This is more or less me just yelling into the void. I find that writing like this is therapeutic. Here it goes.
I know I don't have it anywhere as bad as most people. This post isn't about that. It's about my behavior and how I treat money. I don't know if it's the ADD or maybe it's just how I tend to self soothe when I'm feeling depressed but I spend money like it ain't no thang. I'm having a pretty serious financial problem right now from situations seemingly out of my control. The small stuff does add up though. I need to admit to myself that I'm irresponsible and work on it.
Having self control around money is something I've tried to beat into myself. I'm starting to just think I'm actually a child and I haven't spent anytime maturing. I'm 31 and I have lived a lot of life but this is the one thing I feel really nervous about. I look at credit cards and accounts with disbelief at times. It's sad really. My luck is about to change but even when everything is paid and great, this behavior is still there. I am absolutely sure I will mess it up again if I don't change. I don't want to fuck this up!
I'm not gambling, no I'm not spending money on drugs and I definitely don't try to mess myself up. I'm not buying designer bags or expensive cars. I'm not maxing credit cards on plastic surgery. It's nothing semi horrifying but interesting like that.
It's just normal everyday stuff I think I should be able to afford but I can't right now and I don't think I'm seeing the reality of the fact that within a month or two, I went from making more, to making less and suddenly having a lot more bills. Plus a bit of personal disaster. This is a huge change!
Right now I have a pretty full fridge of food (which I'm thankful about) I made a giant pot of chili which my boyfriend and room mate has been enjoying. I always try to make a big batch meal that is semi cheap and will last a long time. Look at me trying to be responsible. I buy everything great value brand at Walmart. (It's not seeming at cheap these days but anyways )
I have lots of eggs and milk and tons of cereal. I wasn't happy enough for that. I have cabinets over flowing with ramen packets and random ingredients.
I bought stuff to make an apple pie and a pie plate. My Mom used to make that for me and I thought it would be nice to make it for my boyfriend. I bought black berries and some cherries and some stuff to make miso soup. I bought some frozen dumplings and a new yoga matt because I don't have one.
I'm having a bit of an aha moment right now. So, If I'm being honest with myself I'm struggling with a development of a eating disorder and eating chili makes me feel nervous and scared. I feel safer eating cherries. I will need to definitely work harder on that in therapy.
I sat with my new things like a dragon sitting on its trove and I did honestly feel better. That dopamine rush didn't last long however. I know I need to change right now. I just think I'm self sabotaging myself. I'm going to try harder not to. Self sabotage is a cruel mistress.

My current 2 channel setup is the following - Vincent sv-237 with upgraded tubes Martin Logan motion 40’s Rotel ra-630 integrated Monitor Audio silver 200 6g Canare speaker cable Topping 50s dac Wireworld usb cable Macbook air - apple music lossless. Oppo 83 bluray - Cd and Sacd duties Audiotechnic turntable (not currently plugged in)
So I am thinking of getting rid of bothh amps and running the both speakers off one. Thinking of getting a rotel a-14 or 1572 as I like the sound better. Clarity and punch is what I find most important and I think the Rotel has this. I am trying to downsize to fit everything on my cabinet as I dont have my turntable there ATM. I dont like stacking components either.
i listen to 70’s to 90’s rock/pop and Some classical (the missus). Keeping both speakers as we always wanted a set of ML but I like the sound from the MA’s. Which brings me to an issue with the ML’s. I find the mids are muddy on both amps but this is obviously comparing to the MA’s. Has anyone experienced this with ML’s and if so was there anything that helped? Maybe a different amp or bi wiring or something? Any suggestions, comments or opinions welcomed or just rate my setup.

Hi all! As someone who was big into perfume in my 20s, but lapsed due to the economic reality of being a public school educator and social science researcher, I've only recently come back to exploring fragrances now, in my 40s. I appreciate the reviews I've read on here, and wanted to give back via my own little contribution.
These are my notes on The Complete Works, Volume One and Two, from Imaginary Authors. These are all the most recent formulations, and I've tried to acknowledge where my background and biases influence what and how I'm smelling the fragrances.
Yesterday's Haze
This is floral, but with something else. I smell sunflowers and the kind of gardenias that you get at funerals in the South. It's an initial warmth that dries down to something cooler, like coming inside in Florida in the summer from fresh air to air conditioning.
Whispered Myths
Imaginary Authors says this one is 'bold'. It doesn't open with a huge burst, but the oud is there right away, backed by a bit of honey, like popping the cap on a squeezy bear. It's possible there's something I can't smell in it, because it just doesn't have much OOMPH for me.
The Soft Lawn
If you like fresh cut grass, but the soft kind on golf courses, not the ubiquitous Bermuda and St Augustine of the suburbs, this is a sweet hit of that. There's a bit of sharp citrus in the dry down though.
The Cobra and the Canary
I had a Great Uncle who used to sit and smoke in the shade of his garage while my cousins and I rode our bikes on the slightly sticky blacktop in South Florida. This smells like that, in the best way possible. The tobacco is there from the beginning, but the warm asphalt creeps in. There's also a bit of overly hot grass in there, like a lawn that hasn't been watered today, but has baked in the sun. The smell of the grass bending and breaking juuuuust a little under you is a tiny note deep in. I think you probably wouldn't smell it unless you were deliberately inhaling deeply into your skin with it on.
Telegrama
This is a sheet hung out to dry in the sun. The sheet is hanging over a planter of lavender. You're sitting in a wooden chair nearby. But also? It kinda smells like the sharpness of a really expensive hairspray.
