Venn diagram first grade

I smile and laugh, play, and joke around, but I also cry a lot, especially at night. I feel like a balloon that's been overinflated, ready to burst. I see no hope for the future, no motivation, no confidence, and no self-love. When I try to envision my future, I see myself stuck in the same place.
This started when I was 12, after 6th grade, and worsened at 14. Since I was 11, I've been babysitting my little brothers a lot. I love them and understand why I had to do it—my parents were struggling and working to keep a roof over our heads. It's not their fault, and I don't blame them. But for the past seven years, babysitting has been my daily routine. When my parents were home, they were either resting, spending time with my younger siblings, or doing family activities. Emotionally and mentally, I felt they weren't there for me. I never felt comfortable talking to them about how I felt. And I thought they had bigger worries than me, so I kept everything to myself but there was like three times were I’ve opened up to them . For temporary happiness, I turned to video games, the internet, and my dog. These distractions kept me happy for a while, but over time, they stopped working. I had no friends and stayed home all day. After sixth grade, I did online school for two years, which meant I spent my days playing video games, eating, and staring at screens. Without social interaction, I forgot how to socialize and developed social anxiety, insecurities, self-hatred, and no confidence.
I was isolated for two years, which severely affected me. When I returned to school in 9th grade, I couldn't make friends. I was always quiet, couldn't ask for help in class, and struggled to hold conversations. When someone talked to me, I got dizzy, experienced blurred vision, tunnel vision, and shaking. I kept my head down because I was so insecure about my face and body. Everything I'm typing is how I still feel.
When I was 15, we moved. For two or three months, I didn't go to school, staying in my room all day, watching my younger brothers, sleeping, eating, and browsing the internet. I was socially isolated again. When I finally started school, I met a girl who talked to me first. We became friends, and I felt a bit happier, though still insecure and sad. Eventually, I made three more friends, and we ate lunch together. However, as soon as I got home from school, my parents left for work, and I watched my siblings until late at night. This pattern continued, though they didn't leave as often as they used to. I had some alone time when two of my younger siblings started school, but I still had responsibilities, like picking them up from the bus stop and again watching them until like 10 or 11.
After more moving and struggling, we settled into a nice house, which I'm grateful for. But despite the change in living conditions, I still feel the same—full of self-hate, lacking confidence, feeling hopeless and unmotivated. I'm 17 now, not in school, have no friends, and feel worse than ever. I want to tell my parents, but I fear they won't understand, and nothing will change. No matter how many times my mom tells me to love myself or sends me motivational videos, I feel numb. Deep down, I can't imagine ever loving myself, feeling motivated, or escaping this hopelessness. I believe nothing will ever change. Am I wrong? Are my feelings even valid? Every single day, I deal with crying, fighting, and my name being called constantly. I can't do this anymore—it's overwhelming and exhausting. I'm bed rotting all the time, unable to take care of myself properly. I'm neglecting myself. Basic tasks like brushing my teeth, showering, and cleaning feel useless to me. Why take care of myself when I feel so low?
Don't get me wrong; I have days where I feel better and think I should take care of myself and dog, but those feelings only last a few days at most. Then I go right back to neglecting myself. I still get up to take care of my brothers, make them food, and clean up after them because I have to—otherwise, my mom would be upset, and I just don't want to hear it.
On especially hard days when I'm feeling more down than usual, I reach a point where I just don't care anymore. I won't clean up, though I still make food for my brothers because I would never let them starve. Other than that, I can't find the motivation to do anything else. Is this just me being lazy? Or is it something else? I lack the motivation to just do it. Are my feelings valid? I don't feel like they are. I don't know anymore—I just can't.
I feel so awkward around my parents and barely talk to them, especially about my feelings. It’s just never been that way. Three times, I tried to open up to them, but nothing changed. Instead, I felt like they were invalidating my feelings with comments like, "What do you have to be stressed about?", "When I was your age, I didn’t have anybody," "Growing up was hard; you're lucky," and "Depression isn’t real."
I'm grateful for everything my parents do for me and my siblings, but these comparisons to their past make me feel even worse. It makes me question whether my feelings are valid. Once, I told them I thought I had an eating disorder, and they just looked at each other, shook their heads, and laughed. That was me trying to open up, and it made me feel terrible.
I'm sorry if this seems jumbled; I just have a lot to say. I want to understand what’s going on with me. Are my feelings valid, or am I over-exaggerating, being dramatic, or having a victim complex?
Also I love my parents so much like I just wish things were a bit different and I’m grateful for everything they’ve done for us I really am I don’t want to seem disrespectful but I’m sorry if I’m coming off as disrespectful or ungrateful I don’t know.

I've been "shy" my whole life. Parents were alcoholics and one has major mental health issues. I was made fun of in school, called fat, the "ugliest guy in school," etc. Had a really bad teacher in grade 3 who berated me for talking in class and it messed me up quite a bit. At 13 I started abusing weed and that did me no favors developmentally and social anxiety wise. I was diagnosed with SAD about 16 or 17 maybe. The diagnosis made the effects worse in a way. I eventually went on meds. I believe it was Effexor but maybe not.
I never got a job when my teenage peers were getting them. My Mom was very lax about it and just told me to focus on school for now. Then we received an inheritance and the need for me to work was diminished even further. Of course I wanted to work in order to fit in but I was too scared to really try anything. I never thought about my future. I dropped out of school in the middle of high school.
I've had some close calls with jobs over the years. Nothing ever panned out or I'd quit my first day. I'm 40 years old and haven't had what I would consider a real job. I'm grateful to say I've managed to continue on financially over the years through a few chance means which I won't get into, but those funds are going to be gone in 6-12 months. I live with my Mom (well technically she lives in my house but same thing) and I can't stand it anymore. My life is just the same thing day after day. I don't hang out with old friends I lost touch with because I'm so ashamed of my life. But I need to...
I'm on meds and currently working through "The Shyness & Social Anxiety Workbook" and hoping with some effort it will help give me some relief from this horrible condition. I'm thinking of going to school to become an MDRT (Medical Device Reprocessing Technician) as it was the only short term course I could find that sounded doable with this condition, but even still I'm not so sure I can handle it. I just want change and GROWTH. I see everyone else around me actually experiencing life and I'm so tired of thinking about money all the time. I don't even care about money, it's just a tool.
If you're young, DON'T let yourself end up like me. Get therapy, read, expose yourself to the things life has to offer, try medication, hold on to the friends you may have, WORK whatever job you can and KEEP IT for as long as possible.

Hey guys so I am a first year music teacher in a tier 1 district. I currently move between 3 schools which seems like a lot (and it is) but hasn’t been too difficult for me to handle because of the way my schedule is.
That being said at one of my schools I have had constant issues with my space. I wasn’t allowed to put anything up because they needed to use my bulletin boards in my room. My space was constantly, for lack of a better term, pimped out and in some cases even when I was scheduled to be there I was pushed out. I would come to school some days with my room looking destroyed, garbage all over, chairs moved around and out of my usual arch, my speakers knocked over and chords (black and red that link them together) torn out, and I’ve gone through 20+ dry erase markers. I’ve been told it is my responsibility that this is happening because I should be locking my things up and overall it has been extremely frustrating with multiple documented emails and complaints to principal met with nothing.
I was just told in passing that next year I will not even have a classroom at all and will need to do music from a cart for the whole year. This year I teach 5th grade next year I’ll be teaching K4 at this school.
40 minutes of PK music 5 days a week with no classroom let that sink in
Being a first year teacher I’m trying to navigate how to actual put my foot down with situations exactly like this and really could use some advice.
Only 5.5 more days for me let’s see if I make it.

I feel too old to feel this way, i'm 18f and in uni. It feels so dumb to even be feeling this way considering I never even dated this person, just had a sort of off and on “talking stage” for most of the year. I was fine with dealing with things when it was just me suffering, and I could rationalize his actions in my head and I still do. But now he’s done things to other people and it affected my friends and family and I know that I can’t talk to him anymore. I want to be mad at him and I am but I’m not.
I don’t know how to not have him in my life, I talk to him all the time and I’ve told him things I don’t allow myself to speak about to anybody. I talked to him about my mum's death and he actually listened over giving platitudes or acting weird. He always wanted to talk to me and call me and it was reciprocated. He didn’t treat me like a freak when I was suicidal, and reacted in an actually helpful way when I told him about cutting. I don’t know if I’ll find someone like that again, I have so much in common with him and he was my person for so long I was just thankful to have him in my life. He’s the only person who has ever cared about me in the way he does and it just has to go now, and now I’m losing someone who I trusted with everything. I feel so sad and when I’m sad I’ve grown used to talking to him about it, and now I can’t. I got a good grade in one of my classes and I was so happy I wanted to tell him, but now I can’t. I don’t know how to cope with being alone in everything again. I have other friends, but nobody who is just mine, and I don’t know. I know I have to stop talking to him, but I don’t want to lose everything I had.
It’s even worse because he’s trying so hard to make it up to me but it doesn’t matter, everyone in my life is telling me to stop talking to him, they’ve been telling me this for a long time since the first time he hurt me. If I let things I know he’d let things go back to the good parts of before, but I can’t. I want to cut him off but I don’t. I love him but I don’t want to see him anymore, and I just wish none of this happened but I can only move forward, but I don’t know how to move on. How could I move on? Do I just put a space between us and keep the door open for if he gets better? Nobody in my life likes him and it’s all valid. Best case scenario is I just be friends with him without anything sexual or romantic, but is that even possible? We’ve tried but have never just been friends, but I don’t want to lose the person closest to me. What do i do.

