Game: Pathfinder 2e
Group type: Online (Discord voice / Roll20); GM shares Roll20 sourcebook collection with players.
GM Experience: 8 years (various systems)
Location/Timezone: Eastern
Schedule: 3-hour sessions, every Tuesday from 8:30pm to 11:30pm (again, Eastern time)
Seeking: Up to 3 more players to join the current 3. We have a Fighter, Cleric and Magus.
Per-Session Fee: $20 USD via PayPal or Venmo
Character Level: 5
Game Content: For the three hundred years since the city fell from the sky, an eldritch corruption has festered deep in the heart of Seraphium. The labyrinthine halls of the Underspire echo with the whispers of the Blighted Sovereign, the twisted remnant of her once-great ruler. Now the time has come to purge the dead sky city of this rot, lest it spill forth into the land of the living and bring about a second cataclysm.
This post-apocalyptic medieval fantasy adventure takes place in a homebrew setting called Ondoren, where the pantheon of old has gone mysteriously silent and the now-sparse use of magic serves as an ever-present reminder of the time humanoid-kind flew too close to the proverbial sun.
On a meta level, the party is very RP-forward, so an ideal fit would probably share that interest. That said, you can expect at least one or two combat encounters every session, and lots of opportunities to engage with the world itself via exploration as well.

This is more directed to women I suppose but feel free to share your thoughts otherwise.
I've been thinking a lot lately about what it means to be in our 40s or approaching 40 as single and childless in Singapore. It's a topic that doesn't seem to come up often enough, so I wanted to hear from you all.
For those of us in this age group, how do you feel about not being married and childless? In Singapore, there's this strong expectation to settle down and start a family by a certain age. But life isn't always so straightforward I guess, too many curveballs.
I always thought I'd have a future with someone special by now. But things didn't turn out as planned. Had my share of relationships, and honestly, most of them didn't end well. I think I have a very people-pleasing trait that attracts a lot of energy vampires and narcissists and I tend to ignore red flags. However, I've learned a lot from those experiences and can see things more clearly now. Now, I'm feeling pretty jaded about the whole dating thing imho
On top of that, I'm of Indian and Eurasian ancestry, and our communities here are quite small. This makes the peer pressure even more intense. It feels like everyone knows everyone else's business, and there's this unspoken expectation to hit certain life milestones. While I'm not really feeling FOMO, it's tough being surrounded by people who think that getting married and having kids is the epitome of success.
I've noticed that some of my friends who are single and childless seem to be leading very mundane, Groundhog Day sort of lives. It feels like they're just going through the motions, perhaps to avoid thinking about what they might be missing.
Another thing that scares me is the number of divorces happening around people in this age group. And this is very hard to say, but while I was dating in the last few years, I came across so many married men on these sites in their 30s and 40s. Even friends who are married with kids behave like they're single. It makes me feel like they aren't fulfilled in their marriages and are looking for something else or just variety. I don't know, but it scares me a lot.
So, how do you deal with these societal expectations? Have you found fulfillment in other parts of your life? How do you balance personal happiness with all the external pressures?
Would love to hear your wisdom and experiences. Let's support each other and share some advice!

Original Source: https://boringmoney.in/p/brightcom-made-a-profit-by-hiding (my newsletter Boring Money. If you like what you read, do visit the link and subscribe to receive future posts directly in your inbox)

The standard way for a company to make a profit is to produce a thing at some cost, then sell that thing at a higher cost, and pocket the difference. Another, if slightly frowned upon, way of making a profit is to not worry too much about what your company is producing or selling. Instead, at the end of the quarter, you can pick up your financial statements, take a pen, put some nice numbers under “revenue” and erase the numbers under “expenses”. On paper, the company’s making a profit either way.
The risk, apart from running out of money, is that the company might get caught. This month, Brightcom Group, an ad-tech company, got caught. [1] Here’s a SEBI enforcement order describing the stuff Brightcom did, and one of the many things it did was to show profits which didn’t exist.
Some intangible assets are under development
If your company buys, say, a truck, the standard way to account for this expense in your books is by dividing the cost of the truck by the number of years you expect this truck to last, and then adding this number to your expenses every year. This is slightly weird because you do pay cash upfront for the truck. But still, it’s useful to not have to call it an expense just for the first year because it is an asset that lasts many, many years.
If you buy a truck, account for it the standard way I described above, but then the truck meets with an accident and gets trashed the next day? Then that’s it. You have to now account for the full expense of the truck in one go and can’t split it into chunks every year.
In short, as long as an asset is “alive,” you can split its expense into chunks and account for each chunk every year. If it’s “dead,” you have to account for it right away.
Modern accounting is surprisingly thoughtful and there’s a weird in-between “alive” and “dead” that it allows for. Instead of buying an asset, if you’re building it, your asset is in some sense neither dead nor alive. So you can just, umm, add nothing to your expenses until you figure if your asset is actually dead or alive.
Brightcom was spending a lot on salaries, marketing, and stuff, but it didn’t want to show these expenses. So it decided that it wasn’t “spending” but instead “investing” in building an asset. From SEBI’s order, here’s Brightcom’s CFO:

Brightcom was building software and this software would eventually be an intangible asset. But, until Brightcom could figure whether this asset would eventually be dead or alive, it didn’t count any of its expenses as expenses, instead put it under an “intangible assets under development” category. This way, the company could show a nice profit because all its expenses were apparently assets. In all, the company hid ₹863 crore ($100 million) and showed a profit of ₹440 crore ($50 million) in 2020. If its expenses had actually been counted as expenses, Brightcom would’ve shown a loss of ₹428 crore.
https://preview.redd.it/a2xn3xc5bb1d1.jpg?width=762&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=8b9bfd5cd84b25807c6025ad9a26980abc57d2da
Asset’s dead but it’s not an expense
One problem with showing your expenses as an “asset under development” is that this asset can’t be under development forever. At some point, depending on if this asset is dead or alive, you have to account for your expenses in some way.
… Or not. If your company makes any money, you put those figures in your profit and loss statement. This is simple and straightforward. But accounting isn’t simple and straightforward. If your company makes money, but it’s not a result of your actual business, then you can’t put it under the P&L. Instead, you have to account for it under a separate subheading called “Other Comprehensive Income”.
The idea behind this new sub-head is that the company's P&L is supposed to reflect its actual ability to make money. If you hold a lot of dollars and the price of the dollar goes up (or down), your company didn’t really do anything to make that profit (or loss) so you’d put it under Other Comprehensive Income and not in your P&L. So stuff like this wouldn’t affect your profit, on paper at least. [2]
Yes, of course, Brightcom recognised the ₹863 crore loss that it had hidden under “intangible assets under development” by categorising it as Other Comprehensive Income. SEBI wasn’t excited about it.
Share this post so that Boring Money can move from “asset under development” to P&L
Sell your stake but keep quiet about it
If a company is doing well, its founders don’t usually sell stock. So if a founder sells some shares, they have to tell everyone about it by regulation, because it could be a sign that things aren’t well.
There are three entities that need to know if a founder sells stock:

1. The company itself, via its registrar and transfer agent (RTA)
2. Depositories that hold stock on behalf of investors
3. Stock exchanges

1 and #2 are important, but they’re obvious. The company has to know if its founders sell stock, and so does the depository that actually moves the stock from one account to another. #3 is how the rest of the rest of the world gets to know. A founder sells some stock, files a disclosure in a stock exchange, the exchange updates its records and screams out that this has happened, and that’s how public investors know.

In March 2014, if you had asked Brightcom’s RTA, a depository, or a stock exchange about how much stake its founders owned, they would’ve all said, “about 40%”. If you asked them again in June 2022, the RTA and the depository would say “about 3.5%”, but the stock exchange would scratch its head and say “18.47%”.
That’s because Brightcom’s founders—primarily CEO Suresh Reddy, his friends and family—sold their stock but didn’t inform the stock exchanges. Here’s what they said when SEBI asked what’s up:

Man, I’m just some dumb guy writing about finance every once in a while, and even I know that if you pledge your shares as collateral to get a loan, you don’t transfer ownership. You just inform your depository and investors about it, and you still own the shares. Reddy & Friends transferred some of their shares to someone else (that is, sold them) and decided not to inform the stock exchanges. Then they used pledging as an excuse and everyone had different answers about how much stock they really owned.
How much money they make tho
When a company’s stock price shoots up in a short period of time, and there’s no concrete reason for it to happen, in all likelihood, it’s a scam. The management of the company may or may not be involved, but it definitely helps if they are.
Last month, I wrote about Sadhna, a company that SEBI charged with running a pump-and-dump. The founders owned a lot of shares, they spread some false news, the share price shot up, then happily sold their stock to naive investors, and made a profit. If you see Brightcom’s share price trajectory without knowing any of the company’s other shenanigans, it might seem a similar story. The stock price was around ₹3 in January 2021. By December, it was at ₹117. 40X in a year is definitely not normal.
In a pump-and-dump, it’s important for those running the fraud to own shares before the price goes up. The fraud that Reddy & Friends are accused of, which I described above, was of selling stock and hiding the fact that they sold it. By early 2021, they had in fact sold 80% of their shares and it’s only later that the share price started going up.
But wait, here’s more from SEBI:

In 2020 and 2021, Brightcom sold a large chunk (almost 15% stake) of shares to a group of investors. [3] Later, Suresh Reddy—who had been selling Brightcom shares all these years—became a partner at these entities that had just bought a large chunk of stock.
It’s all a bit confusing but here’s what I think happened. In late 2020 and early 2021, it had become apparent if you called yourself a tech company, investors would push your price up. The finer details didn’t matter. Brightcom, of course, happened to be an “ad-tech” company. So there was a decent chance that its share price would go up (or it could be made to go up, there are ways). But since Reddy & Friends had already sold nearly all of their shares, they needed to buy more shares so that they could sell them when the price went up. But they couldn’t buy them directly—because how would they justify selling shares so soon?—so they got some proxy investors to do so on their behalf.
As expected, the share price did go up. A lot. Around the same time, SEBI started investigating the company because of all the shady stuff it had done over the years. If the proxy investors were to sell this stock now, SEBI would definitely catch on, it was already investigating them! So instead of selling any shares at crazy high prices, Reddy instead came out with his association with those proxy investors so that the total founder ownership would go back up to the exact amount expected [4] by the public, that is, 18.47%.
It’s possible that Reddy & Friends made some profit but SEBI says it needs more information to be sure about just how much it would be. It would’ve been easier to know had they also run a pump-and-dump for good measure.
Footnotes
[1] Technically, Brightcom got caught earlier when SEBI actually started investigating. But it’s just this month that SEBI put a nice document out with whatever its investigation found.
[2] This “Other Comprehensive Income” should be a small number. If it’s a huge figure more than your actual profit, there’s usually something fishy happening.
[3] Brightcom didn’t directly sell shares to the group of investors. Instead, it issued warrants. What this meant was that the investors had the right, but not the obligation, to buy shares from the company at a fixed price at a later date. This was a good way for these investors (who are now part of the founder group) to not risk too much money buying shares in case the price went down.
[4] Reminder, the reason that the public expected the founder group to own 18.47% was that they hadn’t informed the stock exchanges when they had reduced their stake.
Original Source: https://boringmoney.in/p/brightcom-made-a-profit-by-hiding

Original Source: https://boringmoney.in/p/brightcom-made-a-profit-by-hiding (my newsletter Boring Money. If you like what you read, do visit the link and subscribe to receive future posts directly in your inbox)

The standard way for a company to make a profit is to produce a thing at some cost, then sell that thing at a higher cost, and pocket the difference. Another, if slightly frowned upon, way of making a profit is to not worry too much about what your company is producing or selling. Instead, at the end of the quarter, you can pick up your financial statements, take a pen, put some nice numbers under “revenue” and erase the numbers under “expenses”. On paper, the company’s making a profit either way.
The risk, apart from running out of money, is that the company might get caught. This month, Brightcom Group, an ad-tech company, got caught. [1] Here’s a SEBI enforcement order describing the stuff Brightcom did, and one of the many things it did was to show profits which didn’t exist.
Some intangible assets are under development
If your company buys, say, a truck, the standard way to account for this expense in your books is by dividing the cost of the truck by the number of years you expect this truck to last, and then adding this number to your expenses every year. This is slightly weird because you do pay cash upfront for the truck. But still, it’s useful to not have to call it an expense just for the first year because it is an asset that lasts many, many years.
If you buy a truck, account for it the standard way I described above, but then the truck meets with an accident and gets trashed the next day? Then that’s it. You have to now account for the full expense of the truck in one go and can’t split it into chunks every year.
In short, as long as an asset is “alive,” you can split its expense into chunks and account for each chunk every year. If it’s “dead,” you have to account for it right away.
Modern accounting is surprisingly thoughtful and there’s a weird in-between “alive” and “dead” that it allows for. Instead of buying an asset, if you’re building it, your asset is in some sense neither dead nor alive. So you can just, umm, add nothing to your expenses until you figure if your asset is actually dead or alive.
Brightcom was spending a lot on salaries, marketing, and stuff, but it didn’t want to show these expenses. So it decided that it wasn’t “spending” but instead “investing” in building an asset. From SEBI’s order, here’s Brightcom’s CFO:

Brightcom was building software and this software would eventually be an intangible asset. But, until Brightcom could figure whether this asset would eventually be dead or alive, it didn’t count any of its expenses as expenses, instead put it under an “intangible assets under development” category. This way, the company could show a nice profit because all its expenses were apparently assets. In all, the company hid ₹863 crore ($100 million) and showed a profit of ₹440 crore ($50 million) in 2020. If its expenses had actually been counted as expenses, Brightcom would’ve shown a loss of ₹428 crore.
https://preview.redd.it/a2xn3xc5bb1d1.jpg?width=762&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=8b9bfd5cd84b25807c6025ad9a26980abc57d2da
Asset’s dead but it’s not an expense
One problem with showing your expenses as an “asset under development” is that this asset can’t be under development forever. At some point, depending on if this asset is dead or alive, you have to account for your expenses in some way.
… Or not. If your company makes any money, you put those figures in your profit and loss statement. This is simple and straightforward. But accounting isn’t simple and straightforward. If your company makes money, but it’s not a result of your actual business, then you can’t put it under the P&L. Instead, you have to account for it under a separate subheading called “Other Comprehensive Income”.
The idea behind this new sub-head is that the company's P&L is supposed to reflect its actual ability to make money. If you hold a lot of dollars and the price of the dollar goes up (or down), your company didn’t really do anything to make that profit (or loss) so you’d put it under Other Comprehensive Income and not in your P&L. So stuff like this wouldn’t affect your profit, on paper at least. [2]
Yes, of course, Brightcom recognised the ₹863 crore loss that it had hidden under “intangible assets under development” by categorising it as Other Comprehensive Income. SEBI wasn’t excited about it.
Share this post so that Boring Money can move from “asset under development” to P&L
Sell your stake but keep quiet about it
If a company is doing well, its founders don’t usually sell stock. So if a founder sells some shares, they have to tell everyone about it by regulation, because it could be a sign that things aren’t well.
There are three entities that need to know if a founder sells stock:

1. The company itself, via its registrar and transfer agent (RTA)
2. Depositories that hold stock on behalf of investors
3. Stock exchanges

1 and #2 are important, but they’re obvious. The company has to know if its founders sell stock, and so does the depository that actually moves the stock from one account to another. #3 is how the rest of the rest of the world gets to know. A founder sells some stock, files a disclosure in a stock exchange, the exchange updates its records and screams out that this has happened, and that’s how public investors know.

In March 2014, if you had asked Brightcom’s RTA, a depository, or a stock exchange about how much stake its founders owned, they would’ve all said, “about 40%”. If you asked them again in June 2022, the RTA and the depository would say “about 3.5%”, but the stock exchange would scratch its head and say “18.47%”.
That’s because Brightcom’s founders—primarily CEO Suresh Reddy, his friends and family—sold their stock but didn’t inform the stock exchanges. Here’s what they said when SEBI asked what’s up:

Man, I’m just some dumb guy writing about finance every once in a while, and even I know that if you pledge your shares as collateral to get a loan, you don’t transfer ownership. You just inform your depository and investors about it, and you still own the shares. Reddy & Friends transferred some of their shares to someone else (that is, sold them) and decided not to inform the stock exchanges. Then they used pledging as an excuse and everyone had different answers about how much stock they really owned.
How much money they make tho
When a company’s stock price shoots up in a short period of time, and there’s no concrete reason for it to happen, in all likelihood, it’s a scam. The management of the company may or may not be involved, but it definitely helps if they are.
Last month, I wrote about Sadhna, a company that SEBI charged with running a pump-and-dump. The founders owned a lot of shares, they spread some false news, the share price shot up, then happily sold their stock to naive investors, and made a profit. If you see Brightcom’s share price trajectory without knowing any of the company’s other shenanigans, it might seem a similar story. The stock price was around ₹3 in January 2021. By December, it was at ₹117. 40X in a year is definitely not normal.
In a pump-and-dump, it’s important for those running the fraud to own shares before the price goes up. The fraud that Reddy & Friends are accused of, which I described above, was of selling stock and hiding the fact that they sold it. By early 2021, they had in fact sold 80% of their shares and it’s only later that the share price started going up.
But wait, here’s more from SEBI:

In 2020 and 2021, Brightcom sold a large chunk (almost 15% stake) of shares to a group of investors. [3] Later, Suresh Reddy—who had been selling Brightcom shares all these years—became a partner at these entities that had just bought a large chunk of stock.
It’s all a bit confusing but here’s what I think happened. In late 2020 and early 2021, it had become apparent if you called yourself a tech company, investors would push your price up. The finer details didn’t matter. Brightcom, of course, happened to be an “ad-tech” company. So there was a decent chance that its share price would go up (or it could be made to go up, there are ways). But since Reddy & Friends had already sold nearly all of their shares, they needed to buy more shares so that they could sell them when the price went up. But they couldn’t buy them directly—because how would they justify selling shares so soon?—so they got some proxy investors to do so on their behalf.
As expected, the share price did go up. A lot. Around the same time, SEBI started investigating the company because of all the shady stuff it had done over the years. If the proxy investors were to sell this stock now, SEBI would definitely catch on, it was already investigating them! So instead of selling any shares at crazy high prices, Reddy instead came out with his association with those proxy investors so that the total founder ownership would go back up to the exact amount expected [4] by the public, that is, 18.47%.
It’s possible that Reddy & Friends made some profit but SEBI says it needs more information to be sure about just how much it would be. It would’ve been easier to know had they also run a pump-and-dump for good measure.
Footnotes
[1] Technically, Brightcom got caught earlier when SEBI actually started investigating. But it’s just this month that SEBI put a nice document out with whatever its investigation found.
[2] This “Other Comprehensive Income” should be a small number. If it’s a huge figure more than your actual profit, there’s usually something fishy happening.
[3] Brightcom didn’t directly sell shares to the group of investors. Instead, it issued warrants. What this meant was that the investors had the right, but not the obligation, to buy shares from the company at a fixed price at a later date. This was a good way for these investors (who are now part of the founder group) to not risk too much money buying shares in case the price went down.
[4] Reminder, the reason that the public expected the founder group to own 18.47% was that they hadn’t informed the stock exchanges when they had reduced their stake.
Original Source: https://boringmoney.in/p/brightcom-made-a-profit-by-hiding

So this has all happened within the past few weeks. A girl Im friends with at college is a senior, and I will be a sophomore. I jokingly said that she should help me practice kissing for next semester and she said that if I didn’t kiss at all when I graduated she would kiss me. I then jokingly said that I gotta wait three years and then she said that she’ll do it at her graduation instead which is next year. She is 100% serious. What does this mean? Does she like me? Think Im attractive? Or just wants to do something nice for me because she’s a really good friend? I sorta like her and find her pretty attractive but I already like another girl who just got in a relationship. She has told me she likes another guy but she hasn’t really elaborated much past that. However she knows the guy she likes doesn’t like her back. She wanted to FT me that same night to fall asleep because she’s wasn’t feeling well and having birthday depression because she doesn’t like her birthday. What does this add to the story already talked about?
Then cut to the day after where she went swimming and when she told me I jokingly said to not send swimsuit photos and she then later sent a mirror photo of her smiling, however she was in a tank top and jean shorts and not her swimsuit. Then a couple hours later she sent me another mirror photo in said tank top and jean shorts showing me her sunburn, she was making a sorta laughing smirking face with puffed out cheeks. However she sent a photo to a group chat we are both in but it was a different photo of her. It was definitely taken back to back with each other and the gc photo was more a goofy face/expression. Could that mean anything? Then fast forward to tonight where she asked me if she could send me a photo of her “looking good” (her words). I ofc say yes and she sends another mirror photo in a black tank top and black nike pro shorts, while having a flirty smirk on her face. She said she needed approval before she sent the photo to her mom and when I asked why she need approval to send a picture to her own mother, she responded with she’s scared of sending photos to her mom which I asked why and she replied with “Idk why I’m weird ok.” She then told me that she used to have someone to approve her photos but doesn’t anymore and that she can be herself around me, I told her she can always come to me for approval and she said she appreciated it. Was that photo meant for me or actually for her mom? Is she genuinely just wanting my opinion on photos of her? Or is there something else Im not seeing?
Then yesterday she was out boating and swimming again and she sent me a picture captioned “I hope I stay this tan” and its just a photo of her sitting down and her camera is just showing off her thighs and legs. Is there anything in that or am I just being crazy?