Sundrunk
The orange your mother packed in your school lunch, combined with the papery smell of the brown bag she packed the lunch in. This is an immediate memory scent for me.
Slow Explosions
There's a particular smell that well-used horse saddles have. It's leather, but with a bit of musty funk. This scent is that, but you're also feeding the horse a red apple, and you can tell it's a very crisp red apple.
Saint Julep
I read the official notes on this one, and they all sounded like my jam. It's supposed to have mint, magnolia, bourbon, and sugar. (Hello, Immediate Recognition of my Youthful Indiscretions.) I mostly get the sugar though, and maybe a bit of the caramelization of the bourbon, but not much. This fragrance is much lighter than I expected. The magnolia doesn't come through until it's super dried down. I think my reticence here is that I want this perfume to be something it's not, and that it's probably not intended to be. I wanted a Big Derby Perfume, and it's all, "Nah, nah girl. Calm your tits and drink slower."
A Whiff of Waffle Cone
Y'all, this is just what it says on the label. It is that particular vanilla-y, caramel-y, warm in your hand scent of a fresh waffle cone. Subtle, it is not. It also lasts for-ev-er, and can be smelled (in my house) two rooms away.
O, Unknown!
As a teenager, I was a goth who also wore Birkenstocks. I would have been all over this. There's a lot of sandalwood, but it's like it's a sandalwood bubble that's surrounded by black tea with sugar. It's the way any clothes you bought from the 'alternative' store in your town in the '90s smelled, even after a wash or two.
Cape Heartache
First, this smells like a Christmas tree. Then it smells like a Christmas tree overlaid with strawberries. Then it smells like turning over a rock in the forest and sniffing the wet dirt on the back of it. I don't mean any of that to imply an unpleasantness. This was a weird scent ride.
Fox in the Flowerbed
This is a very accessible jasmine backed with powder. I think, as with Whispered Myths, there's something my nose is just ignoring, or this is very basic floral (which seems at odds with the rest of the fragrances from this producer.)
In Love with Everything
Here's the oomph that I expected (and didn't find) in Saint Julep. It's a handful of raspberries tossed into a glass of half orange juice and half fruit punch, that you spiked with a splash of coconut rum. And though that may sound very coded feminine, it somehow doesn't come off that way. There's something sharp at the back. In my dreams, this is what Pedro Pascal's neck smells like when I bury my head in it.
Memoirs of a Trespasser
This smells like bourbon, y'all. Good bourbon. Expensive bourbon. There's an immediate strong vanilla, and then it smells like a whiff of antique oak furniture, and then finally, church incense.
Falling into the Sea
I was surprised by how fast this mellowed out. It starts very 'beachy'. There's a lot of lemon and bergamot coming straight at you. As it wears though, it gets a bit gentler, and the sharpness of the lemon goes, leaving a faint citrusy, floral wash. I liked the first bits of this better than the dry down, but I love me a beach.
Every Storm a Serenade
Have you ever gotten a bouquet of flowers, and they use eucalyptus as one of the 'greenery' bits? And you feel like you can't smell the pretty flowers at all? And the smell of eucalyptus going off eventually fills your whole place? That's this fragrance. This has all the big non-florals. There's a woody tree smell, and then the feeling of rubbing your face in vetiver, and always the eucalyptus. This is the fragrance that made me go, "Ohhhh, when someone says something smells of ambergris, THAT'S what they mean."
Bull's Blood
I can't imagine what this smelled like before the reformulation, with all that I've read about how this 2.0 version is tame in comparison. I'm going to turn to my spouse's description of this, as I think he explained it better than I could. He said, 'It smells like the London Underground. I smell iron, and electricity, and being too close to too many other people.' All I would add to that is that it's more floral than the name suggests, and there's a bit of rose and patchouli funk in there.
A City on Fire
One of the poor choices I made as a teenager was my furtive use of clove cigarettes. This fragrance takes me back to that, but with (presumably) less inhalation of fiberglass. This is a resinous, spice cabinet smoke. It's lighting a match and holding it close to your face. There is nothing sweet in this - often smoke fragrances lean very campfire, and this isn't that. You're not making s'mores with A City on Fire, you're burning it all down.

Long rant skip ahead if it's too long for you. Renting for 1.5 years so far .Not too bad of a location for work , however the price of rent is high for the lack of maintenance on the property .My landlord was aware from the beginning that my fiance and I are both carpenters /painters electricians and capable of doing plumbing among other things that were beneficial to remodeling or repairing.Her eyes lit up, hinting she had some repairs she might want us to do cheaply for her ,and once we moved in she began asking me for finish carpentry jobs and to repair other contractors shoddy work prior to us having moved in.Both of us are full time and we have 4 jobs between us both so we were not willing or even able to take on personal side jobs for her WE MADE THAT CLEAR . Soon after we told her were not able to do side jobs for her ,we started to see what a nightmare of a landlord she has the potential to be since moving here .
●countless pictures of trashcans out for 5 min while loading garbage from the house on trash day
●told me my door step is common place for neighbors to store their trash /belongings on because they have no room in front of their own door
● told by her verbatim can have a ring camera as long as I don't make holes or wire anything .But when I soft mounted one on the Door with a tension knob ,she took photos and said the other tenants don't have one so why should we.(packages stolen and homeless try to get into our property regularly) it doesn't state in the lease we can't have a ring camera .
●She won't allow us to pay rent past 5:30 even though we pay 1 day early and then she collects rent close to 11 pm at night if she has something to do and it interferes with her schedule.