I saw this movie when it came out but i cant remember if it was in the theater or on VHS, but i loved it. I’ve probably seen it 50 times.
I swear there was a scene in the movie when they are late where the teacher marks them down with an F on the grade sheet. Later on when their presentation is over he changes it to an A+. I have not seen this part in years. Anyone else remember it? It’s like the Jurassic park scene when Ellie grabs the leaf on the way to see the first dinosaurs. Haha.

When I was but a sprout of a potato I had a miserable teacher. We'll call her Mrs. B. I was in the first grade and around seven years old.
One day Mrs. B finishes up her lesson earlier than she anticipated and she needed to fill time until recess. So she hands out paper to each of us and instructs the class to draw a picture of the two people we love the best. Once we finish we have to have her check it off before we could go out to recess.
Context: My parents were never married and young when they had me. Recently, I had been trying to get them back together. In my little seven year old mind I thought this picture would be it. If I drew a picture that showed them how much I loved them they, in turn, would realize they love each other and we could be a family.
Excitedly, I get my chunky crayons out and proceed to draw and color as carefully as I can. It has to be perfect.
I wanted to put them in a field of flowers, but my flower skills were limited. Tulips and sunflowers. That was it and they were NOT good enough. Then I came up with the best idea. Heart. Shaped. Flowers. Pink and red ones. As many as I can fit. By the time I finished, recess had already started and I was the only one left in the classroom.
I sign my name on the back, put away my crayons, and walk up to get my smiley face stamp from Mrs. B. I'm so proud and cannot wait to show my picture to my mom and dad.
Mrs. B looks over my picture, turns to me and stone cold says, "there's no such thing as heart shaped flowers." She proceeds to rip my picture in half, right down the middle, and THROWS IT IN THE TRASH!! Mrs. B hands me a new piece of paper and says I can't go out to recess until I draw a new picture.
I am shocked. The kind of shock where you don't know what to say or do. I'm not even heartbroken yet. Meekly, I take the paper, sit at my desk and just stare at the blank paper.
Mind you, the only rule Mrs. B gave was to draw a picture of the two people we loved. No other requirements, no other instructions.
As I'm realizing that I didn't break any rules or do anything wrong I get pissed. It was like a fire was lit inside of me. This was completely unjustified and I was not about to allow that to happen.
I grab my black crayon and scribble a big black circle in the middle of the paper. I take out all of my anger scribbling as hard as I can. Making it as dark and angry as I felt.
Once I felt better, I calmly put my crayons away, walked over to Mrs. B's desk and SLAMMED that paper onto her desk. Before she has a chance to say anything I litterally skipped out the classroom door and down the hall to enjoy my recess.

Context: We are both 32, met on neopets at age 11, met in person at age 14, didn’t see each other again until 2022 but remained close friends online.
In the summer of 2022, I was going through the absolute worst part of my life. Early June, I went on vacation out of state, and though I was in a 10 year relationship at the time, I didn’t talk to my at the time girlfriend much. Our relationship was cratering because she was struggling with alcoholism and depression. I was trying to figure out a way to break things off in a clean way, unwind our financial and living situation, etc. During this vacation, we didn’t talk much. It was tense and frankly exhausting. Instead, every day, from morning til night, I was talking to my now ex. Mind you… I wasn’t cheating. I didn’t have feelings for her at the time. We were both just in a bad place - her dealing with the father of her 3 children cheating on her, and still living with him, me, dealing with a failing relationship I desperately needed out of. To be honest, most of our conversations were about work, where our relationships went wrong, and our kids. My son from another relationship ship is low functioning intelligence / autistic, which also caused a lot of issues - my partner at the time did try to accept this and be a mother figure but deep down, it was too difficult for her.
I get back home, and in the span of two weeks, my life fucking cratered. I’m talking about cinema grade levels of shit hit the fan.

1. My son burned my garage down to the studs while I was asleep - I had to run and pull him out of a burning garage, get my then girlfriend out of bed, and get our dog outside. We didn’t have a fire extinguisher so it was, so far, my closest near death experience
2. I was forced out of a company I co-founded by my 2 business partners, losing a 125k year salary, just months before the company was purchased for approximately 10,000,000 - my share would have been 10%
3. My at the time girlfriend went to a routine doctors appointment - a woman who struggled with alcoholism, has pcos and ovarian cysts, with what we were told an almost 0% fertility rate….was 7 months pregnant.

My son was held in the care of the local state children’s hospital for mental and physical examination. My home was in shambles, and the insurance company dragged their feet throughout the entire ordeal. I was reeling from a massive financial blow and loss of identity in a lot of ways, because that company felt like my life’s mission. My current gf and I split up, she moved out to live with her aunt, and it wasn’t pretty. I was so angry, so defeated.
I had a complete mental breakdown. I’m talking, I flew my mother in town to help with daily tasks. I couldn’t function. I lost about 30lbs, lost many friendships both personal and professional.
But this woman was there for me. She was a shoulder to cry on. She bore the brunt of my mental and emotional exhaustion and never pushed me away, never looked at me differently. We were drawn to each other during this time of complete fucking chaos, and one night, I hit on her. I threw out some bait, she took it, and we met up for the first time since we were teenagers.
We hit it off tremendously. It was like we hadn’t been apart a day in our lives. We both fell in love, quickly, as I began to rebuild my life, welcome a new child into the world, repair my home, work on myself professionally. She was there, through all of it, and she made it easier. I could lean on her, I could look forward to her, no matter what life had thrown me, I thought I had found my soulmate in this woman I’ve known longer than anyone. So, we started to date.
It was difficult in the beginning. She had to move out of her ex boyfriends house and get an apartment. This took a lot of time and planning because she was working a retail job and hadn’t been on her own in 7 years. This man was abusive, controlling, and eventually she managed to get an apartment with her mother to get away from him. He was furious that after a year of the two of them being broken up, that we got together. He wrongfully assumed I’d been in the wings all these years, which couldn’t be farther from the truth - he had cheated on her and she left him and refused to reconcile. It took a few months but she got an apartment. This was difficult for her, she left a nice area and moved to a low income area. She could only see her kids 50% of the time. Transportation was rough between both towns. It put a huge strain on her mentally.
I, meanwhile, did what I could. In the beginning I went out of my way to see her at every opportunity I could. I’d take her out to dinner often, visit her at work, stay over at her apartment. She’d come over to my house. It wasn’t easy - I bought my home just as Covid started to rock the housing market, and I had to land in a rural town. So we had 45 miles between us. I was also busy dealing with life without a live in partner, facilitating my sons care, and having my newborn 50% of the time.
But it was good, I thought. We got along well, it was electric, it was our escape. About a year into the relationship, the mother of my child had to move back into my spare room. She was struggling and I was not going to turn her or my daughter away in the time of need, it was not even a consideration. My ex understood, but acknowledged the pressure it put on us both mentally and emotionally - my house was now, effectively, off limits. This greatly reduced the time we could see each other. We’d go 2-3 weeks without getting together, with our only time between managing our schedules being maybe 2-3 hours on a random day, or a quick outing. Our relationship devolved quickly into a FWB situationship, and this is where the mistakes were made.
I didn’t see it at the time, but that’s all we really had. I was complacent and aloof, a little distant, and just… okay only seeing her every now and then. I think deep down I wanted more but it became such an insurmountable hurdle to put together. During this next part of the year or so remaining, she began to fall out of love with me. She told me that she felt like we were just FWB, stagnant, and going nowhere. She was dealing with depression, openly despising herself, and struggling to see a future with me. I realized that my complacency was to blame, but to a certain degree, she too was complacent.
Instead of voicing her concerns, talking options, solutions on how to build a life together, she sunk into her depression.l, and her feelings faded. I guess the how’s turned into why’s, and the what ifs turned into oh well. I do acknowledge I took on a huge responsibility dating a single mother of 3, but…. After learning these things from her the last few days, I realized.
I never felt like a team. We were together in flesh and bond only, we never discussed our future. We didn’t plan, we merely hoped. And we drifted away from each other, and in the end, it became too much for her to bear, and being alone felt like the best solution for her. She left me 2 weeks ago after bringing these issues to light. Initially I was devastated. I collected my thoughts and spoke with her last night.
I told her, I did want more, but I got comfortable, and so did you for a bit. We were stagnant because neither of us pushed the other forward. I wanted to be a team, I wanted to work towards something, but the opportunity just slipped through our hands. I begged. I pleaded. I told her, I’d do whatever I can to build a life for us. I own my home, it’s small, but it’s something. I can work harder, I can figure things out, I can work towards pulling together the things we need. I can be more present, more attentive. Because despite the both of us checking out to an extent, I very much still love her.
I feel and see her everywhere in my daily life. I cling to her, I dream of her, I long for her. I feel like the deck was so stacked against us, that we both bit off more than we could chew. But in the end, she didn’t want to keep trying, she didn’t see a future, and I’m stuck picking up the pieces and so desperately wanting things to work.
She told me to move on, to heal, to grow stronger and become a better person. She has no hard feelings, no contempt or regret. She just lacks the physical, mental, and emotional capacity to have a relationship, and that she doesn’t want to. But I still can’t shake the fact that I really thought I had found my person. I love this woman. I…. I wasn’t ready to stop. I risked so much, pushed through so much adversity to bring us together, but in the end, it just wasn’t enough.
It sucks. I’m devastated, defeated. I truly feel like life looked me in the eyes and said no, you are not good enough for this. I blocked her this morning because I realize she has made her peace and moved on, and that I will only drag her down, push her away, and erode my dignity at every turn, because I am still struggling to accept no for an answer. She didn’t cheat on me, she didn’t abuse me. We never fought, argued. We got along so, so, so well. She was the most important person in my life outside of my children, and I failed to show her that. And I feel in some ways, she failed me too. Because when it got hard, challenging, when it became time to work on life together, she got spooked, spiraled, and…. Gave up. She gave up on us.
I thank you for reading. It’s disorganized and insane because frankly I don’t know how to put all of this on paper. I’m going into therapy next month to revisit a lot of the issues I faced before her and to understand life after her and what went wrong. I have never felt a void like this in my life, there is a her shaped hole in my life and just….. this is just another level of pain.