I’m starting to fantasize about someone who I don’t know very well and he’s not someone I even want to be with. I think I’m just bored in my relationship, but I know I love my bf and I’m loyal to him and have made it very clear he’s the only one I want to be with. Tbh I think it’s due to me meeting someone I deem to be very cool and I admire that he has so many stories because he is older than me and more experienced in life. I want to just be friends with him as I value our friendship and I value my relationship with my bf. Also we can’t be together anyways for many reasons - I am taken, age gap, we are part of the same business group and it would be unprofessional, two different people looking for different things, etc. I literally just got over my past LOs finally, why does my mind want to find a new LO so bad? Has your mind ever frantically latched onto a new LO the second you forget about the old ones?

In October 2023, I got Strep Group A. It was definitely the worst bout for me symptom-wise. I couldn’t swallow anything without immense pain, and I was very nauseous. After my antibiotic treatment (Penicillin), my main symptoms all went away except I continued to have the chills. I went in for another test once the chills became unbearable at night and a mildly sore throat, a month after I started my 10 day antibiotic course. The rapid test came back negative.
On Thanksgiving, I had an incredibly sore throat much like last time but was less feverish. I got tested, my rapid test came back negative but my throat culture tested positive for Group B. I went through a 10 day course of Amoxicillin, and I never really felt better weeks after.
Both of the previous labs were administered by my university’s student health center. The semester had ended, so I went to MedStar’s walk in to get another throat culture as I still had the same symptoms with the new addition of chest pain. To quote the NP I saw at MedStar
“Your symptoms do not meet the scorecard. You’re 23, you have the body of a BMW and you will be fine.”
… I get younger people are naturally healthier but, what a dismissively crass thing to say. Also, I’m not built like that I’m in skinny fat with a pronounced muffin top lmao.
With that being said, she refused to administer a throat culture to make sure I still don’t have Group B despite pleading with her that my symptoms have not changed, along with the addition of chest pains. I continued to have the same symptoms for months, but the chest pains went away by the new year.
I’ve felt somewhat better since, but the occasional sore throat and chills weren’t uncommon. Actually, I’ve gotten chills pretty much everyday but seemingly only when I lay down in bed at night.
Fast forward to the end of April, my tongue was in splitting pain with a sore throat and I decided to get tested. I came back to my home town where I saw an NP in the walk in… she believed it was post nasal drip but she administered a throat culture upon my request and it turned out I had strep again, Group G this time. So thankful they agreed to give me a throat culture.
They prescribed a 5 day Azithromycin antibiotic course, which I finished on May 1st and mostly everything went away except the chills. Last weekend on the 13th, my sore throat and fever came back so I went back to the walk in, just got my results today that I still have Strep, but they can’t identify which group other than it or being Group A. I have been prescribed a 10 day course of amoxicillin.
My mind is spinning… what in the actual hell is going on?
*Something else I find strange… throughout these times when I didn’t know I had strep even though I did including last month, none of the people I have shared a vape with, a drink with, or kissed have gotten sick.
I can’t see an ENT for months because of the healthcare system, and I’m rightfully getting worried. Having strep for at least a month, and god knows for how long if Group B never went away, is making me concerned about rheumatic fever. I’m really uneasy and anxious about all of this.
Important to note, when I was taking my antibiotic courses the previous 3 times, I really screwed up and was drinking heavily while on them. I had developed alcoholism the same month when I first contracted Strep. I was not considerate or knowledgeable of how alcohol would interact with the antibiotics, and I will not be drinking on this course and I’m really hoping this will help. My throat has had small red bulging spots since October that have never went away, and it’s making me concerned that Strep has been present in my system since and simply hasn’t gone away.
I am also a chronic vaper, which could seemingly line up with my frequency to strep over the last few months. I’m treating my vape like my toothbrush head, getting rid of them.
Am I tweaking for being worried rheumatic fever? And is it strange that I’m prone to multiple groups of strep, or is this reasonable for someone with a weakened immune system? Am I tweaking for being dismissively compared to a BMW because of my age when in fact I’m built more like a 2010’s Mitsubishi?