●She was aware of a leak in our bedroom when it rained and went upstairs in the attic and tracked fiberglass insulation through the house and then stated the person who set up the gas must've spilled water up there.
●Was aware of broken cabinets before we moved in , water leaking under the sink ,did a walk through and never sent anyone to repair
●told us during the house showing ants are a problem in the Summer, when we asked her to give us traps when summer came she stated "there was never a problem before " we are to blame ...
●since moving in had to replace baseboards from previous tenant mopping and water absorbed into the wall ,plumbing fixtures ,cannot use broken washer and dryer so we go to the laundromat with weeks worth of clothing due to our hectic schedules.
LEASE STATES WORKING APPLIANCES dishwasher hose improperly installed leaking under the sink .
●She tells other tenants not to talk to each other and told us the people in number 1 are assholes and number 5 don't speak to them, but the ones who take up our doorstep are saints to her !!!We spoke to number 1 and he has taken her to court before for not allowing his son to live with him and also found out we are paying 400 more dollars than them for less space.She is creating animosity between tenants so we don't find out who she really Is.
CURRENT ISSUE IN QUESTION>>>>>>>> My fiance pays an additional 100 dollars for parking yet she has a garage door in his parking space shes been storing there since we moved here. past 2 weeks a large bush of vines have fallen into his space and he kindly asked her if she needed help removing it ,she fired back with :its already too late you bent and damaged the garage door ",it was already damaged when we moved here but what is it doing in a paid parking spot? She completely ignored the vines and bushes falling into the space, scratching up the truck and decided to make It about a garage door she has no right to store there.No answer as to what it's doing there .Do I have a right to remove this and call LAHD based on previous list of complaints or should I handle this another way? MOVING IS NOT REALLY AN OPTION AT THIS POINT .WOULD ANYONE HERE CONSIDER THIS DISTURBANCE OF PEACE ?WHAT GROUNDS DO I HAVE TO TAKE HER TO COURT ?any help and reading this is appreciated

I spent $1600 to replace all my Ring/Blink cameras during the sale last week.
340 flood was working until last night. Now I get no power to it. When I use the USB, it works, but the wired connection seems to have gone bad. No issue at the panel with tripped breakers. I have a feeling it didn't like when I cleaned the house siding with bleach based solution.
I had to remove the alexa skill because the doorbell notification went off for 15 min straight.
Oh and the fire alarm sensor has gone off twice when closing kitchen cabinets...
Lastly, I miss the snooze notifications via apple watch like I had from Ring.
Not the best start, but I've invested hours switching all this out, so let's hope it improves because the image quality is great.

I want to give my kitchen a makeover. I’m terrible with choosing details. Anyone know of tools I can use to see my choices in place before deciding or of a place that can design for me without high cost (side note - I have no idea how much a reasonable design price would cost). I’m looking to just paint cabinets, change out knobs, update granite/backplash.

The first one is I (3-4 female at the time) was picked up by my mom's the en boyfriend at the time (21-22 male at the time) from the head start program in my neighborhood which is to teach kids as early as 3 years old. I got in trouble that day for telling a kid who we will can Devon to fuck off because he had been bullying me ever since school started that year. When I got home my mom's then boyfriend whooped my ass because of me cursing and my mom came home and told him he wasn't my father and that he wasn't allowed to put his hands on me. Then that night it was around maybe 11PM I was in the bathroom using the bathroom and after I was done I decided to go through the cabinet under the sink because I had never seen what was under there before. I found a little tape and didn't know what it was but all I knew was the film could come out and I had hella fun taking it out. Reminder I was 3-4 at the time I didn't know better. My mom's then boyfriend caught me and was fuming like if smoke could come out of his ears it would've. He snatched the tape out of my hand and tired to fix it but when he couldn't he picked me up by the cooler of my shirt and tossed me into my room which is kind of right in front on the bathroom. (Which is now his daughter's room.) And I slid and hid my head on my dresser which right in front of my window right across from the bedroom door. And my mom heard the commotion and took me to the doctors and I got stitches. Oh and they're not together now but he still lives with us, my mom gave birth to his first and only child in 2020. He's only here to be apart of her life and help around with the house.
The send story is again when I was younger but only a bit older I had to be around 6 because I was in first grade. I went to school on he bus like I usually did and got my breakfast on the way there. This is were I mention I'm a person of color and the following people I'm about to mention weren't in the slightest. I got both apple juice and orange juice. This group of boys who sat at a table not too far away from me asked me if I wanted to join their little "apple juice race" as they called it. I told them a clear no and they kept trying to insist until I started ignoring them. I naturally drink everything I drink super fast and my teacher who happened to be standing behind me heard everything and I finished breakfast as I normally did but when I was done she pulling me out of the class room aboutthe conversation and I told her that they wouldn't leave me alone and I naturally drink things fast and she could ask me my mom. She thought I told them no but still joined without them knowing and I kept denying it and instead of listening to the crying little girl telling the truth she went with her own thought and gave me detention but the boys who were engaging in peer pressure didn't and here it's literally against the law. So I had to stay after school and my mom picked me up after finding out I had detention and when I explained what happened all she said was "It's a choking hazard so it may have worried her." But that's not a good reason at all to give someone detention that's on my record for life now. I told some people as I got older and they were saying because I'm a child of color she was profiling and she was being racist. I'm not sure though. If she some how find out abt this fuck you Mrs. Fowly I hope your daughter breaks a limb or two. :3 You've literally scared me for life hope ya happy.
So what do you think is his PTSD? Or am I tweekin?

