From my Common Dreams article, "How Nations Can End Israel’s Genocide in Gaza" is the excerpt below on the partnership of US tech giants with Israel, which signed cloud computing contracts with Google and Amazon. For those who want to end Israel's genocide in Gaza and occupation of Palestine, the question looms, "How do we divorce ourselves, our institutions-universities, school districts, local governments--from these tech giants that are now suspected of providing AI-assisted targeted killings of thousands of civilians in Gaza?" Please post your thoughts on launching strategic boycotts against these tech giants.
https://www.commondreams.org/opinion/nations-end-israel-s-genocide
"Internal dissent rocks Google in the United States, where employees waving Palestinian flags shut down Market Street (12/14/23) in San Francisco to protest Google’s Project Nimbus, a $1.2 billion contract with the Israeli military for cloud computing engineered by Google and Amazon. Months earlier, before October 7, hundreds of Amazon and Google tech workers protested the contract in four cities across the country with signs reading, “No Tech for Apartheid.” In an open letter,anonymous employees in 2021 charged that the Nimbus contract greenlights “unlawful data collection on Palestinians, and facilitates expansion of Israel’s illegal settlements on Palestinian land.”
Multinational corporations like Microsoft, Google, IBM, and Intel all have offices in Israel. Google’s 8,000 square mile campus in Tel Aviv occupies eight floors of Electra Tower, with one floor reserved for Google’s “Campus Tel Aviv,” a hub for entrepreneurs and start-up companies. Hewlett-Packard—a target of the global BDS movement—profits off the Israeli occupation with biometric identification, hand and facial recognition, used at checkpoints throughout the West Bank, where excruciating wait times can take Palestinians all day to reach family in a village 30 miles away."
And then there's this ...
https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2024/4/23/what-is-project-nimbus-and-why-are-google-workers-protesting-israel-deal
"Known as Project Nimbus, the joint contract between Google and Amazon signed in 2021 aims to provide cloud computing infrastructure, artificial intelligence (AI) and other technology services to the Israeli government and its military, which has faced condemnation for its war on Gaza, described by United Nations experts and several countries as a “genocide”.
Some might suggest the university encampments, once the term ends, establish encampments in front of Amazon warehouses and operations until Amazon agrees to terminate its contract with Israel. Others might press on the divestment front, where Amazon and Microsoft are at the top of the list for the S & P 500. Your thoughts?

"You gotta know that there's an art to it, Ezra," Hitch said, cutting another piece of duct tape.
The sleeves of his weather-beaten coat were shoved all the way up his arms, to stop the fabric from falling over his knuckles while he was working, and goosebumps lined his skin. He was strapping a rubber chicken to the back of his truck, over the lens of the shattered backup camera, with the legs pointing down so that they hung a couple inches above the ground. There were dents in the hood from the crash last week, and scratches along the door from scraping into a curb. The chicken, hopefully, would keep him from breaking anything else.
"You can't go cheap," Hitch said. "The cheap rubber chickens only make noise when pressure lets go. That's no good. As soon as I back up into something, I want this chicken to be screaming like it’s in the depths of hell."
“Sure thing,” I said in a monotone, leaning against the side of the truck.
There were scrambled electronic parts piled in the back of the truck, the innards of a radio, a broken computer, tangled wires, a couple loose pairs of earbuds. He found the parts in alleyways or bummed them off his friends for a couple bucks or stole them from the vacation homes that were left empty for most of the year. Then he sold them for a profit at the scrapyard. Hitch had bounced between minimum-wage jobs for a while after high school, spending a couple months as a bagger at the grocery store or as a seasonal worker at the farm two hours down the highway. He'd never stuck with it. At the very least, the scrapyard got him enough money to eat and occasionally spend a night in a motel when he got tired of sleeping in his car.
Hitch pressed the last piece of tape in place and grinned up at me. "I've got something for you, duck."
The nickname came from when I’d broken my leg as a child and waddled around in a cast until it was healed. I hated it with a burning passion, and I glared at Hitch with the ease of twenty-one years of practice. He had a duck tattoo at the base of his thumb that he’d gotten in a back-alley shop as a teenager. He said that he’d gotten it to remind him of me, and the fact that I hated the nickname was just a bonus. It was shaky-lined, with an uneven face, but he loved it anyway.
The handle stuck when Hitch tried to open the door, a consequence of the rust collecting in the crevices of the car and running down the sides like blood from a cut. The car groaned when the door finally popped open, a metal against metal screech that had me flinching away. Hitch dug through the cluttered fast food containers in the passenger-side footwell, eventually coming up with a crinkly paper bag. He waved away the flies buzzing around the opening of the bag and held it out to me.
The last time Hitch had brought me food, I’d gotten food poisoning because he’d left it out in the midday sun for two days. The donut was squished slightly, and the icing was stuck to the bag. I still ate it, grimacing at the harsh citrus flavor. Taking Hitch’s food was an instinct engraved from the days when Dad had given us a can of kidney beans for dinner and Hitch had drank the juice, leaving the beans for me.
I rarely went hungry anymore, three mostly square meals a day and granola in my pockets just in case, but habits didn’t die easy.
These days, Hitch only brought me food when he wanted my help, like when he saw a place he wanted to hit but was worried about doing it alone.
I got in the car, like I always did.
We drove past the cluster of seafood-themed restaurants with chipped paint decks, the beachfront park where there were always shifty-eyed men sitting under the slide, the single room library where all the books had been water damaged in the flood last year. The change was quick as we drove across Main Street, heading closer to the beach. The roads were freshly paved, the concrete a smooth black except where the sun had already started to pick away at it. The three-story homes lining the sides of the street were crouched on elegant stilts, with space underneath for a car or three. Most of the garages were empty, with the lights off and curtains drawn in the house. Come summer, the streets would be swarming with tourists and vacationers, but until then, most of the buildings nearest to the beach were unoccupied.
Hitch stopped as the sun started to go down at a house that was leaning precariously out towards the beach, tilted ever so slightly, the edge of its foundation buried in the shifting sand of the beach. It certainly looked deserted, with an overgrown yard and blue paint peeling off the door in sheets.
Hitch took his hammer out of the backseat, hoisting it over his shoulder. It was two feet of solid metal with rags wrapped around the head to muffle the sound of the hits. Hitch squared up, bending his knees and holding the hammer like a baseball bat. Before he could swing, though, the door creaked open on its own, the hinges squeaking. The house beyond was dark enough that I could only make out general shapes, glimpsing the curve of a sofa to the left, what was maybe the shimmer of a chandelier on the other side.
Hitch lowered his hammer, looking vaguely disappointed that he didn’t get to use it. “That’s…weird as hell.”
“Maybe the deadbolt broke, maybe they forgot to lock it, it doesn’t matter,” I hissed, checking our surroundings for other people again. “Just hurry up and get inside before someone calls the cops.”
Hitch flicked the lightswitch on the wall, and the lights flickered on. They were dim, buzzing audibly and blinking off occasionally. The walls were plastered with contrasting swatches of wallpaper and splattered with random colors. There was neon orange behind the dining table, a galaxy swirl in the kitchen, and on the ceiling there was a repeating floral pattern covered in nametag stickers. Each of the stickers was filled out with The Erlking. Chandeliers hung in every room, three or four for each, and rubber ducks sat on every table. A miniature carousel sat in the corner along with a towering model rocket.
Sand was heaped on every surface, at least a couple inches everywhere. It was piled in the corners and stuck to the walls, and it covered the floor in a thick blanket. Our hesitant steps into the house left footprints clearly outlined in the sand.
Hitch took a cursory look around and headed immediately for the TV mounted on the wall. “Look out the windows and tell me if anyone is coming.”
I shook the sand out of the blinds and pulled them open, then had to brush sand off of the window before I could see anything.
Hitch was quick, practiced at finding and appropriating the things that were worth taking. He came back to me with an armful of electronics and chandeliers, dumping it at my feet before turning to head deeper into the house again.
There was a thump, somewhere upstairs, and then footsteps, slow and deliberate. Hitch froze at the threshold of the room, then ran for the door with me just ahead of him, sand flying out from under our feet.
My hand was almost brushing the doorknob, close enough that I could see the light from the streetlamp outside streaming in through the cracks in the door. My fingers touched the wood and it gave under my touch, becoming malleable and warm. I yelped, stumbling backwards, and the door started to melt. The paint ran down in thick drops, pooling at the bottom of the door, and the wood warped like metal being welded. The soft edges of the door ran into the walls until there was no sign of an exit ever being there.
“Well, well, well,” said a cultured voice with just an edge of snooty elitism. “What do we have here?”
The man was well over eight feet tall, with long black hair covering his eyes. He was wearing a yellow raincoat with holes cut out of the hood to accommodate the deer antlers jutting upwards from his head. There was sand settled on his shoulders and hovering around his head like a halo.
“Who the fuck are you?” Hitch said, inching towards a window.
He smiled, just a little bit, and his teeth shone in the dim light. “I am the Erlking.”
Hitch nodded, and seemed about to respond. I grabbed him by the hand and pulled him towards the window. I could feel sand in the wind roaring against my back as the Erlking growled in anger, the grains scraping harshly against my cheeks.
We were almost to the window when Hitch was ripped away from me, and I came to a startled halt. The sand had formed long grasping arms that pressed Hitch against the floral wallpaper. His wrists were held tight, and as I watched, a sandy hand wrapped around his mouth and forced its way between his teeth. He gagged, and sand trickled out of the corners of his mouth.
The Erlking strolled towards him, not seeming to be in any sort of rush. “You know, I’m not very fond of your yapping.”
He made an idle gesture and the sand wrapped around my ankles, tethering me in place.
“I yap all the time,” Hitch said. “Three-time olympic yapper, that’s me. Best to just let me go now and save yourself some trouble.”
The Erlking tapped a manicured nail against Hitch’s mouth, hard enough to hurt, judging by the way he flinched away. “But why would I ever let you go when I’ve gone to this much trouble to catch you and your sister? It’s so hard, these days, to find people that no one will miss.”
Hitch struggled against the sand, trying to escape and failing. “What do you want with us, then? You just said it, we’re nobody.”
“I’m fae, dear one,” the Erlking said. “I get my power from my followers. And I think that you two will make lovely additions to my flock.”

