The most effective study methods for academic success boil down to:
Time management
There are countless time management techniques, but one beautiful thing about going to school is that a lot of your time is managed for you.
The week and when you need to be in class is arranged.
Professors tell you when assignments are due, etc.
Heck, when I was in university they even gave us calendars for use to write in our due dates.
So the number one thing is to combine what you know with the tools everyone has: the calendar.
In many cases, you can also get advanced notices from professors by simply talking to them before the semester even begins.
You would also do well to explore techniques like the Eisenhower Matrix, time blocking and the Pareto Principle.
Above all, make time management something you study unto itself.
There's no one-size-fits-all approach. But those who study it as the discipline it is will win.
Study Environment Optimization
Studying effectively cannot be random or subject to interruptions.
If you have to study on transit, invest in custom ear plugs of the kind musicians use, not noise-cancelling headphones that will put you at risk in the case of an emergency. Custom ear plugs have filters that let you still hear without being bothered by shrill noises and you can switch between light and heavy filters.
Having multiple study locations worked out in advance is a great strategy because you can walk between them and percolate your thoughts – literally remembering more by simply getting in a bit of exercise. I used to call this "Road Work" when I was in university.
When at home, put a "Do not disturb" sign on your door. Make it clear to others that you are studying and train them to respect the hours you want to put it. Do not compromise. It's your future.
Note-Taking Strategies
There are many different kinds of note-taking methods. My fave is to use Zettelkasten in combination with Memory Palaces.
These two videos detail how the Zettelkasten Method operates in combination with the Memory Palace technique:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eIQRiqQFKQY
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OrN0kaE6DkY
Memory techniques
Like time management, the topic of memory improvement is huge. Make sure to spend a good three months learning all of its ins-and-outs.
The key techniques you'll want to master are:
The Memory Palace A Alphabet System (or pegword system) A Number System (usually based on the Major System) A Symbol System A Spaced Repetition system
These accelerated learning techniques may feel like you're building an airport in the beginning, but think about it:
You do need airports to launch and land planes as effectively and efficiently as possible. It's the same with memory techniques.
You can also do yourself a favor and learn more about memory science. It will teach you about how the mind and memory work and give you ideas that will only arise if you know a little bit about what researchers have found.
Stress Management For Students
Don't make my mistake. I drank like a fish and ate poorly throughout university. This meant that a lot of the experience was lost to depression.
Sure, memory techniques helped… but I can't help but imagine how much more successful I would have been during and after if I'd had better ways of coping with the stress.
Diet, fitness, mindfulness practices, time off with friends for positive and healthy recreation. This is not complicated, though when you're young, impulsivity can certainly make it seem that way.
Exam Preparation Strategies
This basically comes back to properly using your calendar and memory techniques.
For the benefits of what is sometimes called state-dependent or context-dependent memory, it can be useful to study where you will take your exams. It's advisable to use Memory Palaces based on these exam rooms whenever possible.
(Those terms are the kinds of insider memory hacks you'll enjoy only when you understand your memory science, and there are many more that can help you with your exam prep.)
Take mock tests as much as you can. Reflect on what you're learning often. Talk about it with other students.
Don't cram and avoid wasting time on the fantasy that there are any "subject-specific study tips." Maybe if you're in nursing school and need to have patient bodies in specific position, but generally tests are about words, numbers and symbols. Learn how to commit them to memory and talk as much as you can about the information so it is well-exercised before you sit for your exams.
Form Effective Study Groups
There are many benefits to group study if you can select solid group members. This can be tricky, but one way to do it involves a slightly involved strategy:
Try to be part of a club or association. I was president of the English Undergraduate Student Association at York University in Toronto, for example. This drew precisely the right people because anyone who wanted to be part of the association already loved English Literature by default.
After you find the right members, it's just a matter of scheduling regular meetings based on decent agendas and following reasonable time limits so you don't burn out.
One thing my fave study group in university did a lot was to share reading. In other words, we'd each tackle an article or book and then present on it.
Ultimately, you still have to do the reading yourself, but it forms a nice mental framework that makes reading faster and easier when someone you can speak with has summarized the core ideas. These days, you can search YouTube and podcasts for this kind of summarization much of the time, but it's still not the same as being in a study group with other people.
You also get experience with peer teaching and tutoring this way, which is hugely beneficial for your memory. Even if you never intend to teach yourself, the simple effort that goes into preparing and delivering short presentations will benefit you in the short-term for your exams and long-term in your career. Collaborative learning also gives you something powerful to put on your resume, especially if your study group is linked with a formal university institution or group.
Work On Your Reading And Comprehension Skills
The main shortcut here is to simply read a lot, boost your vocabulary as you go by memorizing terms and write summaries as much as you can.
Doesn't sound like a shortcut, I know. But it really is. It helps develop pattern recognition and that's how you ultimately wind up quickly assessing the key points and inferring many things correctly.
Be humble, though. Mistakes will always happen, so be willing to go back and read things again.
Another key aspect of reading is to challenge yourself. Get outside of your comfort zone and read above your level at least a few times a week.
Don't worry about whether you understand what you're reading or not. Soon, moments of insight will arise.
Even if it doesn't happen soon, rest assured that will. There are aspects of philosophy that didn't come clear to me until after 30 years of reading. I'm not ashamed of this at all. I just haven't read and reflected enough to connect the dots. But if I had read above my level sooner, I probably would have had the insights sooner.
Motivation and Discipline
Technically, motivation is not necessary when you have systems. That's what discipline is all about.
That said, it's useful to know about intrinsic and extrinsic motivation. These will be arranged differently in different people as some people respond well to threats of pain whereas others respond better to promises of reward.
Know thyself.
Hire a coach if you have to, as it will be worth it in the end. Many exist and some universities have behavioral science programs, learning disability labs and other institutions where you can learn more directly about these issues.
Finally, you can learn about the difference between tonic and phasic dopamine relative to how the Default Mode Network of your brain is in a kind of battle with the Task Positive Network. This area is kind of heavy on the brain science, but well worth an afternoon or two to figure out the implications in your life.
Just watch out: When optimizing your dopamine levels for motivation, you could wind up enlightened and have your ego make you think you're better than everyone else… which would not be enlightenment. But it'll sure feel that way.
That's why the next category is so important.
Make Time To Learn Critical Thinking
A lot of education involves humans who weigh what they teach and how they teach it based on subjective agendas. It's pretty difficult for anyone not to do that.
When you spend some time developing your critical thinking skills, you'll be able to determine when teachers and writers/video creators, etc. are being too subjective or otherwise slaves to any number of cognitive biases.
Likewise, you'll be able to spot them in yourself and weed many of them out before they can distract you.
The simplest way to use critical thinking while studying is to put Why, Where, When, Who and How up on a Memory Wheel and constantly rotate through it.
As you learn more about different thinkers, you can also start to ask, "What would Freud say about this? What would Skinner say? What would x say?"
To do this, study as many of the sciences and Liberal Arts as you possibly can. If you don't know where to start, go through the Trivium and then the Quadrivium. Knowing how to think through those seven lenses and ask what the major figures in each field would generally say will help you "triangulate" just about any issue and think both objectively and subjectively about it and know which is which.
Self-Assessment And Improvement
Ultimately, the best judge of your progress is you.
To make sure you're giving yourself good materials to judge yourself by, journal, ideally daily.
If you can, keep two journals:
A snapshot journal that simply lists what you did on a particular day.
A discursive journal where you reflect on your thoughts about how things went.
There are many formal products you can buy that will help you journal in particular ways. The Freedom Journal has been one of my faves, but the real tip is to experiment with as many journaling styles as you can in the two main styles I just mentioned.
As you can tell, there's not that much when it comes to embracing a wide number of learning strategies. Apply these tips to the study resources you need to cover on your way to the exam room and you'll do well.
Take Care Around Technology And Studying
There are tons of apps that can help "gamify" these activities, but at the end of the day, gamification is really just a mental metaphor. If it doesn't work for you, find a better metaphor.
Nir Eyal discussion the power of mental metaphors based on some research in Indistractable and more on the matter is found in The Victorious Mind by yours truly. There was even recently a Duke University study showing just how powerful adopting mental metaphors can be for remembering information.
Academic success can indeed be enjoyable, and all the more so when you work out what will make it enjoyable and meaningful for you. Personalize as much of the journey as you can, constantly applying critical thinking to every suggestion you come across and all of your study experiences will become much, much more rewarding.

So it’s quite the well-known fact that of Willo’s talent: Blastflower, is Willo’s best talent, at least statistically it does well. I won’t say it’s not because it is just that much better than her other two talents. But there’s a huge “why?” to it. In general, the factors of why talents are good or bad when compared to one another come from three factors: Their actual upsides, their actual downsides, and how they make someone play.If anyone takes a look at most talents in the game you’ll notice that most don’t list a downside, the “downside” of taking Darkstalker is the fact he’s not using either of his other talents, that and my technicality certain cards don’t work the same as they would if they were on a chained Netherstep and so this example sucks and I didn’t want to change what I had written, but that’s not the point. All talents have this drawback- the fact they’re not other talents. Some talents in their upsides come up short of their peers. Sometimes they’re not even a problem and it’s that one talent overwhelms the others with its sheer power- I’m not saying Blastflower needs to be nerfed even if the bar graphs are showing that (though it should on principle), that’s not what I’m saying.
The final issue is the playstyle that is incentivized by both Nightshade and Scorn actively making them contrast with their intended and more effective playstyles, I should say that Nightshade is less egregious than Scorn thought it still has problems.
They yellow/gold represents a increase in a stat, The red represents a decrease the red spots represent a potential decrease. Top left is the default.

Nightshade

By increasing the damage Nightshade does you make it an easy-to-land damage tool, in the previous guide I mentioned that Nightshade doesn’t have falloff, and that makes it incredibly useful for helping new players land it, however, it also gives the impression that you should use deadzone for dueling, which you shouldn’t since you’re now no longer using it for Area Denial or Crowd Control, however, if you don’t use it to fight squishies and just use it as normal you end up risking the chance you effectively have a non-talent since unless you save it for only hitting targets you might end up never taking the shot at all, that mixed with Deadzones cooldown makes it incredibly hard to use effectively for a reward that’s more or less able to be caught up with via Blastflower, even with a specialized build for Nightshade, my best advice for when to use this (outside of never) is to use it on TDM where the lack of tanks and objective gives plenty of room to use this for deathmatching.A side note, Nightshade is considered ability damage which ignores AP and instead can only be stopped by flat DR or AW.
In conclusion, in the case of Nightshade, risks, by its incentivised damage amp rewarding using it for fighting targets rather than stopping healing, means it possibly loses out on the area denial, however, it still is capable of doing this job even if the reward of the talent may be lost, so the red isn’t a full stop, though the talent also risks not using the damage however, you will rarely not gain value from deadzone denying heal, and if you use it on a tank or a shield, that damage still exists so it won’t be losing out on its value since you still have use cases of Crowd Control, and Ensuring kills where you’d have used the ability in the same way regardless.

Blastflower

Willo’s meta talent, and by a large margin as it gives Willo the means to duel enemies more easily (without using deadzone to do so) gives her more damage against health pools and generally has no real downsides. It’s to the point it’s more or less self-explanatory but I shall elaborate regardless. Blastflower as a Talent works regardless of whatever else you have going on, by the nature of it being attached to her primary attack with no special gimmicks beyond just hitting the same person multiple times, this and its ability to consistently get this stacking damage even with splash damage (though increasing 125 damage by 90% still doesn’t kill anyone any time soon so still aim at target) means you can easily ramp up damage and land the absolutely lethal 900 damage, while normally these guides won’t be used for balance discussion I will say that they should reduce the max stacks by 1, capping Willo’s damage to 800, to allow for duels, and some tank shredding while at the same time not doing 900 goddamn damage. Since I genuinely believe any attempts at balancing Nightshade in its current state are hopeless and giving her scorched earth (perhaps at a weaker value or without the cooldown reduction to not entirely gut point tanks with a single ability no matter how little uptime it has) it’s hard to advise people about Blastflower beyond just hit your shots.

Scorn

Okay so while I personally never looked at Scorn beyond it being just a weirder weaker version of the already weak accelerant, it was Snake (the person who does my math for me and helped me make this guide via his time on Willo) who made me realize the problems with it. We’ll talk about the positives first, it’ll be quick.

1. It does over 3500 damage if all seedlings hit
2. It’s easier to use aggressively
3. They are considered ability damage like Nightshade so all the same benefits apply.

And we’re done, the issue with Scorn is that by the nature of seedlings, they’re inconsistent in where they land, and the possibility of them spreading too far out or being evaded (they are only reduced by 0.5 seconds means while they are easier to use aggressively they still aren’t doing anything for a decent while, and this means certain techniques that can be done with normal seedlings become much harder on Scorn. This and using them for area denial can end up being pointless since while they still last for 1.5 seconds they disappear sooner which means you can drop your shields sooner, and go on through sooner.They make area denial harder for the incentive of killing a default AFK Barik in 1.5 seconds, which anyone with a brain can easily mitigate the damage they take and make space, and even with decks that focus on spamming seedlings, shields easily eat up the damage they offer and without these builds you end up with a similar long cooldown issue that Nightshade faces without the use cases to use the cooldown on actually mattering since you’re throwing them in hoping for the best. Oh, and you feed Terminus’ siphon more than throwing normal seedlings at him already does which you know… they won’t complain about.
Tommorow I'll make a post about Willo's best and worst cards, and further elaborate on builds.

Psychology awareness and faulting the AI
In this document i will go over and explain important information that i have found through test and trial over MANY years to help better tackle this “AI” with specific things to be aware of and the few ways to cause the V2K to fault. This will not cover the whole program nor will it cover other methods/technologies used by these programs. This will cover some basic knowledge needed to navigate life while dealing with this and the AI chatbot running within the “v2k”. To find information giving an overview of the programs that v2k operates within and other technologies used in tandem with it i will link below a detailed description.
This document is very time sensitive because this information is the only true way to bring the fight to these programs before the programs hit the civilian atmosphere large. There is no way to physically block this technology therefore you need to outthink the AI running it! Sounds easy right? Not really, it takes paying alot of attention and practice. Before getting into how to trick the artificial intelligence there are some things you need to be aware of.
Understanding the basics
Natural language processing (NLP)
The algorithms running these AI chatbots belong to a field of artificial intelligence called Natural Language Processing or NLP for short. Natural Language Processing is a field of AI that enables computers to understand, interpret, and generate human language. It powers applications like language translation, sentiment analysis, chatbots, and speech recognition. These chatbots operate on massive data banks that have been analyzing human thought patterns for years and since they have so much data then it is a fact that they have dealt with people similar to me, you and everyone around us.
Inner monologue
Before starting to practice tricking this AI you need to be familiar with a few things, firstly you need to have an understanding of what your inner monologue is. An inner monologue is the internal voice that narrates our thoughts, reflecting our feelings, ideas, and reactions without vocalizing them. It acts as a silent conversation within our mind, helping us process and organize our thoughts.
Biases
Second you need to be aware of your own biases and how you perceive things, everyone has different biases and perceptions and these algorithms take full advantage of it.
Emotions
The third point here is very important as it concerns emotions, emotions like anger, fear and sadness can trigger knee jerk reactions that can override logical thinking and this will be used as often as they deem necessary BECAUSE it overrides your rational thinking. IE : When gripped by anger you can lash out at someone or something that has nothing to do with your situation, when fear is present the v2k can promise safety in exchange for obedience, when sadness is overwhelming it will provide comfort to make you feel comfortable with it. All of these emotional states can be caused or amplified by the AI to gain an advantage over you.
These pointers should help you gain a small advantage in maintaining stability during these difficult times.
What is v2k?
V2K, or voice-to-skull technology, projects voices directly into your head, bypassing your ears. It can manifest as various personas, such as another individual in your life, the voice of God, an alien, or a fictional character. This technology can modify its voice and tone and intensity to enhance the perceived experience and better suit your situation. These same voices will oftentimes re read your inner monologue milliseconds after you think something to yourself in an effort to add confusion and convince you that it is your conscience. In simple terms : this is a voice in your head that is not yours.
Identify
Reading this you need to be aware that these methods will not work unless you acknowledge through these methods and KNOW that it is in fact not human but AI coded with algorithms, “just a computer program”, “0’s and 1’s”.
Faulting the AI/Algorithm
Method 1
The first method used to find the difference between the AI and a human operator is by finding keywords that it will use often and forcing it to repeat those keywords on purpose via “thinking it” so that it can copy your inner monologue but before finishing the whole word yourself you stop and it will finish it for you, this will be one indicator that it is not human. Finding keywords can be difficult at first if you’re not aware that they exist within the algorithm that runs the AI but once you start to pay attention to everything it says you will find that there are some words that it will use every-time if the conditions are met and ways to force these conditions. These conditions and keywords are unique to each individual so you will have to do your homework and pay attention to what yours are. These algorithms have a SET vocabulary. For instance just imagine you are thinking of doing something that the AI does not want you thinking about in some cases it will tell you “don’t even think about it” or variations of this and it will prompt you to think of something different. You also need to have some intention to perform this action you are thinking about or it will not trigger. for example, for some people it could be thinking of and wanting to engage in certain behaviors like smoking, drinking, doing drugs, being aggressive, talking to someone in specific that they don’t want you talking to among many things that it wants you to avoid. It will be clear that it doesn’t want you to do and think these things. This is just one of the ways to force it to use key words and phrases and will take plenty of paying attention. I suggest keeping track of the conversations by writing them down.
Method 2
The second of these methods consists of repeating certain letters or sounds with your inner monologue like “tttttttttt” or “mmmmmmmmm” and this will also trigger it to continue for a short period after you stop and allow you to acknowledge the AI as it re reads your inner monologue to you but your brain is quicker at stopping then the AI giving you about a second to acknowledge it. Using “shhhhhhh” is one of the better sounds as it will somehwat silence the v2k and give you a break on the chatbot rereading your thoughts.
Method 3
The third of these methods will require you to use rhetorical questions or questions with no real answer when in conversation with the AI, questions like : does a bear shit in the woods? What colour has the best personality? Theres are sarcastic in nature but can have multiple answers or no answers at all, this will cause the AI to stop speaking for a short period of time and likely cause it to throw a keyword or phrase at you OR an operator to take over because this is something that doesn’t make sense and is very difficult for an algorithm to make sense of something that doesn’t.
Method 4
Fourth method is input starvation. You need to think of “nothing”, no thoughts so nothing for the algorithm to react or answer to. The best way to do this is to force the thought of a black empty space in your mind. This is the easiest of all methods but requires the most attention and practice.
Putting these techniques together can make a big difference when dealing with the voice to skull BUT this is merely a fraction of what you need to pay attention to if you want to stand a chance at defeating this technology. Once you start to acknowledge that this is just an algorithm and not human through these methods you will begin to encounter human operators and here is yet another part that takes practice and will ultimately take up alot of time. Once you begin to fault this AI and acknowledge that it is in fact just an algorithm this will set off an “alarm” which on their end is like a notification telling them that you’ve broken through the algorithms and are starting to understand how things work.
Once you have mastered these things you will find yourself in much more control of your situation and life as this will help you realize that these technologies should have NO bearing on reality.
I will continue writing another document on how to deal with the human operators
Below i will link my first document outlining what my findings have produced about these programs and other technologies used within them, mind you there is missing information but it will help give you an idea.
https://www.reddit.comkeyword-exactly/s/dnvuQu64DX - my findings on v2k, directed energy weapons