The Old Machine

By Angel Arevalo
The first time I saw the old machine was as Benny’s father closed his study door to us. It was already a relic then, a heap of beige plastic from a bygone era. The monitor was a beige box with a screen made of thick glass. It must have weighed a ton. It sat odious on the rectangular beige case that contained its thinking guts. Peripherals included a keyboard, a mouse, and a phone.
The phone was not a flat screened supercomputer the way the phones of today are. It was a simple speaker and receiver, with a rotating dial instead of buttons. Technically it was capable of making calls from a connected landline, but this was not its true purpose. Its true purpose was to make communication between the internet and the old machine possible. It did this through the magic of sound. According to Benny, who heard it from his father, the data from the internet came in the form of audible sound. Once it was called, the phone could be placed on a stand from which the old machine could “hear” the signals and translate them back into binary code.
My imagination stirred at the idea of “hearing” the internet. I could put something tangible to the invisible force that allowed me to watch endless streams of videos, or chat with friends from around the world. Benny probably more than me. He lived with the damn thing. However it was off limits.
As much as we wanted to hear the internet, Benny’s father would not have it. His study was entirely forbidden to us, and on the few occasions when he had allowed us entry to give us a word of sage advice or to admonish us for childish antics, he would use himself as a physical barrier between us and the old machine. His physical language was such that neither Benny or I had ever thought to ask for permission. Neither of us believed he would even consider the idea, and the most likely outcome would be that he would make it all that much harder to do so behind his back.
So we waited. Bided our time. As children, this was all that was afforded to us.
This forced patience paid off.
There came a very unusual day in Benny’s house. Often it was Benny’s mother who was charged with the daily maintenance of the household, but outstanding circumstances meant that she was forced to take the day off. If I remember correctly it was to do with Benny’s grandmother, but that is neither here nor there. The important thing is that Benny’s father had to take over the daily run of the house. Part of that was buying the groceries for that night's dinner, so here was a rare moment where the house and the study would be left completely unattended.
The moment we heard his father’s car leave the driveway, we were on it.
The door to his father’s study, where the old machine was kept, was locked, but we accounted for this. Benny had been practicing opening the locks around his house, and they were all the same make and model. Benny stuck the finer end of a hairpin into the keyhole and opened the lock as quickly as if he had the key.
The door swung open, and perched on the desk, was the old machine, in all its pristine beige glory.
It was a comically frightful thing, that heap of beige plastic. It sat there, decades old at least, and yet the casing showed no sign of yellowing. The screen, which showed that it was turned off, was a yawning black abyss; and the deadly silence of the room was disturbed by something that was not quite tangible, but an almost physical mental pressure, like gentle psychic breathing. The pressure was such that you could feel it in the base of your skull, and much more lightly, around your head and in your ears. It made one feel as if they were in the presence of a great monster, and not, in fact, an old beige box of outdated electronics.
“C’mon,” said Benny, stepping into the room. Evidently I had been stuck in place for some time. Benny on the other hand seemed much less wary than me. He scampered forward, smiling as he pulled back his fathers study chair so he could stand on it and reach the strange phone with its rotating dial.
Not nearly as brave, and suddenly three times more cautious, I stood back as he picked up the phone to “listen” to the internet. Depending on how you view it, the phone was luckily, or rather “unluckily”, in its translation stand, meaning that it was at that time communicating with the internet. Benny’s face twisted uncomfortably before breaking into a giddy smile.
“Ooh!” he said, smiling. “That’s creepy!”
He held it to his ear like that for a minute or so, wrinkling his nose from time to time before smiling again and throwing me a conspiratorial smirk. His giddy enthusiasm, despite the sound being what he called “creepy” seemed to calm me down some. Benny always had a way of doing that to me. Suddenly I was excited. He saw this, and offered me his place on his father’s seat.
“Here,” he said, still smirking. “It’s terrible!”
I took his place on the seat, and picked up the phone. It was heavier than I expected. Heavier than any smart phone I had ever held. It was like picking up the lighter end of an animal’s meaty tail. I felt a sudden hesitation, but Benny was still brimming with joy, goading me to have a listen.
I put the phone to my ear, and heard whispers. Surprised, I let the phone slip out of my hands to clatter to the floor.
They had been quiet whispers, barely audible, but audible they were. The whispers painted a picture for me. A sticky red room. A friend, here but not here. I saw the old machine in a new home, and with a new keeper, a willing thrall.
I think Benny would have laughed at me if he had not also been struck stupid in that same moment. Standing in the doorway of his study was his father.
It is difficult to speak ill of the dead, which is funny, because it’s not like they care, but that’s just the way of things. Benny’s father had always been a kind man. If not a kind man then certainly a dutiful father. He was always there for Benny, always there to give a word of wisdom or a consoling hug, but on occasion there was a glint of something sinister behind his eyes. It appeared sporadically, mostly during conversations with other adults. Somewhere in the middle of a conversation between the tragic loss of a child in another state or several towns over, or in discussing the statistic and calculus of death such as a mass shooting, that furtive sparkle behind his eye would manifest, and he would become, for a fraction of a second, someone else. That spark was there now, and it was aimed at me.
Benny’s father saw that I had the phone in my hand. He saw his boy beside me, and that spark behind his eye turned into a barely controlled flame. There was so much hate there.
“Benjamin,” he said in a deathly calm voice, in a heavily restrained voice. “Please tell me you didn’t let your friend here talk you into picking up that phone.”
“He didn’t, dad, he didn’t,” answered Benny.
“Did you pick up the phone too?”
“Of course not dad,” Benny lied.