He flicked Hitch's nose and Hitch gasped. Feathers started to form on his arms, popping out from under his skin in a spray of blood.
Hitch pushed off the wall, using his bound hands as a fulcrum, and his knees crashed into the Erlking’s stomach. The Erlking fell backwards, wheezing, and the sand around my ankles loosened.
Hitch made desperate eye contact with me as feathers shot up his neck and jerked his head towards the window. The message was obvious. Run.
The last thing I saw before crashing out the window and into freedom was Hitch’s body twisting, his arms wrenching into wings and feathers covering every inch of his skin. By the time I landed on the concrete outside, he was a small black bird, held tightly in the Erlking’s hands. The whole building was sinking into the ground, burnished-gold sand piling up over top and streaming from the windows.
Thirty years later, I saw Sam’s Supernatural Consultation and Neutralization written in neat, looping handwriting on a piece of paper taped to the door. The tape was peeling at the corners and the paper was yellowed with age, but there was obviously care put into the sign, in its perfectly centered text and looping floral designs drawn over the edges in gold marker.
I knocked, hesitantly, drawing my woolen coat closer around my shoulders. I’d bought it as a fiftieth birthday gift for myself, and I took comfort in the heavy weight of it over my shoulders.
“Coming!” someone called from within the depths of the office.
There were a couple crashes, and the sound of paper shuffling. Eventually, the door was opened by a young woman with ketchup stains on her shirt and pencils stuck through her hair.
“Hi, I’m Sam, I specialize in supernatural consultation and hunting, how may I help you today?” Sam said, customer-service pep in her voice. She stood in the doorway, solidly blocking entry into the office.
“My name is Ezra, I’m for a consultation. I emailed you but you didn’t respond?” I shifted in place, suddenly feeling awkward.
“Oh! Yeah, I lost the password for the email ages ago. Sorry for the bad welcome, I get lots of people thinking I’m crazy or pulling a prank and harassing me.”
She ushered me into the office, clearing papers off one of the chairs to make room for me to sit down. There was a collection of swords along one wall, all of them polished to perfection, several with deep knicks in the metal which indicated that they’d been used heavily.
“So what can I help you with?” Sam asked again, more sincere this time.
“Thirty years ago, my brother was turned into a bird,” I started. I’d told this story so many times that it barely felt ridiculous to say anymore. I was used to the disbelieving looks, the careful pity. But Sam just nodded along, face open and welcoming.
“I’ve almost given up on finding him, at this point,” I said. “But I saw your ad in the newspaper, and…here I am, I suppose.”
“Here you are,” Sam echoed, smiling. She pulled one of the pencils out of her hair and took a bit of paperwork off of one of her stacks, turning it over so that the blank side sat neatly in front of her. “Tell me everything.”
I told Sam everything, and she wrote it all down, pencil scratching along the paper.
The last part of the story was always the hardest to tell. “I left him there. I ran and I didn’t look back.”
I had been to dozens of detectives and investigators over the years, once the police had dropped Hitch’s case. I’d been to professional offices with smartly-dressed secretaries and met scraggly men in coffee shops. All of them had given me the same look, pity and annoyance all mixed up into a humor-the-crazy-lady soup. Sam, though, just seemed thoughtful.
Sam leaned forward and put a hand over mine, carefully, like she thought that I would pull away. “Sometimes you have to leave people behind.”
I tightened her hold on Sam’s hand and drew it towards me, like I could make Sam listen if only I squeezed tight enough. “But that’s why I’m here. I don’t want to leave him behind.”
“Okay then. I’ll do my best to help you.” Sam agreed, finally. Then she paused, and said softly, “You know…I think I met your brother once. He might have saved my life. He’s certainly why I started in this business.”
“Really? What happened?” I asked.
This is the story that Sam told me, related to the best of my abilities:
It was a new moon, so the only illumination came from the stars gazing idly down and distant porch lights shining across the scraggly brush of the dunes. Sam’s neighbors were decent people who cared about baby turtles, so the lights were a low, unobtrusive red, and the ocean sloshed like blood. Sam walked on the beach almost every night, drawing back the gauzy pink curtains and clambering out her bedroom window. She didn’t often bother to be quiet; her mama worked the late shift and came home exhausted. As long as Sam got home before the sun, her mama would never find out that she paced the shoreline and dreamed of inhaling sand until her lungs became their own beach.
The sky was lightening. The sun would come up soon, and that meant Sam’s time on the beach was over. She needed to get back to her real life, go to her fifth grade class and stop that nonsense, as her mother would say. Her mother loved to say things like that, pushing Sam into her proper place by implication alone.
“She’s a good kid, of course, but she’s a bit…” Her mother would trail off there, usually getting a commiserating expression from whoever she was talking to. Sam always wondered how that sentence would have finished. She’s a bit strange, maybe. She’s a bit intense. She’s a bit abrasive. She’s quiet enough but when Jason tried to steal her pencil in math class, she stabbed him in the hand so hard that the lead tattooed him.
Her mother was better, for the most part. The days of her stocking up the fridge, and leaving a post-it note on the counter, and leaving for days at a time were gone. But Sam still stepped around the place on the kitchen tile where her mother had collapsed and caved her head in, even though the bloodstains had been replaced with new tile.
“Your auntie got an abortion, you know,” her mother had said from her place on the couch, slurring her words. “Pill in the mail and then bam, no more baby.”
She had clapped her hands together to illustrate her point. Her mother jerked forward and grabbed Sam by the wrist, then, staring up at her until Sam met her eyes.
“I love you, you know? But sometimes I wonder…” She settled back onto the couch. “Yeah. I wonder.”
She’d gotten up, then, back to the kitchen. She’d been stumbling, a shambling zombie of a woman. The ground in the entryway of the kitchen was raised, ever so slightly, and her mother went down hard. Her head cracked against the tile, chin first, and she didn’t move.
Sam had been the one to call the ambulance. She had stared at the scattering of loose teeth on the ground while she waited, and considered what her life would be like with a dead mom. Not so bad, she thought, and immediately felt guilty for it.
Her mom was better, now, for the most part. But Sam still stepped around the place on the kitchen floor where she had collapsed. There was still a matchbox hidden under her bed with the gleaming shine of her mother’s lost teeth, two canines and a molar. It was nice, having a piece of her mom to keep. Even if she left again, Sam would still have part of her.
Sam sighed, and turned away from the ocean. As she faced towards the low dunes further up the beach, she saw a sandcastle sitting nestled among them. It was such a strange sight that her eyes skipped over it at first, almost automatically, disregarding it because it was so out of place.
Sam found sandcastles out on the beach sometimes, usually half-collapsed and on the verge of being washed away by the waves, but she had never seen anything like the sandcastle in front of her. It was life-sized, something that wouldn’t have looked out of place in the Scottish highlands, with spires shooting up above her head and carefully etched out bricks lining each side. The front wall was dominated by an arched set of double doors, twice her height, with a portcullis nestled at the top, ready to be dropped. All of it was lovingly detailed, down to the rust on the tips of the towers and the wood grain of the door. It was made out of wet, densely-packed sand, held together impossibly. It had not been there two hours ago, when she had come to the beach.
There was a bird sitting on the overhang of the door, small and black.
As soon as she took a step towards the sandcastle, the bird shook out its feathers and swooped down towards Sam, landing at her feet with a little stumble.
“Hey, kid, get out of here,” said the bird.
Sam closed her eyes, very deliberately. When she opened them, the bird was still there. Sam considered herself a very reasonable person, so she immediately drew the most logical conclusion. The bird was, she was almost certain, a demon.
“Trust me, you don’t want to run into Mr. Salty, the queen bitch himself,” the bird said.
“Mr. Salty?” Sam inquired, polite as she knew how to be. She edged to the side, trying to get a good angle to kick the bird like a soccer ball.
The bird did something similar to a wince, all its feathers fluffing up then settling back down. “Ah, don’t call him that. He’d turn you into a toad.”
The bird gestured with its head, towards the looming sand structure. “That’s his castle. He’s in there, probably scuttling along the ceiling or some shit because that’s the sort of weirdo he is.”
Sam nodded, encouraging. She pulled back her foot and lined up her shot, the way she’d seen athletes do on TV. She aimed right for its sharp beak and let loose. The bird saw it coming, its beady eyes widening, and it cawed in distress. It flapped away, avoiding her kick only to fall backward into the sand in a scramble of wings.
“What’s your fucking problem?” it squawked. “I was trying to help you!”
“I don’t need the help of a demon,” Sam yelled, trying to remember the exorcism that her mama had taught her once, because her mama believed in being prepared for anything.
“I’m not a demon,” the bird said indignantly.
It was at about that moment that Sam gave up and just decided to roll with it.
“What are you, then?” Sam asked.
The bird shuffled its clawed feet, looking about as awkward as it could, given that it didn’t really have recognizable facial expressions. “Technically I’m a familiar of the Erlking, prince of the fae, but I prefer to be called Hitch.”
“You can’t blame me for assuming, though,” Sam said. “Ravens do tend to be associated with murder.”
“Hey, excuse you,” Hitch said. “I’m a rook, not a raven. Ravens are way bigger.”
“Sure,” Sam said, not really paying attention. Her eyes had caught on the details of the sandcastle, and she was transfixed by the slow spirals of the sand, the strange beauty of it. She found herself stepping towards the great doors, lifting a hand to knock, and as she did, the sand warped in front of her eyes, heaving itself towards her with bulging slowness. The door creaked open before her, revealing a vast, empty room. Just before she stepped inside, she felt a piercing pain in her foot, and she yelped, leaping backwards.
Hitch pecked her again, really digging his beak in. “Don’t be an idiot.”
Sam glared at him, rubbing her foot. About to retort, she finally really took in the room inside the sandcastle, and her words died in her throat.
There was a body just past the threshold of the door, face down and limbs hanging limp at its sides. Long hair splayed out in a halo around its head.
“Don’t,” Hitch warned, suddenly serious. “Just leave, kid, I mean it. I’ve seen too many people go down this road and you don’t want to be one of them.”
Sam ignored him. She made her way across the beach, slipping with every step. The sand felt deeper, piling up around her feet in silent drifts. She picked up the nearest stick and poked the body with it through the door, ready to leap back if anything went wrong, staying firmly outside of the sandcastle.
This close, Sam could tell that it used to be a woman. Her head wasn’t attached to her body. It hadn’t been a clean amputation, either. Her upper body was bruised, with chunks taken out of it, and the bones in her neck hung mangled, not connected to anything.
“Well, I warned you,” Hitch said, defeated. “I did warn you.”
Sam nudged the head with the end of the stick, nudging it over so that she could see the face. Her mother stared back at her, torn to pieces, breath still wheezing from her lungs. She wasn’t blinking, just gazing forward with glazed eyes. Sweat dripped down from her hairline.
Sam screamed and dropped the stick, tripping over herself in her haste to get away.
Her mother’s eyes were wide and pleading, and she was mouthing desperate words at Sam. Her vocal cords were broken to bits, and the only sound that came out was a strained groan.
The head rolled, inching closer to Sam like a grotesque caterpillar.
Her mother gasped for air, torn lips fluttering. Finally, comprehensible words came out. “Help. Help me, daughter.”
“That’s not your mother,” Hitch said, quiet.
Sam knew that. Her mother was sleeping back at home, and anyways her mom had never asked for her help. She had an aversion to accepting charity, as she put it.
“Okay,” Sam said, shaking all over. “Okay.”
She backed away from the sandcastle, not looking away.
“Failure,” her mother hissed as she stepped away. “I never wanted a daughter like you.”
The sun came up over the horizon. The sandcastle, Hitch, and her mom all disintegrated into sand as the light hit them.
The beach, the next night, was almost exactly how I remembered it. The beams of our flashlights sent light bouncing across the dunes, illuminating the waves, and I imagined faces in the foam of the waves.
“I’ve been back here a hundred times. There’s nothing left,” I said.
Sam took the car key out of her purse and pointed it at the sand, adjusting the sword slung over her shoulder in order to do it. The key had belonged to Hitch; Sam had requested an item of his, and it was the only thing I had left. She rested the key on the sand and drew a circle around it, inscribing symbols around the borders.
“What are you doing?” I asked.
Sam shrugged. “Not much, really. I’m…I guess you could say that I’m knocking.”
The key laid inert on the sand for long enough that I was just about to give up and go home, admit to myself that Hitch was dead and that I was a fool to believe that Sam could actually help me. Then a building started to take shape, flickering in and out like it was struggling to get away. With a pop of displaced air, the sandcastle settled into existence.
Sam banged on the entryway. Nothing happened. She did it again, harder, and scowled when the door still didn’t open.
“We demand entrance, under your honor,” Sam yelled. There was a hard rush of wind, and I gripped Sam’s arm to keep my balance, but the doors cracked open reluctantly.
The inside of the sandcastle consisted of one enormous hall, the roof arching up out of sight. Rafters crisscrossed from wall to wall, and a cobbled path led further into the building, but other than that, it was completely empty, except for the birds. There were thousands of them, perched on the rafters or hopping along the ground. They parted in front of Sam and I, and reformed behind us, leaving us in a small pocket of open space. They were all black-feathered, with sharp beaks and beady eyes.
The Erlking sat on a throne at the end of the hall, lounging across it with his feet up on the armrest. He watched them as they came forward, the soft caw of the birds the only sound.
“I am here to bargain for the life of my brother,” I said, with as much dignity as I could muster, before the Erlking could say anything.
The Erlking ignored her, tilting his head to look at Sam. “I remember you. I almost got you, once.”