If you're on the apps—whether you're looking for marriage, looking for a hookup or you're just looking for a nice night out on the town—one thing is for sure: You have seconds to make a first impression that keeps someone from swiping left. What's the key? Knowing how to make your Tinder bios stand out among the rest.
If you're wondering: "What is a good bio for Tinder? How do I spice up my Tinder bio?" then you've come to the right place. Marissa Moore, a counselor and couples therapist with years of experience, gave us all her recommendations for making your bio the best of them all (plus 40 ideas for the best Tinder bios, below!)
What to Put In a Tinder Bio
So, you've opened up the "edit" section on your Tinder bio (or Hinge bio or even Bumble bio, too) and you're staring blankly at your phone. How are you supposed to know how to write a Tinder bio that will stop someone in their tracks?
How Dating Apps Are Changing Our Psychology
The secret, Moore says, is deciding between a few different formulas, and sticking to one. Remember: This doesn't have to be super complicated. It's actually supposed to be fun! To get started, use these are a guide on what to put in Tinder bio:
Everyone loves a perfectly-timed one-liner, right? Write something that captures your personality or sense of humor.
Want to keep it straight forward? Go the old-fashioned route and write a brief description of yourself, highlighting your interests, hobbies or passions.
You're funny, so maybe use this time to show it off. Using a joke or witty remark can be a great way to give someone a sense of your personality, too.
Lastly, if you're a romantic at heart or suave in your own right, try using a creative and flirty pick up line that stands out (but avoid anything overly cheesy or inappropriate.)
How to Write a Tinder Bio
Now that you've got a road map for how to make a good Tinder bio—i.e. you've chosen a one-liner, keeping it straight forward, leaning on your humor or a pick up line—what is the best way to approach actually writing it all out?
Whether you're looking to write clever Tinder bios, Tinder bios for guys or just wanting to make your dating app bio shine with your personality, Moore has a few tried-and-true tricks up her sleeve to stand out.
Be Authentic
It might be tempting to want to make yourself look "better" than you are IRL, but this is never a good idea, and your dates will learn the truth eventually. That's why Moore suggests the biggest piece of advice: to be authentic.
Good Morning Texts For Her
Wake Her With A Smile With These 82 Good Morning Texts
Let her know that she's always the first thing on your mind.
Woman looks at her phone while smiling.
Funny, punny and non-corny inpsiration, right this way.
"Showcase your genuine personality and interests," Moore says. "Rather than trying to portray yourself as someone you're not."
Keep it Concise
Next up? Make sure to keep your Tinder bios as concise as possible. Remember: you've got seconds to impress the person on the other end — let's make sure you get a swipe right.
"Aim for a bio that is clear, concise and easy to read," she says. "Avoid overwhelming potential matches with too much information."
Show, Don't Tell
Another tip? Show, don't tell. According to Moore, Instead of listing qualities about yourself, you might consider sharing anecdotes or stories that illustrate who you are and what you enjoy. This can sometimes be more intriguing.
Highlight Your Unique Traits
What makes you unique is a good thing! Use it to your advantage. By focusing on what makes you stand out from the crowd, and what you can offer in a relationship, you may find someone who already loves your quirks and differences, right off the bat.
Funny Tinder Bios
Do you consider yourself a comic? If so, you might have chosen going with the funny Tinder bios route. If so, here are some ideas to use, below.
I'm not a photographer, but I can picture us together.
Looking for someone who can keep up with my pun game.
Swipe right if you're ready for cheesy pick up lines and spontaneous dance parties.
Looking for a wingwoman to hunt down the best tacos in town on a random Tuesday afternoon.
Seeking someone who will support my travel addiction and my obsession for squeezing everything into a carry on bag.
If you date me, you'll be the good looking one.
Looking for someone to appreciate my puns and share pizza with. If you can't handle my cheesy jokes, you're not the one for me. Let's see if we can find the perfect slice together!
You're single, I'm single. You know what that means? Nobody wants us.
Life's too short for boring conversations and dull dates! Let's do both.
I'm really bad at putting together IKEA furniture—looking for a cute helper 😉
Clever Tinder Bios
Maybe a clever bio is more your speed. If so, there are plenty of ideas for Tinder bio that fall under clever and smart, too.
Currently accepting applications for a partner in crime and fellow Netflix binge-watcher.
Like a 'Fun-Size' Snickers bar, they say good things come in small packages.
If life is a game, consider me your cheat code. Swipe right and let's unlock some bonus levels together.
I'm like a Rubik's Cube—complex, colorful and slightly frustrating at times. But once you figure me out, you'll realize I'm worth the challenge.
If you can guess my favorite pizza topping, you win bonus points.
Seeking someone who can match my level of sarcasm and appreciation for dry humor.
Looking for someone who can handle my impeccable taste in music, questionable cooking skills and my uncanny ability to always find the best meme for every situation.
Outdoor enthusiast and indoor Netflix champion.
Professional overthinker seeking someone who analyzes texts as much as I do. Showcases self-awareness and a touch of vulnerability.
Chapter 23 - Looking for someone to co-author the next chapters. Indicates a life seen as an unfolding story, inviting collaboration.
Cute Tinder Bios
If being cutesy is more your thing, look no further: using cute Tinder bios has been proven to work again and again. Being and feeling cute can be a confidence boost when dating — here are some of our fave examples.
Lover of sunsets, dog walks and spontaneous adventures. Let's create our own love story.
Looking for someone to share lazy Sunday mornings and late-night conversations with.
Searching for my partner-in-crime to explore the city, try new foods and cuddle up with on rainy days.
Puppy enthusiast. Ice cream connoisseur. A seeker of great coffee dates.
Might steal your heart, will steal your fries.
Just a Jim looking for his Pam. Bonus points if you give great bear hugs!
A believer in fairy tales, serendipity and the magic of a good cup of coffee.
Looking for someone who's all about making everyday moments a little bit extraordinary.
Cuddling champion searching for a worthy competitor. Must be fond of star-gazing and midnight snacks.
Looking for someone to share in my adventure of finding the best tacos in town.
Simple Tinder Bios
If being cute, funny or clever doesn't speak to you, it's OK to stick to simple, too! Here are some ideas to try on for size.
Looking for a real connection, not just a one-time thing.
Just trying to find my other half.
Drinks?
Come say hello.
____ born & raised.
Looking for more laugh lines.
Traveling and exploring. Want to join?
Let's see how this goes.
Looking for an adventure partner.
If I am not home, you can find me ____.

I’m not going to lie, I used to have no faith in dating apps. I thought that all the people I found on Tinder, Hinge, and Bumble were all people I could never click with in real life. But then I did it. My friend and I took the jump. We downloaded a dating app and tried to come up with funny answers to Hinge prompts to make my profile the best it could be. What started off as a joke, slowly turned into something that made us excited. We looked forward to showing each other the guys we matched with and the conversations that were started.
We giggled as we made each other’s accounts, choosing the hottest pictures of us and creating the most ridiculous responses to the Hinge prompts that would be on our profiles. We hoped to find someone who could match our silly energy and find someone that we could be authentic with: We wanted to find someone who would encourage us to delete the app.
Hinge prompts are like interview-based questions that make things a little more interesting than a generic bio with your name and age. All prompts have a 150-character limit so the answers should be short and clever. You can even use a voice prompt but the point is to show off what makes you, you: uniqueness is key. So, if you’re looking to beef up your profile, here are 36 Hinge prompt answers to add to your profile.
Oh, and PS, some of these are actually from my Hinge feed and are the perfect way to get into someone’s DMs. Jussayin’.
“Dating me is like…”
Be transparent and give a glimpse into what it is like to be with you.
“Reading a really good book…but you’re dyslexic.”
“Having TSA Pre-Check.”
“You know that feeling of closing dozens of Chrome tabs after finishing your last final before a holiday.”
“Finding a pair of jeans that fit perfectly on the first try.”
“My Most Irrational Fear”
From heights to clowns, this is a great place to talk about your fears.
“Finding out I’m allergic to food while eating it.”
“Fear itself?”
“You ignoring my profile.”
“Swallowing seeds because I was told a plant would sprout in my belly.”
“Green Flags I look for…”
Get a little deeper about your type. What are you looking for? Be open and honest.
“Using a fork properly, rather than stabbing at your food”
“Being good with kids.”
“Survival skills. If we ever get stranded on a desert island, you should know what to do.”
“Always has room for dessert.”
“A Shower Thought I Recently Had…”
This prompt is a great way to show off your humor. Be creative with this.
“Is Punxsutawney Phil emotionally okay?”
“It’s illegal to own one guinea pig in Switzerland because they get lonely.”
“Water is not wet.”
“Aliens invaded the moon on July 20th, 1969.”
“We’re the Same Type of Weird If…”
This is definitely a more lighthearted prompt. Pick something that is totally unique about yourself.
“You enjoy the Turkey Trot on Thanksgiving, too.”
“You can eat pickles at any time of the day.”
“You still play with Legos.”
“You pour the milk before the cereal.”
“First Round Is on Me If…”
Be assertive! Skip the small talk and invite your match to drinks. Don’t be super easy though. Pose a challenge.
“You can beat me at bowling. I’ll accept Wii Bowling.”
“You can beat me at today’s Wordle.”
“You can quote [movie].”
“If you can beat an escape room.”
“Unusual Skills”
Showcase some niche interests. Anything that comes with a story is perfect if you want to keep the convo going.
“Belly dancing.”
“I can catch basically any reptile.”
“Notorious alarm setter who can still sleep past their alarm.”
“I can tie a cherry stem into a knot with my tongue.”
“Let’s Debate About…”
Controversial topics can get the ball rolling. This could be serious or maybe something flirty.
“Pineapple on pizza?”
“Brunch should never be before 1 p.m.”
“It’s acceptable to eat a tomato like how you eat an apple.”
“A morning person can never be trusted.”
“Together, We Could…”
Outline a dream date! Highlight your favorite ways to get to know someone
“Cook a nice dish and drink a bottle of wine.”
“Rule the world.”
“Be like when oxygen and magnesium get together… because people will be saying OMg.”
“Backpack our way through Europe: Paris, Florence, and Madrid are on my bucket list.”
Overall, Hinge prompts allow you to showcase yourself, your passions, and what you are looking for. Successful prompt responses should show a bit of your humor and vulnerability. Don’t be afraid to be genuine. These are the perfect way to kick-start conversations with matches. Dig deep. Good luck!

form filling GOOD or BAD
What is form filling? - form filling is a way to enter a buyer giveaway via filling out a form on whatnots website , entering you into a buyer giveaway.
Honest opinion - Form filling is okay , and doesn’t take away from the actual buyers. Let me explain.
For one , it’s legal. Yes yes I know , “it’s legal” well it is , and if you don’t like the laws go re-write them! Be my guest! Form filling doesn’t take away from buyers because 9 times out of 10 , a buyer usually wins. Form fillers are just an inconvenience , that’s all. Is it wrong to potentially take away from buyers? No, because EVERYONE should have a chance. Not just buyers!
Should you send a form filler their win? -
Yes , you should. Be the better person! Don’t be an immoral jackass and switch up their prize , because what did they do wrong? at the end of the day… nothing! send it and go on about your day , it isn’t worth the strike you may get!
Should you break all of whatnots TOS trying so eagerly to have one of your buyers win?
No! Don’t be a rule breaker , so what if your buyer doesn’t win. That’s okay! They’ll have another chance next time!
WHATNOT GIVEAWAY RULES TAKEN FROM THE WEBSITE!
Standard Giveaways
Standard giveaways allow users to enter using the “Enter Giveaway” button once the giveaway goes live. Sellers can limit standard giveaways to domestic users (based on the seller's location). Follower-only Giveaways
Follower-only giveaways are similar to standard giveaways but allow only viewers who follow the seller to enter using the “Enter Giveaway” button once the giveaway goes live. Sellers can also limit follower giveaways to domestic users (based on the seller's location). Buyer Appreciation Giveaways
Buyer Appreciation giveaways are intended to show appreciation for users who have made a purchase during a seller’s livestream. Available in the US, Canada, the UK, and France. Users who want to enter a Buyer Appreciation giveaway must live in the same country as the seller running the giveaway. Users who want to enter must make a purchase AFTER the giveaway is created to qualify. Exception: United States and Canadian Users can enter for free by filling out a web form found on the giveaway details page. Sellers and buyers must use the mobile app to create or enter a Buyer Appreciation giveaway. Sellers must include rules pertaining to the giveaway; these rules vary based on seller location. For United States users, visit US Terms of Service (see “Whatnot Promotions and Giveaway Rules” to learn more). For UK and France users, visit EU Terms of Service (see “Section 15. Giveaways” to learn more). Sellers must ship the giveaway item regardless of who wins. For guidance on how to Create a Buyer Appreciation Giveaway or Enter a Buyer Appreciation Giveaway please see the linked help center articles. Visit Buyer Appreciation Giveaways Rules and Requirements for more info.
Giveaway Policies
Prohibited Behavior
No denying a winner: You must not deny a user the item they won during a giveaway. Winners are not required to react in any way to claim their prize at the time of the drawing. Disclose prize in advance: You must disclose what the giveaway winner will receive before running the item. This disclosure may be in the applicable listing and/or in the livestream. Mystery items may be given away provided the mystery item remains on screen until fully opened. No downgrading, withholding or changing prize based on who wins: Sellers must not downgrade, withhold or change the giveaway prize based on who wins, for example: You may not deny a giveaway winner based on whether they follow you on social media. You may not downgrade the prize if the winner has not made a purchase (or upgrade the prize based on a buyer winning). You may not deny a winner because you suspect programmatic entry; if you suspect giveaway abuse please report the user in our in-app reporting flow for Whatnot to review. You may not add requirements to win a giveaway outside of what is included in Whatnot's giveaway feature. The following restrictions are included in Whatnot's giveaway: Limit entries to followers only. Limit entries to domestic users (based on seller location) only. Limit entries to buyers who have purchased an item in your livestream and users who enter for free via a web form. Shipping and fulfillment: You must fulfill the giveaway item within Whatnot's standard shipping timeframe. No purchase necessary: Requiring purchase to win a giveaway is prohibited and you will be subject to investigation. In many jurisdictions; it is illegal to require a purchase to enter a giveaway. For example, this includes: Requiring a buyer to spend above a certain amount in your livestream to qualify for a Buyer Appreciation Giveaway. Hosting Buyer Appreciation Giveaways without an alternative method of entry (AMOE). No stopping a giveaway: Once started, a giveaway can't be paused or canceled. A winner will be automatically drawn at the end of the five-minute time limit. Comply with laws: Giveaways must comply with our Giveaway Rules and Requirements, Terms of Service, and applicable laws and regulation. No future redemption: Do not offer giveaways for redemption in a future stream. All giveaways must be completed within the livestream in which the giveaway was run. No circumvention: Sellers must not circumvent Whatnot's giveaway rules in any way, including by hosting a buyer appreciation giveaways without an alternative method of entry (AMOE) or by listing an excessive number of buyers appreciation giveaways that are not run. Permitted Behavior
Sponsored giveaways permitted outside of marketplace: Listings or solicitations to sponsor or fund a seller's giveaway is permitted provided any such listings do not appear in the marketplace. Any such listings will be removed from the marketplace. Sellers may promote and establish targets for running giveaways, such as stating a giveaway will be run at a certain sales goal or time of day. Participating in Giveaways
We want our whole community to participate in and enjoy giveaways, which requires giveaways to be fair for all users.
FORM FILLING IS GOOD!