Relief washed over his father’s face. He ran past the threshold of the study and knelt down to wrap his arms around his boy. He then looked at me.
“Get out,” he said quietly, nearly on the verge of tears. Then again, louder, “GET OUT!”
I was still too stunned to move, even after the second shout, but then Benny’s father rose– with Benny still in his hands. The menace I felt. I bolted from the study, running past Benny and his father.
I learned from Benny at school the next day that we weren’t allowed to play together anymore. Benny’s father didn’t even want to see me anywhere near him. It was ridiculous. We were neighbors for crying out loud! Benny was my best friend, who else was I going to play with? And for what? But it didn’t matter. Benny’s father had made his decree, and Benny had to abide. At least we still had school. Benny’s father couldn’t dictate who he spoke to there.
Benny and I sulked for that whole school day, unable to enjoy the little time we were going to have together. We sulked like that together at school for ages. And in this way, the strange whispers that we heard in the phone were almost forgotten, overshadowed by our forced separation.
Every day after school I hoped and prayed that my exile from Benny’s home would end, and in a roundabout and terrible way, my prayers were answered.
A year later, Benny was pulled from class, after which he disappeared for a week. His home, which was next to mine, sat dark and empty. For a whole week I heard nothing from him, not any social platform or messaging medium. When I finally did hear from him, it was no longer Benny. It was the shell of a person that had once been a child. It was Benny, aged eons.
The broken shell that had been Benny stumbled into class. He said nothing, and looked at no one. It wasn’t until lunch period that I finally got anything out of him, and when I did, I don’t think I could ever have been ready to hear it.
That day that Benny had been pulled out of class was the day that his mother had been arrested for the murder of his father. She was found in his study, and according to police, was basically mid act. How the police were alerted so quickly as to show up with the crime in progress was never fully revealed to Benny personally, but news coverage afterwards revealed that an anonymous tip had arrived at the police station.
Benny’s mother would stand by her innocence until the very end, but the fact that she was witnessed by police in the middle of committing the act made it indefensible. Her trajectory to the lethal injection room was one of the swiftest the state had ever seen.
It was tragic. Benny was out both parents, and it was all the more tragic because Benny didn’t have any other family. His last grandparent had passed the year prior. He was due to go into foster care, but God bless my parents, because they took him in. Benny got to stay in town, with a family that loved him nearly as much as his own had.
Benny stayed in my life, it was the reverse of what had happened the year prior when his father had found us listening to the internet on the old machine. Now Benny was in my life more than ever, but also not.
Physically he was there. Benny and I shared a room, and we hung out all the time. Mentally, or perhaps even spiritually, Benny just wasn’t with me anymore. His soul was in some godsforsaken elsewhere. His inner self was closed off to me. My mind didn’t have the words or wisdom to say what was wrong, only that despite being around him nearly 24 hours a day, he felt absent.
It wasn’t until later, much later, years later really, when Benny and I were well into our teens that I felt like I saw the real him again. His home, and everything in it, the things that had once been his father’s, were his. He’d never cared much about that. He’d never even mentioned his not exactly meager inheritance beyond the vague idea that he supposed he would move into his old home once he became an adult. Other than that he made no mention of his old home, which sat dim and forgotten next to mine. He hadn’t so much as stepped inside of it since he left for school on the day of the murder.
But one day, on the porch, while the sun was beginning to die on the horizon, Benny asked me if I would go into his old house with him. We were pushing seventeen, and college bound so I supposed at the time that he was seeking a kind of closure. Despite the vast chasm that Benny’s depression had carved between us, I wanted to be there for my best friend, so I agreed to go along with him.
Once we were at his old doorstep, Benny produced a small, unopened, envelope. He tore it open, and produced a key that he used to open the door to his old home. I watched him do this and felt a pang in my heart that was something more than sadness. I didn’t have a name for it. I just knew that it was coming from Benny. The straw that broke the camel’s back was Benny looking behind him to see me, and flashing me the barest hint of a smile that was filled with the same sadness that panged in my chest a moment ago. It was the tiniest crease on the corner of his mouth, but it broke me. That crease was the most genuine thing I’d gotten from him in years.
I wish I had been brave enough to cry, but I swallowed those tears. Drowned out all emotion, because I thought that was what the burgeoning man I wanted to become would have done.
We entered the house, which was dark and smelled awful. There was a rot in there that had settled into the very foundation.
“Augh,” I let out, “what is that?”
“I– Uhm… I don’t now.” That’s what he said, but something told me that he did know. He just didn’t want to say it out loud for some reason.
In my role as supportive best friend, I still hadn’t asked why Benny had wanted to come back here. So I decided to do that then, but as he ascended up the stairs I knew there was only one destination he had in mind. His father’s study. The old machine.
I kept my mouth shut, but I wonder sometimes if maybe I should have started protesting. I wonder if maybe I should have dragged Benny back out the door, kicking and screaming, but those are just what ifs and meaningless regrets. Even if I dragged him out then and there, so what? He would just come back without me. If I had barred him in any way he would just choose a different time and place, and he would be doing it alone. No. I had no choice. It was inevitable. There’s no stopping the inevitable. So I did nothing.
We ascended up the stairs together. The smell of deep seeded rot grew heavier. It was in the stairs, in the walls, in wood and the furniture. Apart from the smell, everything looked normal, as if frozen in time. I could practically envision us running down the hallway playing tag.
That changed in the study.
Benny and I reached the door. Yellow police tape from when this was an active crime scene was still there. The rot was strongest here. Had the site of the murder never been cleaned?
