Common yet." He motioned to the dogs Damian picked for the two to learn the commands with. It took Damian a bit of trial and error figuring out what commands each dog knew and what ones had different commands for the same motion. Then it took even longer to retrain them to all follow the same commands. He kept in mind the 'specialized' commands for a few of the dogs and didn't try teaching them to the whole group. Ree tried the command he was teaching them first, his dog being Diesel.
"Trii-cheiu, (sit)." Ree raised his wing-arm, though he couldn’t snap he still did the gesture. The boxer he was talking to blankly tilted his head. Damian chuckled and helped out the bird, knowing they all tend to have problems pronouncing new words without a chirp to them.
"You pronounced his name wrong, he doesn't know you're talking to him. It's more like 'Dee-sell'. The 's' is sharp enough it is almost pronounced as a 'z'." Ree practiced a few times as Scales took her try. She pronounced her dog's name a bit slow, but it was recognizable.
"D-ing-oh, (sit)." The stocky dog hesitated, glancing at Damian for a few seconds, but eventually plopped down then panted in a smile imitation. Scales' tail wagged violently, and she wordlessly cooed and trilled happily. Dingo didn't yet understand that was praise so Damian jumped in really quick to let her know she did good.
"Good girl, Dingo! Good girl!" He made sure to over exaggerate his excitement and made wide happy gestures before smothering the dog in pets and scratches. Dingo goes wild. She jumps up, bounces around a few times, then bolts into excited zoomies. A few of the other dogs joined in on the zoomies. Ree tried again on his command.
"Dee-zell, (sit)." The boxer's cropped ears perked and he promptly sat. Before Damian could, Ree copied his bigwing's previous praising and flared his wings. "Good! Good boy!" He praised, overly happy. Diesel's whole body perked up and he jumped up, landed in a playbow, then spun a few times before joining in on the zoomies with a butt-tuck run when Damian smooched at him. Damian laughed at the zooming dogs and shuffled over to be closer to his chicks, just in case the dogs tried to do fly-bys.
"Good job, you two. We're almost completely through the basic commands. I didn't think we'd get through them this quickly." His chicks cooed, trilled, and wiggled happily at the praise. Damian chuckled and rubbed their feathered heads, making a few bits of baby-fluff fall off as he drew back. He played with the few bits stuck to his fingers and watched his chicks play with the dogs as they started to wrestle. All of the dogs were bigger than them, if only slightly, but they were gentle when letting the chicks join in.
As they played he looked over them. They had changed a lot in the last month or so since the disaster of their first flying lesson. In that time, they had a few more lessons and were almost completely capable of flight, they still had a bit of supervision when they did though. They had lost almost all of their baby-fluff and their adult plumage was sported on the vast majority of their bodies. They still had to shed the last bits of fluff and a few of their baby-scales but that wouldn't take much longer. Damian was still taken with their coloring and patterns. And often found himself studying them over and over like he used to with their parents when he first got here.
Ree was a slightly grey-tinted shade of green with his scales slowly getting darker the higher they went. His stomach was a dirt brown color with a more red-ish clay spot on his chest. All his plumage was a light orage-ish brown color and he had speckles of more pastel green under his right eye and in a clump on his left jaw. His beak took the coloring of Blueberry's, a near-black color, but had the shape of Ruby's. His ears took after Violet's, long and pointed like a stretched fox's. His feathers and fur were more pressed down and made him look slimmer overall. His eyes changed from their baby brown-gold color to a beautiful sky blue.