Sam glared at him but didn’t respond.
“You want your brother,” The Erlking said to me, and he almost sounded amused. “Then go get him.”
As if by some sort of silent signal, every bird in the room took flight at once, and their cawing made me think of screams. I covered my head against the flapping of their wings, and my vision was quickly obscured by the chaotic movement of them. I found myself on my knees, just trying to escape them.
A hand met my shoulder. Sam urged me to my feet, and together we ran for the edge of the room, where the swarm was the thinnest. We pressed ourselves into the corner and the swarm spiraled tighter and tighter at the center of the room. It went on until there seemed to be no differentiation between the birds, all of them fused together into one creature.
When the chaos died down, the birds had become one mass, with wings and eyes and talons sticking out of its flesh, thrashing and chirping. Human body parts stuck out of it, bulging out from the feathers. It was hands, mostly, with a couple knees or staring eyes. The bird amalgamation had no recognizable facial features, but there was one long beak extending from the front of its head. Most of the body parts were concentrated around the beak, and they peeked out from where the beak connected with muscle, or grew from the tongue, nestled between the two crushing halves of the beak.
It turned its beak down and crawled forward, using the hands to balance. The fingers scrambled over the ground. I was afraid of centipedes as a child, and I felt that same crawling dread when it started moving.
“Holy shit,” Sam whispered, which was rather disappointing, because I had been hoping that at least one of us knew what to do.
The creature turned, a lurching movement that crushed some of the hands underneath it, and started heaving itself slowly towards our corner.
“Better hurry up!” the Erlking called from his throne.
It was blocking the exit, by then. The shifting body of it had moved to block us off. It ambled towards us and I tried to sink further into the corner.
As it approached, getting close enough that I could smell the stink of it, I saw a flash of a tattoo on one of the hands. I leaned in, trying to find it again, like looking for dolphins surfacing in the ocean. And again, I caught a glimpse of a duck tattoo, the tattoo that Hitch had gotten on his hand as a teenager.
I ripped away from Sam’s death grip and ran for the monster.
I fell to my knees in front of it, wincing as I impacted the ground, and reached into the nest of hands. I could feel them tearing at my forearms and ripping into me with their sharp nails, but I kept going. I pressed further in, up to my shoulder in a writhing mass of limbs, aiming for the spot where I had last seen that tattoo.
The hands were tugging at me, wrapping around my back and hair. They were pulling together, trying to draw me completely into the mass of them. I was aware of Sam at my side, anchoring me in place and bashing any hand that got too close with her sword or the sparks that leapt from her hands with muttered words. But I didn’t think it would be enough. They were too strong, and there were too many of them.
I was up to my waist in the hands when something grabbed my palm. I felt the way it clung to me, and the calluses on its palm, and I knew that I had found my brother.
I flung herself back. The hands didn’t want to let me go, and they fought the whole way, but slowly, I made progress. I kept hold of Hitch’s hand in mine the whole time, gripping it as hard as I could. I finally broke free, Hitch with me, and Sam was immediately charging the creature, able to use her sword with much greater strength without being worried about injuring Hitch. She swung it forward, and it sliced through the wrist of one of the hands. It fell without a sound, red sand flowing out of it. It deflated until it looked like dirty laundry, just a piece of limp flesh. The creature shrieked, scuttling away enough that the door was finally accessible. The three of us ran for it, Sam and I supporting Hitch between us.
I looked back as I left and found the Erlking staring right at me.
“Interesting,” he murmured, his voice carrying impossibly across the vast space between us.
The sandcastle collapsed behind us, the great walls falling in on themselves. We were out in the morning sun, the sandcastle disappearing as we watched. Hitch was on the ground in front of me, as young as he’d been thirty years ago, when he was captured. He started laughing, feathers puffing out of his mouth. He laughed until he cried and I hugged him in the way that he’d held me when I was young, in the times when my life had been defined by hunger and fear.
Hitch left, afterwards. He scratched at the pinhole scars covering his body, where feathers burst through his skin, and pulled his long sleeves down around his wrists. He didn’t know where he was going but he told me that he needed time
I had spent thirty years worth of time without him. I wanted to grab my brother by the shoulders and beg him to stay. But he flinched when I hugged him goodbye and he refused to go near sand and he stared distrustfully at the birds chirping in the trees. Hitch needed to go away and I loved him too much to stop him.
I sat out on the beach every morning. I felt the sun on my face and I waited for Hitch to come home.

Hi guys! I just wanted to share a few things with you guys. In a world where OCD is deeply misunderstood, here is some things I want you and even people who dont know what this hell is to understand.

• we are not broken • our brains are different, not defective. I want to be accepted not fixed.
  
• Our diagnosis is only ours to disclose. • it’s scary when the stigma is so real.
  
• Therapy and medications are not a cure. • they’re tools to manage our OCD, but we will still spiral at times.
  
• We can’t just get over this. • We’ve tried. Worrying less doesn’t help. I wish it was that simple.
  
• Shame is the devil. • Having OCD isn’t a choice and shame is the worst motivator. Please exercise compassion.
  

Even though there isn’t a cure, you don’t need to get rid of your intrusive thoughts to recover. The problem is our reaction to the thoughts. When we give those thoughts power our brains get stuck in them. So, instead of trying to get rid of our intrusive thoughts we can learn to not engage with them. Therapy can show you skills so you can regain your life. It may not always be perfect, but whatever the size of the win, it’s still a win.
My OCD has been very isolating for me. I often find myself grieving my life before OCD and how my life is now. I grieve the fact that I suffer everyday. I grieve the thoughts of feeling like a crazy person 24/7. I grieve knowing I am not ok. I grieve knowing most people in my life and in this world do not understand and will never understand.
OCD is a very very lonely hell. I know we all are feeling the same or we wouldn’t be on this page. I grieve for each and every one of you and I am so sorry you have to go through this. I know what it’s like to be surrounded by people, even the people closest to you and still feeling so distant and alone because of the constant cycle in your brain that they don’t get.
I want you guys to know there is absolutely nothing wrong with us. We are not crazy. Our brains have faulty engine systems, and that’s ok.
I just started a new therapy specifically for my OCD. I learned a lot in just an hour! I know I’m not better yet, but I am feeling some hope that I will be.
Anyways sorry for the book, the last thing I want to say is i highly encourage you if you are not already to start putting in the work. Go to therapy, watch videos on YouTube, do research. We can and we WILL get better. Please don’t lose hope, this will get better. At the end of the day, at least we have a whole community here who truly gets it. I would love us to all be able to meet one day just to gain that sense of community and be surrounded by people who ALL get what you’re going through. That would be so so cool.
Cheers to putting in work and cheers to our journey of taking our lives back!! 🥂 🥂
We got this. We will not let this evilness win!!! 🖤🖤

Hi everybody,
I am using Hyper Backup to back up files from my DS918+ onto my DS413.
Each of these backups are run at specific times, which I had to configure when creating each backup.
However, my DS413 only runs for these backups. That means that my DS413 boots at a specific time and shuts down at another specific time.
Here is an example
* DS413 power on 11:55 * DS918 start backup 00 at 12:00 * DS918 start backup 01 at 12:45 * DS918 start backup 02 at 13:30 * DS918 start backup 03 at 15:00 * DS413 shutdown at 16:30
This works fine. However, depending on the size, backups take different amounts of time (of course). I planned 45 minutes for backup 00; however, let's say there is nothing to backup... in this case, it would make much more sense to run backup 01 at 12:05 (or, to be clear, at whatever time my DS realizes that backup 00 has finished already).
However, the current configuration will run backup 00 at 12:00 and wait until 12:45 no matter what. I would like to start backup 01 as soon as backup 00 has finished; if it's done by 12:05, start backup 01 by 12:05. If it takes longer than expected, for example, until 13:00, then don't start backup 01 until backup 00 has finished.
Is this possible? If so, how can I achieve this?
Why am I even doing this? Well, I have tried to use one single Hyper Backup task to backup everything at once. Multiple attempts failed. They took days each at the time (multiple TB have to be backed up) and failed eventually, so I figured I'll split this one backup task into many smaller ones. There haven't been issues with this.
Except that I have to schedule each backup at a specific time, which results in either gaps (if backups finish earlier) or overlap (in which case backup 01 will start while backup 00 is still running).
I am doing all this to conserve energy. DS413 only needs to run when backups are being synced. If the DS could improve the duration of this by running the next backup related to the previous one, this would allow me to shut down the DS413 sooner (because, if only one of those four backups were to run, this would be determined by an external script and also externally send a command to power off the DS413 way sooner than if it were to wait until a specific, hard-coded time).
Thank you in advance for your ideas :)