As Benny turned the knob I swallowed back some anxious energy, and stowed it away in the same place that I threw that soul breaking pang in my heart.
Inside we found the desk, the books shelves, his father’s office chair. All of it was as it once was, except that now every inch of it was covered in a film of something that was muddy red. The sticky red room.
There was only one part of the study that was disturbingly clean of the muddy red source of the rot. The old machine.
It sat perched on the desk, slumbering and waiting. It was pristine. Its comically mundane beige casing was clean, and every piece and peripheral like the keyboard and attached phone were in mint condition. It was alien, how clean it was compared to everything else in the room.
Benny took a heavy breath, and stepped forward. He approached the old machine, examining it in the dying light of the sun.
“I’m going to need your help carrying this back home,” he said.
This would have been my second opportunity to say “no”. I should have, but again, why? All it would mean was another trip or two for him on his lonesome, and then I would just be the friend that bailed out on him halfway through something that seemed very important for him. So I said “okay.”
We gathered up the odd ends of the old machine. Benny carried the monitor, and I carried the thinking guts, and between us we shared the weight of the peripherals.
Once we were home, Benny got to work putting the thing back together. He seemed to fly into a manic fugue state. He worked rapidly to put the old machine together, connecting every odd end, beginning to sweat as he did so. His eyes became deranged, and then suddenly, with only the power cord left to plug in, he stopped.
He stared into the black abyss of the old machine’s monitor, and did nothing for a long minute that stretched out into eternity. Benny put the power cord down and shoved it into a box. I didn’t question this. If anything I was relieved. I hadn’t realized it until just then, but as Benny was putting the thing together I had started to feel a deadly pressure building in the back of my skull. I didn’t dare ask why he stopped, worried that I might accidentally reignite his resolve.
Together we chose to forget the old machine. Or so I thought.
The last few months of our senior year passed, and they were the best months I’d had with Benny in a long long while. I think collecting that beige heap of plastic, that old machine, it had brought something to a close for him. Whether it was simple catharsis or something more I’ll never know, but I’ll cherish those last few months for the rest of my life. It was the last I’d ever see of Benny again.
With college came real distance, and although we kept in touch through video and text, we never met in person, the times just never lined up. Benny was his own man, and although it brought a small amount of heartbreak to my parents that their adoptive son never seemed to find the time to visit them, they were more than anything glad to see that he at least seemed to be enjoying life. That was definitely the facade he sold on social media.
It was at the start of my second year at college that I got the first wisp that something was wrong with Benny. He sent me something, a file that I couldn’t open, in a format that I didn’t recognize. I thought it must be some kind of obscure meme, but when I couldn’t decipher it, I got a pit in my stomach and I sent him a brisk “wtf?”
He never replied.
It was the last of anything I would ever get from Benny personally. A few weeks later my parents contacted me to tell me that Benny had killed himself.
What followed was a rapid procession of life. That I somehow managed to continue to turn in my school work for the next week or so, was a fact. That I then used the following fall break to attend Benny’s funeral was also true. Mixed in there was a meeting with a lawyer that let me know that I was the sole inheritor of Benny’s estate. This all happened, and I have a very superficial recollection of it all. But in truth I was half a ghost myself. My body– no –my soul, had gone into a form of catatonia. I became an unchanging statue, a rock in the ever flowing stream of life. Things happened, but they seemed to flow past me in a ceaseless stream of almost memories.
On the last day of the fall semester, in a fit of pique depression, looking for something to occupy the void of my soul, I remembered the message that Benny had sent me. I redoubled my efforts to decipher the unknown file type, and scoured the internet for a decoder or playback device that would be able to read it for me. Eventually I stumbled on the answer. It was a type of sound file. With that information it was surprisingly simple to find an app to play it back.
I brought the file over to my phone, and loaded it into the app, and hit play. What came out were whispers. I dropped my phone like it was made of hot iron. The phone clattered to the floor, but kept playing the whispers, which remained just at the edge of audibility no matter how far away I retreated from them.
When it finished playing I was relieved. I also realized I had understood none of it. Unlike the whispers I had heard in my childhood, these had been unintelligible. I tried them again, but although I could hear something I could make out nothing. But I knew a way that I could. The old machine.
The next opportunity I got, I went home. I went back up to my room to look for the old machine, but of course it wasn’t there. It hadn’t been there for a long time. Benny had taken it with him when he went his own way during college. I had to ask my parents to help me find it, and they directed me to the garage, where boxes of Benny’s old things were piled up. Things he had taken with him and things that he had acquired while he was away at college. The old machine was packed into one of those boxes, with a sticky note on the screen. A phone number, possibly left there by Benny himself.
I took the box up to my old room and got to work putting the old machine back together. Slowly it came alive, and bit by bit I felt that dreadful pressure building in the base of my skull. As I connected the monitor to the thinking guts I felt a spark of awareness, as if I was suddenly in danger or being watched. As I connected the peripherals, the pressure around my skull grew heavier and I began to sweat. The feeling only intensified as I plugged the thing into the power, and it came to a pique when I finally connected the strange phone stand to the internet. It’s alive! Gods of all faith and creed, help me! It’s alive!
I turned it on.
The screen lit up, and I noticed that I’d forgotten to remove the sticky note that had been placed there. I ripped it off and crumpled it in my palm as I watched the old machine finish its startup sequence.
I’m not sure what I expected. I certainly hadn’t expected it to feel so normal, or look so mundane. The operating system was definitely proprietary but other than that it felt no more alien than Windows, or Apple. Navigating it felt as natural as anything.