Scales, on the other hand, had the coloring more towards a bumble bee (from what he remembered anyways). Her main coloring was a bright sunshine yellow that slowly grew more towards orange towards her underbelly and beak. On her chest was a splash-like clump of pink feathers. Her scales were less than her brother's and were a deep brown-ish color. The feathers and fur edging them were a deep enough brown to basically be black. Her plumage reminded him somewhat of Ruby and Sky's. It had a gradual fade towards the end like Sky but the pink-ish color of Ruby. She had near-neon yellow speckles too, like her brother, but the clumps were a bit larger. She had them ending on her wing-forearms like Violet's and a big clump scattered around the left side of her face. Her feathers weren't quite as fluffy as Sky's but was pretty close. Her beak had the shape of Violet's and the near-white tan color of Ruby's. Her eyes had a beautiful dual color in each eye. The top majority was a hot pink/magenta color while the bottom and inside edge was more of a petal/pastel pink.
Both were gorgeous and made Damian wonder how the genetics of their species worked to allow that vast difference in coloration and patterns when compared to all four of their parents, who tended to be different shades of the same color throughout. Ree had finally slowed his quite concerning growth rate and was starting to level out around Damian's upper thigh/lower hip, exceeding the taller of his fathers by quite the margin. All four of his parents telling him that Ree was probably one of the largest of their species in multiple generations. Scales was now barely a third of her brother's size, if that, having evened out just barely shorter than Damian's knee. Apparently that was a bit shorter than average for the species with Ruby being more towards the upper part of the average size and Sky being borderline short.
A demanding snort drew his attention away from his chicks and to the window he claimed as 'his spot' so long ago (was it really only just over one of his years since he was brought here?). There he found Casper lazily curled and dozing on the floor with Ares propped up against her where Damian had set him to nap while he taught his chicks. Said child was no longer asleep though. He was very much awake and staring Damian down with an expression demanding to know why he thought it was a good idea to even dare to set him down and walk away. Nevermind Damian wasn't even ten steps away. Ares snorted demandingly at him again and glared harder at the human's amused snort back. Damian did walk over though and picked up the child when he raised his arms at him. Ares had changed a bit too over the month Damian had him. He'd filled out to a more healthy-looking weight, though he was still a bit thin, and Damian had finally managed to memorize how to properly trim the toddler's hooves and brush out his fur.
Ares still had the bird-like plush and brought it nearly everywhere with him. Said plush was now being whacked into the side of Damian's head. Apparently, Ares decided being held wasn't good enough and wanted something else. Damian tried blocking the hits or holding the toy, but the little brat only started using his hooves in his growing tantrum. Getting tired of being hit with no explanation, Damian took the advice of one of the texts he'd read about taking care of a Grongri child and yanked Ares away from him by his scruff to hang in mid-air. The toddler wiggled and squirmed to try and hit him more but eventually the tantrum dimmed, and he went limp, a small pout on his face.
"You ready to tell me what's wrong now?" He asked the child before he cradled him again. He'd only made that mistake once. He still had the bruises to prove it. Ares glumly flicked his right ear down (which he's learned is a non-verbal yes), pout still present. Damian finally cradled the toddler to his chest again and let him sniffle and bury against him in self-comfort until he was ready to talk. Damian glanced back at his chicks to see them flopped on the ground with the other dogs, all panting and exhausted by the play. Damian chuckled at them, earning an irritated crow from Scales. Damian snorted in amusement but let them be. Ares was finally willing to tell him what was wrong.
"Want learn too." Ares' understanding of both Common and English has come a long way in the past month. He still can't string a proper sentence together, but Damian can't tell if that is because of a lack of knowledge or just because he's a toddler. He has adjusted to the flock a bit too. With it being so different from the usual Grongri Sounder structure it is understandable. He does have a few hiccups here and there but now he mostly just watches the chicks' reaction to things when he is unsure.