Big long post but there’s a TL;DR at the bottom. Also apologies for any incoherent rambling— I’m probably malnourished so my brain isn’t at 100%.
I want to be self-sufficient by becoming disciplined without needing motivation, but I don’t have a solid reason or drive to become disciplined. Any desire for it is fleeting. And it seems like all actions (or at least non-habit actions and actions to start habits) require desire/reason to do. I’m 20 years old, live with my parents, neglect meals and above-minimum hygiene, spend all my free days writing stories/consuming interesting content, haven’t actually cleaned my room in ages, and I feel like a lazy grown child loser who goes for the fun option instead of the productive one. It’s caused by a combination of problems, but mostly my lack of care and lack of discipline.
For example, I have no excuse for my room or bathroom to be a disaster, since I’m constantly in my room when I’m not at work. But besides my own disgust and my parents’ judgement, I don’t care about it. Even when my parents voice their disapproval, don’t care enough to do anything about it (because then I would have done something about it). Only when my dad threatened to kick me out do I have the motivation to finally do something about it. Later.
The only motivation I’ve ever had in order to achieve anything (other than chasing fun useless personal whims) is to avoid a negative consequence such as being judged or kicked out. I’ve spent my entire childhood in this stressful “do or you are destroyed, and if you take that second option, it mentally doesn’t exist so its not an option” mindset, and tbh I’m hakuna matata done with that— I’m not considering using stress/survival/negative outcomes as the drive to become disciplined (it might actually break me if I let stress become my world for tackling situations again anyway). But at the same time, I have no intrinsic motivation for anything except for my passion of writing and small fade-and-return interests. Disregarding those, if I had to say what I want in life, it would be to want something in life, but really I don’t actually care. This has caused a severe stagnation in my career (or lack thereof) which results in “failure to launch syndrome” and I hate it.
I do desperately want to live on my own because I feel like a loser, but I don’t have the income nor understanding of How People Adult to survive on my own. And I only care to survive because I want to finally, finally self-publish my stories, which I never accomplish out of crippling procrastinative perfectionism. I know that writing for a career is in fact a motivation, but in order to not further soil my passion of writing with the need to prove I’m not a loser, I will not use my passion of writing to motivate myself for general life stuff. That would foul my passion, and I don’t want to lose one of the only things that keep me going.
So I don’t have any motivation to do Actual Stuff until it hurts, but I also don’t have the discipline to do anything without motivation. For important things in my life, someone had always told me what to do, how to do it, and helped me do it, so I lack initiative, confidence, and discipline. Without someone’s help, I just stress and avoid doing a new important task because I don’t know how to magically and spontaneously know how to do it. (How do people learn life stuff??? I wish there was a step-by-step handbook for life-ing.) It’s like I never developed the magical adult skills of knowing stuff and I just exist there like some infant. (I know people don’t just know stuff or gain common sense without learning, but I don’t know how to learn common sense in order to learn stuff.)
I hate my current state, yet I don’t do anything about it. When I finally get fed up enough to try improving anything, I make some ambitious plan and it immediately fails because I don’t practice the concept of small steps and small goals. I know I should “start small” but I just don’t. I can try, and I understand it’s good advice, but I never care enough to go more than a day of starting small (I don’t see the progress and go “meh I wanna do something else”). I’ve read and been told to start small countless times, and I understand how it works and how it’s beneficial, but I never do anything until I’m fed up with myself, and then the desperation of my emotions and desire to prove to everyone that I’m actually a responsible, competent not-loser makes me go for a big plan instead. Which I then proceed to polish up and forget about it in favor for some short-term sparkly thing.
I’ve been Googling to try to get answers to solve my issues off and on for months. I always read the same advice, and I always understand the real solutions to my problems, but I never put it into action. I know I need to work on my discipline and get a therapist for my probably-depression and find a good-paying career but I just don’t.
TL;DR: I’m fed up with myself again. I want to become disciplined without needing motivation, but I don’t have a solid reason or drive to become disciplined. And it seems like all actions (or at least non-habit actions and actions to start habits) require desire/reason to do. How do I actually get disciplined when I have no intrinsic motivation to persevere enough to get the discipline to get disciplined? I can’t afford to go survival-mode by moving out, and I refuse to ruin my only hobby by using it as motivation. But I also can’t survive on bursts of being fed up to motivate an inch of action out of me every few months (that doesn’t build habits). I can try to “start small” which I understand is good advice, but I never care enough to go more than a day of starting small (I don’t see the progress and go “meh I wanna do something else”).
I’m so undisciplined that I can’t just “get disciplined”. I want to become disciplined but I don’t care enough to actually do so. Is there a way to self-help this?
Thanks in advance.

…Then what was the point of Gege dedicating so much panel time to Ui Ui taking the bodies of the deceased to Shoko FOUR SEPARATE TIMES.
Gege is basically spelling it out with Sukuna doubting Shoko’s ability to heal them, him not knowing about Utahime’s technique and thinking Gojo used a binding vow to buff the initial purple, and having Todo introduce the precedent that Yuji (and by extension the audience) is not being told key parts of their plan to prevent information leaks.
All of this happening so close together and right before Gojo’s appearance pretty clearly shows Gege’s current intentions for the story. Here is the throughline:
Utahime and Shoko (who were already shown talking one on one with Gojo during the time skip) made a plan with Gojo to swap Gojo’s soul along with anyone else who would be playing major roles against Sukuna with Shoko (minus Yuji because of info leaks) in order to allow her rct to get used to them so they would not have reduced efficiency in healing (we literally JUST learned about how this works with using rct on other people). They also planned with Mei Mei and Ui Ui to get him to get anyone who takes fatal injuries off of the battlefield as quick as possible in case Gojo loses. They probably even have Nidai on standby to put people in suspended animation like Nobara in case Shoko needs more time to heal the last person. Then Shoko starts healing people who soul swapped with her with Utahime’s help. Gojo was by far the most grievously injured so the theory that he had to give up one of his eyes to survive still can hold water.
So how does the story go from here if everyone is going to be coming back?
Sukuna is going to activate the merger. It would be stupid if it didn’t happen with how it has been built up since the Kenjaku vs Yuki fight. We will need everyone to contest it because I don’t think Yuji and todo can fight that thing alone.
Wouldn’t Yuji get overshadowed?
No. Sukuna will use more binding vows to take control of the merger, weakening his bond to Megumi even further. This gives Yuji a chance to enter Sukuna’s inner domain and fight his soul along with Megumi while everyone else fights in the real world.
BAM!

Long story short, I just got in a heated argument with my father over how he treats my 13 year old brother (more on that later). I am 21 years old and they still control a lot of my life. I am financially independent (technically, more on that later as well).
For some background. I was raised VERY religious. Those Christian moms you see on social media that was my father. I never went to prom (because godforbid I got out in the world). I went to a public high school but was still super sheltered. My life outside of school consisted of coming home and working on homework, the extra homework he assigned me, yelling because I never did "good enough," and church youth group (which I hated because I am not a Christian). I made good grades, mostly As, the occasional B, and one C (in chemistry, but I mean come on that shits hard). That was never good enough. Every single assignment I did he had to look at. Study guide for an exam. He had to look at it. Discussion board reply. You guessed it he looked at that too. I didn't get a phone until sophomore year of high school and when I did I got one of those shitty 80 dollar Samsung phones that you couldn't do shit on (and where he checked all my texts, notes, and emails). I was very sheltered. The extent of my fun was shooting the shit with my friends in the cafeteria at lunch and on the bus. I wasn't allowed to go to birthday parties or sleepovers or even go over to a friends house. He is raising my brother the same way, but way worse. If I am ever blessed with kids one day he has taught me what not to do.
Thankfully I am now in my third year of college. I picked a school he didn't want me to go to. Not because of money or anything he just said "you aren't going to a party school. There are too many idiots there you don't need to be around." I rebelled and committed to that school. Hands down the best decision I have ever made. I have a full ride scholarship that pays for my tuition (although it is dirt cheap for in-state already). I also have a scholarship that pays for rent for my 1100 dollar a month apartment and gives me about 500 spending money every month. I consider this my second best accomplisment as screwed up as that may sound. My father controls my money. All of it. I have a credit card that I use and then he pulls that money out of my account. I have no idea how much money I have and what he is doing with said money. He also has access to my Schwab and Vanguard accounts. He says he does this to help me with investing but I know there is more to it. He still wants to control me. I don't even know my damn login to the banking app for Christ sake (sorry not sorry dad for using the Lords name in vane). I know I should have fixed this issue sooner but I didn't want to fuck up our relationship. I am not sure what to do about this.
Another major problem came from this sheltered/overbearing environment I grew up in is my inability to say no to things I have never done before. Throughout my time in college I have experimented with drugs and alcohol (cocaine, weed, molly, lsd, shrooms, xans, oxy, you name it, pretty much with the exception of meth and heroin, I've done it and not just once). I am not proud of this (minus the fun I've had on psychs and even then not one of my better attributes). As a result of his abusive parenting style I have a hard time saying no and give in super easily to peer pressure. So much so that the first friends i met at college I still hang around with. These guys I probably shouldn't be around (the type where daddy pays for everything so they get a four-year drug fueled adventure in college). Don't get me wrong they aren't all that bad but just not the type of people I though I would be hanging around. I never thought I would be sleeping around, going to clubs on a Tuesday, and doing lines of coke off my island at 4pm but here we are. I am not proud of this but feel like I started doing these things because I was finally free. It is so hard to stop now. I think that I hang around them as a sense of rebellion to my parents and a sort of "f u" if you will. I know it is wrong but it feels good to finally be free. I have developed a raging nicotine addiction as well (something I am definitely not proud of). My parents have no idea. I have had to lie to them about things for the past three years.
I don't know if that is a result of my own actions or the years upon years upon years of constant yelling by my father. I mean for fucks sake the man never told me good job on anything. I got an A on a test it wasn't good job. It was "show me the test and what you got wrong," followed by a thirty minute yelling match about how I fucked up on the test. When I got into college on a full ride it wasn't good job it was "that is all because of me and the things I gave you." When I graduated high school it wasn't good job. It was my mom, god bless her she is great but tied down by my father, putting on a dinner party for me with all the neighbors and my parents friends. My dad was there but never even spoke to me (he just bullshitted to his friends about how I was such a hard worker (mind you he never told me this) and other things that narcissists do). I never was told good job when I got Eagle scout. That fucked me up, all of it. I am not one to want praise or one of those participation trophy people but come on that's fucked up at least in my mind. I never heard good job once.
He does the same shit to my brother but worse. My brother is 13 and in seventh grade at a private Christian K-12 school (one of those rich schools where the parents drive benzs and the kids have gucci shoes and shit). My father doesn't send my brother there because it is a better school, trust me, it is not by any stretch of the word. He sends him there to look better (aka "my kid goes to a private school you peasants" type of behavior). Recently, my brother was caught playing a computer game (papa's pizazaria on coolmathgames). Off topic but that is still the best one and you cannot change my mind. When he caught my brother they went at it for four hours. Now my dad checks my brothers search history, backpack and every single piece of paper in every binder every single day. He has moved my brothers desk into the living room and made my brother buy, with his own money, 300 dollar noise cancelling headphones to somehow be able to focus down there. My brother now has developed a twitch and the habit of twirling his hair. It was gotten so bad that some of his hair is falling out because of it and my dad refuses to take responsibility for it. The kid is so stressed that you would think he is on coke or meth the way he acts. He told me that he is scared when my dad comes home from work. I brought this up with my dad and asked him how he feels about his child being scared of him. My dad said nothing. Not one word. I am asking advice/thoughts on this situation.
To end things off I want advice on what I should do moving forward. I am home for the summer and working a job up here but am really considering not working and going back down to my school. I never had a normal childhood and can't stand my brother being treated this way. He is not allowed to go outside and play with the neighbor kids, watch TV, search ANYTHING on his computer, and take breaks longer than dinner away from his "schoolwork." I can't handle this shit anymore. I understand that part of my situation is my doing but I think it partly stems from the years of manipulation and control on behalf of my father. Am I overreacting? What would you do?
P.S. One final thing I wanted to say to get off my chest is that I do not respect this man. He yells at my mother constantly about how when she lets him be a kid and do kid things she is "setting him up for failure." I don't mean yelling I mean cussing and screaming to the point when I go to bed I can hear my mother crying. It hurts me to hear her cry it really does. I'm a bigger dude, 6 foot, 210, built. But that shit hurts. A fucking lot. I'm at the point where he needs to be confronted about it. I have lost every ounce of respect I have ever had for him. This may be an overreaction but I don't think so. He still controls my life. He tracks where I go in school, what I buy, etc. I have to lie to him sometimes but I am okay with that. This is the first real fun I have had in my life. I am doing pretty good in school, 3.1 gpa in a major I (not him) am happy in. I already have a job lined up outside of school making 58k straight out the gate. He has no idea because I don't tell him shit, he doesn't deserve to know in my mind. This is a man who will act super nice around everyone but our family. He is super active in the church and scouting, although he doesn't let my brother go anymore. He constantly gives to charity and volunteers around the community. You would never know this if you watched how our family operates on any given day behind closed doors. The only conversations I have with him now are about "why is there a charge for mexican food on the credit card. you should be studying," or my personal favorite "why is there a charge for x amount of dollars at a convenience store at 9:00 at night. Only bad people hang outside after dark (by bad people he is referring to everyone who is non-Christian by the way)."
This man has held me back so much even in college. I understand that this is partly my fault because as a legal adult I could have stopped this but I did not want to ruin our relationship. He stopped me from going on trips because "people could be drinkng" and has told me that on my 21st birthday (last week) that if he ever catches me drinking or vaping or anything I will not be allowed back into the house. I want to get clean but I do that shit as a fuck you to him. I apologize about cussing so much in here I'm just frustrated and need to get some stuff of my chest. I can't be the only one with parents like this. Right? I refuse to let this situation continue on. Should I do something about the way he treats me and my brother and mom? What do I do? What would you do? FYI cutting him out of my life entirely is not ideal because my mom and I still get along great. I would do it if there was a way to still be able to see my mom as they live in the same house. Minus certain political issues (mostly economic stuff) my dad and I don't agree on anything. He is the most judgemental person I have ever met in my life. I have met upwards of 1000 people in the past couple of years and he is by far the most judgemental person I have ever met. There is not even a close second.
Am I overreacting? What would you do in this situation? God bless and thanks for any and all responses/similar stories you all are willing to share. This seems like a great group of people. Stay blessed and if you need someone to talk to I am here for anything.