I'm the oldest in all my friend groups so a lot of my friends turn 18 much later in the year and I've been having a crisis about my age everyday since my birthday.
It's like I'm suddenly hyper aware of everybody's age and what they've achieved. Almost anybody famous will have some anecdote about how at 15/16 they made or did something cool. All the news articles will be about some 13-16 year old changing the world or achieving the impossible.
Every competition I come across, there's an under 18 category and an over 18 category, I thought about participating in this essay writing competition after I was done with school but got freaked out when I saw I no longer fit in the "13-17" category but instead the "18 and above" category, and so I let the deadline pass. It's like suddenly I'm supposed to be that good, no longer do I have the "oh look at this cool high school kid doing this cool thing to do at their age" cushion.
I read all these reddit posts where everybody says things like "he/she is 18, they're responsible for what they say/do, hence they deserve xyz consequence" and it just always gets me thinking about how I don't feel like a mature person- I'm incredibly impulsive and irresponsible, I feel like I've been the same person since 13, I get jealous and petty and lazy and stupid: how can I possibly be someone who can be held accountable?
I feel like I'm becoming every older kid my parents would talk to me about in disgust, "oh she's in this mediocre college, she didn't do very well in school", "oh he's in some stupid job, he's just wasting his time there", "oh he's been sitting unemployed for months after graduating, all that money they invested in him for his education, all for nothing".
It's like turning 18 takes everything you hate about yourself and anxieties you have about the future- and multiplies it tenfold.

Been playing remix for a bit and see a lot of frog farm 2x4 groups in LFG. I get the frog farm is the hyperspawn frogs I timeless Isles but what does 2x4 mean?

Hi, I am 34, married and have a 2 yr old kid. I ha e always been a shy kind of person and had a very small and close group of friends before i got married. There were a few girls in the group who i was very close with but then marriage happened and slowly and steadily we drifted apart mostly cus my wife felt very insecure about my female friends.
Now i am left with only male friends in my group and i really miss a female presence in my life other than my wife. My wife has a lot of friends and more importantly she shares everything about our marriage and our family life with her friends giving her the much needed release. I on the other hand, have got no one with whom i can share my deepest thoughts or feelings. Ofc i share somethings with my wife but then i always have to be careful cus at times her reaction scares me and we end up fighting a lot.
I just need a friend who could listen to me without being judgemental and forming opinions about me. I promise to do the same for you, i am a great listener and very patient. It'll be a big plus if u are married cus maybe we'll be able to relate with each other. I am only looking for someone to talk to online and not anuthing irl.
Please reach out if u are in a similar situation as me or need someone who can hear u out and comfort you. Cheers
PS - I have good sense of humour , so don't worry, you'll not be becoming part of a real life drama.

My ex of 8 years left me in August. I’m over it other than remembering the past 8 years like a flashback. I don’t cry or sulk. Just feel empty and bored. I had to move back with my parents in a small town. Can’t find a job or a friend. Been like this for months, filling out applications everyday, calling everyday, doing stupid odd jobs for a pack of cigarettes. I don’t have a car that’s my own. I’m 26. I feel like I can’t seem to find a way up out of this bottomless pit. Feeling like my youth is wasted away and taken from me. I wish I could just take me and my dog and hitchhike it but too much in the news nowadays about psychos picking up folk and being picked up by folk. I just can’t seem to find an in. I’m a decent looking fella, hard worker, nice guy, charming and yet introverted. Today I thought about ending my life. Can’t because my poor dog will wonder where I went. My ideal situation is someone from a bigger city taking in me and my dog and giving me a chance to find a job there. But that’s highly unlikely. Any advice? Express employment never called me back either I’ve done tried them.