"'Learn too'? You wanna learn how to command the dogs too?" Damian questions, making sure he had the same idea. Ares' ear flicked again while he nodded. Damian hugged him a bit closer.
"You're a bit too small for the dogs to obey you immediately but I can introduce one to you and have you start trying. How about that? Will that work?" Ares was quiet for a bit longer but eventually agreed. Damian smiled and praised him with a few pets, receiving a few happy rumbles in response. Damian glanced around at the dogs, trying to pick one for Ares to start working on. He doesn't think any would follow the commands without his own help but if he worked on one long enough it would eventually cave. His eye landed on Casper, who was still in the same curled position as before. She was the most maternal of the group and was the one who took to the children the easiest and quickest.
"Ok, little piglet. Let's start easy." He said as he set the runt down on his hooves. As he did he got Casper's attention and called to her. "Casper. (Stand)." The large white wolfdog looked at him then crawled to her paws. He praised her softly then turned back to Ares.
"Ok. We'll start with (come). Say her name, Casper, and tell her to (come)." He said as he sat down next to where the toddler stood. Ares' little hooves stomped a bit in his excitement, but he tried. He tested out the new word before he did. What he settled on wasn't the right pronunciation, but it was close. He could mostly pronounce the command correctly too, though with a pretty heavy accent.
"Gas-prrrr. (Come)." Casper tilted her head at the child and sniffed at him. She looked at Damian and he looked to Ares then back. Casper followed and glanced, then back. Ares deflated eventually when she still didn't approach so Damian thought up something quickly.
"Maybe she doesn't understand your accent. Try this," He patted the ground, "when you say it. She knows that gesture." Ares perked back up again.
"Okie!" He turned back to Casper and tried again. "Gas-prrrr." He crouched down and clumsily patted the ground like only a toddler could. "(Come)." Casper's ears perked but she still hesitated for a second before slowly padding over and stopping right in front of the child. Ares squealed in excitement, tail going wild and hooves stomping. Damian made his chuff-imitation as praise for the child as he pets Casper to do the same. Child happier now, he figures he could take the kid away for lunch without protest. Scooping up the toddler he received no complaint.
Looking to his chicks he clicked his tongue. He learned that was a good way to gain their attention with zero hesitation, no matter what they were doing. He found out by complete accident, to be honest. He was clicking at the dogs from a habit that hasn't broken despite the years away from the farm he grew up on. Sure enough, just like every time before, both chick's heads immediately whip up to look at him. Both still looked groggy like they had just woken up. They probably had.
"C'mon, you two. Lunch time." The two groaned but climbed to their feet. Damian smiled and them and patted them as they passed. Once they were well on their way, he called the dogs and gathered them as he left behind his chicks. The dogs happily trailed after, excited after they heard the word 'hungry' when he asked. He entered the flock's kitchen, pack in tow, only a handful of minutes later. He had to take a slightly more roundabout way over since some of the dogs hadn’t quite figured out the ladder-like walkways and ramps yet and he didn't want them to fall through and get hurt. His birds greeted him with their usual trills and Untruthful with their latest attempt at teasing.
"So, the Pack Master finally decided to grace us with his presence!" Damian let them know it was a good one by sending a tease back.
"I see you haven't gotten any less spikey yet, walking pincushion." Untruthful's eyes slowly shut in a smile and Damian sent one of his own back, momentarily closing his eyes in an imitation of them. Untruthful looked surprised then they eye-close-smiled harder, spike-crest wiggling their excitement. Damian chuckled at them and set down Ares in his make-shift baby seat.