I’ve been out of work on WC for four weeks due to an injury to my arm/shouldehand that is from repeated use. They did X rays that showed no fracture, and had me on PT 3x a week and I see the doctor weekly for an update. I also started acupuncture this week (2 sessions a week). A MRI is pending and has been pending since week 2. There has been no improvement, only worsening of the pain that is now almost constant and unbearable. I cannot do a movement without pain. Going to PT this past week has been a huge struggle as well, as each exercise has been strenuous, unable to finish any of them, and exhausted for hours afterwards and the day after. My other arm now feels it has no strength from compensating and it’s starting to hurt too. I have mentioned this to the PT who said maybe I need to really push through the pain more. I feel like my injury is worse already. I have told the doctor and she hasn’t changed the treatment plan, but changed my limitations from “ok to go back to work, 10lbs weight restrictions for right arm” back to 5lbs, and said I should wear my sling.
Work and WC came up with an alternative job at a volunteer store for 20 hours a week (4x5hrs). My usual shift at my real job is about the same amount of hours but is a totally different job. However when I’m healthy and working, I am not exhausted like this, and I don’t have 6-7 medical appointments a week that take 2 hours each time along with extra driving. This schedule I know will kill me. I already feel like I am just a shell of myself, with the pain and inability to do anything, can’t even cook or drive. My spirit is now gone, just enduring the constant pain and fear for the sharper pain that comes with movements.
I went to the first day at the job on Friday and they were very lovely and laid back, they had me sit on a couch attaching tags to items . They told me I can come whenever I want and leave whenever I want and whichever day I wish. I appreciated sitting down and work on this one task but it also hurt my neck a lot. I was physically and emotionally exhausted after a little more than 2 hours (that included a lunch break), and I went home. I haven’t recovered yet. I emailed the liaison at work about it but since it’s the weekend I have not heard back. I don’t know what to do, there is nowhere in the store for me to lay down and rest. I can do the job for about 2 hours, maybe 3 hours max. Also, the job wasn’t updated about the change from 10lbs to 5lbs, and was surprised (but very compassionate) to see the sling and learn I can only use one arm. I can’t do more than this amount of time, especially sandwiched between medical appointments. I feel like I’m about to collapse, I even considered going to urgent care tomorrow because I can’t live like this. Ibuprofen does absolutely nothing to ease the pain.
I don’t understand this treatment plan… am I just supposed to continue going to PT and move my arms and work a job that will inevitably make my condition worse, and that’s it? How am I supposed to get better if we don’t even know yet what the injury is? Shouldn’t the MRI have been one of the first things to get done?

What happened to me was fucking hot. I don't have much of a sex life outside of my marriage, but when I'm out of my home area, I log into grinddr and feeld to see what guys or couples are in the area. Last Thursday, I was at the mall, which is more than 20km from home, and I started chatting with some guys, for a while, until I ended up chatting only with a young and versatile guy. First he sent me some photos of his penis, ass and body, and I sent him mine. Until then, everything was normal, but then, I gave him access to my private photos and he accessed mine. That's when I realized what a mistake I had made. He was a boy who lives near my house in the same street, with his parents, with whom we have exchanged a few words, and surely he would also know me and my family. I didn't know what to do, so I just wrote sorry F...(his name) and he replied Hello M.... (my name) I apologized to him, and asked him to forget this, to which he replied that now who had seen me was more interested in us meeting in person. I froze for a moment, because he is young, because he knows my wife, and because then I would be forced to see him almost always. But on the other hand, I thought about the photos that he had sent me and I liked that ass with little hair and that long, thin penis. In the end I told him to come home on Saturday morning since my wife has a class with activities for her and our baby. I am 46, I was excited but afraid. He is 19 years old, he arrived that morning also a little nervous, it could be seen in his voice, I invited him in and then I told him we should go to a TV room, I asked him if he wanted something to drink and he was speechless. , I told him that I was nervous too, I took his hand and put it on my penis, over my pants. This was the key that unlocked everything, he began to rub me harder and his mouth kissed me, his tongue searched for mine and I let myself go. My mouth also kissed him and I liked how his tongue tangled with mine. My cock was already feeling his grip and it was already hard but rolled up under my pants. While we were kissing, I took out my cock and his. My cock was already erect, pointing towards him, colliding with his flaccid cock, I hugged him so that our bodies made complete contact and I kissed him. I felt his mouth on mine, our tongues together, I felt my hands on his buttocks, gripping them tightly, his hands on my buttocks, our breasts were in contact, our bellies, our penises, our feet... it was an incredible sensation. . Then I kneeled down and put his flaccid penis in my mouth. I licked it, sucked it, and jerked it off. His cock was getting big and hard but after a few inputs and outputs of my mouth he moaned and cumed up inside my mouth. He apologized, but I caressed his buttocks and I continued sucking his cock while I swallowed his cum until his cock stopped pulsing. I stood in front of him and we kissed again. This sensation is very strange, I have kissed very few men and in general I have not felt anything. This young boy's mouth was different, it excited me. After kissing his lips, I guided him down with my hands until he was kneeling in front of me. He just looked at me, this made me get even harder. I grabbed his head with one hand, my cock with the other and brought it closer to his mouth, he opened it a little and part of my cock went in. Now both my hands were holding his head while the tip of my cock was in his mouth. Little by little I was sinking my cock deeper into his mouth, although part of it didn't fit. I fucked his mouth for a while and then I released his head and sat on the living room couch. He didn't waste any time, he walked on all fours towards me and continued sucking my cock. After a while, I told him to lie down on the couch, I sucked his cock and balls again, but they were still flaccid, I raised one of his legs and then the other, and licked his ass, this one is clear and has little hair along her slit and around her ass hole, it was delicious, I licked it, I kissed it, I put my tongue in, then I put a finger in... My cock wanted it, it was very hard. I put on a condom and lube while I continued licking his ass hole. I felt how his ass hole throbbed and opened with my tongue. I brought my cock closer to his ass hole and inserted the tip and a bit more. I felt how his anus tightened and imprisoned 1/4 of my cock inside. At this moment he told me "slowly, it hurts, it's the first time I've been fucked." "Calm down baby" I told him, I brought my face closer to his and kissed him while I let my cock out. I put the boy on his side and I behind him, I caressed him from behind and I put a lot of lubricant on his hole, until I felt that he relaxed and was opening to let my fingers enter with lubricant. I put the tip again at the entrance of his anus, and this time I went very slowly, millimeter by millimeter, I found no resistance, he moaned while my penis little by little was already more than half inside, then until his buttocks were completely leaning on my lap, with my entire penis inside her beautiful ass. One of my hands held his hip while the other grabbed his head and leaned it towards me, to kiss him while he fucked him. I fucked him slowly at first and increased the intensity, I felt how his buttocks were hitting my legs, how the walls of his anus were squeezing my cock. I didn't last long, I cummed on her ass intensely, we stayed in that position for a while, until my penis came out, with the condom a little loose and hanging. I sat down and he settled down, staying next to me, lying facing me. I was captivated by the way he looked and his young body. His penis was still flaccid, I leaned over to caress it. He apologized for not having an erection and he told me that he was nervous, he also said that this was his first time being fucked by a man and that he had been incredible, that he had liked it a lot. At 46 years old, I had had the honor for the first time in my life of taking someone's virginity. While we were getting dressed, I told him that if he liked it, we could do it again another day. Before leaving the house, he came up and kissed me, with his tongue searching for mine, I opened the door and he left. Should I do it again? Until now this game with other men was just that, a game. This boy has something that attracts me. On the one hand he scares me and on the other hand he excites me