Hey guy. My first midterm I did not good, 65/100. And I want to fail this class to retake it next quarter. My questions are: 1. Is better to fail the class or end with C? 2. Will fail grade be replaced by new grade (A or B)? 3. Are they allowed you to enroll the class that failed on next registration appointment or will I have to talk to department? 4. When I want to fail the class, do I have to talk to Professor I won’t take midterm 2 and final to fail class? 5. Any dismiss or suspend apply when I fail the class? Will department call me to talk or financial aid discipline/warning?
Anyone with experience before please help me more details. It gonna be my first fail class.

i posted this on the ocd forum but just joined here. wanted to get some comfort. i feel so ungrounded because my brain has been saying “no matter what anyone says, you are alone, they are fale, and everything is fake.”
here it goes!! :
Hi! I’m a 21F and have had OCD since about 8th grade. I also have Panic Attacks and Anxiety. I was on Lexapro for about a year, then got off in October. This is important because I’ve heard getting off can make anxiety and everything else 10x worse once you hit that 4-6 month mark. I have had a mix of Harm, Relationship, Religious, Existential, Health, etc OCD, basically my whole life. I also had a weird hyperawareness of being in first person, and everything looking like teeny tiny particles in 8th grade, not sure how it went away. I had a small period of time Freshman-Sophmore year of high school where I somehow managed to forget I had OCD?? Miss that tbh.
Anyways, starting about three months ago my anxiety started to SKY rocket. For context, my bf came back from a 7 month deployment, so that caused some weird stress/ excitement. I also had a VERY social life during, aka I was drinking steadily. It was during this I was getting off meds too, then fully off by December of last year. I had/ now have horrible panic, guilt, OCD, fear of living day to day because I had no idea what was/ is going on. I tried everything, cutting alcohol, confessing, vitamins, working out. The whole shabang. It never really went away. I had about one “normal week” because I had a super stressful situation occur that I think drew my attention away, but anyways, it came back full force and 10x worse. Basically, I have been in a constant state of derealization and hyper aware of my existence for the whole three months but SO powerful the last three weeks. Like WAY too aware. Here are what most of my thoughts are now: •••”Other people experience this too. What if I am the only real person though? So everything people say to help is fake and so are they.” •••’’What if I am truly alone?” •••’’Am I going to feel like this forever because I really don’t want to.” •••”No one else sees in first person and I am the only existing being.”
The first person view reaaalllllyyyy gets me and the thought of being truly alone, and everyone being fake. I get that that is just how it “is” but for some reason my brain isn’t taking that answer. I am so scared of everything now, of existing, of feeling this. I don’t get why it is happening to me. I know DR can come from high anxiety, and when that high anxiety started, I had just hit the four month mark of being off my meds. (Heard that anxiety symptoms after getting off meds can come back 10x worse after a while too) I just want to go back to being happy again. I’m starting back Lexapro soon (within the week) but I want this to go away. I want to love the life I had three months ago. Anyone else feel anything similar? Especially the fear of first person?
To leave this off, a youtuber who has went through something similar said this quote and it is me to a T. “I was so afraid of dying and death, but so unwanting to living like this.”
Also, I am doing ERP, plus starting that medication soon. I have been trying the acceptance of uncertainty and “so what?” thinking. I still hate this. I am a prisoner of my own mind, and existence. I used to love life and love and sadness and adventure and turmoil but it’s like a flip switched.
Help!!!

hi guys, after work today I was driving home and reached a stop where I needed to turn left. A little distance away, and on the other side of the road, there was a semi waiting to make a left turn as well. He was there first, so I was yielding to him. He didn’t go, though. So I waited a little more, and he still didn’t go. At this point, the person behind me was annoyed. So, I went ahead and made my turn. After I turned, he turned too. I slowed down and kept my distance so he could make his full turn without hitting me or anything. I just don’t know if that’s what I should’ve done. Anybody have any suggestions?
Here’s a diagram.
https://www.reddit.com3lviraWannab3/s/eMDkH9Ff3P

The dust clears revealing Gojo wearing a school uniform. Gojo greets Sukuna and tells him his uniform has been fixed and then hands a four armed jacket to Sukuna. Yuji says hello to Gojo and then runs off. Sukuna, now wearing his uniform, walks with Gojo.
They arrive at a school and head towards a classroom. When they enter they see Yuji, Megumi, Todo and Takada-chan are already seated. Sukuna looks confused and Gojo tells him that because of the accident they had during the Occult Research Club's field trip, they all missed the exams and now regardless of grade they are all taking make up exams in the same room. A teacher walks in, it is Kenjaku(as Yuji's mom). Kenjaku informs the students that any 3rd years who fail will be unable to graduate.
Last page is Sukuna staring at his exam with a look of horror while the narrator says that "for the first time in his life, Sukuna felt despair."

I have always been told im great with kids. I love babies up to age 9. I've had several daycare/ long term substitute positions with high praise from coworkers and managers. I truly enjoyed working at each place. So I got my MA in education.Got a teaching job right away. Great team, annoying unhelpful admin. Big struggles. I foolishly asked my principal for help and I was literally judged and scrutinized for the remainder of the school and the next (23/24). I had small wins but not enough to save me from NR. My license is ECE to 2nd grade. I want out but im not good at the "great transferable skills" everyone sees in teachers. I hate data collection. My scheduling was a mess. Im not good at differentiation on the spot. I have so many children with undiagnosed high needs and challenges I was crying from stress every other week. 7 out of 15 of my students fully exhibit very physical & verbal Neurodiverse tendencies and I cannot support or set expectations that work for all of them. One thing triggers another student and the emotional outbursts are nonstop.They take 10 mins each and they usually happen 2-3 students at a time over "hes looking at me!" " Shes laughing at me" "I was first in line!" (They have a set line order with a posted and predictable line leader job)
What the hell can I do on the same pay scale if my skills are best for kids? im too old to nanny. I am applying for more teaching positions because I need to pay my bills but I am afraid of what my lack of skill will do to another class of kids who deserve a skilled teacher. I can support a few kids but not a whole class. I feel awful and hate that I can see my failures in real time.