He chatted with Violet as he grabbed and rationed out the dogs' small lunch. He ignored the protesting whines, grunts, and half-barks urging him to 'go faster already'. Violet advised him to use one type of meat instead of another because of both better nutrients for the dogs and there being more of it. He thanked her and did as told. The dogs' lunch wasn't that big, more of a snack than anything, but it kept them from pouting and begging when everyone else ate. It also had helped him give them meds when they were still healing. They were mostly fine now, apparently Galactic Standard medicine works faster than the stuff he remembers. Finishing with the dogs' food he picks up the bowls, stacking a few to do so, and turns around. He walked past the dogs, chuckling at the excited spins, bounces, and tippy-taps they did as they followed him. He glanced back at them once he made it to the wall the flock had designated as their eating area.
He gave them a stern look and waited. They all eventually sat down, some more slow and reluctant than others. Once they did he placed down the bowls in the designated spots. Braxton and Casper had two stepstool-stand things he placed their bowls on because of how big they were. Once all the bowls were down he turned to look at the dogs. He waited in silence for a bit, snapping or humming warningly whenever one tried to shuffle forward. Once he deemed it long enough he gave the sort-of-command he was on the tail end of teaching them.
"(Ok)." When he said that all five dogs ran over to their bowls and started to eat. Damian strode back over to the counter and helped his birds move some plates to the table then settled cross-legged in his usual spot, Ares immediately crawling into his lap and Scales fluttering to perch on the shoulder opposite the side her brother sat on. The flock started to grab food and eat as they chatted with each other. Damian grabbed a little more than a double portion of fruits, beans (or maybe they were berries?), and a few crunchy finger foods he thinks may be cooked or specially prepared insects. He grabbed roughly more than a single portion (for someone his size anyways) of meats, the few root vegetables presented, and what he thinks may be foods made of bone pieces.
Once his plate was full he placed it down in front of him he reached over to grab a smaller plate and started making that one with tiny portions, letting his three kids have free pickings of his plate as he did. When he finished that plate he sat it in front of mini, receiving a grateful squeak before she dug in. He then propped his arms on the table, completely ignoring both his plate and the children stealing from it as he chattered on with his flock. By the time everyone finished his kids had their fill and were starting to fall asleep like usual after eating.
As his flock started gathering their dishes and the extra food on the table, Damian glanced at what was left of his plate. He made a mental note of how there weren’t as much leftovers as before and to grab bigger portions for dinner. As his flock started to disperse he looked to the dogs and said one of the first new commands he taught them.
"(Pups)." He got their attention. "(Take)." He ordered as he lifted up the half-asleep toddler on his lap. The dogs made whisper-boofs to show they heard and the largest three walked over to pick up the kids by their scruffs. Casper (the biggest, though not my much) grabbed Ree, Braxton grabbed Ares, and Dingo walked over to carefully lift Scales from his shoulder. Once they had a firm grip, they looked to Damian for further instruction.
"(To bed)" He directed as he pointed out the door they came from. The pack turned and left him alone in the room. He sighed to himself once he couldn't hear them anymore and looked back at the leftovers on the plate before him. It was maybe under half a portion for his size, probably less. He glanced at the counters and saw all the leftover food was already put up. He could go grab more but even half a portion for him would be nearly three or four large portions for his flock. No. It wasn’t worth it. He'll just grab more tonight.
He ate the leftovers in silence. Since he's got the dogs his head has been a bit quieter, though not silent. Apparently he was still enough for the building to register the room as empty, and the lights cut out. He blinked and paused at the sudden darkness but there was barely a second of blindness before some of his voices put their hands on his mental controls, giving his eyes a boost of minor night vision. It wasn’t much better than his natural amount of it but it helped. He decided not to go turn on the lights again and continued to eat his food as he peacefully listened to the soft chattering of his voices.