Hey,
So I just want some unbiased feedback from people regarding if my cousins were abused growing up. They both would insist they weren't, but the older one (27F same age as me) is currently in rehab for alcohol abuse after her 3rd DUI after moving across the country to California by herself. She's made a LOT of bad decisions over the years but she used to be my best friend when we were younger... I know she's suffered from ana/bul for a long time and had a miscarriage when we were 13. She has openly had issues with her dad (my uncle) since we were teens, but has verbalized for the last few years on and off that "nobody cares about her" and "her family treats her like shit"...
My younger cousin (24M) I currently live with and love to absolute pieces but he's also been through a lot. His parents kicked him out during covid at the age of 20 with no job because they were moving almost 2 hours away and wanted to live child free. I've expressed many a time how shocking this was to my cousin when he told me about it and it severely changed my overall outlook on my aunt and uncle. He couch surfed for years off and on until I was able to get him a job working with me and he was able to move in with me and my best friend. We've lived together for over a year now and things were overall happy but recently he's been dealing with a lot again. My best friend and my cousin are both queer and a messed up situation occurred on the Grindr app between the two of them, but long story short my best friend ended up coordinating a voyeur event involving my cousin.
This has caused shock waves throughout the house obviously and my cousin has every right to be extremely upset. After a lot of confusion, some things were cleared up from the extra person that was involved with this and it was proven that my best friend did not touch my cousin. This does NOT change the fact that the entire situation was effed up and orchestrated, but I do believe with intense therapy for both of them that something can be worked out...
However, I also do not believe that with all of the stuff going on with my cousin that he had any right to lash out at me in the car for explaining how I feel like our coworkers are harassing me at work. For context, my cousin is into edgelord dumb alt right style comedy and likes to make transphobic, homophobic, racist, etc jokes at work sometimes. The trade field I am in is almost all men, and I am one of two women in our whole shop. There were more before, but after the last one quit for a different job, all these jokes have just gotten SO much worse. I constantly feel like I am getting egged on for my reaction, one example was last week i was told I should "get stung by a bee for the experience" after talking about how my grandma was deathly allergic. This kind of things been happening almost weekly since January and I vented to my cousin in the car ride home (I give him car rides almost every work day) and he just absolutely blew up on me.
He screamed about how I need to "Get the eff over it", how he has to tell me like it is because when I get upset it ruins the whole vibe for him and he just wants to have fun at work. I told him that edgy jokes are fun when theyre NOT pointed directly at someone and he just wouldnt put himself into my shoes and continually told me to get thicker skin. There was a lot more that was said but long story short, he basically cannot accept that he could be wrong in this situation and even if it was all jokes, if it hurts someone its not worth making them.
I know that's how he was raised, his dad specifically gives no effs about equality, "woke culture", etc and they've always been VERY well off their whole lives so my cousins feel that anybody who has trauma or gets upset about "little things" need to suck it up because that's what their parents told them. My uncle still calls depression "the dark place" I do know that he's currently in therapy but I fear that the damage to his kids is too far gone. My dad (my uncle's brother) died in 2010, and my mom is a single mom whos been working at a grocery store for 41 years but can still find time to love and empathize with her child. She was also very upset to hear that my cousin was kicked out during covid and she bought him a queen size mattress to sleep on while he stayed at her house with my sister for a few months before moving in with me.
I just want to know the best way to move forward with my cousins. The older one in California I fear is a lost cause, she's been told to move back home so many times and she just wont... The cousin that I live with didn't come home last night after our blow up because I texted him setting my boundaries going forward (not allowed to use my coffee and no more rides to work) and texted back shooting off things to hit below the belt (like my weight, how I am "rotting" because I dont go out and see friends every night like he does, etc.) I want to be there for him because of all the things he is going through but I also need to protect my peace.
Thoughts?

Name: Kole
Age: 21
Height: 6'1
Weight: 225 lbs.
Species: Unknown
Quote: "When in doubt, use excessive violence."
Background: Kole just kind of showed up in the multiverse one day, and no one really questioned it.
Physical Description: Kole is a Caucasian male with brown hair and dark purple eyes. He has several scars all over his body, including a large vertical slash on his chest and several cuts on his face.
Kole wears a purple hoodie, a dark blue shirt underneath, black pants, and brown combat boots. He also wears a pair of black fingerless gloves and a purple bandanna that he uses to hide his mouth area.
Powers/Abilities:
Superhuman Physical Characteristics
Flight
Teleportation
Telekinesis
Telepathy
Force Field Generation
Regeneration
Shape-shifting
Elasticity
Fire Manipulation
Ice Manipulation
Water Manipulation
Earth Manipulation
Plant Manipulation
Energy Manipulation
Electricity Manipulation
Air Manipulation
Toon Force
Time Stopping
Transmutation
Hammerspace (via hoodie pockets)
Arsenal (Standard):
Broadsword
Katana
Axe
Pickaxe
Spear
Bo Staff
Duel Hatchets
Bowie Knife
Switchblade
Shield
Mace
Pistol
Shotgun
AK-47
Rocket Launcher (different types of rockets will be covered lower down.)
Sniper Rifle
Grenades
Molotov Cocktails
Cryogenic Grenades
Poison Gas Grenades
Stink Bombs
Smoke Bombs
Electric Grenades
EMP Grenades
Sticky Grenades
Cluster Grenades
Hallucinogenic Grenades
Arsenal (Futuristic):
Blaster Pistol
Fireball Gun
Freeze Ray
Acid Sprayer
Charge Gun
Spread Gun
Homing Gun
Beam Rifle
Rockets (for Rocket Launcher):
Incendiary Rockets
Cryo Rockets
Electric Rockets
Homing Rockets
Splitting Rockets
Acid Rockets
Nuclear Rockets
Arsenal (Fictional):
Mega Buster
Keyblade
Master Sword
Various Minecraft Potions
Known Pokémon Moves:
Fire Blast
Electro Ball
Icicle Crash
Hydro Pump
Solar Beam
Hyper Beam
Shadow Ball
Dark Pulse
Fire Punch
Ice Punch
Thunder Punch
Bullet Punch
Mach Punch
Swords Dance
Iron Defense
Agility
Dragon Breath
Dragon Claw
Swift
Energy Ball
Feats:
Saved his world several times.
Can casually dodge lighting.
Dodged lasers with his back turned.
Destroyed a large chunk of a mountain.
Blew up a planet sized asteroid.
Alongside his sister, Autumn, destroyed an evil sentient star.
Comparable to Anthrax, who could destroy entirely galaxies.
Weaknesses:
Lacks any formal combat training.
Tends to underestimate his opponents.
Weapons can be stolen from him.
His hoodie is the source of his powers, meaning he will lose his powers when it is destroyed.
Usually rushes in, guns blazing.
(Sorry for the lack of art, but I can't draw to save my life.)

Hi everyone!
Last February I was around 250 lbs (114 kg). In one year I lost 65 lbs (30kg) and finished cutting around 185 lbs (84 kg), because the progress became a lot slower and I did not want to go below 1 800 kcal a day.
For the past 2 months I started to slowly up my calories every week and I am currently at my maintenance, eating around 2 500 kcal a day.
Right now I am at 190 lbs (86 kg) with a height of 6’2 (188 cm) and my body fat is around 20%. I feel great in the gym, I got back to my former strength, in fact, I am even stronger than I was before. I can see a lot of muscle definition and vascularity on my arms, chest, shoulders and even some on the abs.
What do you guys think I should do now? Go on a lean bulk and gain back the muscle I lost during the cut? Go on a cut again to lose more fat before the bulk?
Thank you in advance for your tips!

To give a little background, my (42f) last long term relationship ended after 10 years, three months before our wedding.
Everything was booked and planned and paid for. He picked me up from work one day and confessed he couldn’t marry me because he wasn’t in love with me anymore. There was no discussion, no attempt or willingness to try to work things out. It was just done.
I was broken. After that, once I started to recover I found myself reconnecting with my childhood sweetheart. The more time we spent together the more we discovered we still loved each other. The problem was he was with another girl. I will strongly emphasis that at no point did we ever do anything physical with one another. No kissing, no inappropriate touching, nothing.
He strung me along for a year telling me how unhappy he was and they were sleeping in separate bedrooms and like an idiot I believed him. I know, I know. 🫣
Eventually I told him he couldn’t keep on having what I considered an emotional affair and not tell his gf. He agreed and went home to do exactly that.
Turns out (according to him), that he told her, she broke down and he decided to stay with her. I’m sure everyone else here is not in the least surprised.
After that I decided I’d prefer to be alone than experience the kind of pain and shame of those two “relationships” again.
Along comes my now husband (36m) We met online and bonded instantly. We met in person a bunch of times, flying to and from each others countries until I quit my job and moved to his to be together.
After a few years we bought a house together, then had a baby and then god married. We’ve been together six years now and have been so so happy. We joke about how alike we are and how we’re practically the same person just of the opposite sex.
He’s not perfect, neither am I but we’ve always made it work and we might disagree and snap at one another occasionally but we’ve never had a massive blow out fight.
I’ve been sick for a while and it’s made me depressed, I’m also not working because we’ve also moved to yet another country where I’m not fluent in the language and am six months pregnant with our second child.
Now here is the problem. We’ve grown distant, he’s stressed and tired, I’m stressed and tired and / or sick and our son is a wonderful, kind, animated little soul who has endless endless energy but we both have struggled with him because we don’t have the energy to keep up with him. He’s not got any issues that we’re aware of, nothing has been highlighted by his kindergarten teachers except a short tempter but everyone admits that he’s a handful due to his boundless energy, endless chatter and somewhat wilful nature.
I’ve started to feel as though my husband doesn’t love me anymore. He’s admitted he feels put off from penatrative intercourse due to the pregnancy and honestly that’s quite common. He’s also told me how he feels like he never has any alone time.
Either myself or our son are always home and he feels stretched thin and over stimulated. As a loner, I totally understand those feelings but part of me worries he’s also falling out of love with me.
He admits that a spark has diminished and he hopes it comes back after things settle down and assures me that he still loves me.
We have a friend couple who we’ve recently started chatting to more and spending more time with and we both seem closer to the girl of the couple. I’m finding myself feeling insecure and jealous that he may be developing feelings for her.
She and her boyfriend seem happy and committed. They’re buying a house together and she’s talking about wanting kids with him. But when we’re out or hanging out as a four she and my husband still seem to be more interested in what they’re doing than their partners.
She’s younger and a very giggly bubbly girl and I like her but I’m stressed and don’t have that same happy energy I once had.
I suspect I’m over reacting and hormonal from the pregnancy but I can’t get past these feelings and I’m now almost in tears some nights and actually cried the other night when I told my husband how I felt.
I know he won’t cheat on me but that doesn’t mean his heart won’t want someone else.
What can I do to get over my insecurities?
TL;DR I’m worried my husband has fallen out of love with me, based on my past experiences and probably pregnancy hormones. How do I work on myself to get over this?

I'm not joking it all,i have played higher ranks before when I got out of it,it seems like for every account I create I always get to diamond easily, usually with no losses,then I just get to diamond mmr and the most ape stupid actually braindead players get into my queue and I insta lose,I get into hard matchups that are unplayable,and my team is full of apes, I have played in high masters with a 80% win rate and have played against the past rank 1 challenger player in the start of a season, I think he has probably like 700 lp or something
I was actually smurfing. asf that time but now it seems like the cycle just repeats itself, I get a new account,I one trick Qiyana, get to diamond in one or two days and then I start losing because I get into hard matchups that I can not win lane no matter how hard I try or how good I play, and then I just try to do anything else but I am team dependent and I insta-lose
it's not a joke, at all.
I swear to god it seems like I get to play against better people in lower elo than in Diamond+ they have to be the most brain-dead people I have ever seen, in every single match I don't know what to do.
like that has to be actually so sad, one season I smurf so hard that I got games full of challengers, grandmasters mmr and then this season I am struggling to get out of diamond for every account I get because I am cursedo r something I am always in losers queue every single account I get,I don't wanna get to a good elo with a bad winrate account,I wanna get better than 70% if I get to masters/gm in any account again with a 50% and something winrate I rather not get there at all. that's it.