I found the program that would allow me to interpret the whisper recording on my phone. It was the same one that would normally connect to the internet, except this time instead of letting the translator hear the bulky beige phone, I would put my smartphone up to the translator while the recording played. I did this, and for a few tense moments nothing seemed to happen, and then I noticed that something had been downloaded onto the desktop.
The file was called “Dad(1)” and for a moment I felt like an idiot. The “(1)” appearing after the word “Dad” suggested that a version of this file was already downloaded, and of course it would be, this was probably where Benny had sent me the file from. I checked the now translated file and saw that it was a video. The thumbnail showed a man sitting at his desk.
Benny’s dad.
My hand trembled as it reached for the mouse, and clicked on the video.
The video was a top down perspective of the study, and it started at 100, there was no buildup or context to what was happening on the screen. Benny’s father was skinning himself alive. The footage of it was grainy, and was twice as disturbing for it, because the more skin that Benny’s father peeled off the more grainy red pixels appeared on screen.
It was difficult to tell how much of this Benny’s father was doing of his own volition. Heavily pixelated expressions of agony played on his face. He twisted and squirmed, he writhed in pain and appeared to yell into the ceiling as he striped reels of flesh from his arm, and then his legs, and then his chest, and on and on. I couldn’t look away. As much as I wanted to look away I couldn’t, I was forced to watch by my own horribly morbid fascination. God help me. No. God forgive me. I. could. Not. Look. Away.
It was Benny’s father’s twisted and pained flailing that covered the study in blood, leaving the room red and sticky. How he produced so much blood, and in fact, how he had been able to remain conscious this whole time was a mystery to anyone. The act didn’t stop until a light appeared from offscreen, and then suddenly Benny’s mother barged into the study to see her screaming husband. He tried to skin her alive as well, but she fought back. They began to wrestle each other, slipping in the wet puddle of his blood. Soon the blood itself stopped being the worst thing on display, as the father’s viscera began to spill out of him, the membrane that had held it together inside his abdomen splitting open in the tussle. It was an awful scene, and still, I couldn’t look away.
The fight continued like that for some time. With the two of them on the ground, fighting for control of the knife that the father had used to skin himself alive. Even with half the father spilt and spread around the room it was a hard won victory for Benny’s mother. She finally managed to wrestle the knife away from the dying man, and plunged it into his chest, just as shadows appeared from the direction of the doorway. The mother broke down as police aimed their guns at her, and then the video ended.
“Did you like it?” appeared in text over the end of the video.
“What the fuck?” I remember saying out loud.
Why hadn’t Benny turned this in? I thought. His mom was dead, sure, but why not clear her name? Why hadn’t he told me straight away what he’d found? Why had he– I didn’t let myself ask that last question. Instead I unclenched my palm, and looked at the crumpled sticky note. If there was a logical answer to any of this, then maybe it was on the other end of that number. That’s what I told myself anyway.
I put my phone away, and picked up the phone attached to the old machine. It took a few tries to get the method of dialing correct– I’d never used a rotary style phone before, and I didn’t know how to spin the wheel to “dial” the number that I needed, but I managed it. The phone rang for a bit, and then the whispers started to erupt from whatever black beyond I called.
I placed the phone on the translator, and on the monitor, the desktop came alive. The old machine’s proprietary web browser opened and landed on a bare bones white webpage. It reminded me somewhat of a dark web directory.
The dark web isn’t as difficult to navigate as you might think. The difference between a dark web site and a regular one is that dark web sites are unlisted, meaning they don’t show up on search engines, and often they require special browsers and specific URLs. Those URLs are usually kept on some kind of surface web directory. This looked a lot like that. A list of URLs ran down the bare bones page in a ladder of blue.
They were hyperlinks, all of them, and one of them stood out to me immediately.
“Do you want to see how he did it?” It read.
It shouldn’t have freaked me out. There was no way that link could be talking about Benny, which is where my mind went first. There was simply no way.
So I clicked it. And I guess… there was. Somehow there was a way.
I won’t say what I saw. It wasn’t nearly as graphic as his father’s death. In that sense it wasn’t nearly as “interesting”, but even still I can’t bring myself to recount it. It’s too personal. In that way it was much much worse, so much worse. The look in his eyes… despair. There was something almost beautiful about it.
No.
There was something beautiful about it.
At the end of the video, a familiar message popped up.
“Did you like it?”
A box beneath the video asked for a reply. I typed one in.
“Do you want to see more?”
Another box. Another reply.
I saw more.

The Old Machine

By Angel Arevalo
The first time I saw the old machine was as Benny’s father closed his study door to us. It was already a relic then, a heap of beige plastic from a bygone era. The monitor was a beige box with a screen made of thick glass. It must have weighed a ton. It sat odious on the rectangular beige case that contained its thinking guts. Peripherals included a keyboard, a mouse, and a phone.
The phone was not a flat screened supercomputer the way the phones of today are. It was a simple speaker and receiver, with a rotating dial instead of buttons. Technically it was capable of making calls from a connected landline, but this was not its true purpose. Its true purpose was to make communication between the internet and the old machine possible. It did this through the magic of sound. According to Benny, who heard it from his father, the data from the internet came in the form of audible sound. Once it was called, the phone could be placed on a stand from which the old machine could “hear” the signals and translate them back into binary code.
My imagination stirred at the idea of “hearing” the internet. I could put something tangible to the invisible force that allowed me to watch endless streams of videos, or chat with friends from around the world. Benny probably more than me. He lived with the damn thing. However it was off limits.