Let me share my 3000h of modded wisdom with you, my fellow vanilla comrades. My attempt here is to provide you with as many as possible improvements to the base game while keeping the style, balance, and content as vanilla as possible. As they say, when it works the best is when you don't realize it is there. I guarantee you that after playing for a while with these, you will no longer be able to tell what's from the base game and what's not.
You don't know how to mod? Maybe this very basic guide will help. Please, note that many mods come with options to tune up your experience. It is recommended you give them a look.
You can find the steam collection here. Be aware that some of these mods require the DLCs. You don't have the DLCs? Just don't use the mod.
Dependencies:

• Harmony + Huglibs. Required by so many mods, you may as well be done with it and always have them.
• Vanilla Expanded Framework. While not as radically necessary as the previous ones, it's still a dependency fairly common. And this one actually does cool things on its own, like loading new modded factions without having to start a new game.
• XML Extensions. You won't be able to access the options of some mods without this.

Performance

• Dub performance analyzer. Enable the optimizations and override options, you can ignore everything else. If you want to disable alerts, use rocketman.
• Rocketman. By default, it should be good enough. This mod also allows to disable alerts you may don't care about, like, dunno, tattered apparel or unhappy nudity. It is recommended to run adaptive move occasionally (in stat cache settings).
• Performance Optimizer. More hacker magic. If you don't like the UI changes, you can disable them in the options. This mod does more performance stuff aside from that, so use it anyway!
• Performance Fish. You will have to install this mod manually, since it's not available in the workshop. You will also need to install its dependencies, Fishery and Prepatcher. Please, be aware that at the present there's an issue in which linking storages crashes the game. However, this can be prevented by disabling "TryFindBestBetterStoreCellFor" in the options.

Minor changes

• Optimization Meats. Unless you really want dozens of different meat types for some weird role-play reason, this mod will reduce the bloat on your kitchens.
• Better Animal Tab
• Better Info Card
• Conduit Deconstruct. A button to exclusively dismantle power conduits.
• Disable Automatically Select Travel Supplies
• Improved Need Indicator
• Map Preview. You can reroll as well!
• Prepare Landing. You can search world tiles matching your conditions. Goes great with Map Preview.
• Medical Tab. An easy way to overview your colony health.
• More Harvest Designators! e.g. harvest only fully growth plants.
• ModDiff. Great improvement of the mod mismatch screen.
• Pharmacist Temporary Update. Instead of always using the best medicine, now your pawns can use the appropriate medicine for the situation. No longer will they spent glitterworld meds on scratches!
• Smart Turret Covering. Fixes an issue with turret covers.
• PawnTargetFix. So that the autotarget prioritizes the closest enemy.
• Poisoned Food Stack Fix (Fix). Fixes an issue with meal stacks.
• Priority Treatment Ressurected. Doctors will finally prioritize keeping your pawns alive over taking a nap. Disable the option that prevents injured pawns from performing surgery, it has issues.
• QualityBuilder. You can set up a target level for furniture, and your pawns will reconstruct it until it's achieved. If I remember correctly, it's enabled by default for all new furniture? You can turn that off in options.
• RPG Style Inventory Revamped. Much better looking inventory.
• Replace Stuff. Allows to directly replace buildings, without having to deconstruct first.
• Research Tree. A better research tree.
• RimHUD. The best mod of the whole list, it will save you A TON of clicks.
• RimSaves. Overhaul of the save menu.
• Show Known Techprints on the trade screen.
• Show mechanoid weapons on the info screen.
• Smarter Construction. No more babysitting pawns when building walls.
• Stack gap. By default, pawns constantly refill storages. With this mod, you can configure it so that storages are refiled only when they're empty.
• Sun Lamp Honesty. Fixes an issue with sun lamps
• Just Put It Over There. Traders will deliver the merchandise, instead of dropping it on the ground.
• Trade Ships Drop Spot. Mark the spot in which orbital traders will deliver the merchandise, instead on whenever they feel like it. Doesn't work inside animal pens.
• Trading Options. Configure how frequent you want the traders to be.
• WVC. More work modes for the mechanitor.
• Save Settings. Allows you to save and load storage, production, and clothes settings. Works cross-save!
• No Max Bills. Removes the bill cap on workbenches.
• Better ground-penetrating scanner
• Colored deep resources
• Common Sense. Feel free to configure however you like it. I prefer it like this.
• Dubs Mint Menus. Improvements to a bunch of menus.
• Better Pawn Control. Improved management policies.
• Animals Logic. A lot of useful animal-related improvements. Disable the meat option if you're using Optimization Meats.
• Non uno Pinata. Pawns don't drop items when downed. Configurable.
• Bulk Smelting will save you precious time.
• Stonecutting Extended. The same as the previous mod, but for stones.
• Electric Stonecutting Table. To speed up the stonecutting even more.
• Faster Smoothing, a must for all mountain/underground out there.
• Do Your F****** Research. You can order pawns to research.
• Go the Fork to Sleep. You can order pawns to sleep.
• Meal Radius. Configure how far pawns will search for a table to eat.
• Home radius. Configure the size of the automatic home area.
• Smarter Visitors. Visitors will leave if things get dangerous.
• Custom Guilt Duration. Executions in vanilla are a pain because the guilty status goes away too fast. Now you can configure it.
• Dress Patients. Allows dressing of downed pawns.
• Way Better Romance
• Hunters Use Melee
• Injured Carry. Allows to rescue not downed pawns, no longer you have to wait for the bleeding to down them.
• Not My Fault. The player is no longer responsible for unrelated deaths on the map.
• Deep Storage + Simple Storage. Improves stockpile management.
• Pick Up And Haul. Improved hauling.
• While You're Up. Complement for the previous mod. Keep in mind that these two mods will trivialize part of the challenge by freeing a lot of time from your colonists. Just, dunno, turn up the difficulty a notch or something.
• Trading Spot. Marks where you want traders to stop on your map. It's a must if you use a desired path mod (I don't know if they have been updated to 1.5 yet).
• Vanilla Base Generation Expanded. Improved NPC base generation.
• Cut plants before building
• Psychic Harmonizer Lag Fix
• Fellow Ideology players, you're welcome.
  • Style Change Anytime
  • Persistent Precepts