1330 Terran Front Fleet Time
On the Turinika homeworld, the first signs of unrest began to manifest like a wave, The broadcast of the most esteemed Tizikikoonazikiakakiatkata, Taratanti of the roost Kazatalak, openly performing the act of Kavsa had been met with shock. The last Taratanti who had voluntarily performed Kavsa had done so in protest of the treatment of the Kulorn caste, nearly two thousand years prior. It was an ancient rite, one that signified rejection of the greatest shame. Even more shocking than the act itself was the evidence that had followed it. Visuals of species, brought into the Conclave, not as migrant workers as had been believed, but as slaves, was met with an almost immediate attempt at censorship. This attempt failed spectacularly, mostly due to those who had been tasked to censor the information not only refusing to follow the command, but openly declaring that they had been ordered to do so. A situation that was already, as the humans would say, out of hand, spiraled completely out of control. Within only twenty minutes of the ending of Tizikikoonazikiakakiatkata’s broadcast entire cities entered a state of absolute anarchy. Two planetary capitals were stormed and taken by the furious civilian population, demanding the location of those who had been enslaved. The Turinika Armada, which even then was in the middle of a training session meant to prepare the fleet to withstand the Terran Front’s assault, began to cease operations. Within the hour, the entire armada would be recalled to the turnika homeworld. Those who did not take to the streets simply stopped whatever work they were doing and went to their homes to be around their brood. Images of Tizikikoonazikiakakiatkata with his stripped wings spread wide in front of the human fleet commander were on every news fed of the Conclave, as was the sound of his thunderous voice, and the wails of despair from a turinika female that couldn’t be seen. Close ups of the human fleet commander’s face were shown, with analysts remarking on the shock, horror, and sympathy. Since the outbreak of the Seventh Orion War, the female human known as Simmons had been reported to have made several threats towards the turinika, she had quickly become seen as a warmonger, ready to take revenge against the turinika for refusing to go to war and violate their principles of pacifism. Now the images of her lunging forward to stop the violation of Tizikikoonazikiakakiatkata’s plumage, the agonized expression of her face, and the true reason for her threats against the turinika were rapidly reversing her image. On far flung deep core mining stations and agricultural stations, on deep space stations dedicated to material processing, and in other areas hidden from the sight of the normal turinikan population, overseers and taskmasters felt their hearts run cold at the knowledge that very soon, their part to play in the willful enslavement of another species would be known to the wider Conclave. As the data package transmitted alongside the broadcast were fully decompressed and the scale of the Conclave’s government’s involvement was revealed, the entirety of the Conclave itself was teetering on the verge of absolute pandemonium. The image of a member of the kolra species, from the look of it barely a hatchling, quickly was becoming the face of the entire incident. The picture was absolutely damning, and the sight of the image had sent any who saw it instantly into contorting and painful displays of shame. The young kolra was sprawled on it’s stomach, looking to the one taking it’s picture with eyes that had no life in them. It’s shell covered it’s back, and despite the age of the kolra it was already dulled and scuffed. The foot pressing down on the shell was unmistakably familiar to those who saw it, the clawed feet of a turinika. Within the hour, billions of winged figures stood in streets, the normally soft spoken and passive species demanding action, demanding justice, on the hundred worlds of the Turinika Conclave. The bulk of the Taratanti caste, most of whom had been left in the dark of the truth of the situation, quickly went public with their own declaration of outrage, and the eyes of the entire species turned inwards to the mountainous homeworld of their species.
Hakuri Watanabe looked down at his helmet before putting it on his bed, the stylized SEVEN seeming to stare at him. He sat down in his chair and picked up a small cloth from his buffing kit. No one knocked on his door, in fact, mostly he and the rest of his squad were left alone before a major operation. They were just given their time, time to mentally prepare. Some of his squad would go over their mission briefing, some, like him, would spend their time doing something to relax themselves. Hakuri always found that taking care of his suit calmed him considerably. Granted he could simply turn it over to the squads armorers to be tended to and they would do as good of a job as he could, but he preferred it to be done by his own hand. The symbol of a triangle was on his form fitting shirt, the symbol of his special operations command unit. He was known as a Myrmidon, but the official title of his unit was Section Three. He knew this, his superiors knew this, and as far as Hakuri knew, most of the Terran Front was aware of his unit’s existence, but past that, they knew very little about what he actually did. As far as his mother knew, Hakuri was a pencil pusher onboard the TFS Berlin, the troop mothership that all of his letters were sent from. He thought about writing her, but then again, he only liked to do that when he returned from a mission, not when he was expecting to go to one. If he tried to write her when he was waiting, he would just get anxious, and homesick. That wouldn’t do when he was dropping into a combat zone. That wouldn’t do at all. Hakuri instead started to buff his helmet, waiting for the word to come down which meant they were prepared to jump. A glance at the clock made him pause in his circular rotations. The clock said 1330. Operation Naked Sun was about to begin.
Tika was on his side, Kzia standing at the end of the medical bed that had been adjusted for his turinikan physiology. He felt cold in more ways than one. For his people, clothing was more of a decoration than a necessity, but without his protective plumage he felt the cold stabbing him through to his hollow bones. His diplomatic access was already gone, his privilege access revoked. He heard the broadcast for a preparation to jump, but he wasn’t truly listening. There was no question in his mind he had made the right decision. There was no question at all. One of the humans, a nurse, came to his side and gently laid a heavy blanket over him. The human’s hand lingered on his trembling body for a few moments before it was removed, and Tika glanced in their direction. The female was one of the ones who had responded first to the call for medical service for him, had heard what had happened and why. Tika had gotten very used to being glared at on this ship. He was hated, and he knew it. He knew he had deserved it. He was a party to the vral’s enslavement of the humans, the chua, and far too many others. When he had come to Thermopylae station, he had not even given that fact a single thought. He was born into power, being of the Taratanti. He belonged to the most powerful species and government in the entire quadrant of the galaxy. His people, while mighty, did not seek to use it. To him, they had simply been above it all. When the vral had approached him with the offer to sell captured species at first TIka had wanted to reject it out of hand, but a few had told him to go through with the sale. Such was the nature of this galaxy, or so he had believed. The weak were at the whims of the strong, and one’s place in the galaxy was determined only by the power they could wield. The turinika were not nearly the first to have taken a species and used it for slave labor, and while Tika did not approve of the deal, he had not fought it either. As he looked back to the wall, he remembered what the humans had taught him these last days. When he had arrived in Thermopylae he had assumed he would find the chua species to have been at the very least regulated to a subservient role, if not outright enslaved. Finding them sharing power was a curiosity. He had expected to be treated with all the honor and dignity that his station demanded, that the power of his government demanded. Fleet Marshal Simmons had disabused him of that, and had left him humiliated and shamed. As he had laid in the dark as Simmons had declared the Seventh Orion War, covered in his own filth, feeling as if at any moment he was going to be killed he knew true fear and horrific uncertainty for the first time in his life. He had never faced these emotions, these sensations before. He had always been in power. He had stood with the full might of the Turinika Conclave behind him. He had never known anything other than the superior position. Now, as he lay in the hospital bed, staring at the wall, he was ashamed of how arrogant, how blind, and how short sighted he had been. After he had risen from his own filth, he had desperately tried to convince his leadership of the strength of the Terran Front, how it matched or eclipsed their own. The Conclave was not the unchallenged power in the quadrant anymore. The terrans, the human and chua, had somehow defied fate. They had not fallen to the vral after ninety years of near constant conflict, and now if Tika was right they had come out of it nightmarishly stronger than before. Tika had actually begged to be heard by his superiors, and he had never come close to that once in his life. The chua homeworld however, had fully broken him. If he had not been on the Antares, had not been humbled beforehand, he knew that he would have just clapped his hands together and said that it was delightful. As the transmission from the chua homeworld had come in, and the rescue effort had begun, he could only wallow in his own shame. He had profited directly from the chua’s suffering, the human’s suffering. Again he had tried, and failed, to convince his people, and again he had failed. Being on the Antares, for him, was torture. The lights were too dim, every human and chua looked at him with nothing more than loathing and contempt, his entire worldview had been shattered from the way he viewed the galaxy to his own place in it. Every time he closed his eyes he saw the shadow of Simmons standing over him, her voice cold with a lethal rage, hearing her voice echo in his mind, seeing the glint from flashes of light shining in her eyes. ‘We Know.’ echoed in his mind in his sleep, the voice of the terrifying Fleet Marshal transforming into the sound of a vengeful god demanding compliance and promising retribution. Then he had watched the humans and chua, who he knew were preparing to go to war with his people, celebrating the return of the shesvie. Once more he had expected them to be integrated into the Terran Front, but as soon as he learned Simmons offer to them, and what it had entailed, he had been called to his room to answer the latest message from his people. Once again, his people had doubled down, the knowledge of the enslavement of the humans had been suppressed, and once more Tika found himself, and his people, standing against a Terran Front that had every justification to declare war, to right the wrongs that had been done to them. All the while, he knew something else. He knew that, after everything he had seen, that his people would lose. The turinika had not been to war for nearly two thousand years. His people were not ready for what the Terran Front could do, and after seeing what they had done to the vral so far, he knew his people were not ready for what the Terran Front would do. He was afraid of the dark. Tika was absolutely terrified of it now, because now he knew the monsters were real. Simmons had shown him that, but the humans, the chua, they were not the monsters. He was. He had refused to be one any more. He had announced his intentions to his staff, who had squalled in rejection, all but three. Kzia was the first to step to his side, Kikumot and Tziki had stepped forward as well. Never, in his most nightmarish dreams, did he ever think that he would stand in front of Simmons and voluntarily have his plumage stripped from him, performing the act of Kasva. He never thought that his staff would have ever compiled and transmitted the data package they had sent. He had never thought that he would betray his people, if only to save them. Simmons had changed that, the humans had changed that. He knew the terror of the dark, he knew fear for his people’s safety, he understood the horror of war, and for the first time in his long life he could truly look back at every interaction he had had, with every species, that had asked for help in their struggle for survival against the vral and truly understand their fear and desperation. Now he lay, his plumage stripped from him, his station revoked, his status removed, surrounded by a people who despised him. He wouldn’t have it any other way now. He knew that they would listen now, if not to him, then to the civilian masses of the Conclave that would not stand for what they had done. He prayed to the Great Mother often now, shivering in the dim light, hoping that it would be enough. He had been wrong, and in his error he had sullied his own people. He had made them complicit. Even now, he did not know how they would ever be forgiven, because right now he wasn’t quite sure he could ever forgive himself. As he heard the broadcast calling out on the ship, announcing one minute to jump, he felt a hand on his side, and looked up to the human nurse. She was smiling at him. Not a smile born of malice, or anger, but a genuine smile. She patted his side lightly, then turned to walk out of the room. For not even the twentieth time since he had come onboard Thermopylae, he was mystified by these people.
The bridge of the Dhampir was thrumming with music and the vibrations of the reactor and Conrad leaned forward in his chair mount, his eyes almost feral as he looked at the empty space that was the mandeville point. He was positively chomping at the bit. Batz was positively roaring the lyrics to the song that was blaring over the ships speakers. Rev and Dev sat side by side in their mounts, throwing their hands up in time with the pounding bass beat of the sound. Towns was the only one besides Conrad that was quiet, both of them looking towards the mandeville point with complete impatience. Conrad felt like jumping from his skin. Fidget, well, fidgetted, holding his hands over his headset and listening as if he were trying to hear secret messages in the music. They were ready, their pulses were racing. The crew of the Dhampir was positively vibrating. Conrad looked to the shipboard clock, seeing 1330 displayed, and his head snapped to Fidget, waiting for the word. They were going to run, they were going to chase, they were going to hunt.
Vicky sat back, looking towards Jess and Kukat as they slept. Jess was in her chair, Kukat in her medical bed. Vicky glanced back at the block print on the paper and read it for the fifth time. She read the individual lines, one at a time, cursing their existence. After reading through the message printed she let her hand hang again. Kukat would be released from medical tomorrow, and both her and Jess still thought they would be boarding the Thumper to join the Vellacore once more. Jess had talked non-stop about her quarters on the Vellacore the past few days, how she just wanted to be back in her room. Kukat was equally excited. Only Vicky didn’t share their excitement. They didn’t know yet. They didn’t know about their battlefield promotions, they didn’t know about their reassignments, they didn’t know the days of them working together were functionally over. Vicky looked down at her hand holding the paper again, and felt like crumpling it. She had lost her crew. She had lost them not due to negligence, or time, she had lost them to fame. Kukat was to be promoted to ensign, and was to be the sensor officer on the destroyer Hadrian, Jess was getting the same promotion, her station on the cruiser Victorious. Vicky? She was the sparkling new commanding officer of a destroyer that was arriving at Thermopylae in two days, the Quarrel. She never wanted this. She had turned down promotion after promotion that would take her from the cockpit of the Thumper, away from Kukat, away from Jess. She wanted to serve in this war in her own way, as a pilot, with the two who had made her life so enjoyable. Now though, they were to be split up, and there was nothing she could do about it. These promotions hadn’t come from simple seniority, they had come from High Command, as had the orders. Tomorrow, when Kukat was released, they would be ushered into the hanger bay of the Barrowmore. They would all three be awarded the Star of Terra, then they would be reassigned. Tonight was the last night they would all be together. Vicky wanted to wake them up, she wanted to tell them, to give them a chance to process it. As she looked to Kukat and Jess she couldn’t bring herself to do it. She held up the letter again, reading the first few lines, then she felt the sting of tears in the corners of her eyes. She looked away, her heart panging with sadness, and stared at the wall. The clock read 1330.
Corporal Brandy was sitting on the small rack, with Janet Shippen sitting between his legs using his thighs as armrests. They were both dressed for the first time in the last few hours, both of them staring at the clock. This close to the reactors they could feel them beginning to spool up for the trip through hyperspace. When the news of the operation had come down they had elected to spend as much time together as possible, which Brandy had enjoyed to no end, and he had made sure Janet had as well. Brandy had even taken some time to reach out to his sister Victoria, a rarity for them both, as since they were children they were often barely able to speak to each other simply due to schedules. He had even told her about Janet, and although he hadn’t gotten a response from his sister yet he already knew what she would say. Janet nestled back against him, but he could feel her body was stiff. Neither of them knew what the next few months were going to hold. Their time together might be constricted, in fact, this might be the last few moments they were together for quite awhile. Brandy’s Ghouls were specialists, ship boarders. Chances are he was going to be extremely busy, as was she. He didn’t quite know how he felt about Janet, but he did know that beyond a shadow of a doubt he didn’t want to be away from her. Judging from how she was acting, she felt the same as him, conflicted about her relationship with him, but not wanting to be apart. He knew what he needed to tell her, that he had to get up, that he had to leave. The Ghouls were going to be assembled at 1345, ready to board. Her unit was going to be prepared at the same time, to begin taking on salvage. Her hands were like clamps on his legs, and from how tense she was, he wasn’t going to get up until she was good and ready. The clock on the wall switched to 1330. He stared at the clock, feeling like the clock was mocking him, when suddenly Janet leaned up and turned. Her hands took hold of his shoulders and she threw her body against his, her lips finding his own. Her arms wrapped around her frame and he tightened his grasp on her.
Simmons spread her hands over the panel in front of her, looking at the table. Seven points connected the recently reclaimed chua space to what was former Shesvie territory, and beyond that, the heart of the Vral Empire. Her lip curled in a wicked smile, On the digital display of the table the hyperspace lanes, and more importantly, the avenues of attack her fleet was preparing to take. She held out her hand, all five fingers splayed over the lanes, envisioning the war as it stood now. The war to come. Seven hyperspace lanes, seven systems, branching out into sixteen, branching out again to another twenty. The Antares herself was going to link up with the Barraki, and was set to simply plough through the next five systems to do so. Slowly she tightened her hand into a fist as she looked along the hyperspace lanes, seeing task forces lined up and ready to jump. Drones had already been sent through. The vral had forces along the border, but nothing that could withstand what was to come. Her fleet was ready. She was ready. The Seventh Orion War was at the end of it’s first month, and had taken back six systems. The first moves of Operation Naked Sun would double that and exceed it, then double it again. She had already given her speech, her task force commanders were ready. High Command had taken it’s time making this decision, and while she had railed against the delay that didn’t matter now. All along the front, individual task forces were joined into larger fleets, ready to jump into the next system and eliminate any vral defenses, but unlike now, they simply would not wait. Naked Sun was to be a lightning strike to cut off as much of the Vral Empire as possible, to deny them their own space, to imprison them on their own worlds. Task Forces were designed around three types of vessels combinations, Lighthammer Task Forces were comprised of corvettes and fast destroyers, the fastest vessels in the fleet, meant to take systems quickly, to devastate unprotected infrastructure, and to eliminate light resistance. Simply put, they were going to swarm into vral space, determine pockets of resistance, and move on. They were going to rip entire sections of vral space from them, calling in other task groups if needed. Thunder task groups were the primary capital fleets, meant to be sent into those pockets of resistance, and neutralizing them, joining with the Lighthammer groups if needed. The cruisers, carriers, battleships, they all belonged to these task forces. Her own task force was called the Nova task force, and it comprised only the Antares and it’s sizable fleet escort. Simmons glanced up at the clock, the time was 1329. She breathed in slowly, then unbidden the thought came to her head and she looked to the report from the two habitable planets that had been scanned by the drone cutters, the information having been relayed to her almost twenty minutes prior. She was not worried about the ground campaign, in fact a reserve fleet from Thermopylae would be the ones to escort the landing ships from planet to planet that her fleet left behind in it’s wake, isolated and defenseless from the wider Vral Empire. Fleet escorting was no longer her job, protecting ground invasions were no longer her job. Simmons was positively growling now, as her only job was to take her fleet and use it to rip the vral out of the stars. Still, the thought nagged at her. On both of the planets that her fleet was set to overrun, there were Vral ships in orbit. On the first, there was evidence that the Vral had been bombarding a small area of the surface, extremely similar in size to the hole that now existed on Zvitia, the planet that even now was being integrated into the Terran Front. In the second system it showed Vral ships in orbit, but whatever they were doing during the time they had taken the scans, whatever they were covering up, they didn’t seem to have gotten to it yet. On the radiological scan of the planet a massive bloom of electromagnetic energy painted a broad region of the planet blistering white. She had sent the images back to Earth, back to High Command, but no one seemed to know what was happening. The one thing that every analyst agreed on so far that was that whatever the blooms represented, it meant nothing good. She took another long look at the radiological scan, seeing the intensity of the radiation, and her lip curled in a snarl. She couldn’t think about that right now, but orders had already been given to notify her the moment that they had taken a planet that still bore the radiation signal. The vral were being damned fastidious about it though. She pulled her thoughts away from it, looking back to the hyperspace lanes. The slow grin entered her features again. She glanced at the clock. 1330. Her hand took hold of the receiver next to her station and she pressed the transmission stud, knowing that Hazard had already opened a channel to the wider fleet.
“Commence.”