I (29F) was in a 7/8month relationship last year and I'm just trying to process what the heck happened bc he (25M) made it seem like I'm the asshole and I'd like to know if I am, so I can work on it and not carry it over to future relationships.
It started with a reckless night. I'm studying overseas and he and I met on a d&d discord server. He happened to live where I was going so we planned to meet and he offered to help me with my first day of getting stuff done. We'd been close friends by the 5th month of me being there. I had just ended an online relationship that was overwhelming me and my family was coming to visit so I took him on a fancy night out where I paid as like a thank you in advance for driving me and my family around when they visit thing. After dinner we went to his place and I - now recognise as mistakenly - allowed uh intimate activity bc I was vulnerable and he made the first move. And it just kept happening.
Eventually, he started to ask for more despite me saying that I didn't think I was ready for a relationship. And he pulled out an ultimatum - relationship or nothing. I was torn bc at that point he was my best friend, my closest friend, in a country where I had no family. So I gave in and agreed. He said I have to be willing to do the work on myself and our relationship bc I have a lot of issues. So I promised that I would put in the effort to work on myself and be better.
Now in retrospect, I recognize I was afraid of being abandoned. But at the time, I thought myself in love, and that he cared about my wellbeing so deeply. I mean, he did spend hours listening to me talk about all the pain and trauma I'd experienced. So he must have truly wanted me to heal.
But once we got together, we stopped going on dates. We'd hang out at his place, occasionally meet his friends. I usually didn't go out bc I'm more of a homebody - I enjoyed my private space and doing my solo things. Then things started to bother me.
Like the state of his home - you could barely see the floor, the kitchen was a disaster area. And he didn't even have a proper bed. But I'd acquiesce and make a random comment (not often, just sporadically).
I personally just don't drink bc I don't enjoy it like most people do and I don't enjoy taking care of people who are super drunk (I'll do it anyway bc no one else does it but it actually really bothers me and I kinda hate it)
I like PDA but I don't like extreme proclamations back to back to back.
My ex used to get drunk around his friends and throw affection my way. He had no control over his liquor and every 5 mins would yell out that he loves me. Then he'd get very clingy bc I get uncomfortable in big groups sometimes and I try to hide or get some space. I don't like being touched or kissed by someone who's drunk (or when I'm pissed at someone) and that always bothered him. The overaffection was just overwhelming and he had a body odour thing every time he drank which just made it worse bc my nose is sensitive. It just brewed like a sense of resentment bc I'd communicate it to him and he'd just claim I'm trying to control him but honestly, I'm just trying to tell you that it doesn't make me feel good and maybe it can be a thing you do without me around.
And everything started piling up and I was pissed but I wasn't ready to talk about it bc I know I was overwhelmed and I just needed to sort through the things to try and give myself perspective and decide if I was overreacting or if I had legitimate things to be mad about. But he kept badgering me over and over and over while I was still mad. And I tried to not explode (successfully) but he started getting mad at me when I had explicitly told him I'm not ready to talk about it.
(I can't remember specifically what happened after, but we had a big fight. A very big fight. And he wanted to pull the plug. All because I wasn't ready to talk about it bc I didn't want to fight over what could potentially be nothing)
Eventually, he forgave me when I apologized for... well I don't remember what I apologized for. And we were good. I made sure to cook food that he could pack and take to work if he was staying over. Helped him plan some finances. We talked about how the next year or so would go. I had a little mental health struggle but he urged me to see a doctor and such and asked me to get on birth control.
There was then, an incident, totally not his fault. We both got carried away. I had to be celibate for a month and we got heated and when he almost broke the celibacy, I had a breakdown. I didnt know that would be a trigger, but he went on a shame spiral and started getting upset with himself so I consoled him. And we were okay. Didn't really speak about it again after that.
He had arranged for me to join an in person d&d campaign with his friends and I had a hard time keeping up bc I had classes and assignments so I had to miss a few sessions. When I got there and played a session, I did something wrong and everyone - including him - were upset with me. I apologised for it and said I wouldn't repeat that. Two weeks later, we had the next session and his friends kept making comments about the previous session throughout the 4 hours we were playing and... it started to get to me. I lashed out and told them to build a bridge and get over it.
When my ex was dropping me home, I expressed that I didn't like being treated like that, my friends don't do that to me. And he got mad at me bc he said and I quote "You're not taking responsibility for what you did. They've made fun of so many embarrassing things I've done, you don't see me getting affected by it". I didnt immediately respond (also bc I don't remember what I said) I do remember thinking "You can accept that kind of abuse from your friends if you want to, it doesn't mean I have to". When I got out of the car, I just said I am upset but I love you and I'm really tired. I didnt give him a kiss that night.
(For context, that was a Friday night. He had spent the entire week at my place bc he was sick and didn't want to be alone so I was taking care of him and feeding him)
On Saturday (3 days before my lease ended and we'd agreed I would move in with him temporarily), he asked how my house hunting was going. I told him the market is crappy rn and I can't find a decent place but I'm trying to. He said you really need to focus on that right now. I told him I am and I'll update you if there's a place, I love you. And he couldn't say it back so he said we need to talk.
He said I told many small white lies (example: I cut my finger, I ask for a tissue - bc bleeding - he asks if I'm bleeding, I say no) and it was overwhelming him and exhausting him. He said he knew its bc of how I grew up but he had mentioned it before (I don't remember if he did but he could have and I forgot) and I didn't work on it like I was supposed to.
He said ( based on the argument on Friday about the d&d game ) that I didn't take accountability for my actions and he couldn't trust me bc it showed that I was an untrustworthy person.
I said let's sit together and talk about this, these are things I can work on, we can tackle them as a couple and talk through them.
He then said I just don't love you anymore. I've talked to my family and friends and I think I mistook what I felt for you and thought it was love.
I tried to fight for him but I knew that I can't make someone love me so I was heartbroken, almost homeless (if not for some friends that had a spare room) and I had an exam in 2 weeks.
He said there's no good time to break up with someone and I didnt wanna drag it out (which I suppose was his form of mercy)
Its taken a year to process... for me bc he blocked me from everything after I returned his stuff. And it made me feel like the asshole? Then I rationalised that I did everything I possibly could, but did I? Maybe I didn't address his needs well enough? Maybe I didn't listen to his concerns enough? Maybe there's more I could have done to make him feel secure or sure? Maybe I was too headstrong and it overshadowed him?
I keep going round and round about it in my head. My therapist says it wasn't a loving and caring relationship. But like I remember a time when it was? But I also remember feeling so exhausted by it. Was it my fault? Am I the asshole? What could I have done better?

Somewhere between 90 and 95% of openers I get are either "hi" or "hey." So literally anything else puts you sonewhere in the top 10%. Even "HEY ASSHOLE! would at least be memorable. So I wouldn't sweat it too much; the bar is set really low.
If you're really insistent, though, it's thd same sort of stuff women want in an opener, just with waaaayyyy less competition. And if you can somehow prove you're not a scammer while you're at it, even better.
The opener I start with is usually something easy to answer and invites a thoughtful response. Such as, "What is your go to karaoke song?" or "What's your favorite thing about living [insert city]"? or "What's your favorite way to spend a Sunday afternoon?"
I usually get the conversation started and then if he doesn't match my energy, I unmatch.
One of my favorite opening lines I got from a guy was “Hi there! Let me know what you think of the following:
A white picket fence house, a couple dogs, some nice cars, maybe a boat for weekend trips to the lake, and we can do that for about 5 years until you get sick of me. After that we divorce, I let you keep everything, and we’ll call it a good time!”
Made me laugh and for being an introvert who struggles immensely with conversation this helped relax me instantly.
The online dating world is vast, with a plethora of apps to choose from. However, according to a study by Statista, one outranks them all when it comes to finding love: Bumble. The app, known for letting women make the first move, has since expanded into a networking platform for building both friendships and professional connections. But if you’re still interested in using Bumble for its original intent, you might be wondering how to go about answering all those Bumble prompts, of which there are over 40 to choose from. Here, we’ve rounded up ten of the best Bumble prompts, plus example answers. So fill out that profile, pick your preferred zodiac sign to date (it’s Pisces, right?) and watch the notifications roll in—before you know it, you’ll be needing a spreadsheet to track all those dates.
How Do You Write a Good Bumble Prompt?
The best way to write a good Bumble prompt response is to be honest, specific and positive, according to experts. If you leave your profile generic (or worse, empty), you’re not giving dates enough information to work with so that they can start a conversation. So, focus on being clear about what you want (without being a negative nelly) and don’t be afraid to throw a little humor in there, too. After all, laugher is proven to help us relax, and when we feel at ease, we’re more comfortable sharing about ourselves and learning about others.
The Best Bumble Prompts and How to Answer Them

1. Perfect First Date...

This Bumble prompt is a great way to let potential matches know what you’re expecting, so be specific. “Drinks” is not going to cut it. Instead, write out a little itinerary—it doesn’t have to be incredibly detailed, but it should give someone an idea of what you enjoy. Maybe it’s a picnic in a park. Perhaps you lean towards the classic dinner and a movie, or you love art museums, comedy clubs and bookstores.
What you can say:
Catching a flick (sci-fi or rom-com) followed by dinner at my favorite Italian restaurant in Los Angeles. If the sky is clear, we’d drive up to Griffith Park and have a little La La Land moment.
Picnic in Central Park and then a ride in a rowboat—you’re doing the rowing, of course. We’d top it off with ice cream and maybe a bookstore jaunt.
We’d eat our way through Smorgasburg in Brooklyn and then sit on the pier looking at the Manhattan skyline as the sun sets.

1. I Get Way too Excited About...

Behavioral scientist and author Logan Ury advises that a successful dating profile makes it easy for someone to start a conversation with you. Use this prompt to talk about something you’re passionate about. Restaurant openings, golf, Bluey, painting, opera, rock climbing, cooking, Paris, Marvel...whatever you can’t stop talking about goes right here. Don’t worry about appealing to the masses—the right person, who might also love these things (or just love how much you love them), will come.
What you can say:
Paris in the springtime. I took a gap year there and love going every April to see the cherry blossoms, and one day I’d love to do a tour through Provence to see the lavender, too.
Rock climbing. I’m at the climbing gym at least twice a week and love going bouldering once a month with my club. If you haven’t seen Free Solo, you’re missing out.
Broadway shows. Every year, my dad and I spend a weekend in NYC marathoning every single musical we can get tickets for. I’ve seen Phantom of the Opera five times and yes, I’m crushed that it’s closing.

1. A Pro and Con of Dating Me...

Stay away from the “beige flags” here. Ury has previously explained that beige flags are clichés, and the whole goal here is to stand out. So be honest and own both your pros and cons, all while finding a way to keep it lighthearted. Debbie-downers aren’t good first impressions.
What you can say:
Pro: I’m a great baker, so you’ll always have fresh-baked chocolate chip cookies. Con: I’m definitely a planner and being spontaneous can be hard, but I’m working on embracing last-minute adventure.
Pro: I’m on the pulse of the restaurant scene and always have great recs. Con: I can’t stand the MCU. (But I’ll make an occasional concession.)
Pro: I’ll never ask you to TikTok dance with me. Con: I can be slow replying to texts—but I’m working on it!

1. A Non-Negotiable...

This Bumble prompt is important because it can be your deal breaker, however, avoid being super negative. We all have our icks, but as dating coach Lindsay O’Brien has told us, you don’t want to spiral on a list of things you don’t want, because it can imply emotional baggage. (That’s not a bad thing and a lot of us have it—it’s just not something you might want to spill in the “handshake” phase of dating.) Use this prompt to reveal qualities, values and even shared dreams/goals you’d like the person to have.
What you can say:
Great communicator.
You like and are conversational about art, books and travel.
You think living abroad for a few years sounds like an ultimate bucket-list adventure.

1. My Real-Life Superpower Is...

This one can be a lighthearted icebreaker or a lean more serious. Whether it’s a quirky talent or your favorite quality about yourself, share it. Just, as noted above, stay away from the clichés.
What you can say:
Making conversation with strangers and putting them at ease.
Cooking for a crowd.
Somehow always managing to win the Broadway lottery.

1. After Work You Can Find Me...

Here’s another Bumble prompt that can show not just your interests but how you spend your time. If you’re a budding cocktail connoisseur, maybe your future date will find you at the latest trendy opening in the city. If you love art, you might be taking advantage of museums’ free admissions nights before heading home. Tell potential matches how you want to spend your time, so you don’t waste time getting to know people who aren’t interested in those things.
What you can say:
Curled in bed with a book—I live for murder mysteries, Jane Austen and fantasy novels.
At a concert; I’m obsessed with alternative rock and country music.
Baking cookies while watching the latest season of The Bachelorette.

1. I Promise I Won’t Judge You If...

Now is not quite the time to get serious with a heavy hitter, so use this prompt to get silly and show your sense of humor, while potentially revealing your own eccentricities in the process.
You totally trip over nothing on the sidewalk, because I do that at least three times a week.
You haven’t read Pride and Prejudice, as long as you promise to watch the Kiera Knightley version with me.
You have zero sense of direction. Me too.

1. Favorite Quality in a Person...

Here’s a chance to cast a reel for the good traits you're looking for. Again, diving deep is key, so try to avoid things like “nice.” A lot of people and things are nice. Elaborate on what you want to see in a nice person.
What you can say:
The way he/she makes eye contact with the people they speak to, making them feel seen and heard.
Remembering important dates—birthdays, anniversaries—and celebrating them.
Prioritizing others’ needs first, while still having healthy boundaries.

1. I’m a Great Plus One Because...

A lot of your answers to Bumble prompts will be serious. This one is a chance to be less so. Flaunt your funnier side and tell them why taking you to a company party, wedding, family or other social event will be a good time.
What you can say:
I’ll totally stick by you if you’re the wallflower.
I can talk about literally any subject.
My dance moves can’t be beat.

1. A Review from a Friend...

We want to know what other people think, so now’s the time to reel in a friend and have them give you a review. It’s always interesting to see how we are perceived by others, and as your profile is filled with prompts that you’ve answered from your own perspective, calling in a review will give potential matches a look into who you are that highlights qualities you may have glossed over.
What you can ask your friend to talk about:
Your personality traits that they like.
A favorite memory together.
Five reasons they would date you.

1. My Favorite Quality in a Person...

Time to pull out your dream list of a person’s best qualities and...ask for them. (Gasp!) As dating coach Lindsay O’Brien has previously told PureWow, it pays to be clear up front so that the right people can find you. Just make sure to keep it positive, because listing the negatives (ex. Someone who doesn’t [insert quality here]) can suggest relationship baggage. “For example,” she says, “If you don’t want someone who is sarcastic or critical, you can say, ‘A sweet guy makes my heart melt.’”
What you can say:
A sense of humor.
Planner extraordinaire.
Thoughtfulness.