Just got done with finals and write on. My school releases grades the first week of June and thats when I will be sending out applications. Should I cold email attorneys at larger firms I am interested in? what do I say in the emails? I want to apply in a market I don't have any connections to (I'm from the South + went to undergrad +law school in the south and want to work in the midwest)
also what else should I be doing during this time (my summer job does not start till the first week of june)

I saw someone else did something like this recently and thought that I might have something to add to the discussion to help people figure out whether they think this program is right for them, or for people currently in the program to help them plan out classes.
My background is very heavy in statistics and finance (I'm an actuary), so my grounding in calculus, statistics, linear algebra, and business topics was considerably better than most of the other people I interacted with in this program. Conversely, I'm sure my programming skills were probably about average or maybe a little bit below compared to someone with a more targeted background towards those skills.
I started in Fall of 2020 and just finished up this month, Spring 2024. I started out just taking one class a semester and never changed up that plan, would highly recommend doing the same if you're working full time alongside; there's no reason to rush this program. I got a 4.0 GPA overall, although I never really stressed that much about it and definitely did not shy away from "harder" classes in order to bolster GPA. I did this to learn, not to get good grades. The classes I took, in order (my memory of some of the earlier ones might be a bit jumbled as so much time has passed):

1. CSE 6040 - I mentioned how my programming background was weaker relative to my mathematical background. However, reflecting on my experience in this class, it was probably still pretty strong. This class is focused on generalized programming skills, you don't really get into the analytics and modeling that much; it's more of a primer on things like functions, recursion, computer memory management, etc. It's been a few years, but I don't remember struggling with this class at all, and most of the concepts covered (object oriented programming, things like byte encoding, hexadecimal forms, recursion, etc.) were things I was already familiar with in another programming language (this class was in Python) or was relatively easy to pick up. From what I remember, the assignments were auto-graded and you had unlimited attempts, not to mention the fact that most of the prompts were to produce some predetermined result... and, as long as you were able to verify that your code produced that result, you got full points. I didn't miss a single point in this entire class. I believe there were "final exams" which were really just timed window coding assignments much like the homework, and you could do the assignments at any point during a 4-day window or something like that.
2. ISYE 6501 - This class was R-based and focused on basic analytics models. The material was much more applied than 6040. Similarly, the material was not difficult, and I was familiar with a lot of the basic models already (such as GLMs) from having worked with them in my job. The grading was done on a peer-grading framework; based on who anonymously is assigned your homework to grade, you can get someone who's a stickler for every point on the guide, or people who are a bit more lenient. I never really worried much about how things were graded in this class; yeah, I did miss some points arbitrarily, but nothing that made that much of a difference. If you generally put in the work and understand the material, your peers will recognize that. I found this a bit more interesting than 6040 because, rather than a deterministic "right answer", there was some more creativity implied here to solve each problem. There was a final project for this class where you walked through a hypothetical analytics problem and explained how you would go about solving it. I found this an interesting thought exercise and enjoyed this class. The pacing felt a little fast, as you basically had an assignment due each week, but the assignments were small. Like 6040 I found this class to be quite easy but I didn't 100% it due to the peer grading thing.
3. MGT 8803 - I almost applied to be exempt from this class, as my background intersects a lot with the material. The accounting and finance modules for this class literally did not teach me anything new. Supply chain was new for me and I found it interesting. I'm trying to remember what the other module was. I think it was marketing? I didn't like it. Overall I found this class quite easy for the aforementioned reasons, however I've heard from a lot of the other folks without business backgrounds that this class was pretty tough so take my opinions with a grain of salt. Taking this in the summer cut out one of the modules, normally there are 5 but in Summer there are 4. I figured this made sense to take during the truncated semester because I was unlikely to cover that much new material, and it turns out I was right about that. Each module lasted 2 weeks (I think in a normal semester it lasts 3) and has a timed multiple-choice test at the end. A lot of people didn't like this format compared to ISYE 6501 and CSE 6040; I'm not really sure how else this material could've been covered. This class was OK, the material is not really that deep but it's a pretty good primer on a large number of business topics.
4. ISYE 6740 - The first class I took that was actually pretty challenging, which makes sense considering the first 3 courses were just the basic core. This is pretty much an intro to machine learning as a discipline, and the first time I remember digging into academic papers that discuss some machine learning topic and attempting to recreate the results (this is something we did a lot in the more advanced classes going forward and incidentally now that I have graduated is probably one of the best ways to go about learning a new topic). I remember this class as having a format similar to ISYE 6501/CSE6040 in that you had large programming assignments to do, as well as open-book "exams" which were really just timed programming assignments. Assignments are not auto-graded; TA's review each one and thus the assignments have much more of a focus on explaining your findings than producing the exact expected output (unlike 6040). Some of the theory questions have you applying complicated matrix algebra rules that I'm not surprised a lot of people struggled with. The TA responsiveness in this class was pretty good from what I remember, but your mileage may vary. I remember getting 3 weeks to do each assignment but I also remember not thinking that was a lot of time, these assignments are very extensive, have many parts, and take a long time to get through. Like with 6040 I ended up not missing a single point in this class but I did find it difficult and spent significantly more time working on it than in prior classes, probably 10-15 hrs a week, give or take.
5. ISYE 6644 - I was familiar with maybe 50% of the material we covered due to my extensive statistics background, however I was not aware of the exact mechanics of random number generation or the concept of a batched mean, for example. I remember this class having several "check your understanding" quizzes that focused on the mathematical foundations. Didn't struggle with this much in terms of difficulty and found the material very useful. Setting up custom simulation environments is very useful and arena is pretty cool even if it's unlikely you'll ever use it. Some assignments feature similar tools in Python (simpy). There might have been some coverage of R in this as well, or at least the accommodation for people that wanted to use it. There was a project for this class, but you didn't have to come up with the topic on your own, you could pick from a list, and you could do your project on your own if you wanted (which, given the option, was always the choice I made, due to the inherent randomness in picking the right members of a group). However you can do a group project if you want.
6. MGT 6203 - The first of the classes I took that required a group project. I recommend you are proactive in putting together groups in situations like these, posting threads on Ed/whatever the forum is as soon as the class begins. My group was alright; not everyone in it was great, but we had enough going overall to make up for the weaker group members. The project has some arbitrary guidelines from what I remember - you need to put together a midterm report and video presentation that is no more than ~2 minutes long or something like that (if it's 2:01 you get penalized) and the final report is 5 minutes or less, and everyone in the group needs to speak. I honestly don't remember much else about this class, it was pretty forgettable, but not horrible. Not overall that difficult, another business class so a lot of topics I was already familiar with, but there was more new here than in 8803.
7. CSE 6242 - Another class with a group project. Again, I was proactive, and again, overall, my group was... okay. Some people who were really good, some who were... not. This class is characterized by a lot of assignments that are autograded, like 6040, but the assignments are a bit more difficult. Overall not that difficult with the exception of the D3 assignment, but that's more due to the fact that I'm not really sure how the autograder works for that; it tries to determine based on some internal structure of your html code whether or not you're fulfilling the requirements. I got a perfect score on all of the assignments, and they give you the chance to score over 100% on I believe either assignment 1 or assignment 2. A lot of people bombed the D3 assignment (I think it's assignment 2) but still did well in the class because it's not that hard to do well on everything else, so keep that in mind. This class does a great job of exposing you to a lot of new technologies, but there isn't that much depth to it. That's not really the point of this kind of class though, it equips you with the tools to explore things deeper if you so choose.
8. ISYE 8803 - I was a big fan of this class. It's taught in MATLAB but you can use Python if you so choose, you'll see in reviews of this class that you should really just use MATLAB since a lot of the sample code etc. is not in other languages, so that's what I did. However, they must've recently added Python and R code for sample solutions, so feel free to use what you want. MATLAB was interesting, there were parts of one assignment I also used R for (grouped lasso in R is a lot more straightforward). This class is all about high dimensional data and representing it in a more simplified and comprehensive way, think about something like sonar which might have datapoints separated by milliseconds and thus a very dense representation of a signal captured over a short period of time. After ISYE 6740, I found this to be the class that taught me the most up to this point.
9. CS 7642 - Taking this class in summer is kind of rough. There's 6 homework assignments that are autograded, similar format to CSE 6040. There are 3 projects which are much larger programming assignments for which you'll write papers explaining methodology, results, etc. These projects take a while, particularly project 3. I did well on projects 1 and 2 and decently on 3, although I spent the most time on 3 by far; it involves reinforcement learning to simulate a soccer environment and train agents how to play against an AI developed externally. The AI baselines are hard to beat, and I didn't manage to beat them, but I wrote a decent paper explaining what I did. The final exam for this class should be dropped as it doesn't add value to the class, people regularly score extremely low on it, the average score in the class was something like a 45%. I scored a bit lower than average but still got an A in the class because it was heavily curved. Reinforcement learning is a very interesting topic, though, and I would highly recommend this class as a primer on the material. It's probably a good idea not to take it in the summer, though.
10. CS 7643 - This class was pretty difficult but I still think 6740 was tougher. The material is extremely dense. There are parts of programming assignments that are autograded, but also short answer portions that are reviewed by TAs. Grading on those were pretty subjective. This is the only class I can remember really needing to discuss things with TAs to understand what was being asked a little better. Unfortunately, the TAs in the semester I took this weren't the best. They seemed more concerned with unintentionally giving away a bit too much information in any of their responses. I can understand this, but it came off as intentionally opaque most of the time. There was a group project for this course as well, and my group was excellent, probably the best experience I had with a group in this program. I can imagine how much this course would've sucked if I would've had a mediocre/bad group. Based on discussions with my group, some of the grading seemed highly arbitrary, with some TAs grading similar responses to the same question differently. Like I said above, though, I never really worried about this. I never once in this program ever disputed a grade, and I continued with that in this class as well.
11. CSE 6748 - Practicum and final class. For this class you get to choose between a number of pre-determined Georgia Tech sponsors, or form your own project for your own employesome external entity. It was a lot more work to do this, so I just went with one of the pre-determined GTech ones. I really enjoyed this one, I had constant communication with the sponsor as I developed my project and came up with something that I was quite proud of. I wanted to explore a natural language processing task, so I picked a project that I thought would allow me to do this, and was very satisfied with the result. There's a number of videos you have to watch that explain some overarching aspect of analytics that were pretty interesting as well, you can watch all of these in a single day and then focus on the project if you like. It's possible to finish the entire semester's work in just a few weeks, I was able to do the entire project and write the final paper in about a month's time, at which point I coordinated with the sponsor to tailor the work I did to a format that they would be able to implement for their business problem if they wanted to.