Over the past 3-ish years, since he met his current girlfriend, my bestfriend of 10+ years has become distant. When we were in highschool, he had unofficially moved in with my family for roughly 3 years as some unforseen circumstances had arose in his life. He eventually moves out of state, back and forth until about 2021, he comes back permanently. Once he returns, he comes back to live with me and my girlfriend (now fiancée) of 2+ years. He meets his girlfriend a few months later, and suddenly our friendship is almost non-existent. I am completely aware that getting into a relationship, getting older, etc. comes with much less "friend time", however it seems like he always has time for other friends, just not me.
I got engaged 6 months ago, and recently had an engagement party to celebrate with friends and family. The few friends I have, I didn't really expect to RSVP, just because of how close we've been I figured it was just expected they'd be there, However, they all RSVP'd and showed up the day of... except for the friend mentioned above. No call, no show, from the one person not only myself, but my family gave everything for one the day of the biggest milestone of my life thus far. It's been about a month since the event, and he hasn't apologized or even reached out regarding this. I have reached out in the past over issues that have come up to express my concern that I felt as though our friendship was fading, but was returned with b.s. excuses and empty promises.
I guess that brings me to the question, am I chasing a friendship that is clearly no longer there? Is there a "best way" to handle losing your best friend? Thanks in advance for any advice.

I don't know how else to title this. I got fired three days ago and I'm having difficulty processing. I've been working in the childcare field for two months and haven't properly learned everything that I need to. I have all my licensing, a clean criminal record and a (ex-employers words not mine) kind personality. I am however extremely inexperienced.
The trouble started with my training. No one told me how or what to do. Most of the time I was just following my boss's exact on a whim instructions. If she told me to do the dishes, I would do the dishes. If she told me to do the laundry, I would do it. She didn't however explain how to do the attendance or how to calculate hours or fill out incident reports or any of that. I was trained in good prep and basic company policy and that's it.
I have anxiety and my boss was well aware of that as I specifically put it in my file and she took me aside and asked about accommodations. I said that I might have trouble interacting with large groups and older children. Despite this I was put in the out of school care department. I struggled a lot interacting with the kids and was really awkward despite my training. I did however improve after this was pointed out and this guy from upper management said he had never seen someone switch up so fast.
I got written up two weeks ago for being bad at the attendance sheets and was told I should cooperate with my coworkers and if I noticed a kid hadn't been signed out I should ask my coworker if they knew when said kid had left. This worked for the three hours after I got written up, but then my coworker stopped working for the company and they hired a new employee.
New employee is absolutely terrible at keeping track of the children. She spends her entire shift making crafts and never signs any of them out. I tell her she needs to and I'm going to lose my job if she doesn't help me. I'm trying so hard to get better at the attendance sheets, but I'm only getting one shift a week at this point. She doesn't follow company protocol, refuses to keep her radio on her person, condescends me a lot, says I'm young and just haven't worked for long enough. I bring this up to my managers and am completely ignored. They say new employee will get better with time.
Last shift at work I forgot to take my meds in the morning. That was on me. That was my fault. I tell my boss I didn't take my meds and might be more stressed than usual. She says she understands. I miss a kid on the attendance. My coworker says she has no idea when he left. This conversation happens in front of my boss.
I have a complete breakdown/crying fit because I think I'm getting fired (I was right lol). My boss takes me aside and tells me she thinks I would do better at a different place within the company and she'll get upper management to transfer me to a different department possibly working with younger kids. She says I'm too honest (about a week prior the company had overpaid me by like 1000 dollars and I told them instead of keeping it), and kind to fire outright.
So I go into my job the next week on the day I'm scheduled and they sit me down and hand me a letter. I get excited because my boss has told me that she isn't going to fire me. It's a termination letter. I don't know if she was lying or just didn't want me crying at work but here we are. I didn't react until after I had left the building but I called my girlfriend and started angry ranting because my boss said something that didn't turn out to be true.
My mom thinks it's entirely unfair to give me one shift a week and expect me to improve my performance, and everyone else I've talked to thinks this situation is actually bs