I’ve been with my boyfriend for about 2 years. I’ve had the idea that he had a different um ….appreciation for sex than I do for a while now but I didn’t think it was a big deal until recently. I’ve been becoming less and less lets say satisfied with our sex life and more frustrated. I’ve spoken to him about it - usually I need more time which usually means more rounds depending on how soon he releases but we’ve been having just one as of late where he nuts and we’re done and while initially it was okay - I didn’t except a stallion every time ….it started to become more frequent and l expressed wanting more effort - he says he’s needs some stimulus because he feels like he’s stuck at gear one of his “sexuality” with me so he doesn’t have the push or motivation to go any longer as often as I’d like I guess / or more often than he does. He basically wants nasty sex - you know the kind you see on porn - really really wet and spitty. He showed me some examples pictures and videos (one girl was kinda choking herself and wiping the spit all over her face) and as much as I wanna be that person for him. it just doesn’t do it for me. I don’t want a glob of spit on my face and I don’t want porn sex (the kind he showed me if anything ) . He says it’s not a requirement but it kinda is if how sex has been going so far is any evidence - he needs that to get off (or go some more in this case I suppose) and I just need some more time . In no way am not open to exploring - I just really don’t get off on an EXCESSIVE amount of spit on my body or face during sex and thus …I don’t know what to do. Do I proceed with our usual sex life and hope it goes back to how it was or try to match his taste. In case it sounds like I don’t try to be accommodating to his taste at all - he likes videos and nudes as well ( which isn’t my favorite thing mostly due to trust issues) but I let him tape and send him pics/vids regularly because I trust him and he likes it. It might sound a bit stupid or like I’m complaining he isn’t satisfying me (please don’t misunderstand) in simple terms I guess I don’t think I can match his freak and I’m afraid this is gonna be a problem in our relationship if not now - In the future…
On a side note- he watches porn regularly which I don’t really appreciate and it’s evident this is where he got his taste from. While I generally don’t have an issue with watching porn - I watch some now and then myself I’m almost certain he does this everyday which is where my problem is. I feel if I say something he’ll just try to hide or feel judged but I just don’t think porn is real or a reference for one’s sex life . Could just be me - and I do blame his regular consumption for this issue as well - how should I even address that If at all?

Thank you guys for all your nice comments on my previous post! Here's my followup post walking through the anthology - I apologize for the delay, but I wanted to sit with this half of the album a bit longer. This analysis will be slightly different: first I’ll go through themes present throughout the anthology, and then walk through each song individually, since it’s not as consecutive of a story as the first album. As with my first analysis, I tend to also stay away from literal details as proof that a song is about a certain subject or muse – to me, it’s easier to understand the album when you think first about what the song’s overarching meaning is, rather than getting caught up in literal details (and I think Taylor often throws these in as red herrings). Moreover, it’s important to note that it’s likely that the literal detail she’s thrown in is one that only she and the muse will understand (i.e. her referencing a lilac skirt in imgonnagetyouback is unlikely to be one we’ve ever seen her wearing in public, so it’s useless to paternity test based on that detail!).
Firstly, the word anthology means a collection of assorted literary works. As a result, I think there are more themes scattered through this album, and it’s meant to be a little harder to parse than the first one. I think this album is what TTPD would have been before it crystallized into a tighter theme – similar to the 3 AM tracks for Midnights, the majority of which were written prior to the standard edition’s tracks.
There are a few themes throughout this album. From a romantic context, to me, this album is primarily about Joe. I’ll walk through why I believe that, but this album feels less muddled to me in terms of its muses, and I think that is in part due to the fact that her self-described mania from the standard edition is not a theme on the anthology. This work also covers her own relationship to celebrity and fame, and how that affects her romantic relationships and her personal life in general. And finally, I think the final theme throughout this collection is the idea of childhood, of formative experiences, and how our author goes about processing events that happen to her.
The Black Dog
What happens when you intimately know someone, when you share every aspect of your life with someone, and then it's over? Six weeks after their breakup, she’s barely holding it together (“I move through the world with the heartbroken”). She even tried to rebound her pain away (“I took the miracle move on drug, the effects were temporary”), and wasn’t able to succeed. Meanwhile, she sees him go to a bar, and she has the sudden realization that he may be able to do what she failed to do – he might be able to move on, with someone new. Reckoning with that realization is horrifying. If he is able to pull it off, what does that mean about the love they shared? When he had told her for years that he was who he was for her, and her alone?
You said I needed a bravе man
Then proceeded to play him
Until I believed it too
And it kills me
How could they go from being so intimate that they shower together, that she’s aware of his every move, to being so distant from each other that she wonders if making her fall in love with him was a hazing? And the cruelest part of it is – she doesn’t want either one of them to be able to move on, and give validity to the fact that they weren’t right for each other, even though she knows they have to. Moreover, she’s already *tried* to move on at this point, and failed – she tried to manufacture a counterfeit version of their intimacy, but what if he’s able to perfectly replicate it? And to really drive in the knife, what if it’s with someone younger than her?
And you jump up, but she's too young to know this song
That was intertwined in the magic fabric of our dreaming
Given that a theme throughout the first album was her feeling like she’d given him so much of her youth, so much of her childbearing years, with nothing to show for it, what does it feel like to know that he can essentially reset time, by being with a younger woman, but she’ll never be able to get that time back?
imgonnagetyouback
We know that her and Joe took a break or two while they were together (see: Hits Different, The Great War, in addition to PR articles). To me, this song is about when you do take that break from your partner, and you’re trying to make a point to them that they’re not going to find anyone better than you (I can tell when somebody still wants me, come clean) – the two of you are too intimately intertwined to find a suitable replacement. You know what to wear, what to say, what to do to bring them back to you:
I, I hear thе whispers in your eyes
I'll make you wanna think twice
You'll find that you were never not mine
This song also has a lot of similarities to So Long, London, which is why I attribute it to Joe. To me, it provides a deeper story to some of the lines she touches on in So Long, London:
I didn't opt in to be your odd man out
I founded the club she's heard great things about
And to some of the lines in Hits Different:
I washed my hands of us at the club
You made a mess of me
I pictured you with other girls in love
Then threw up on the street
//
Bet I could still melt your world
Argumentative, antithetical dream girl
imgonnagetyouback is a story of one-upmanship – of trying to out-jealous your partner, of proving to them that nobody knows them better than you do. And maybe this time when they’re both playing this game, it works:
Push the reset button, we're becomin' something new
Say you got somebody, I'll say I got someone too
Even if it's handcuffed, I'm leavin' here with you
//
We broke all the pieces, but still wanna play the game (Oh)
Told my friends I hate you, but I love you just the same
Pick your poison, babe, I'm poison either way
The spacing to me is a deliberate red herring (the 1975 very famously made a song called fallingforyou), and a way to illustrate that the subject of the song wants space from her – but she’s not going to give it to him. This is another theme that calls back to Joe – in So Long, London, she describes him as constantly pulling away (Pulled him in tighter each time he was driftin' away). Matty didn’t pull away – he was all in for two weeks, until he chose to ghost her, and leave abruptly. There was no slow death, no push and pull to her relationship with Matty – it was a meteoric rise and fall.
The Albatross
This song feels like a sister song to “peace” – she describes what it’s like to love her. It’s a little more twisted, however, as she describes her love for her partner as both a danger, and a rescue from the danger she’s imposing on him by being involved with him:
Wise men once said
"Wild winds are death to the candle"
A rose by any other name is a scandal
Cautions issued, he stood
Shooting the messengers
They tried to warn him about her
She’s described herself as wind and liquor in her relationship with Joe previously, in Mastermind:
I'm the wind in our free-flowing sails
And the liquor in our cocktails
She has empathy for the narrator, but disdain for herself. There’s also acceptance though: she knows that she tried to prevent it, and tried to warn him about the danger she posed. In the end though, he chose this life with her, and he chose the danger – there’s only so much she can protect him from.
The devil that you know
Looks now more like an angel
I'm the life you chose
And all this terrible danger
Chloe or Sam or Sophia or Marcus
This song feels like another sister song to The Black Dog – how does she cope with the idea that her long-time partner might move on? How does she cope with the fact that if she chooses to leave, she also chooses the future in which they both move on? A future in which they don’t know each other? It also touches on her wondering if she should move on with Matty, and how feasible it would be to know someone else instead of her partner:
If you want to tear my world apart
Just say you've always wondered
This song, more than anything else, illustrates that moving on with Matty was nothing but a way to move past Joe – what she really wants, more than anything, is a response greater than indifference from Joe:
As the decade would play us for fools
And you saw my bones out with somebody new
Who seemed like he would've bullied you in school
And you just watched it happen
There’s also the realization that Joe may never love who she is now – who she was at the beginning of their relationship will always be who he prefers:
If you want to break my cold, cold heart
Just say, 'I loved you the way that you were'
She’s trying desperately to find some way to make up for the fact that she had to leave Joe, that there was nothing she could do to stay – she tried changing everything about herself, but still, the need to leave him eventually caught up with her:
I changed into goddesses, villains and fools
Changed plans and lovers and outfits and rules
All to outrun my desertion of you
And you just watched it
And she wonders whether despite his indifference, and the distance between them, she should still stay:
Could it be enough to just float in your orbit
Can we watch our phantoms like watching wild horses
Cooler in theory but not if you force it
To be, it just didn't happen
But now, they are merely ghosts of who they once were – it’s not possible to force the relationship anymore.
How Did It End?
When a long-term relationship ends, you can point to the factors that led to its demise: a difference of opinions on money, on marriage, on children, and so forth. It is easy to determine the “what” and the “why” of an ending. But what is harder to diagnose is how you both became the versions of yourselves that weren’t on the same page, that were unable to discuss these topics, that couldn’t move past these dilemmas. That is much, much harder to pinpoint, and this is the question Taylor asks in this song. She knows what killed them:
We hereby conduct this post-mortem
He was a hot house flower to my outdoorsman
//
We were blind to unforeseen circumstances
We learn the right steps to different dances (ohh)
And fell victim to interlopers' glances
Lost the game of chance, what are the chances?
But what she still doesn't know is how it happened – how did it end? She also finds the empathy from the media and from the public to be false and selfish – they only want to know what happened to feverishly spread the news like wildfire.
Come one, come all
It's happenin' again
The empathetic hunger descends
We'll tell no one
Except all of our friends
We must know
How did it end?
//
Soon they'll go home to their husbands
Smug 'cause they know they can trust him
Then feverishly calling their cousins (ohh)
//
Say it once again with feeling
What the feeding frenzy wants more than anything is gossip, and they don’t care that she is utterly lost – lost as to why this happened, and lost physically and mentally:
Guess who we ran into at the shops?
Walking in circles like she was lost
How does she give an answer to quell the empathetic hunger, when she herself doesn’t understand exactly how it happened?
So High School
In an album that touches so much on feeling like she’s running out of time to have the future that she wants, and running out of youth to give the various men who come into her life, it is interesting and heartwarming that the song about Travis on the anthology is one that describes being with him as regaining her youth:
The brink of a wrinkle in time
Bittersweet sixteen suddenly
Moreover, another detail to note in this song is the difference in how she describes alcohol and drugs – in nearly every other song on TTPD, alcohol is a vice she uses in her moments of despair, and drugs are what her previous partners turn to in their moments of strife (she also describes the influence of drugs on her partners as something she detests – “sinking in stoned oblivion” and “you needed me but you needed drugs more”). With Travis, she’s not imbibing in any substances – instead, his thoughts and jokes are enough for her:
I'll drink what you think, and I'm high
From smoking your jokes all damn night
Travis is giving her back her youth, making sober promises, and the impression that we get is that they’re building this dreamlike reality together – it’s wholesome, all-American, and high-school-inspired, yet still grounded in something tangible, unlike the promise of fate and destiny, which powered her relationship with Joe and her entanglement with Matty.
I Hate It Here
More than anything, I think this song illustrates how Taylor sometimes uses escapism and maladaptive daydreaming to ignore the reality of the situation she’s dealing with. She recognizes that it’s not possible to stay where she is, locked inside this prison of stagnation and boredom:
If comfort is a construct
I don't believe in good luck
Now that I know what's what
She recognizes that this isn’t what she used to be, and that she never intended to choose this life of secrecy, perhaps alluding to all those years she spent “locked inside her house”:
You see I was a debutante in another life but
Now I seem to be scared to go outside
She describes herself as finding hope in the places her mind creates (seemingly alluding to her creation of characters and places for folklore and evermore):
I hate it here so I will go to
secret gardens in my mind
People need a key to get to
The only one is mine
I read about it in a book when I was a precocious child
And her escapism into her past, and imaginings of what could have been:
I hate it here so I will go to
Lunar valleys in my mind
When they found a better planet
Only the gentle survived
I dreamed about it in the dark
The night I felt like I might die
All throughout the song, there’s recognition that she doesn’t want to be here – she doesn’t want to feel as if the only place she can be free is in these imaginary worlds she creates. But there’s also concession – is she perhaps only destined for an eternal consolation prize? For loneliness? For imagined romanticism? For the fantasy of how she imagined her life and her love to be?
I'm lonely but I'm good
I'm bitter but I swear I'm fine
I'll save all my romanticism for my inner life and I'll get lost on
purpose
This place made me feel worthless
Lucid dreams like electricity, the current flies through me,
and in my fantasies I rise above it
And way up there, I actually love it
​​thanK you aIMee
This song, along with a few others in the latter half of the anthology, discusses the loss of innocence she felt in key moments of her life. This one quite obviously alludes to Kim Kardashian, and their infamous feud. I will make a separate post on this, but I think people describing this song as petty may not remember the depth of the hate aimed at Taylor in 2016. Kim and Kanye organized a revenge porn music video for Famous, and held a museum exhibit so that people could take pictures with the naked dolls. The night the snapchat videos were released, every Kardashian family member descended upon social media to gleefully celebrate the #TaylorSwiftIsOverParty. The amount of hate Taylor got was so unprecedented that Instagram actually built their comment filtration system because of this incident. It really was that bad.
And every baby step Taylor took (for example, even just posting that she had a good 2017 was met with immediate media backlash) was quite literally mocked across the internet. People thought the reputation era was cringey, that she was over, and that she deserved everyone’s ire because she was “proven” to be a liar. She describes this in the song:
Each time that Aimee stomped across my grave
And then she wrote headlines in the local paper
Laughing at each baby step I'd take
And it was always the same searing pain
But the whole time, despite the pain and blood, she was dreaming of the day that she would heal, and dreaming of the day that she would climb her way back to to the mountaintop:
And our town, it looks so small from way up here
//
So I pushed each boulder up that hill
Your words were still just ringing in my head, ringing in my head
What still irks her though, is that this bully who created this entire hate train and organized her downfall will pretend as if it never happened – she will undoubtedly reframe things to make our subject seem overdramatic, petty, and unable to move past the incidents of years ago. Taylor, however, has always been clear about one thing: sometimes, no amount of time can heal you from something that deeply traumatized you.
I Look in People’s Windows
This song to me feels like a sister song to The Black Dog, but a few months after the official end of a relationship. A sub theme that runs through Taylor’s songs about the Joe breakup is the loss of being understood – when you are no longer with a long-term partner, how do you cope with the fact that you move the world knowing everything about this person, but at the same time, not knowing them anymore? Would you peek into their windows just to get a glimpse of what their life looks like now? As anyone who has gone through a breakup knows, the hardest part is often not being privy to the mundane details of that person’s world – their dinner parties, their wine, their friends, and so on.
I look in people's windows
Transfixed by rose golden glows
They have their friends over to drink nice wine
I look in people's windows
In case you're at their table
What if your eyes looked up and met mine
One more time
The Prophecy
The prophecy is devastating. More so than any other song Taylor has ever written, it is full of desperation and longing. All she asks for is to be known, to be understood – to not be perceived as an idea of a woman, or a starlet with no humanity:
Please
I've been on my knees
Change the prophecy
Don't want money
Just someone who wants my company
Let it once be me
Who do I have to speak to
About if they can redo
The prophecy?
It’s striking especially considering how much she laments that leaving Joe means she’s giving up being known – it’s also striking given the fact that in the epilogue poem, she states that neither Joe or Matty ever truly knew her:
He never even scratched the surface
of me.
None of them did.
What she desires beyond fame, beyond notoriety, beyond money, is to be loved and to be known. The song also alludes to her being in therapy, and to finding some sort of consolation that she will find someone to share her life with:
I'm so afraid I sealed my fate
No sign of soulmates
I'm just a paperweight
In shades of greige
Spending my last coin so someone will tell me
It'll be ok
Cassandra
This track is a sister song to ​​thanK you aIMee, and continues exploring the theme of fraught public womanhood we see in Clara Bow and Who’s Afraid of Little Old Me. In this song, Taylor discusses how the validation of women is never publicized in the way that the crucifixion of them is:
When the first stone's thrown, there's screaming
In the streets, there's a raging riot
When it's "Burn the bitch, " they're shrieking
When the truth comes out, it's quiet
Moreover, when women speak up about an issue, they’re often viewed as overdramatic, and unserious. Cassandra, in Greek mythology, was cursed by Apollo to always predict the future accurately, but never be believed. We see this happen every day to women in politics, in the media, and in pop culture:
So, they killed Cassandra first 'cause she feared the worst
And tried to tell the town
So, they set my life in flames, I regret to say
Do you believe me now?
And for Taylor, it’s reminiscent of all the times she’s been the first to speak out about something in the industry – for example, against Scooter Braun and his well-established pattern of bullying, or of the exploitation of artists on streaming services – but never been supported broadly by her peers. They believe her later, but at that point, very few people give her the credit for speaking up in the first place. It’s reminiscent of the Kimye scandal. When the news broke originally, the hatred she received was widespread. But when she was acquitted by the long-form video that leaked, it didn’t receive anywhere near the level of coverage that the original scandal received.
Peter
Peter is another song that touches on both the male muses for this album, and in turn, on the promises various men have given her over her life (we’ll circle back to this in The Manuscript!). It also touches on the theme of waiting that’s seen throughout this album, especially on her songs about Joe – how much time is enough time to give?
Both Matty and Joe were 25 when they met her, and it’s abundantly clear that both men made promises to her: promises of marriage, of children, and of a future. But how long can she wait for these promises to be fulfilled? To Joe, she gives six years of her life and youth, and to Matty, she gives him a chance to prove that he was reformed from the time she knew him last: both men eventually fail. Neither man is ready to give up their childish whims, and she has no choice but to lose hope that either of them ever will.
And you said you'd come and get me but you were 25
And the shelf life of those fantasies has expired
Lost to the lost boys chapter of your life
Forgive me Peter, please know that I tried
To hold onto the days when you were mine
But the woman who sits by the window has turned out the light
Another thing to note is the interesting double meaning of the song title. To peter also means to diminish gradually – much like her faith in both men’s promises.
The Bolter
A lot of the songs Taylor has written about Joe in this album deal with the question of “when is the right time to leave?” When you know that things are stagnant, and you know that you’ve given everything you have to a relationship, you know that you have to leave – but it’s easy to convince yourself if you have a history of “leaving before you get left” that you should ride out this wave, and that this pain might just be temporary.
The Bolter, to me, reflects on Taylor’s history – it seems like she prided herself on being able to see the warning signs, and being able to get out in time.
She's been many places with
Men of many faces
First, they're off to the races
And she's laughing drawin' aces
But, none of it is changin'
That the chariot is waitin'
Hearts are hers for the breakin'
There's an escape in escaping
It’s relevant to TTPD, because likely, she saw not bolting as a sign of growth and maturity. You know that you’ve grown as a person when you don’t abandon ship at the first sign of trouble, but what if there are so many signs of trouble that the truly mature thing to do would be to leave?
Robin
Robin leads into this theme of childhood and innocence that we see further in The Manuscript. The track name is also the name of Aaron Dessner’s child. She ponders how beautiful and sweet it is that we work so hard to protect childhood naivete:
Strings tied to levers,
slowed down clocks tethered,
all this showmanship
To keep it, for you,
In sweetness
And there’s an element of wistfulness to it – don’t we sometimes wish that we could also be protected from the worst the world has to offer?
You have no room in your dreams for regrets
You have no idea
The time will arrive for the cruel and the mean
You'll learn to bounce back just like your trampoline
But now we'll curtail your curiosity
The Manuscript
This song is perhaps the most climactic song on the album. It covers her romantic history up until that point, and starts at the moment she feels everything went awry – and it predates Joe and Matty. Instead, it calls back to the first time she experienced a proper heartbreak, and the first time she lost her childlike innocence in the world – her relationship with Jake Gyllenhaal (a time she described as her transition from childhood to womanhood). She describes how they compared licenses, and how he told her that if they had sex, and it was as good as the conversation was, then they would get married, and have a family. He was the first man to make her these promises:
He said that if the sex was half as good as the conversation was
Soon they'd be pushin' strollers
But soon it was over
He tells her that it’s ok that they have an age gap, because she’s so advanced for her age:
She thought about how he said since she was so wise beyond her years
Everything had been above board
She wasn't sure
While dating him, she desperately wants to be older, and starts emulating his behavior:
In the age of him, she wished she was thirty
And made coffee every morning in a French press
And when it’s over, she regresses, and turns back into a child – unable to sleep alone without the comfort of her mother, and unable to eat anything substantial besides the sugary cereal of her youth:
Afterwards she only ate kids' cereal
And couldn't sleep unless it was in her mother's bed
She forces herself to date boys her own age, to not rely on the maturity of an older man to guide her through adulthood, but she can’t help but feel disappointed in their youth:
Then she dated boys who were her own age
With dart boards on the backs of their doors
Finally, as she creates the All Too Well short film, she recognizes the damage he did to her, and how the consequences of that affair have shaped her life since:
And the years passed
Like scenes of a show
The Professor said to write what you know
Lookin' backwards
Might be the only way to move forward
Then the actors
Were hitting their marks
And the slow dance
Was alight with the sparks
And the tears fell
In synchronicity with the score
And at last
She knew what the agony had been for
Everything calls back to this first man, and these original promises – everything she’s been chasing since is reminiscent of this first scar. And just like how releasing All Too Well transformed and healed her, she hopes that by releasing this additional manuscript into the world, it will heal her again. As she describes in the epilogue poem, she is entering all her thoughts, emotions, and pain into evidence – she now asks the audience to process it with her, and thus conclude this process of healing.
The only thing that's left is the manuscript
One last souvenir from my trip to your shores
Now and then I reread the manuscript
But the story isn't mine anymore
If you read all of this - thank you! I enjoyed writing it, and I'm excited to discuss with you all in the replies :)