I can't comment on the job placement prospects of this program, as I just finished it and was actively employed the entire time I was in it. As an actuary there's not much this program does that my exam certification process didn't in terms of career prospects. However, it did position me much better within the context of the expanding role of data and analytics in insurance going forward, and also opens me up to similarly mathematical roles with a firmer grounding in big data and also some business elements (quantitative finance/data science roles). There were also things I learned in this program that I was able to apply directly to my day-to-day work. If you're considering this program, I would recommend you think about a few things:

1. I'm pretty shocked at how many people I saw during my program who didn't really think that much about why they're doing this. I get that the barrier to entry is low, but it's a serious commitment if you're actually trying to graduate. Most of the people who start this program don't finish, so consider whether you're ready to spend almost 4 years going to school part-time, or if you're able to double up on classes for some of the semesters. Most of the people I know in the program doubled up at least once, I never did but I was never in a hurry. If you must double up, don't make it your first semester. Dip your toe in the water, see how it is, and then reassess. But, above all else, think about why you want to do this, and use that as your guiding goal to bring you through to the end.
2. Something I tended to see pretty much without fail in most of my classes - a lot of the graduate students in this program spend way too much time worrying about minute, particular details that don't really matter. Maybe it was just my philosophy that I would probably never dispute a grade, or that I was never really that concerned with getting a perfect GPA, etc. but I was always marveling at what I saw asked in Ed posts. People would ask whether they could use a certain programming language for an assignment, what packages they were allowed to use, would post screenshots of bugs and ask for TA's to help walk them through it, etc. Generally, without fail, the TAs would respond along the lines of: use whatever programming language you want, as long as you can display your output/submit it in a way that we can verify by running ourselves, we'll make the effort; use the debugger to step through your code to find the problem; etc. Generally, in most cases, the assignments and questions are designed in a way to teach you something, to get you to realize/understand some pattern or data concept that has some underlying logic that makes sense. For example, the idea of saliency maps on image processing takes the 3-channel RGB color pixel shading representation of an image and condenses it into a single channel, and, as a result of that, loses some resolution in suggesting parts of the image driving a model result that might be different depending on the channel; i.e., an image with a very heavily blue-shaded part that detracts from a certain result, but with a red-shaded part somewhere else that increases the probability of the modeled result. This was part of a conceptual question on how saliency maps differed from other pixel influence attribution methods in Deep Learning, and is part of what you should logically understand since it reduces the channels of the image representation from 3 (R, G, B) to 1 (usually grayscale). I think people tend to run to the TA the second they have difficulty with something and don't stop for a second to think it through, one exercise I might recommend is to consider: if you ran into this problem out in the world and you didn't have a TA/managesome other authority figure to explain the answer to you, what do you think it might be? Does the answer even matter? If it still matters and you have no idea how to solve it, maybe then you can go to the TA.
3. In every single group project I worked on, we had an initial planning session where we determined the scope of what we wanted to do. For most of the projects, this was an essential deliverable in addition to the final paper. However, in almost every case, someone in the group was always playing some game of runaway scope where they kept on wanting to add methods/questions to exploration beyond what was initially planned in ways that I intuitively knew would be impossible to manage in just one semester. I often had to say something along the lines of "if we have time we'll do that" or "when we write up our paper, we can put that in the avenues for future exploration section" or something similar. It turns out that we never had time to look into these things, and our initial scope was usually well-defined considering the time we had. I'm not sure why this was always so front-and-center in my focus, maybe since I used to work in consulting and project budgeting/scoping is so unbelievably important in that context. Whatever the case may be, understand that you won't be able to change the world every time you do a project. Make some incremental improvement, reflect on the results, and then include some notes in a "potential avenues for future exploration" section. I was pretty surprised at how many people had so much trouble putting the pencils down at the end. I can practically guarantee that, for the classes where I did a project on my own, I probably did substantially less work than other individual groups for precisely this reason. In general, you probably don't have to do as much work as you think you do.

So, would I recommend the program overall? Absolutely. It's not perfect, I found some of the formats annoying - CS 7642 has no business having that final exam, it adds nothing to the class at all, is arbitrarily extremely difficult and the class is good enough and complete enough with the removal of that exam that its inclusion to me appears to be the result of some arbitrary quota somewhere. I also don't really like the group project format and profoundly disagree with the reasoning that GTech and most other academic institutions give as to why group projects are even good or necessary, however I do acknowledge that from a logistics and resource standpoint it's unmanageable to grade individual projects for every single person in a given class and group projects do decrease the number of papers that TAs will have to read. Considering the scale of what GTech has managed to do, and how many students enroll each year, I'm surprised the program is as well-managed as it is. Yes, it does require a lot of self-teaching, but in most cases you can actively engage with TAs multiple times a week if you're struggling with topics and from what I've seen they were very responsive.
Anyways just wanted to give my perspective as someone who just finished this program and still thinks it's worthwhile despite its flaws.

Hi! I’m a 21F and have had OCD since about 8th grade. I also have Panic Attacks and Anxiety. I was on Lexapro for about a year, then got off in October. This is important because I’ve heard getting off can make anxiety and everything else 10x worse once you hit that 4-6 month mark. I have had a mix of Harm, Relationship, Religious, Existential, Health, etc OCD, basically my whole life. I also had a weird hyperawareness of being in first person, and everything looking like teeny tiny particles in 8th grade, not sure how it went away. I had a small period of time Freshman-Sophmore year of high school where I somehow managed to forget I had OCD?? Miss that tbh.
Anyways, starting about three months ago my anxiety started to SKY rocket. For context, my bf came back from a 7 month deployment, so that caused some weird stress/ excitement. I also had a VERY social life during, aka I was drinking steadily. It was during this I was getting off meds too, then fully off by December of last year. I had/ now have horrible panic, guilt, OCD, fear of living day to day because I had no idea what was/ is going on. I tried everything, cutting alcohol, confessing, vitamins, working out. The whole shabang. It never really went away. I had about one “normal week” because I had a super stressful situation occur that I think drew my attention away, but anyways, it came back full force and 10x worse. Basically, I have been in a constant state of derealization and hyper aware of my existence for the whole three months but SO powerful the last three weeks. Like WAY too aware. Here are what most of my thoughts are now: •••”Other people experience this too. What if I am the only real person though? So everything people say to help is fake and so are they.” •••’’What if I am truly alone?” •••’’Am I going to feel like this forever because I really don’t want to.” •••”No one else sees in first person and I am the only existing being.”
The first person view reaaalllllyyyy gets me and the thought of being truly alone, and everyone being fake. I get that that is just how it “is” but for some reason my brain isn’t taking that answer. I am so scared of everything now, of existing, of feeling this. I don’t get why it is happening to me. I know DR can come from high anxiety, and when that high anxiety started, I had just hit the four month mark of being off my meds. (Heard that anxiety symptoms after getting off meds can come back 10x worse after a while too) I just want to go back to being happy again. I’m starting back Lexapro soon (within the week) but I want this to go away. I want to love the life I had three months ago. Anyone else feel anything similar? Especially the fear of first person?
To leave this off, a youtuber who has went through something similar said this quote and it is me to a T. “I was so afraid of dying and death, but so unwanting to living like this.”
Also, I am doing ERP, plus starting that medication soon. I have been trying the acceptance of uncertainty and “so what?” thinking. I still hate this. I am a prisoner of my own mind, and existence. I used to love life and love and sadness and adventure and turmoil but it’s like a flip switched.
Help!!!