I’m shopping for a new bike and have more or less settled on an FX Sport. I test rode a 6 today but I didn’t like the loud clicking. From what I’ve read this is from the free hubs of the Aeolus 35 wheels. And that hubs aren’t easy to replace. So that made me wonder if the FX 5 hubs also click. And wondered if any of the carbon wheel options from Trek had silent hubs and would work for the FX Sport series.
I’m also interested in the new Shimano GRX group set. It only comes with drop bar shifters afaik but can these components work on the FX Sport? I’ve read the new 8 series GRX group set is a huge step up in quality and design from the older 6 series the FX Sport currently uses.
Am I so in the weeds with wanting custom components that I need to try and figure out a custom build or can I somehow get most of what I want from an FX Sport 5 and some light customization?
I really loved how light the bike was and it was buttery smooth over rough terrain compared to my current giant escape on 32c road tires.

I deactivated my Instagram months ago and rarely use social media now, only have Facebook for marketplace and a hobby group and reddit, which I'm cutting back on.
I wanted to find some contact info in an old message on Insta and that was my reason to open it up again. I now feel like I got brain slapped by digital garbage. Having been off for a while, I found the app to be immensely overwhelming. I have a lot of connections there to acquaintances, some friendish professional contacts, parasocial type relations...
It's so weird to see people posting so much about their lives and work and opinions. I used to be that way, so I'm not bashing it, I'm just weirded out by the whole thing having some more distance now. It seems so odd - I just can't figure out what anyone is actually trying to communicate to each other with these posts. I do not think it's all narcissistic, as I know my intentions for sharing something like art I saw or something beautiful or inspiring were done with the intention to share that good with others and I often consumed content from others with a similar assumption about intentions - but still, it is so disconnected from the people next to you or that beauty in that moment. It's also just too darn much, too much, I can't see another flower tree there with the same awe again and again like I can irl. I loved the positive things shared and there were moments when the platform was something I really enjoyed, but it became less and less so, especially once stories and reels were added and the algorithm took you all over the metaverse away from the accounts you follow.
I gave myself a decent amount of time with the app to just explore old accounts I liked and sift through it while being mindful and I was surprised by how stressful even engaging with it just in one day is for me now. I could feel the pressure I would have had to post things about interesting things, or the protests on my campus, or travels, or big work milestones, and dang I'm so happy to have not had that these past few months. I also always used to tell myself that I'm immune to comparison on the apps, since I rarely feel envy irl, but I realized while I don't have "envy" I was definitely comparing myself to people in reels; I've lost 40 lbs recently and feel great and am working on 25 - 30 more, and the reels made me feel more insecure than ever about my body. I was bombarded with events and cool things in my city I would love to go to, but realized in my limited free time I am currently regularly getting out to museums and shows and the park and other things without Instagram directing me there -- and actually, I'm doing so more than ever without wasting my life online. There were other subtle changes in my mood or thoughts I was much more aware of while engaging after my break.
The whole thing felt fake and weird and left a bad taste in my mouth. I posted some new contact info for my friends (from my non inner circle irl whom I talk with regularly outside of social media) and said I'm doing well, gave it up for a bit and my break convinced me I'm going to keep doing so and turn it off for good tomorrow. I honestly wish instead of letting that contact be posted for a day I just shut it down for good after getting what I needed, but I'm happy to give a final adios to the platform and let people know, but I find the platform totally horrible to explore even for the brief amount I did today.
I cannot believe the amount of time I wasted on that platform and can't wait to but that garbage in the trash tomorrow.
It was completely eye opening to get back on social media like Instagram after a break.
I'm also more inspired than ever to tackle my last internet hook, which is reddit. I'm fairly confident I'd feel similarly coming back here as I did to Instagram; weirded out by why I or others ever wasted time reading AITA or TIL or more. On Instagram the accounts and content I enjoyed were so sparse to the junk I saw when I opened it was the majority of what I saw. I feel similarly about reddit. I hope to change my use here to what I do with Facebook, which is very sparingly and utilitarian with all my profile info wiped etc (since I find there are some very helpful subreddits / posts, and I believe I can use this more responsibly). Instagram, however, is gone for good from my life - and good riddance.
Totally eye opening. I am stunned.

going to Florida in June with friends for a weekend. we’ll be staying in the downtown Jacksonville area. are there any fun things to do during the day, good night time activities, or any food spots that we NEED to try? keep in mind that our group is all 19-20 y/o. ty!

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