https://discord.com/invite/vGGtg3qj7w
Server name: Verda Vente RP (18+ RPvP)
Map: Savage Wilds Platform: PC
Style: PVE/RP/PVP Server Location: USA Direct Connect: 216.52.25.102:7783 RP Format: Text Based Max Level: 70 Slots: 60
Welcome to the Isle of Verda Vente!
Verda Vente is an RP server with a focus on storytelling and Mechanical PvP to drive conflict designed to allow our players to create tales of their own throughout the time they spend playing, and with players on all day there is always someone to visit or fight at your hearts content. With PvP, PvE, and RP options everyone has something they can do and relax! Just to show, here are a few...

PvP

~14~ Unique Races that come with their own specialized set of perks and bonuses that make each one a strong contender in our lore and in the game itself. We have: Humans Elves Dwarves Goblins Orcs Aquatics Beast-Kin Dragon-Kin Devil-Kin Fae Celestials Cursed Undead Cursed Vampires And Cursed Werebeasts!
~8~ classes that provide the bonuses needed for each character combination of Race ad Class to excel in what they do. We have: Fighters Rogues Magi Clerics Druids (With Shapeshifts) Rangers Paladins Warlocks
-Raiding opportunities with no restrictions on the use of Trebuchets, bombs, magic, and thrall use with building destruction a hard yes! Raiding times are between 6pm CST Friday, and 12am CST Monday
-Offline Raid protection so you can sleep well knowing that your buildings wont vanish overnight -A thieving system designed for Rogues to have their own spotlight outside of being quick and quiet! -Simple and easy to understand PvP rules that make ticketing far less common and less of a hassle!

PvE

Unique Dungeons scattered throughout the world that can be explored or fought for prizes you cannot get anywhere else. This includes a massive cavern known as the Underdark, and a Hell Dungeon meant for even the most geared groups to have a healthy challenge. Events hosted almost every day by me! Meant to drop rare loot you would be missing otherwise! World Bosses that takes full clans to remove from their perch! High Build counts at 1000 building pieces and 300 placeables per person so even the builders who don't enjoy PvP have room to breathe and relax with their game. High thrall counts at 6 fighting thralls and 1 mount per person that ensure your base is always guarded against the new purge system.
Our modlist was voted on by players at the start of each season, and we have a channel dedicated specifically to mod requests from our players! As examples, we have: -Indrid's custom races and classes -SvS Extended and SvS 2 -Emberlight -Highmane's Arsenal -Ancient Civilization -Ancient Sorcery -Less Building replacements -Shani's Stuff -Devious Desires -And many more high end character customization mods!
-We also have other systems in place to allow players to have the things other servers either don't allow or don't enforce, like: Kingdoms! With a King, Lord, and Heir ranking you and your clan can claim entire regions and set laws in place that are not only RP enforced but Admin enforced as well!
-Lore that is always growing at player request, so your character can have their names plastered in the server history for all time! A clear cut rules list for our moderators and admins, so players can always see what is accepted and expected from them!
With our community the stories have been great, the combat fantastic, and the memories better than the rest. Our server is geared for high end custom characters and buildings, and has delivered. Come and join, make your stories heard, and spend time in a world where we reward people not for dollhousing, but for RP'ing and interacting with others. https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3036155384

I think “my simple pleasure” is the best prompt. If used right it’s a good way to say things you like. For example mine was- thrift stores, new tattoos, Philly sports and R&B. Really depends how you write it
As a woman, I’d advise men not to use “I won’t shut up about,” as a prompt.
Woman constantly complain about men dominating verbal conversations. Saying you “won’t shut up about…” just reinforces that you might be one of those guys.
I think if you actually have a good travel story, that prompt can work. That is to say, I think that the "tiers" really fluctuate a lot from person to person, and your qualifiers ("this works if you're funny") are kind of proof of that.
For example, I have two pretty good stories about coming face to face with sharks, and one less good story about coming face to face with a shark. I think that the shark thing is just crazy enough that it intrigues most people. But you have to have a genuinely good story for it to work.
Also, someone else said they need to get rid of prompts - I disagree. It's really annoying if you try a new prompt and then can't go back to your old one.
I think “my idea of a good Sunday” is a great prompt bc if guys include it and they say “church,” I’m 95% more likely to like them.
THERE'S AN ART to curating your Hinge profile. If you're looking for quality matches, don't be the guy with a barren profile who sends a mildly-enthused "hey, how's it going" to every potential partner. Hinge offers a feature called prompts: conversation starters that let you show yourself off and spark more substantive conversations—and you should use them to your advantage.
Choosing the right Hinge prompts—and writing good answers those prompts—will help you scan the many fish in the sea to find those most suited for you. It might sound like a daunting task to craft the perfect profile, but at least you're an expert in the subject matter: you.
Best Practices for Crafting Your Hinge Prompts
Having an air of mystery may seem hot in movies, but it's just a waste of time in real life—especially when it comes to dating apps, where determining what's real and what's not is so much more difficult than it is in person. "Being coy may seem like a safer way to interact on apps, but it doesn't yield fruitful results," Engle says. (No one's swiping right on a bio that says "I suck at writing bios.")
So nix those coy answers and get specific when you fill out your Hinge prompts. The more specific you get, the likelier you are to match with people that are similar to you. That means you'll really have to think about yourself and want you want.
Be specific when discussing what you're looking for, too. Vagueness won't help narrow your options. For example, don't just say you're looking for "someone with a lot of personality" (is anyone not looking for someone with a personality?); say you're looking for "someone with a lot of energy, and who enjoys being active and trying new things" (or whatever that personality looks like to you). Be honest, both with yourself and in your profile. Don't say you're "super into the gym" because you want someone with a six-pack, when in reality you haven't been to gym in six months and have no intention of starting again.
Add a variety of prompts to paint a full picture of yourself. If all of your prompts are jokes, that doesn't reveal a ton about you. But, if all your prompts are serious, you might come off as a little intense—and you won't be revealing much about your day-to-day life.
The 20 Best Hinge Prompts to Help You Get You a Response
Here are 20 Hinge prompts to get you off the apps and into real relationships.
I'll pick the topic if you start the conversation...
Starting a conversation isn't easy, and with this prompt, you're meeting them halfway. It creates less of a barrier to entry for the person doing the messaging. Pick a topic you're interested in or care about, and "be as specific as possible," Engle says.
What you can say:
The best bands to come out of the 90's.
The worst holiday traditions.
The best and worst concerts you've seen.
The last time I cried happy tears was...
"Consider the things that really make you YOU," Engle says. Mentioning things you care about "will allow you to engage with like-minded people who share similar likes and interests."
What you can say:
When they showed Jason Kelce ripping his shirt off at Travis's touchdown against the Bills.
At the closing scene of All of Us Strangers.
When I PR'ed my back squat (the boys didn't see).
The one thing I'd love to know about you is...
It's always nice to see someone on a dating app be interested in you, even if they haven't seen you yet. Put that energy out there with this prompt. People might feel more comfortable responding when it's something about them, since they know themselves the best. Find a topic that's important to you, and let your potential match take it from there.
What you can say:
What would you do for a living if money weren't a factor?
What's your go-to coffee shop order?
Were you a Nickelodeon or Disney kid?
Let's make sure we're on the same page about...
The great thing about this prompt is you can make your answer as lighthearted or as serious as you want. If you have something that's a deal-breaker for you (like wanting an open relationship), you can insert that here. It also works if you have something a little less serious that still plays a role in your life (like putting pineapple on pizza) and you want to get that out there.
What you can say:
Not wanting kids.
The ending of Game of Thrones.
The shape of Earth.
This year, I really want to...
This prompt is an excellent way to open up potential first date options, or show how you want to work on yourself in this upcoming year. Want to get more creative, more fit, or try something new? Maybe someone out there wants to do the same—and wants a partner to do it with.
What you can say:
Try a ceramics class.
Drink less.
Find the best burger in town.
I'm looking for...
If you already know what you're looking for, you may as well lay it all out there. That being said, don't nit-pick or be judgmental in your answer. Don't be too vague either, or you won't narrow down your options for people best suited to you.
What you can say:
Someone who will get along with my family.
Someone comfortable with being in an open relationship.
A good time, not a long time.
My simple pleasures...
You're probably looking for someone with similar interests as you (at least, we hope you are). "Prompts serve as conversation starters, so consider your interests, hobbies, and skills and lead with those," Engle says. Odds are someone shares them with you.
What you can say:
The smell of fresh cut grass.
When Debbie from marketing brings in banana bread.
Open sunroofs.
I go crazy for...
Another easy way into talking about the things you like—but make sure it's something you can carry conversation on. "Focus on answers that you can go into detail on," Engle says. "Talk about interests, hobbies, and goals outside of romantic relationships to give potential partners a full picture of the person you are."
What you can say:
Planning my next trip before the one I'm on has even ended.
Barry Keoghan. Obviously.
Reruns of Pimp My Ride.

You should leave a comment if...

This is another way to discuss what's important to you, with a call to action for the other person. You can pull in your hobbies, hopes for the future, or interests—the world is your oyster here. But remember: specifics, specifics, specifics (don't just put down "you like sports").

What you can say:

• You were hoping for a Ravens versus Bills Super Bowl.
• Your Spotify daylist often includes the term "mallgoth."
• You're on the dance floor all night at the club.

A shower thought I recently had...

Balance your prompts by throwing in a lighter option here and there. A shower thought is a great way to show off your humor and how your mind works. Get creative.

What you can say:

• Could really use a beer in here.
• Whose Line Is It Anyway needs a reboot.
• Is Punxsutawney Phil doing okay mentally?

Green flags I look for...

Get a little deeper into what you're looking for in your person by hinting at characteristics you want to see in someone. It's better to be open and honest about what you're looking for in a potential partner then have to do the dirty work of talking to a bunch of people only to find out you don't actually see a future with them.

What you can say:

• Funny conversation, but can get deep, too.
• Tipping 20 percent, always.
• Emotional support water bottles. Here for the hydration.

We're the same type of weird if...

Have some nuance interests that you want to get out there? Here's your chance.

What you can say:

• You're hitting up the Renaissance fair every time it comes to town.
• You're the person everyone wants on their trivia team.
• You enjoy 5Ks on Thanksgiving, too.