So my school just uploaded this edit with sorta sad music in the background of all the people graduating and making their final parade through the school in their gowns where they leave for the first time. Along with their parents saying their proud of them and even the principal saying congratulations to all of them. I'm in 11th grade, it hits different knowing that's gonna happen next year lmao.
Also this gonna be my last ever summer vacation in school (other than maybe college)

To start this story off, I suppose it's best to talk a little bit about myself and my experience in the TTRPG space. I've been an avid TTRPG enthusiast for almost two decades now. Yes, I'm a bit of an old hat/old fogey. I started my enjoyment of the hobby with Pathfinder 1st edition, eventually transferring over to DnD 5e when it first arrived on the scene, mostly because it was the new hotness, but I ultimately found that it was better suited for the type of games that I enjoy running at my table. While I very adamantly enjoy the structure that a game's mechanical rules bring to the table, 5e provided a rules system that wasn't invasive, and so me and my friends were able to focus on the things about the game that we enjoyed the most - the roleplaying, the storytelling, and (most importantly) the fun.
Many years would go by, as well as a couple of what I would consider to be successful campaigns - basically anything that managed to survive longer than 3 months. Scheduling, right? I digress. Eventually, I arrived at a point where my current circle of friends and I were itching to play a new campaign, and for the shits and giggles of it we decided we would livestream it on Twitch. At the time, we had managed to get affiliated on Twitch, and one or two of us would occasionally have a couple of viewers pop in when we were streaming whatever video game we were playing, and we figured it would be fun to do the same thing with our next campaign. So we did. As you might expect, nothing really ever came out of it. We were just doing it for fun. The campaign only lasted about 3 months or so, and we never set out with the expectation that what we were releasing into the world was anything amazing - we were just four normal dudes having fun playing a game we enjoyed, and if you happened to find yourself on our Twitch channel to see it, awesome! If not, cool. We weren't doing it for you.
So, yeah, that campaign eventually fell off, and we would eventually return to just streaming whatever video game excited us. One of friends got married, and had a kid, and was too busy for DnD. Another friend got a new job, and his schedule just didn't give him the time. Hell, even I managed to land a pretty decent job at the time, and I struggled to make time for our weekly video game nights, but I managed. But ever since that streamed campaign had ended, I had an itch in the back of my mind that I really wanted to scratch. I thoroughly enjoyed everything about livestreaming our campaign. Sure, it was nothing to write home about, but I fell in love with the showmanship of it all. Maybe it was because of the thought of the potential for someone to eventually watch it, but whenever we would stream, I would get in the zone and pretend I was putting on a show for thousands (even though we may have only ever had three or four viewers at max). Basically, I had fallen in love with the idea of putting on a show for others, and I knew I would jump at the chance to do it again in the future. Enter Wayne.
A little over a year ago (at the time of this posting), I was perusing through the /LFG subreddit and not looking for anything in particular, when I stumbled across a post that checked off all the boxes.
I don't like to admit that I'm picky, but that fact that this sub exists should give credence to that fact that one should, at the very least, have a criteria when looking for games to invest yourself in when looking at advertisements. And if my little backstory above should inform you, there were a number of things on my checklist that this post had. For starters, it was longer than a few sentences. Clearly, the person who posted this was meticulous about what they wanted and what they didn't want (I would learn, much later on, that Wayne was not the one who wrote the post, but one of his players). Secondly, the post was very adamant about what was of paramount importance at the table - rich and compelling narratives, deep exploration of characters, and a passion for roleplay. And thirdly, the plan was to turn this into a "production". The post even included a promo video of respectable quality. Clearly, the people involved with this had a plan, much more of a plan than my friends and I had when we streamed. And, I considered myself a pretty decent roleplayer, so I applied. They were only looking for 1 applicant, but I figured I had a decent shot, with my previous livestreaming experience, and the fact that I already owned a (what some would call excessive) microphone and camera. So I shot my shot. If I didn't get picked, no biggie, life goes on. But when I received a discord invite and told that I had made it to the second round of the application process, I was ecstatic.
It is around here that I should introduce you to our cast of characters (names have been changed, of course:

• There is, of course, me, Dave - a guy who fundamentally believes that fun and safety at a table supersedes everything else, who happens to really enjoy hamming it up in character, and telling exciting stories.
  
• Ava - an already confirmed player at the table, with a past experience of playing with Wayne. I would come to find out that Ava was the one who had written the LFG post. Ava was also in charge of Discord moderation, and the second round interview process. She has her own story, which I will allude to here, but is ultimately hers to share.
  
• Jelly - Wayne's significant other. Jelly was supposedly not involved with the upcoming campaign at all, but had a presence on the Discord, and have previously played in Wayne's campaigns.
  Seth - another already confirmed player at the table. Admittedly, Seth plays a minor role in the story, but his inclusion is necessary.
  
  • and Wayne - the lead character of our story. The DM of the upcoming campaign. The visionary. The guy who plans to have the next big thing in the TTRPG actual play space.