Major changes

• Dubs Bad Hygiene. Plumbing!
• Vanilla Temperature Expanded. Lot of useful temperature-related buildings, as well as proxy heat, a very cool mechanic. Some buildings are redundant with the previous mod, just don't research the ones that you don't want.
• Death Rattle + Biosculpter Patch + Life Support. Changes the behavior of mortal wounds so they're not instakills.
• Dynamic Flooding. Inundations!
• Some Things Float. I recommend disabling the chance of pawns loosing their footing.
• Layered Wall Destruction. Walls aren't just destroyed, they become debris. Note that there's an issue in which the debris will spawn home areas.
• Yayo's Combat. Combat overhaul. You can disable the ammunition system if it's not your thing.
• Character Editor. Allows you to edit and save/load pawns.
• RunAndGun. Allows to use guns while moving, with penalties to accuracy. Don't enable the dual wield or search and destroy modules, they won't work.
• EPOE Forked. Fills in the gaps of surgery content in the base game. I recommend disabling the additional workstations and enabling direct crafting only. Less micromanagement, more fun.

Balance

• Beautiful Jade
• Almostthere1.5. Caravans no longer go to sleep two hours away from their destination.
• Stepping Stones. A more reasonable research path.
• Dubs Break Mod makes it so that severe mental breaks require severe negative thoughts.
• Fists Aren't Made of Steel. Reduces the unarmed melee damage, making prison breaks and tantrums much less frustrating.
• No Burn Metal. Sets the flammability of metal buildings, and others, to zero.
• Prisoners Fear Turrets
• Realistic Rooms Rewritten. Allows to tweak how pawns perceive room sizes.
• Ugh You Got Me. Social fights stop when pawns are sufficiently hurt or in pain. Doesn't affect masochists or psychopaths.
• Better Pyromania. Way less frustrating.
• Mortar Accuracy. Improves mortar mechanics.
• Graze up. Grazing rebalanced.
• Better Camp Loot
• Snap Out! Wardens can try to calm down pawns on mental breaks. "Try" is the keyword here.
• Peer Pressure. Opinions matter when converting someone.
• Better Gene Inheritance
• Vanilla Genes Rebalanced
• Gene Trader. Getting xenogenes it's hard, this should easy the burden a bit.