I hype myself up by...
Everyone gets nervous when it comes to online dating. Confidence is hot, but most of us aren't 100-percent confident all of the time, and that's okay. This shows you're nervous, too, but can hype yourself up when need be.

What you can say:

• Blaring some hard rap.
• Power posing.
• Hitting the gym.

I feel most supported when...

Dating app prompts aren't all about making the right joke or being overly funny. You'll want to layer in some real prompts, too, to show potential partners you can get deep. This prompt is a great way to do that without getting too vulnerable before you're ready. Plus, it reveals a little bit about what you want out of a relationship.

What you can say:

• My partner help around the house.
• There's healthy communication.
• My family and friends support my work.

A fun fact about me is...

An oldie but a goodie. To mix in a lighthearted prompt with some deeper ones, stick with what you know and toss in your go-to fun fact from freshman seminar in college. Don't over think the "fun" part—just pick something you think is unique about yourself!

What you can say:

• I've been cage diving with sharks.
• I speak four languages.
• I never lose in Mario Kart. Ever.

Teach me something about...

Want to learn something new and find a partner at the same time? This is also a great way to show an interest in potential partners by making your answer something related to them. Like we said, people are always more comfortable talking about themselves because it's the one thing they know everything about. People love talking about their passions... maybe someone out there has the same one as you. This is a great way to find out.

What you can say:

• The Roman Empire
• Your ick list
• What you want to see in a partner

I know the best spot in town for...

Hate the phase of online dating where you message back and forth forever and never actually get to a first date? Us, too. This prompt can help speed up that process by getting you out of the app, and meeting in person. Suggest something you'd want to do for a first date.
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What you can say:

• $5 happy hour Miller Lites.
• VPR watch parties.
• Live music.

First round is on me if...

Another prompt that gets you out of the app and right into the first date. Plus, you can pose a characteristic you really want to see in a partner: a win-win. PSA though: If it translates, you do actually have to pay for the first round.

What you can say:

• You love a Dadbod.
• You also cried when My Chemical Romance broke up.
• You're okay with my dog joining us.

My typical Sunday...

This gives a little snippet into your every day life. You're probably looking for someone who lives a similar lifestyle to you (if you're a "sleep until the afternoon every weekend" kind of guy, you're probably not looking for a "6 a.m. half marathon on a Saturday" kind of girl), and this is a great way to give them that insight.

What you can say:

• Rearranging all my furniture...again.
• Hitting the snooze button relentlessly.
• A walk with the dogs, football with the guys, and meal prep.

Give me travel tips for...

Have a trip coming up? Hit two birds with one stone: get some travel recommendations and start up a conversation with a potential special someone. It's an easy entry to talking, and you can quickly branch to "well, where else have you traveled to recently?" Even if you just put down your neighborhood—there's nothing like a little stay-cation.You should leave a comment if...
This is another way to discuss what's important to you, with a call to action for the other person. You can pull in your hobbies, hopes for the future, or interests—the world is your oyster here. But remember: specifics, specifics, specifics (don't just put down "you like sports").

What you can say:

• You were hoping for a Ravens versus Bills Super Bowl.
• Your Spotify daylist often includes the term "mallgoth."
• You're on the dance floor all night at the club.

A shower thought I recently had...

Balance your prompts by throwing in a lighter option here and there. A shower thought is a great way to show off your humor and how your mind works. Get creative.

What you can say:

• Could really use a beer in here.
• Whose Line Is It Anyway needs a reboot.
• Is Punxsutawney Phil doing okay mentally?

Green flags I look for...

Get a little deeper into what you're looking for in your person by hinting at characteristics you want to see in someone. It's better to be open and honest about what you're looking for in a potential partner then have to do the dirty work of talking to a bunch of people only to find out you don't actually see a future with them.

What you can say:

• Funny conversation, but can get deep, too.
• Tipping 20 percent, always.
• Emotional support water bottles. Here for the hydration.

We're the same type of weird if...

Have some nuance interests that you want to get out there? Here's your chance.

What you can say:

• You're hitting up the Renaissance fair every time it comes to town.
• You're the person everyone wants on their trivia team.
• You enjoy 5Ks on Thanksgiving, too.

I was born in 2001, so I'm in the older side of gen z. I've also been online ever since I got my first phone at 13 years old in 2014. It's been a decade already and I've noticed a huge difference in how the internet is used.
I was online pretty much everyday and during my high school years I didn't really have any friends, so I would go online and chat/engage with strangers. None of the content I was seeing online was from people I knew irl. I used to follow random kids my age that popped up and I thought were cool, fan pages, update accounts, celebrities, etc. It was all pretty normal stuff, but there was a clear distinction back then with people who were online and those who weren't.
I was online a lot and most of my interests (music, movies, books, shows) stemmed from that. As I said, I didn't have friends irl and it was really hard for me to connect with anyone, because none of my peers were online like I was. They weren't watching the same shows, movies, they didn't know about the trends, etc. I vividly remember thinking about how there were no "internet people" in my class. This was a time where social media trends only existed within social media. Apart from the super popular challenges from the 2010's, the internet didn't exist once you got off your phone.
Things that were very popular online were lame to like irl (some of my personal examples include Dan and Phil, marvel before it got big, one direction, etc). These were very very popular online at the time, and whether you liked them or not, you couldn't scape them if you were online. Yet, I knew admitting to liking these offline was lame.
There was just a very clear distinction between people who were online and those who weren't. Between the online world and the offline (real) world.
Now, I feel everyone is online. Like even the kind of people who made fun of me back then for being online, they are online too. And idk. To me being online was like an scape from my life and the real world. I knew I could go online and meet up with people who were just like me. But now that everyone is online that's become so hard to do. Trends also have gotten out of control and you can quote stuff from online irl and people will get it. That's just something that wouldn't have happened back then (not to this extent).
This is gonna be lame but back then the only people who were truly online were the loser kids, the loners, the ones who didn't have any friends. The popular kids would only ever get online to like each other's pics on ig and that's it. But now, all the popular kids are online too and I know this isn't high school and that's so lame but this used to be a safe space and now it's changed so much.

just a quick rant lol but please lmk if it gets better or what I can do to make it better
I feel that I grew up way too fast because I grew up in a setting where my parents barely spoke English, so I was constantly translating for them. Even receiving difficult news, I was the one who had to break it to my parents.
Since I was very little, I always wanted my parents to think I'm doing fine and that I am always happy. So, I never opened up to them and I also felt so uncomfortable showing any emotions to them. Even when I was being severely bullied for the first two years of middle school, I never said a word. However, they eventually found out from my guidance counselor, and even then I pretended that it was nothing. Even my past relationships, I kept a secret. I feel like my parents don't even know who I am. I know it's partially my fault for not telling them, but at the same time (I don't mean to blame my parents but..) they did not create that environment for me to feel comfortable to do so. Therefore, they overlook my feelings a lot and even claimed that I am not sympathetic enough. For example there has been situations where people I know have passed but I am so uncomfortable to expressing my emotions to the point where it came off as disrespectful. But the thing is, I am an extremely sensitive person. I just hide it very well. I feel things deeply and little words affect me a lot.
What hurts more is that I have younger siblings who I have always looked after. I literally felt like a mother to them even though our age gaps are not a big difference at all. But I see the difference in my life and their lives. I love them so much and I really do want to do anything to support them. But my whole life I have been making appointments for them, making an environment where they never have to feel like how I do and hide everything going on, and more, to the point where I am still like a mother. My parents also treat them so much differently. Everytime they go through a failure, my parents are there with open arms and rather worried about my siblings being stressed about it. Meanwhile, I feel the opposite way. Whenever I experience a failure that my parents know about, I feel stressed due to the way my parents will be stressed and worked up about it. I realized I never put myself first. Especially my mother, she will even sometimes yell at me for my mistakes and while she has never yelled at my siblings once but rather hugged them and told them it's fine. I have NEVER received that treatment.
I also feel that my parents have never been satisfied with me. Yk the classical AP. I'm not tall enough, I don't have a high enough GPA for them (even though at the moment I am in the top 3% in GPAs out of 800 people in a high achieving high school), I'm not skinny enough (even though I have a below average weight for my height), and etc etc. Once, my mom expected me to make the soccer team when I never even got training and I was competing against kids who have been training since they were young. When I didn't make it, she was so disappointed in me and I was freaking out so much because she gave me a silent treatment. This same thing happened with my brother for hockey, and he also did not make it. However, my mom reassured him and said it's fine and that it isn't fair that the other kids were already on teams for several years. It's just so so frustrating to see this. I know I'm being somewhat selfish and I am not at all saying I want my mom to be tougher on my brother. But it's rather that why didn't I get this treatment? Why do I always have to be on my toes and why do I always have to feel like a disappointment?
Regardless, I have so much love for my parents. I have a great relationship with them. They are always rooting for me and wanting the best for me. However, it's just so difficult especially because I live in an area that is white dominated and it's so so difficult for me to constantly wish I got the same treatment as the rest of the kids at my school. I am also fully aware that what I'm complaining about is nothing in comparison to some of the other stories here, but it's just that I am extremely fed up. I know I am being unfair by saying this, but if I try to communicate with my parents in English, it's English that is just jumbled up, pronounced wrong, and doesn't make sense. And I KNOW that they are trying their best, but it can just get so frustrating sometimes because my siblings cannot speak our native language as well as I do, so I ALWAYS translate back and forth to the point where I am so fed up. This isn't just about not knowing definitions, but rather the college process, banking related things, medical related things, etc etc. The only person in my family who is taking care of all this is me. And recently I have been so busy and I am just so tired. I have so much anger building up because nobody from my town has the same experience as me and neither do my siblings. So I am just constantly jealous.
I am going to be applying to colleges this Fall, and I have never been so stressed. My parents have extremely high expectations for me, and I have consistently not been meeting them. My parents will say stuff every once in a while that really hurt. They do not have faith in me for the college process and honestly I don't either. When they suggest some colleges (ofc all with super low acceptance rates) and if I say something like "I don't like the location" they will be shocked because for them it's only academics that matter. But I want to be happy and I want to enjoy it if I am spending four years of my life there. My dad has even said that I should apply because ofc it doesn't matter what I want but he emphasizes that he doesn't know if I am even going to have options from being accepted to many and being able to choose. It's just so frustrating especially because my whole life I have been doing everything myself (well it feels that way) and all of a sudden due to college applications coming up, my parents are somewhat trying to make sure I'm doing this and that. I know that this also sounds so bad of me but for example my parents asked me "did you ask for recommendation letters yet" or "did you participate in school today" and I know that this is nice of them but from my perspective, it frustrates me. This is because yes, I did already, and I have been in control my whole life and I just don't like how they decide to interfere now. They have been completely clueless about so many things and honestly I really know that they are trying to help me and I know that it's nice but pls someone say they understand my frustration lol. It's like my whole life I have been responsible about anything coming up, and them making sure I did something (which I did) just frustrates me because I know!!!!! Like ofcourse I did it already. I feel like it's too late for them to all of a sudden want to manage and be more involved in my responsibilities, and I just want them to back off. I know that this is the support that I want but they should've been like this when I was so much younger. I would now much rather just tell the good news and they don't need to know the process I took or setbacks that got in the way. I know I am being ungrateful but I am just so exhausted and done.
And again, yes my parents want the best for me, and yes they don't mean harm, and yes I am living a financially stable life because they work so hard...etc.. But all I want is emotionally available parents. That has been missing my entire life, and it's too late to reverse this. Btw, I have tried and tried multiple times to express my feelings. But the same events just repeat. They have apologized but there is no change. It was even to the point where I cried in front of them (which is so humiliating to me), and there is just no change. I also feel like since college applications are coming up, my whole conversations with my APs have been about that.