There are at least a half dozen other individuals involved in this story, but ultimately play very minor roles. If at some point while I am writing this one of them pop up, I will update the list above to include them.
Back to the story. I was ecstatic to find out I had been selected for an Discord interview and scheduled it at my earliest convenience. This is where I first meet Ava. To be honest, I don't recall much about the interview, but I remember it being pretty standard and what I was expecting an interview to be. Mostly it was just going into detail about some of the stuff I had included in my primary application and talking about expectations and goals. I was told that after the Discord interview, the next step would be a participation in a practice one shot, to get a feel for how I would play at the table. After the interview was over, Wayne hopped into the voice channel, and this would be when I would meet the man, the legend.
I pride myself on being very good at reading people. I can usually pick up on when someone is trying to sell me something, pretty quickly. I tend to over analyze words and expression looking for intent. I have been gaslit and manipulated several times in my past by people very close to me, and so I have developed this defense when meeting people for the first time. Very rarely do I take someone at their word, or completely buy what they are selling when I hardly know them, and even less so to a complete stranger. In this case, when meeting Wayne for the first time, my defenses failed me.
Perhaps it was because it had been over a year since I last ran a campaign. Perhaps it was because it had been even longer than that that I actually got to be a player in a campaign. Perhaps it was because of that itch of wanting to perform again for an audience. Or, perhaps, it was because Wayne was very good at pitching his plans. Whatever the reason, my first impression of Wayne was that this was a guy who had a plan, and had the means to enact that plan, and I wanted to be a part of it in any way that I could.
Wayne, you see, had two big passions in life. The first was DnD. The second, as he would admit, was being an entrepreneur. He owned his own business in New York City. One of several ventures he had pursued, and it afforded him a premium NYC apartment and the time and luxury to spend on his second passion - playing DnD. And so, he thought, why not marry these two passions together? He had a great head for business. And according to him, the last campaign he had run was fantastic. So fantastic, he thought, that surely other people would enjoy listening to it. And so he hatched a plan - he would use his business knowledge and savvy to launch a Youtube channel that would be home to his next great campaign. But he had the foresight, at least, to know of just how saturated the DnD actual play space has become in recent years. If he wanted to be successful at this venture, he would have to stand out from the rest. And he had a solution to that. He wasn't going to put out just any old DnD actual play. He was going to create "DnD Cinema".
To do that, he said, he needed the right people that share in the same core philosophies that he had. Namely, a "pretentious level of hyperfixation on roleplaying and narrative storytelling". Most other actual plays, to him, were playing "beer and pretzels" DnD. You know, the type of game were you sit around with your friends having a good time and a laugh, where you might spend five minutes on an out of character joke, etc. Shit like that wasn't going to fly in this campaign. When you came to the table, you were going to be in character from start to finish. And recording sessions were going to be seven hours long. Could I handle that?
And I admit that I told him I could. Like I said, he had a way with words. He was clearly passionate about it. And he talked a good talk. And he was friendly enough. So he said he would be in touch. And the wait began.
Over the course of the next month or so, I would come to become friends with Ava and Wayne. We would hop into Discord and play games, talk about the upcoming campaign, etc. It was going to be several months before the campaign actually began recording, and so Wayne was still conducting the interview process while also working on worldbuilding for the campaign. He was also spending over $3000 dollars commissioning an animated table for the youtube video. This was clearly something he was very proud of, as he took every and all opportunity to talk about how amazing and innovative it was going to be.
You see, in Wayne's vision of "DnD cinema", the videos that would be put up on youtube would not include the faces of the players. Or battlemaps. Instead, it would be animated table that he could manipulate in editing at various cue points. It would feature portraits of the characters that would light up when they speak. It was the next big thing in the TTRPG space - a (frankly) audio only experience that was accentuated with the occasional fancy animation that cost thousands of dollars. No one else was doing it, he would say, and that would help him stand out even more.
It was also during these more innocent days that I would come to understand Wayne's obsession with Brennan Lee Mulligan. He idolized the guy. In fact, he would brag on multiple occasions that his significant other's job had her 3 or 4 degrees removed from Brennan - basically, she worked for someone who worked for someone who was involved with the Dungeons and Drag Queens season of Dimension 20, and he would often mention how he was hoping to use that connection to someday have a sit down and meet and greet with BLeeM himself. As time would go on, I would eventually find out that Wayne actually considered Brennan Lee Mulligan as his competition.
About a month would past before I would hear anything about my application. I never brought it up during our gaming sessions, as another core tenet of mine is that I don't want my friendship or acquaintance with someone to give me an edge over other candidates. I want my experience and what I bring to the table to stand on its own merit. This will come up later in our story. Eventually, I would get a message from Wayne asking me if I would be interested in participating in a try out one shot for the campaign. Apparently, he had completely forgotten that I had applied, and wanted to schedule in a last minute try out for me. My fellow players during the one shot would be Ava, some other member of the discord community, and Jelly.
I'll be honest, the one shot was nothing to write home about. And even Wayne would admit it was something he threw together last minute so that he could say I had my chance. I immediately found Ava to be a fantastic scene partner, and even for a one shot, put the time and effort into her character and actions. Jelly, on the other hand, was not that good. To be fair to Jelly, my criteria for grading her performance was strictly on the curve that Wayne himself said he was grading people on. I found her to be a very selfish player, who failed to pick up on narrative cues, and was solely focused on her time in the spotlight. But it was a trial one shot that didn't mean anything. My biggest take away from Jelly was that she was a player that I would not enjoy playing with in the future, and that I wouldn't seek out as a player at a table that I was DMing for. Not horror story bad (yet), but not good. Average.
When the application process was done, it would eventually come down to two choices. I was one. Wayne loved my southern twang, and thought it would sound good in a production. And we had become friends. The other was someone with a theater and acting background, who had been to Julliard. I was not selected. And I was okay with that. The decision did not impact my friendship with either Ava or Wayne, and we continued to hang out and play games together. I then learned of Wayne's new plan.
In the original posting ad for the campaign, it had been mentioned that a possibility for guest character appearing in the campaign could happen. The original idea was that, as members of the Discord community would play in one shots, Wayne would then be able to invite stand out performance to appear in an episode or two of the new campaign, as a gift to the community and to give those players a chance to play in a campaign with other players of similar caliber. This all changed as the months got closer to release date. The idea for guests at the table changed completely. Instead, Wayne's plan was to use the guest spots at the table as a networking opportunity. Don't forget - Wayne is an entrepreneur. This was a business venture for him, and successful businesses need to show growth. And he wanted to achieve growth at an accelerated pace. The plan was simple - as the channel grew, Wayne would scour the internet for similar channels with slightly higher subscriber count than his. Well, I say Wayne would do this. Wayne would actually pawn this off on to someone else. A tangent that I will perhaps need to touch on later in this story - Wayne was very good at finding ways of pawning off work on to others, and then taking the credit. He very much believe himself to be a manager, and other members of the Discord that showed any interest in the success of this venture as his employees. He would then engage in communications with these other channels in the hopes of achieving some Quid Pro Quo. You send someone to be a guest on our channel for a few episodes, and we'll shout you out. In return, he would send someone from his channel to theirs, and get a shout out in return. Something to note here - all of this was done without ever including his players in the discussion. He was offering them up to strangers without even asking if they even wanted to do that.
Time passes, and eventually recording for the campaign begins. It would be about two months into recording when Wayne approached me about being the first guest character. (At this point, I had been an active member of the Discord community for over six months now). He wanted me to be the first guest character for two reasons. The first was because I was familiar, and he wanted to test out the format before bringing in strangers. The second was because of my prior livestreaming experience. I was a part of an affiliated Twitch channel that met the criteria of having a slightly higher subscriber count than his. But for the most part, our old Twitch channel was dead. Sure, we still streamed games into the void, but there was practically no engagement. And I told him so when he asked me if I wanted to be introduced as someone from that Twitch channel. I was more involved in his community as that point, anyway. And so, I finally got what I was wanting - to sit down and play quality DnD with like minded individuals for the purposes of entertaining others.
At this point, only a handful of episodes had aired. The recording schedule had them a grace period of a month or so before release, and I admittedly hadn't watched them. Honestly, I wasn't that interested. I don't know if that's bad or not. There are a lot of actual plays out there of varying quality. And each one requires a lot of time commitment to watch. Already I was regularly watching Critical Roll, and I was having a hard time to find time to watch some of the other really good shows I was enjoying, like Dimension 20 and The Glass Cannon. On top of that, it was an game that I wasn't a part of, so yeah, I admit I hadn't watch any of it. But even if I had, it wouldn't have prepared me for what playing at the table was actually like. The released episodes were highly edited, with sound effects and music. It wasn't until I became actually involved at the table that I would find out just how manufactured the game actually was. And I use the word "game" very generously.
For starters, once recording began, all out of character talk and banter was immediately and explicitly forbidden. We were to remain in character at all times. Secondly, I would find out that Wayne had developed a "formula for success" in regards to time spent recording. No scene would ever last longer than ten minutes. If players spent too much time having their characters engaging with each other and the time elapsed, we were moving on the next scene, regardless of if it was a natural conclusion or not. Speaking of the characters, I would come to learn that the characters that the player brought to this campaign were secondary to the story that Wayne wanted to tell. "This campaign isn't character focused, it's story focused" he would say. The campaign simply did not have time for that. I don't like to toss out the word "railroaded" very often, but it quickly became apparent that there was a good bit of railroading being done here. The only character decisions or choices or conversations that would ever make it to the final cut were ones that provided what he thought would be the most interesting while pushing his narrative forward. And for a DnD game, there wasn't a whole lot of game being done here. Sure, the players had character sheets, and classes, but it was all superficial. Combat was a rarity on the level of a shiny Pokemon. I think mostly because Wayne didn't find combat narratively compelling. But in that case, I have to ask, why use DnD as your game system? If all you want to do is roll clicky dice and improv, there are much better systems out there. And speaking of the dice - I'm sad to say that in most cases they were superfluous, as well. The only real purpose the dice served to Wayne was when they could be used to clip epic moments of success or failure. A natural 20 or a natural 1 was gold for him, because then he could clip it into a Youtube or Tiktok Short and grow those subscriber numbers. For a game in which "every decision hung on the roll of a dice", there weren't a lot of dice rolls, there weren't a lot of decisions, and when there were decisions, most of the time, the outcome was predetermined by Wayne. Everything Wayne did in regards to this game was in service to growing his Youtube channel. And the sad part? It worked.
In a shockingly short amount of time, Wayne was able to grow his Youtube channel from just over a 100 subscribers to over a 1000. This was mostly done by his excessive push of Youtube and Tiktok shorts. For a short period of time, I was deemed trustworthy enough to have access to the Youtube channel's admin, and I could view the statistics. The turnover rate for shorts into actual video views was miniscule. Only a tiny fraction were tuning in for the actual show. At this point, he had just become a Youtube Shorts creator.
And I want to mention at this point - I understand and respect the hustle. The world of Youtube is a dog eat dog world, and you have to have to play the game to stay in the game - I get it. I don't have any issue with being proud of what you've created, and pushing it out to people. I really don't. My issue was with how deceptive Wayne was being with it. And how deceptive he was, in general, as I would come to find out.
You see, before the inaugural campaign had even launched, Wayne approached me one day to see if I would be interested in running a campaign on his channel, as I had experience before in it, and had expressed an interest in doing it again. And I will admit, I was excited about the prospect. But before my words of "Yeah, I'd love to talk about" even had a chance to dissipate into the ether, Jelly would hop into the channel, in the middle of the discussion to say, "You know who should run a campaign? Seth." And then immediately log off.
I don't have a lot to say about Seth. I think he is an amazing, caring, friendly guy. He also happens to be an incredible roleplayer and storyteller, and his character is Wayne's campaign is truly phenomenal. I envy how easy it is for Seth to get into and portray the wide arrange of emotions of a character. He also happens to be a great GM. I understand why Jelly would suggest him to run a campaign. What I didn't understand, at the time, were her motives. Wayne, Ava, Jelly, and Seth had all played in a previous campaign together, and Wayne and Jelly had become enamored by just how good Seth was. And even prior to that, Ava and Seth had a past campaign together. Jelly wanted to be a player in a Seth run campaign. And if Wayne was going to have a second campaign on the channel, she wanted it to be Seth's, and she wanted to be a player in it.
And so, immediately, any and all discussion about me running a campaign was ceased, and the legwork was put forth for Seth to run a campaign. Wayne would approach him about it, and he was interested. Seth would already have in mind the players that he wanted for it - two friends of his from outside the server, Ava, and another player from the Wayne campaign. Noticeably missing from that list - Jelly.
Strangely, Wayne would then tell Seth that if he was going to run a campaign on the channel, he would have to have an application process for the players, and open it up so that anyone could apply. After Seth had already stated he already had players in mind - players who already said yes. I don't know about you, but as a DM, I would never let someone dictate to me who I could have at my table. If I have players in mind already, it's because I have a reason. But Wayne demanded an application process be followed, and a second LFG post would appear in LFG for the Seth run campaign - that was noticeably advertising for 4 players. After Seth had chosen his players. The advertisement came with another well edited and narrated youtube promo that was, and still is, the highest viewed video on the channel. And all of it was a sham. Which I knew it was. And I confronted Wayne about it. It was then that I learned some unsavory backstory involving Ava and Jelly and the prior campaign. That is not my story to tell. I have shared my accounts of events with Ava, and she is considering posting an account from her perspective following this. The most I am willing to say on this is that involves situations that should never be okay at a DnD table, and that Wayne would gloss over and sugarcoat these situations as no big deal. It would lead to Ava not being comfortable with being at a table with Jelly which both I, and Seth, would understand.
Wayne, however, found this to be unfair and manipulative on Ava's part. Those past incidents should have had no bearing on Jelly's consideration for the Seth run campaign. Which is why he would demand an application process. He would then confide to me when I questioned the duplicity of the LFG advertisement that it wasn't completely misleading. There would still be someone chosen from the list of applicants - because he was going to make sure that Ava wasn't part of the campaign. After Seth had already told both Wayne and her that she was. After the players for that game had already come together for a session zero. He claimed that Ava had prior incidents of being difficult to work with, and that because he wasn't involved in the campaign, he couldn't be there to handle any situations that might arise of conflicts between players at the table. At the time I thought that was an odd statement to make - if you are trusting enough of another person, like Seth, to run a campaign on your channel shouldn't you be trusting enough in their ability to handle problems between players? Looking back now, I can only assume he made that statement because he was certain that Jelly would be a player at the table, and that problems might arise between Jelly and Ava. He asked that I keep the conversation between us. But that was something I could not do. None of that situation felt right to me. Wayne, Ava, and I had been friends playing games together for nearly a year now. I never saw any inclination of Ava being a "problem player" - she was great at the table, and a great person to hang out with. And I found it weird that Wayne would say those things about her, and not approach her about it. So of course I talked to her. For weeks she had been sharing her excitement of the new campaign with me, often with Wayne in the voice channel with us. Ava would then share with me her past experiences with Wayne and Jelly. Again, it is not my story to tell, but I am a good judge of character. I believed Ava's account of events. It made sense to me, with how Wayne and Jelly acted.
I wish I could say this story had a happy and/or satisfying conclusion. I'm not even really sure if there is a point to it, or even if it will be a good read. It has been clear for some time now that Wayne has been entirely obsessed with the growing of his Youtube channel, damn any and all bridges burned, and walking back some of his initial promises of what he claimed the campaign and the Youtube channel would be. It's also very clear to me that Wayne is someone who absolutely has to have control over everything, especially the narrative (fictional and real life).
There are so many minor grievances to air about Wayne that I haven't already touched on, and I feel like I've already taken up too much of your time already. Here's just a brief overview, I'd be more than happy to go into more details if you want them:

• Multiple players from the Wayne campaign confided in me about some of the problems they had with Wayne and how the game was being run. When Wayne found out, he blew his lid, and said that he was both Manager and HR, and no one should be complaining to anyone outside of the table. If they were going to complain to anyone, it should be him.
  
  • It turns out, Wayne has a prior history of being an asshole. Long before the Youtube channel, and the campaign, even before the previous campaign, he told his then group that they were playing the game wrong. He then found a new group, sang their praises to the old group, and then even brought both groups together to show the old group "the right way to play"
  • In addition to Wayne, he has two editors working for him. One of which he pays. The other one has had no compensation. The one not getting paid is doing the same work as both Wayne and the paid editor combined.
  • I mentioned way early on in the story that Ava was the Discord Administrator for the Discord server. After the Seth campaign incident, Wayne unceremoniously removed Ava as Administrator, told her it was "by mistake", and never put it back. As far as I can tell, there was nothing to warrant this other than control. I suspect it was because there were certain Seth campaign related channels or other channels he didn't want Ava to see.
  • The unceremonious removal of myself and Ava from the Youtube channel admin. Admittedly, we contributed very little to it, but it was removed without a word mentioned.
  • Recently making a post requiring his "talent" to purchase a minimum $5 dollar Patreon subscription. He has admitted to me the reasoning for this was to inflate Patreon subscriber numbers to entice new subscribers. He has since walked that back after much outcry from the "talent"
  • Asking Seth if it wouldn't be too much to convert his envisioned DnD campaign into a Daggerheart campaign, because Daggerheart is the new hotness, and will attract more viewers.

Ultimately, I suppose I feel disheartened and deceived. Deceived because I originally signed up for what I thought was going to be a bunch of friends sitting around and recording themselves playing quality DnD, and it has shifted so far from that original purpose. Wayne is obsessed over subscriber numbers and views, it's all he ever talks about. He claims that his goal is to reach a level of success to which all 10+ people involved will be able to achieve financial freedom (which he claims is roughly $2000 a month). I'm sure you've done the math, just like I have. Even if you believe $2k a month is financial freedom (I certainly don't), that comes out to $240,000 a year. That's an insane level of success to promise your players. Oh, I'm sorry, your "talent".
I feel disheartened because....there's actually good work being done here. Some of the players are some of the best I've ever played with. Wayne can actually be a good storyteller, when he's not pushing for likes or clicks. The editors do a really fantastic job. I have seen and listened to the work being done on the Seth campaign (luckily Wayne is only tangentially involved), and Seth's campaign is turning out to be something really special. There is something good being done here, but it seems so tainted by Wayne and his obsession for Youtube and Tiktok success. So, maybe this is an RPG Horror Story, maybe it's a cautionary tale. I dunno. I have committed to finishing out my run in the campaign, (I was brought back to the table multiple times because the players enjoy playing with me, and also I suspect I was involved in one of his highest viewed shorts), but my hearts not in it. I've told Wayne I've no interest in any of his future projects, and I wish him well on his Youtube journey. But in the pursuit of clicks, and likes, and subscribers, I feel like he has fundamentally lost what attracts people to actually watch and invest in TTRPG actual plays - authenticity.

Hello everybody :)
Re-listening to IT lately and have a few nagging thoughts. I searched the sub and ready many posts related to these topics but none that really scratch the itch, so here goes:

• Did Stan have like a psychotic break or disconnection or something? I’m mainly talking about his reaction to his first encounter and the idea of the Losers confronting IT. He has an internal monologue about IT offending him, and how you can’t really live with offense. Is this him saying his mind just cannot handle the magnitude of what IT is and the implications thereof?

I know he’s seemingly more aware than the others (a psychic? Just more “grown up”?) and knows IT is pregnant, and that he remembers more or is closer to the truth of it than the others….but why can the others face IT more readily than Stan? Is his mind/will “weaker” than theirs? Does it have something to do with his OCD? (Everything has a place & purpose but this THING breaks all the rules)

• Why hasn’t IT has offspring yet? IT’s been here for millions of years right? Why are they still just eggs? And are these offspring not exactly children with their own identities but more like extensions of the Deadlights? As in, hypothetically the Losers DID defeat IT the second time but an offspring survived, would that offspring just be IT again and not a child of IT? (Pennywise Lives)

Also just want to say I LOVE this book and have since eighth grade. I want to tackle the Dark Tower series again soon as I was way too young to even begin comprehending it the first time.

In class, I am doing a unit on Linda Brown and Brown V Board of Education for 4th grade ELA. I work at a title one school in an urban environment.
Tomorrow, we are going to look at MLK Jr’s response to Brown V Board and finish it off with his I Have a Dream Speech.
I’m just amazed at how apathetic some students are about learning about this. This is so relevant to them. They were denied a quality education for a year with Covid in first grade. They can relate to Linda Brown more than I can.
I wonder what MLK Jr. would say about the apathy in America today for many students. African Americans and others poured out blood, sweat, and tears so that they could have equal rights.
This is just a rant and a thought experiment. I can’t teach kids that won’t read, listen, or engage with the text.