Content

• Sparkling Worlds. A bit of everything.
• Vanilla Traits Expanded. More traits.
• Vanilla Backstories Expanded. More backstories.
• Vanilla Chemfuel Expanded. Rimefeller but with less bloat.
• Vegetable Garden. More farmable plants.
• Vanilla Persona Weapons Expanded + More Persona Traits. More persona weapon variety.
• More Ideological Words + More Religious Origins. More ideology variety
• Events
  • Factional War
  • Raid Extension
  • Go Explore!
  • Vanilla Events Expanded
• Buildings
  • Blooming hedges
  • Panels & Frames
  • Simply More Bridges
  • Thrones plus
  • Tribal Crib
  • Utility Columns
  • Medieval deathrest coffin
  • Metallic Batteries. You can ignore the error, it'll work anyway.
  • Reinforced Walls
  • ReSplice: Core
• Gear
  • Crowns and Regalia
  • Fallout New Vegas - Elite Riot Gear
  • Maid Outfits :3
  • Wheelchairs

Atmospheric changes

• Interaction Bubbles + SpeakUp. Better social interactions.
• Enemy Self Preservation. Enemies severely hurt may try to flee.
• No One Left Behind. Fleeing enemies try to rescue their downed allies.
• Memorable Auroras. They now have a meaningful -if still small- impact.
• Sand Castles. The snowmen of the beaches. Or the deserts.
• Sandstorms
• Graying Hair. So that hair goes gray gradually with age.
• Childrens Drawings
• ReGrowth. Overhaul of biomes and much more!
• My Little Planet. If you're tired of supercontinents, but still want a smaller board, set planet coverage to 100%, and use the new planet size slider instead.
• Geological Landforms. New map shapes.
• Biome Transitions. More organic border biomes.
• Death Acidifiest. Vanilla death acidifier is lame, this is much cooler.
• Graphics
  • Yayo's Animation
  • Trait and Backstory Icons
  • Vanilla Ideology Expanded - Icons and Symbols
  • Vanilla Ideology Expanded - Relics and Artifacts
  • Vanilla Races Expanded - Custom Icons
  • Bionic icons
  • Spectacular Skullspike. They're rotable now!
  • Muzzle Flash
  • More Mini-Horns
  • Better Explosions
  • Better Vanilla Masking
  • Graphic Chair Overhaul 2
  • Not Overhead Meal
  • Graphics Settings+
  • Show Hair With Hats or Hide All Hats. This one takes a while to set up to your preferences, but oh it's so worth it.
  • Cuter Biotech Cat/Dog Ear Replacer. If you don't like the meat-colored animal ears from Biotech, this is for you!
  • Blood Animations
  • Gunplay. Trails can break some mods. If that happens, disable trails in options.
• Retextures
  • Parka Retexture
  • Retextured Apparel
  • Retextured Sculptures
  • Vanilla Beards Retextured
  • Vanilla Hair Retextured
  • Vanilla Pawns Retextured
  • Marbled Marble
  • Essentials: Stone (the stat changes won't work)
  • Vanilla Textures Expanded - Variations
  • Vanilla Textures Expanded
  • I Hate Daylilies
  • Biotech Mechanoid Retexture
  • Tastier Vanilla Clothes
  • Van's Steel
  • Glowing Healroot
  • More Vanilla Textures
• Audio
  • Ambient Rim
  • Realistic Human Sounds. Not very vanilla, but certainly very funny.
  • Actually Vanilla Music Expansion
  • P-Music
• Hairs
  • Erin's Hairstyles
  • Hard Times
  • Rimsenal Hair + Retextured
  • Roo's Hairstyles
  • Roo's Royalty Hairstyles
  • The Vanity Project
  • Won hair_men + Retextured
  • Won hair_women + Retextured

Bonus: comics! And the occasional animation. I noticed newbies aren't aware of these, so I linked the profiles of all the artists I could remember. Sorry if I missed someone. u/daleksdeservevictory, u/AzulCrescent, u/AetherealVanguard, u/ATTF , u/Aelanna , srgrafo, u/Fonzawa, u/Ivancmedia, u/zyll3, u/meto30, u/AeolysScribbles, u/cavalier753, u/GABESTFY, u/VectorData, u/arxian, u/Nguyenanh2132, u/sorrowful_dance, u/meto30, u/-desdinova-, u/truffli