Platinum End Theory: Who Is God And Those Mysterious Beings In The Finale Explained
Original link- https://reddit.com/platinumend/comments/sdw2rc/deleted_by_use
Repost cause the original was deleted. I'm not OP. OP is https://www.reddit.com/usemuphenz
Deleted Theory https://www.reddit.com/platinumend/s/b347iH85A7
Thanks https://www.reddit.com/usecompletelylostcase for the Pastebin link. https://pastebin.com/A8K4bJiD
DISCLAIMER: This theory will go over the entire story of Platinum End, so obvious spoilers ahead.Just a heads up, this theory is posted at the time that only a few episodes of the anime have been released. Depending on how much the anime stays like the manga, details may end up changing. Therefore, the entire theory will be based solely on the manga. I will also leave snippets of the manga with the highlighted text to support my claim. Please be sure to read those as it will help this theory make sense. This theory is completely my own original thoughts. If anyone shares this, please be sure to credit me, Muphenz. Thanks! Hello, my fellow Platinum End fans! If you’re like me, the ending completely caught me off guard and left my head-scratching. Do not worry! I’ve overanalyzed everything and made a theory to possibly explain who god and those beings at the end of the story are, so you don’t have to. Those beings at the end of the manga, chapter 58, are drum roll…humans of the future who have achieved many scientific advancements who existed well before the story of Platinum End takes place and are simulating their own world with fake humans, fake angels, and a fake god. Why are the real humans running this simulation? Simply put, they’re suicidal and no amount of therapy is going to help with that. Why are they wanting to die? In the future, it is predicted by Gaku Yoneda that within 500 years, humans will achieve immortality. Once they achieve immortality, they will eventually master time and space and will be able to do things like teleport, time travel, see the future, etc. And once humans achieve immortality and are able to know all of the future, they will discover that the future cannot be changed according to Dr. Yoneda. Just like Dr. Yoneda’s prediction, the real humans are wanting to die which is why it’s stated by one of the real humans how annoying it is that there is no death. Whatever the process was that made the real humans immortal, it seems that it cannot be reversed to restore one’s mortality. Although it’s not stated how humans will achieve immortality and allow them to control time and space, this will somehow cause humanity’s apocalypse as well, destroying the original Earth. What makes these creatures more human-like than god-like is that they admit they were born on another planet, most likely the original Earth. They are also aware that they too were created by something that is above them. How do we know Dr. Yoneda’s predictions are right? It was stated by Shuji Nakaumi that his past predictions came true. One thing to understand about science is that it’s extremely good at accurately predicting things. Example 1: With Issac Newton’s law of motion, scientists can predict the position of an object at any specific time, past, present, or future. Example 2: In the 1840s, Fitzner astronomer Urbain Le Verrier was analyzing the orbit pathway of Mercury and found that it is changing very slowly over time. With technology limited at that time, it was hard to provide proof. In 1915, the famous German physicist, Albert Einstein was able to calculate the influence of the curved space in Mercury’s orbit. That is 75 years later that science proved its prediction was right. Although science cannot tell future events like a psychic will attempt to, I believe this is what the author was using to help advance the plot for the ending. The real humans already know the future and they’re aware that no matter what they try, death is not a part of that. If they cannot do it, someone else can. That is when these simulations come in. The real humans will create simulated humans. In one of the simulations, the story of Platinum End takes place. This would not be on a computer. This process would involve terraforming an entire planet to support carbon-based life. The planet that the simulated humans live on will be similar to the original Earth as well as the history and advancement of science will be similar to the real humans. As the simulated human’s society progresses, like in Platinum End, they would eventually learn how to become immortal and learn how to control space-time which would lead to them wanting to die just like the real humans. But unlike the real humans, the simulated ones may actually achieve a way to kill themselves once they obtain immortality that the real humans could use. But as we already know stated by the real humans, this specific simulation was a failure. Nothing was created that was capable of killing them. Thus, the real humans will move on to a new simulation. Pay very special attention to this picture. Notice right after all of the humans disappear when the fake god kills himself, the buildings are slowly crumbling away since no one is here to maintain them. According to World Building, it would take an average of 250 years for a building to start to break apart since materials like wood and plastic would be destroyed by the environment if not maintained. Metal would be expanding and no longer able to keep the building's structure in place. This would cause things like windows to fall off and shatter. So after a few hundred years, the real humans return to the planet after the simulated humans disappeared due to the fake god’s suicide. It’s possible that during this time they’re running other simulations on other planets and returned when this simulation was completed. Since the real humans have achieved master over space-time, teleporting to anywhere in the universe would not be out of the question. Since they cannot die, the amount of time it would take for the real humans to travel anywhere in the universe is irrelevant as well. Even though Gaku Yoneda’s predictions about the simulated humanity’s end were wrong, he was technically right. It did come true for the real humans. If Shuji Nakaumi, as the fake god, did not kill himself and wipe out all of the fake humans, they would of most likely learned how to cheat death and to control space-time in the future. Gaku was wrong about the fake god being a product of human belief in order to live. He even admits that the composition of the fake god was wrong. If the fake god required human belief to live, then Shuji would not have erased the memories of those who were not god candidates as it would have affected the fake god's existence if fewer people believed in him. There is one thing that begs the question. Why is a fake god needed to run these simulations? Why do the simulated humans have souls? Why not just create the simulated humans and leave them to figure out how to create an immortal killing machine without the process of a false god? This is because God and souls are actually real and are necessary for life to exist. To clarify, the “God” that Shuji Nakaumi was transmuted into is not the true God that I’m referring to. I’m referring to the first cause of everything, a self-aware creator, a deistic God who existed before time and space who created the universe and does not intervene in its creation. This means no miracles, prophecy, answering prayers, divine revelation, etc. Everything in the universe is governed by physics and these laws cannot be broken. The real humans who are running the simulations are aware that they are a creation made from a creator. However, since a deistic God does not interfere in the universe, the real humans cannot know of him, at least while they are still alive. Considering the real humans can control space-time, I can say for certain at one point, at least one person went to the very beginning of time and saw something that would be evidence of an intelligent designer creating the universe. When the real humans are conversing with each other at the finale, one human suggests identifying what created them and the second one replies that seeking their creator will be a waste of time. If a deistic God won’t intervene in its creation, the real humans would be wasting time by attempting to contact him. Even though they can control space-time, if the creator exists outside of reality, they would not be able to reach this entity. Focusing on figuring out who created them means that time is wasted if they're not figuring out how to die which is why it would take them further away from death. Just as the simulated humans have souls, the real humans also have souls. At some point, the real humans discovered the soul. They are aware that this is needed for life to be sentient. The discovery of the soul could have played a key part in the real humans achieving immortality. The fake god is engineered by the real humans to create souls so that life can be sentient, mimic the universe's deistic God by allowing the simulation to run with no interference, and act as a mod to keep an eye on life with the red and white arrows. The celestial realm was created so the fake god would not be a part of the simulated world. Even though time moves differently in the celestial realm, it is the closest thing that the real humans can engineer to simulate a deist God that is separated from its creation. This fake god does not have the powers of a supreme being. The fake god does not know everything, is not everywhere at once, and does not display any sort of omnipotent ability. There is a lot of things that the fake god admits to not knowing, such as who created him, why are souls preserved, and how long does the merging process take. Although we do see the fake god have the ability to observe humanity, I would say that this is the equivalent of having admin privileges to watch humanity live-streamed on YouTube. The fake god is aware that he is created by someone. The fake god noticed that there are things that had already been created that he was not a part of just by observing everything in the universe. Although he seems to not understand what created him. He even acknowledges the idea that humanity could have created him. All the simulated souls come from the fake god. This is done through a process of emanation, which means to flow from. In the Abrahamic religions, specifically Gnosticism, Jewish Mysticism, and certain sectors of Protestantism, instead of your typical creator being separate from its creation, everything is a spontaneous outflow from God. As pieces of God emanate from him, it becomes less divine, but these pieces will eventually become an individual soul that forms into human spirits, angels, demons, as well as other things that come into reality such as heaven, hell, and the world of the living. Eventually, everything that came from God, will return back to the creator. (If you’re still confused on what emanation is, I would do more research before continuing to read as this will play a key role in understanding who the fake god is.) Emanation is how the fake god created the simulated human and their soul, the fake angels, and the celestial realm. The fake god took a piece of himself and used it to create life. Since everything emanates from the fake god is connected to him, as he is dying, most of the angels are dying too. Due to this connection, when the fake god killed himself, everything that was tied to the fake god disappeared. But because the creation of the fake god is not connected to the physical world, the planet and everything that is not life remained on it. When the simulated human beings die, the soul goes to the celestial realm. This is the returning aspect of emanation. The souls that came from the fake god are returning back to him. You always see all angels, regardless of rank, having the task of carrying the souls to the celestial realm. It seems that the main purpose of the angels is to help with the return part of the emanation process. The more that the emanence is divided, the less divine it becomes. This is why the fake humans are considered sub-celestial in the hierarchy.It appears that there is a certain order to the flow of emanation. The newest creations emanate from the fake god. Kids will be the first in the line for the emanate process and their parents will be behind them. This is why when the fake god committed suicide, the kids were the first ones to disappear, then the adults. All things that emanate from the fake god are returning to the original source in reverse order when the fake god takes his own life. When the fake god merges with a human, this appears to go against the set pattern of the emanation process by breaking the order in which the emanence flows. This is why when Shuji merged with the fake god, it felt like there was something foreign in the fake god's body similar to how an infected person's body acts when the immune system detects foreign bacteria or a virus. The only way to get around it is by the fake god merging with a simulated human and having the fake god take over the new body when the fusion is completed. It is stated by the fake god that it is nothing more than humanity's assumption that God cannot die. This may be true for the deistic God, but not for a fake god. It is already known that the real humans achieved immortality. Although the fake god could have been engineered to be immortal, that would just create another being who would eventually want to die. The fake god was designed to live a long life, compared to humans, that could be extended through the process of merging with one of its emanated counterparts until the simulation was completed. This has been done throughout time in the form of the god choosing process. The fake god confirmed to Shuji that his purpose was to create life. Professor Yoneda confirmed that the fake god was created by human imagination and that its purpose was to end life. On the surface, this may seem like a contradiction. But both of them are right. The fake god’s purpose was to create the simulated humans. God is metaphorically a creation of human imagination. It was not by the simulated human’s imagination as stated by Yoneda, but it was designed and engineered by the minds of the real humans. Since the purpose of the simulation is for the fake humans to achieve immortality and figure out how to reverse it, you can say that the fake god is a part of that process of killing humanity. Right as all of the humans are disappearing, Dr. Yoneda realizes that the composition that makes up the creature is based on a science that the simulated humans have not discovered yet. The composition of the fake god is Aether. In medieval times, a common study among scholars is alchemy, which can be best described as the forerunner for modern-day chemistry mixed with the pseudoscience of metaphysics. According to Charles Gillispie, a historian at Princeton University, in his book, The Edge of Objectivity, An Essay in the History of Scientific Ideas, Aether is the fifth element, along with earth, wind, fire, and water, that are the basic building blocks of the universe. During medieval times, Aether is the substance that is believed to connect the physical world to the spiritual one. It was even a common belief that the Abrahamic God was surrounded by Aether and that all of the angels, demons, and souls that dwelled in the afterlife breathed it in as humans breathed in the air. According to Jakob Bernoulli, a mathematician from the 1600s, believed that Aether is what allowed souls to interact with their human bodies. All of these characteristics of Aether match the composition of the fake god. Aether is what allows life to become sentient, connecting all of the simulated humans back to the fake god from the physical world to the celestial realm. It seems at some point, the real humans discover this element. This discovery most likely led to the discovery of the soul. Using this element, the real humans used Aether to construct the fake god needed for the simulations. Everything that is a part of the simulation, the fake god, angels, the soul, the arrows, is made up of this element. The red arrow is what allows the god candidates to make other humans fall in love with them so much that the person who is under the influence of the arrow will do literally anything the person who is in control wants, even die for them. The white arrow has the ability to kill any life while all inanimate objects are unaffected. These were limits placed on the arrows by the fake god. According to Ogaro, the fake god can use the full power of the arrows at will. The red arrow is more than just making someone fall in love. The arrow does this by taking away their free will. The god candidates were limited to using the arrow on 14 people at once for a period of up to 33 days. With the fake god able to use the full power of the red arrow, he can enslave any or all simulated humans with a snap of his finger for as long as he desired. The red arrow also played a role in creating the first simulated life as well. The fake god stated that if life was left alone, it would multiply. The desire of falling in love and wanting to procreate was implanted by the red arrow when life was created. The white arrow is the opposite of the red arrow. This arrow can kill life instantly. The limit that was placed on this arrow is that only one white arrow can be shot at a time. Just like the red arrow, this arrow has a maximum range of 31.6 meters. When cycling the white arrow, there is a cool down period of 0.3 seconds. If these limiters are removed, the fake god can kill all humans with the white arrows with virtually no limit on distance, any number of arrows can be used simultaneously, and there would be no mandatory cool down period. The creation of the simulated humans involves two key ingredients. The first is the soul which comes from the fake god. The second is a physical body for the soul to be attached to. The real humans asked if it was worth planting another seed and another god as those are two separate things. The making of another god is obviously the fake god. But what is the seed? The seed is what makes the physical embodiment of all plants and animals that all emanence is attached to. I.E., souls attached to bodies. According to the fake god, before he created life on the fake Earth, there was some sort of micro-organism. This seed would be that micro-organism, specifically carbon-based bacteria that is capable of evolution. Around 3 billion years ago, the first life on Earth was bacteria. There are two types of bacteria, a classification of anaerobic bacteria that ate other organic compounds and simple sugars to survive. The other kind is autotrophs bacteria which is capable of self-feeding. Anaerobic bacteria would evolve into modern-day animals. Autotroph bacteria would evolve into modern-day plants that still have the ability to self-feed through a process of photosynthesis. It is possible to send bacteria through space. According to a 2020 study published in the Journal of Frontiers in Microbiology, bacteria were able to survive in space for three years. If the real humans were able to transport the seed through space in less than 3 years, it could easily survive. Considering they achieved immortality, it is within reason to think this would be a piece of cake for them. At some point, part of the anaerobic bacteria would come in contact with the fake god, who was on the fake Earth at that time to make life, recognized the fake god as food, and attempted to feed off of him to survive. The bacteria that fed off the fake god would eventually evolve into Nasse. The bacteria that did not feed off of the fake god would evolve into more complex forms of life on the fake Earth. Since Nasse was accidentally created from this event, it most likely means that she is the first angel that the fake god created. This means that she could serve as inspiration for the fake god to create angels for the celestial realm. The angels don't seem to share any ability to reproduce with each other. There is never any mention of any family heritage. It means that all of the angels were created around the same time. Since Nasse is the only angel that came from the seed/bacteria, her biological makeup differs from all the other angels. While the majority of her is angel, part of the genetic makeup is similar to carbon-based life. Although I would not say Nasse is an angel-human hybrid, she could be considered a type of Nephilim. Due to this biological difference, Nasse is the only angel that can interfere in both the physical world and the celestial realm. Much research has shown that facial expressions are innate among all animals, not just humans. The same animals that display facial expressions when expressing emotions, lying, determination, etc. use similar muscles in the face as humans do. For example, a Psychologist, Paul Ekman, studied facial expression from hours of film and ventured on to multiple isolated tribes who have very little contact with modern society. He showed them pictures of facial expressions and asked them to interpret them. These people were able to match facial expressions and their meaning with high accuracy. This is one of the many studies that show facial expressions are genetic. Even though Nasse is single-minded, she is able to understand facial expressions due to her biological relationship with the simulated life on the fake Earth. But hey, this is just a theory."

Hi all,
Just looking for some advice for anything at all that might help our situation other than divorce.
I've been with my husband for almost 13 years, married 10. We are both 35. Have three wonderful kids 5-9 years that we both love so much. We are through all the toddler phase and sleep deprivation.
Our marriage is in a dire place, which both of us contributed to by not prioritising the other and essentially just aiming to survive through parenting. We have no family close by / breaks so it is full on.
For several years I've felt lonely in the marriage and things have come to a head the last 18 months. He's acknowledged the issues and says he doesn't find me sexually attractive, doesn't have any romantic feelings for me. Going on dates is like time filling for him. He says he finds other women attractive, but there's no specific woman he wants to have sex with. He has no desire for sex with me and will occasionally have sex after a lot of work on my end. He thinks his libido is normal But he is not seeking out sex with other women and masturbates only on occasion to porn. He wants more time for himself (which is hard in the constraints of a family, but I have worked hard to provide for him by doing as much household stuff as possible, taking kids out so he has house to himself, he stays up very late). He thinks his current needs and behaviour are selfish, but doesn't want to compromise on that.
He has had bloods done with GP. Normal testosterone level. We've done marriage counseling. She says he's got a severe dismissive avoidant attachment style, which I can see now, but I can't understand how he wasn't acting like that pre-kids. Our best sex was actually post- last kid but dried up a few years ago. We still have sex maybe once every 1-2 months but it's not enough for me and I feel like he's fulfilling an obligation rather than any actual desire to be with me so it reduces my pleasure. He says he doesn't want a longterm romantic relationship with anyone currently. But he loves me. We are still together currently as both our ideal outcomes would be for a happy fulfilling marriage and intact family unit. But it's at the point he doesn't even want to have to greet me or ask about my day and I've always prided us on having a great underpinning friendship and don't want to lose that too. I am also aware of the example we are setting for our children for their future relationships.
We've gone on regular dates in the last year, I try flirting with him, he's sharing a bit more of some aspects of the household work, although I have the majority mental load. We've tackled identified areas of resentment from both sides (although I feel like this has been a lot of him doing what is best for him and me doing a lot of what is best for him). He does not feel he is depressed and happy on other aspects of his life. His mum Is asexual and has never had another partner after separating from his dad 32 years ago, his brother lives with his mother at 37 years old and has never had a partner, his maternal uncle lived with his mum until she died and I wondered if there was a genetic component to things. But maybe I'm grasping at straws and that doesn't offer a solution.
I'm fit and attractive to the general population haha. He says he can see I'm attractive to others so it's not like I've "let myself go" in any sense since having kids, and actually have a better body than pre-kids.
I have talked a lot with various people and some had suggested having an affair to give me what I need, but I would never disrespect him In that way. However we have talked about a "one-sided" open marriage for me to essentially Have a sexual relationship +_ some emotional connection with someone else, in the hope that in the future, my husband would want those aspects again and hopefully pursue them with me... I had thought this might relieve him Of his guilt / make our interactions not an obligation for him. I had hoped we could go on dates and have the rare sex when he wants in the interim also. He is supposedly agreeable to this. I'm scared to do something (ie sex with someone else) that I can't take back though.
I guess I always have a sliver of hope, he's the dad of my children and I committed to spent my life with him and that's what I ultimately want. But currently, every day is like I lose a part of myself with the constant microrejections and while I know you are the one responsible for your own happiness, my self-worth, confidence and happiness are slowly being eroded by feelings of inadequacy and why I am so unattractive / undesirable to him on so many levels (sexual / non-sexual gestures / romantic / friendship) etc. If it was just one area, perhaps I could be more accepting / patient.
Other context, I have the primary career / income earner / drive in where we have ended up. I've always asked his opinion and been mutual decision making for big decisions, and despite my best efforts to support him to find himself, he has never shown much drive for anything other than computer gaming (which he would easily spend 5+ hours a day most days doing, at a cost of sleep). He doesn't particularly enjoy his job and has changed industries constantly when working. There's a Netflix special for a show called Jigsaw and that resonates a lot with him, he didn't have a complete self-identity before he met me and was happy to follow me along the way in life and got to where we are (which on paper is the most amazing life) and he's realised he's not happy within it. I've tried to support him in trying new things and exploring himself, but I can't be his motivation and really the only thing he is showing motivation for currently is increasing his level on DOTA2! We did have sex droughts during pregnancy due to me being incredibly sick and having zero libido, but we got through that and I guess I didn't feel it was a big issue at the time as we loved each other and every other aspect of the relationship was solid, but potentially that was a contributing factor to marriage demise. Although at the time, I felt we would never get back to an amazing sex life, we did and it was very fulfilling until twoish years ago.
Any advice is much appreciated. I am guessing a lot of people will think we are non-compatible / he doesn't want a relationship and I can't change that so divorce is the best option, but I'm willing to try anything at this stage.
Ps we have both seen a personal counsellor as well as the marriage counsellor. I am seeing mine next week and will ask about the open marriage concept.
Thanks for your thoughts!

I realize the fact that I’m even writing this should say enough, but I guess I just want more perspectives and writing this is also weirdly therapeutic. (This may be long, sorry) I (21 f) have been dating my boyfriend (26 m) for 2.5 years and I know the age gap may explain my concerns. We met at work and started dating after a couple of years working together,(I had a crush on him and never acted on it until I was older, he literally never showed interest in me before this) in the beginning of our relationship everything was perfect and then he suddenly started getting upset about how I talk to my male coworkers. He said that I have a flirty personality but because I liked him so much I was willing to stop talking to them completely. He had a lot of trust issues in the beginning and I accommodated him but then I started getting trust issues. He never did anything I guess it just rubbed off on me, for context I have never been a jealous person in relationships before this but with him we have both been very jealous about certain things. This was all fine for me honestly, but the older I get in this relationship the more I realize the toxicity in this. My boyfriend tells me “one day you will realize you can do better and leave me” and every time he says that I feel myself getting closer and closer to the door and leaving. I want to be clear he is so nice to me and always lifts me up and tells me how perfect I am, but I also know that there are unhealthy dynamics in this relationship. Our age gap used to not bother me, but the older I get the more I think about and question if it’s wrong. He doesn’t have a history of dating younger girls, and most of his exes have been older than him, but I still have a feeling inside of me that this isn’t okay. I love him so much but I feel like my brain is trying to send me signals that I can’t ignore anymore. Little things that never bothered me are starting to now and I know that’s a sign feelings are starting to go away. I just keep hoping they can come back because I don’t want to hurt him and he tells me I’m the love of his life and he’s still mine but something is changing and I don’t know what to do. A lot of times he says that his controlling tendencies is him just trying to protect me, for example he doesn’t want me going to places alone because it’s dangerous. This may sound reasonable but when I insist on going to places alone like running to the store on my way home he guilts me. Younger me used to think it was so nice how much he cared, but older me wonders why he guilts me when I just want to do something independently. What are his real motives? I know he may not consciously realize this but it feels like he is just insecure and doesn’t want other people even seeing me. He did the same thing when I wanted to go to the bar on my 21st birthday, and when I want to hang out with my girl friends he also gets insecure, not all of them but a couple of my friends. I should mention we live together so it’s even more complicated. What would you do if you were in my shoes? Is this worth saving, can a conversation fix this? Or is this just what happens when you are in your early 20’s dating an older man? TL;DR- I don’t know if my relationship is good for me, we have an age gap and the older I get the more I start to realize that there are a couple unhealthy aspects of our relationship.

The thought of reaching out to my ex in order to thank him has been weighing on my mind for a long time now. I've really been on the fence about whether or not it is a good idea.
Long story short, we began dating when I was in an extremely low point in life and coping poorly with a slew of mental health issues. It honestly made me a partner that I am ashamed of, especially given the fact that I never showed him appreciation. But my life has finally gotten much better after years of working on myself and I truly think he played a significant part on my journey. He not only stayed by my side during this time and showed me what a stable, caring partner looks like, but he also gave me an outline on what to do to help better myself.
I would keep the message devoid of anything that could be misconstrued as an attempt to just pull him into conversation with me (e.g. asking how he's doing) and would stick solely to telling him how much I appreciate him now that I am older and in a better place. I'd also love to explain to him how he helped me and just why it played a massive part in my life (disclosure: I lost my best friends to suicide 3.5 years ago, so being where I am now vs then is very sentimental to me).
However, we broke up in December 2018 (, debatably Sept 2018 when we decided to go on a break) and have not had communication since then, outside of one instance where I reached out in April 2021 but was shot down.
Any ideas? I'd love to hear what everyone thinks. I've been leaning more towards yes these days, but I really need some outside perspective. This has been on my mind for years.

Hi guys~! It's me again! <3 I had wanted to email my "friend" the following but experience tells me that either I will get myself into a poopy poop poop storm or worse. SO!!! I am just sharing it here to people who can use this information in any way.
SO! A short while back I was in this coaching group and I thought I got along well with everyone, or most people at least. The coach even gave me my own channel to share my learnings and whatnot. I also got good feedback and all those from him and others. However, I also noticed some people blocked me and since there were no confrontations, I only assumed that some people just don't want to keep getting notifications. And/or they want information from the coach. It was a Discord group so each message I sent set a notification going.
The group had quite an interesting dynamic, while there were quite a lot of members, only a bunch of us kept talking, and in that context, I see it ok to use the server like I would with friends.
And then one day the coach decided to let back a trouble maker whom he previously blocked, both from the group and in private. Honestly I have no opinion on that because it is really not my place to do so. Besides, I was sure this lady will just likely get blocked again. 🤣😅😂😆😁 And I seriously think it is only kind to let troubled people in these open groups as these groups might be the only places they get help or a listening ear.
I also see that if that group had been exclusive, I wouldn’t have gotten all the benefits.
Things went on fine and as I got this lady blocked after she kept harassing me, I had no idea that she still chose to attack me despite not being in contact for close to a year. And meanwhile no mutual friends or even our coach told me anything too. Well, actually she pretty much went crazy on everyone and quite a few others blocked her too.
Meanwhile, a close friend who had a big beef with the lady was utterly uncomfortable with the whole arrangement and he got so upset that he confronted the coach, and started a new community. All this while I had told this friend that it is technically unethical for him to set up a new group and of course his has own opinion and from my understanding, he was hella displeased with the coach. I stood by him coz I saw him as a friend and didn't want him to go through this tough time alone.
Things then took a really weird twist...
Somehow the whole thing between the coach and my close friend turned into a slander on me. It became about how actually many people in the group hate me and yet I was tolerated, and I am someone bitter and angry despite posting many cute stuff.
At that moment I could have defended myself but I lost all faith. If I exposed the truth about what my friend (and probably others!) was doing, it would cause him his place with the coach and I know that as a young man he looked up to the coach a lot. And there was literally nothing left to talk with the coach because while he had been so nice to me all the time, he talked about me differently to my friend. I guess that when it comes to his interests at stake, the coach played a different game. I didn’t want the whole thing to turn into students against the coach. I still have supportive friends elsewhere and they can take me in to help me continue in my growth as a person. I don’t need to fight to be in this particular group.
So, without wanting to drag everyone in, I left.
2 months later, I experienced so much joy and growth, I thought of another friend who had been pretty neutral the whole time. Honestly, cross my heart, with no intention to sow discord or even to “poach” anyone, I just thought that it would be great to tell this other guy how he has so much more potential and he can get in touch with all broader stuff. I thought new things will benefit him so much. And I want him to succeed!
But I guess in the end things didn't work out and this guy wasn’t even interested to hear me out.
I know you people are still looking at my pages for gossip and my last words are, while it is perfectly fine to choose your own ways, do note that this kind of behaviour is not going to get any of you fulfilling friendships and relationships. Maybe for a while it is great hype to say that the best student (LOL!!) rebelled coz she is such a hateful person, but after this died down, who are you guys going to sacrifice inorder to unite again?? Realise that this cycle have been repeating itself too much already. Are you guys really in self-help or self-destruct?? Haha!!! 😈😂
I get that young people have no care in the world and literally you guys see everything as possible. Just remember that one day you got your own self to face. Will you people still be proud to say oh, I backstabbed and accused Yuxing of this and that and earned a place with my coach and friends?
And for anyone interested, the saying of “Good thing, bad thing, who knows” is so true. I had thought the troublemaker was the vice but her life gave me the message that my old group was simply not treating people right. Because despite bringing her back, the coach and that lady was basically smiting each other the last I know. The lady called him someone who manipulated his family and now he is doing it to her and of coz the coach kept giving her warnings that he will ban her again. For sure the coach was just moderating the group, but warning someone again and again is not kind either??
Halfway I just cannot take it anymore. This lady is already nearing 40, just had her fourth child from a third man after two divorces and that was how she was being treated in a place that the coach claimed will help her. And how do I know these? All this while the coach appeared to talk about the lady’s life like it was a joke and a bad example for us all to take note. Yup, the coach had her blocked but got information from other students who were “friends” with the lady.
I don’t think anyone was a “demon” here but it just shows that when a community doesn't have elders and a wise council it is very easy for everyone to fall into such pits. This is why I am the best student around. LMAO. Inside joke.
I could have name and shame and post screenshots to help myself, but this doesn’t help in anything. It is really very easy for me to spread my hate to all those who already hate the coach and gain a huge support. But guess what? You guys are wrong, my cuteness is real. I won’t bite you guys just because you guys did me dirty.🍀🌹🌺🌻🌼🌸🌷
To my old friends and even the coach, my doors are still open and I welcome you guys to ask me anything and to be connected to better, broader teachings. And until today, I remember how it was this coach who taught me about all the self-concept and I believe this great foundation is gonna carry me far.
May we meet again in our better selves.
I be waiting in Country N! 🌟🌟🌟🌟🌟

The thought of reaching out to my ex in order to thank him has been weighing on my mind for a long time now. I've really been on the fence about whether or not it is a good idea.
Long story short, we began dating when I was in an extremely low point in life and coping poorly with a slew of mental health issues. It honestly made me a partner that I am ashamed of, especially given the fact that I never showed him appreciation. But my life has finally gotten much better after years of working on myself and I truly think he played a significant part on my journey. He not only stayed by my side during this time and showed me what a stable, caring partner looks like, but he also gave me an outline on what to do to help better myself.
I would keep the message devoid of anything that could be misconstrued as an attempt to just pull him into conversation with me (e.g. asking how he's doing) and would stick solely to telling him how much I appreciate him now that I am older and in a better place. I'd also love to explain to him how he helped me and just why it played a massive part in my life (disclosure: I lost my best friends to suicide 3.5 years ago, so being where I am now vs then is very sentimental to me).
However, we broke up in December 2018 (, debatably Sept 2018 when we decided to go on a break) and have not had communication since then, outside of one instance where I reached out in April 2021 but was shot down.
Any ideas? I'd love to hear what everyone thinks. I've been leaning more towards yes these days, but I really need some outside perspective. This has been on my mind for years.

So I dumped this deep into one of the other threads, but am curious as to see what others think of it bounced up a bit.
The TLDR is that I think this is a good movie - my ranking is probably 6.8-7. It is.... real long for reasons I can't explain though.
Full thoughts are below but tagged as spoiler. Me and said friend walked out of the theater 7 hours ago.

Our biggest complaint by a mile is just... the movie is too long for what it is. Just way too long. There are several sections that could have been cut/trimmed in the beginning and middle that are just... there and heavily extended for no reason we could see. The biggest example I can give is that I had to use the bathroom shortly after the Rictus bit where he had taken her away from the other wives just before she goes full "pretending to be a boy" and they start building the war rig. I made a point to look at my phone while I was in the bathroom cause I thought things had probably gone on for a while by that point, and I was right. We were an hour and 10 minutes into the movie and the main character wasn't even an adult yet.
That's more of an example than the whole breadth of the issue, but that is a crazy amount of time for a prequel movie. There are loads of examples that would have covered what the movie had by that time in... 15 minutes if you were being drastic and 30 if you really wanted to explore the space. 45 if you wanted to go really above and beyond.
Another example we could think of was the action sequence with the horned warrior going rogue. This action sequence is in our opinion, probably the best the movie has to offer. It's the closest to the Fury Road style of action beats, has outstanding cinematography, a great story is told visually over the entire section. It's arguably the best 10-15 mins of the movie...
And yet it required an absurd amount of set up to get there involving a lot of characters that aren't really central to the plot at all. It's main point in the movie is to show how competent Furiosa is by that point and hit on her motives of "still getting home". It also sets up Praetor Jack as a mentoquasi love interest by the end of it and shows how she "earned" her spot in the convoy crew.
But the set up to get there primarily rotates around the Horned Warrior and why he decided to go rogue on Dementus, which earned probably 10-15 minutes of runtime beforehand to get to that point for a character who ultimately should kind of barely be a footnote to the movie.
There's a similar thing that happens with most of Dementus' more prominent crew mates get establishing shots and kind of almost fleshed out backstories, only for those same crew members to have extremely segmented deaths/not really do much for the story because the script is already accounting for 2.5 hours of storytelling and having a sizable payoff just wasn't in the cards.
The other issues we had with it were... honestly what felt like plotholes at worst, or framing mistakes at best. A quick hit list-
The Place of Aboundance is shown as a very advanced society with a lot of population and a clear warning system - people can hear Furiosa's whistle and at least 10-15 are rushing into the woods at a dime, but in the end, only two people follow to engage the raiders, and only one of them continues the pursuit.
While Dementus is having Jack drug for "his crimes", there's an establishing shot of Furiosa chained to the big rig, jack is being drug in a circle by one of the motorcycles, and then there is a larger motorcycle circle circling that and heckling. Somehow despite being in the center of at least one (maybe both) rings, Furiosa rips her arm off, sabotages the monster truck, steals a bike, and gets out without anyone noticing despite her being a central part (like literally, she's in the middle) to the whole affair.
There's basically no explanation as to how Dementus was able to take the bullet farm except "the king of the bullet farm was busy talking to joe about killing Dementus". This, theoretically should easily be the most heavily armed/defended of the three major stronghold cities, even if their leader isn't there. They legit just make guns/bullets, and have a very workable defensive wall with clear protocols to opening the gates. There's also... some uh... plot armor on said gate when the war rig cant back through but the monster truck rams it down after two bangs at short distance- we can chalk that one up to suspension of disbelief, but the idea that the farm didn't already have a thousand snipers ready to handle "idiots on motorcyles" hit us as off.
There were some other minor examples, and even these may have actual explanations we missed, but they're also pretty glaring on a casual watch.
Finally... we both kind of thought the max "tie in" was fairly weird/out of place except just to show "Oh hey max was here but didn't care about any of it until years later" and also to show "yes we promise tom hardy won't be coming back".
I really don't want this to come off as us not liking it, because we both agreed it was indeed a pretty good flick. It honestly has more in common with the very first film than anything else though - being a kind of biographical retelling of one person's entire life in the wasteland rather than any one event with a heavy grindhouse revenge plot... and both of those movies kind of suffer for it.
We both loved the amount of worldbuilding - I was especially geeked to see both bullet farmand gas town in the flesh. It was amazing to get an idea of what characters inhabit those worlds, although if they were already going ham, I would have preferred to see more of bullet farm's denziens.
I especially loved the new actor for younger Immortan Joe - I thought he was played expertly and was an outstanding contrast to Dementus being an upjumped minor warlord high on himself. Trading for a new "breeder" and a doctor was particularly inspired.
And it goes without saying in this franchise that the action scenes were all great. We both especially loved the aforementioned sequence with the horned warrior's crew. Despite the faults in the early sequences, the opening sequence with Furiosa getting kidnapped and her mother coming for her was also very excellent and visceral. The showdown at the Bullet Farm was also outstanding.
While slightly overdone, we both were also obviously very much loving Hemsworth hamming it up as a strong a villain as we've seen. He did great just being as over the top as possible, and we were laughing a lot - we both agreed at least some of this could have gotten cut since it seems like his character got more play than furiosa's in some ways, but the execution was outstanding and he's a great character to add to the series.
Finally, we both thought that Dementus' end was probably as cruel and fitting for this fucked up wasteland world and got a strong heavy nod.
At the same time, it felt like a very bloated production with a lot of set ups that ultimately don't feel like they go to satisfying places. In the pantheon of the franchise I probably have it tied with the original and above Thunderdome... but well well behind Fury Road and Road Warrior. Good movie, but there are very much flaws to be found.

Hello, I am joining the CLaSP department this Fall 24 as an MEng grad student, and I have an appointment on June 3rd to register for classes, but the problem is I have several issues which haven't been answered by the department. This is the first time I have across this kind of a course registration system so I would love for a senior or someone with knowledge about this to help out.
1) So the academic advisor, sent us an introduction mail in which she gave a basic outlines of the course structure, and in her mail suggested that the courses SPACE 478 (Space Environment) and as some of the very common first semester courses that is selected, but 478 shows on the website to not be available for the Fall Term 2024 and some more courses just like it are also shown as unavailable for the fall term and I was also told 581 has already gone into waitlisting , so when and how can I register for these courses? If so many of them are not offered now won't that thin out my options? (I screenshot below shows how some of them don't have the offering term)
https://preview.redd.it/es4hkvhd134d1.png?width=717&format=png&auto=webp&s=9562f2fc9979fe457122ec8453e68c5b4c35c80a
2) Is there a proper catalogue that separates and shows the available concentration electives and breadth electives which can be chosen?
3) As I've mentioned in Point 1, there seems to be a lot of mainstream courses so can we choose more electives and less core? Or is there a specific rule regarding the credits split for each semester?
4) There is an option to choose courses from the Aerospace department as well, so are these concentration elective courses or breadth? Apart from that, which of the ones offered by them can actually be chosen? Of course, courses with pre-requirements of other courses like AERO 512 etc. can't be chosen but is that the only criteria for selecting some of the AEROSP courses?
5) If a student plans to study for a total of 1.5 years, how does an average course selection look like? For example, does the student select a lesser number of courses to accommodate time for other things and projects or do they select more courses in total, which would mean that they would have finished more courses than a person that graduated in a year.