As much as we wanted to hear the internet, Benny’s father would not have it. His study was entirely forbidden to us, and on the few occasions when he had allowed us entry to give us a word of sage advice or to admonish us for childish antics, he would use himself as a physical barrier between us and the old machine. His physical language was such that neither Benny or I had ever thought to ask for permission. Neither of us believed he would even consider the idea, and the most likely outcome would be that he would make it all that much harder to do so behind his back.
So we waited. Bided our time. As children, this was all that was afforded to us.
This forced patience paid off.
There came a very unusual day in Benny’s house. Often it was Benny’s mother who was charged with the daily maintenance of the household, but outstanding circumstances meant that she was forced to take the day off. If I remember correctly it was to do with Benny’s grandmother, but that is neither here nor there. The important thing is that Benny’s father had to take over the daily run of the house. Part of that was buying the groceries for that night's dinner, so here was a rare moment where the house and the study would be left completely unattended.
The moment we heard his father’s car leave the driveway, we were on it.
The door to his father’s study, where the old machine was kept, was locked, but we accounted for this. Benny had been practicing opening the locks around his house, and they were all the same make and model. Benny stuck the finer end of a hairpin into the keyhole and opened the lock as quickly as if he had the key.
The door swung open, and perched on the desk, was the old machine, in all its pristine beige glory.
It was a comically frightful thing, that heap of beige plastic. It sat there, decades old at least, and yet the casing showed no sign of yellowing. The screen, which showed that it was turned off, was a yawning black abyss; and the deadly silence of the room was disturbed by something that was not quite tangible, but an almost physical mental pressure, like gentle psychic breathing. The pressure was such that you could feel it in the base of your skull, and much more lightly, around your head and in your ears. It made one feel as if they were in the presence of a great monster, and not, in fact, an old beige box of outdated electronics.
“C’mon,” said Benny, stepping into the room. Evidently I had been stuck in place for some time. Benny on the other hand seemed much less wary than me. He scampered forward, smiling as he pulled back his fathers study chair so he could stand on it and reach the strange phone with its rotating dial.
Not nearly as brave, and suddenly three times more cautious, I stood back as he picked up the phone to “listen” to the internet. Depending on how you view it, the phone was luckily, or rather “unluckily”, in its translation stand, meaning that it was at that time communicating with the internet. Benny’s face twisted uncomfortably before breaking into a giddy smile.
“Ooh!” he said, smiling. “That’s creepy!”
He held it to his ear like that for a minute or so, wrinkling his nose from time to time before smiling again and throwing me a conspiratorial smirk. His giddy enthusiasm, despite the sound being what he called “creepy” seemed to calm me down some. Benny always had a way of doing that to me. Suddenly I was excited. He saw this, and offered me his place on his father’s seat.
“Here,” he said, still smirking. “It’s terrible!”
I took his place on the seat, and picked up the phone. It was heavier than I expected. Heavier than any smart phone I had ever held. It was like picking up the lighter end of an animal’s meaty tail. I felt a sudden hesitation, but Benny was still brimming with joy, goading me to have a listen.
I put the phone to my ear, and heard whispers. Surprised, I let the phone slip out of my hands to clatter to the floor.
They had been quiet whispers, barely audible, but audible they were. The whispers painted a picture for me. A sticky red room. A friend, here but not here. I saw the old machine in a new home, and with a new keeper, a willing thrall.
I think Benny would have laughed at me if he had not also been struck stupid in that same moment. Standing in the doorway of his study was his father.
It is difficult to speak ill of the dead, which is funny, because it’s not like they care, but that’s just the way of things. Benny’s father had always been a kind man. If not a kind man then certainly a dutiful father. He was always there for Benny, always there to give a word of wisdom or a consoling hug, but on occasion there was a glint of something sinister behind his eyes. It appeared sporadically, mostly during conversations with other adults. Somewhere in the middle of a conversation between the tragic loss of a child in another state or several towns over, or in discussing the statistic and calculus of death such as a mass shooting, that furtive sparkle behind his eye would manifest, and he would become, for a fraction of a second, someone else. That spark was there now, and it was aimed at me.
Benny’s father saw that I had the phone in my hand. He saw his boy beside me, and that spark behind his eye turned into a barely controlled flame. There was so much hate there.
“Benjamin,” he said in a deathly calm voice, in a heavily restrained voice. “Please tell me you didn’t let your friend here talk you into picking up that phone.”
“He didn’t, dad, he didn’t,” answered Benny.
“Did you pick up the phone too?”
“Of course not dad,” Benny lied.
Relief washed over his father’s face. He ran past the threshold of the study and knelt down to wrap his arms around his boy. He then looked at me.
“Get out,” he said quietly, nearly on the verge of tears. Then again, louder, “GET OUT!”
I was still too stunned to move, even after the second shout, but then Benny’s father rose– with Benny still in his hands. The menace I felt. I bolted from the study, running past Benny and his father.
I learned from Benny at school the next day that we weren’t allowed to play together anymore. Benny’s father didn’t even want to see me anywhere near him. It was ridiculous. We were neighbors for crying out loud! Benny was my best friend, who else was I going to play with? And for what? But it didn’t matter. Benny’s father had made his decree, and Benny had to abide. At least we still had school. Benny’s father couldn’t dictate who he spoke to there.
Benny and I sulked for that whole school day, unable to enjoy the little time we were going to have together. We sulked like that together at school for ages. And in this way, the strange whispers that we heard in the phone were almost forgotten, overshadowed by our forced separation.
Every day after school I hoped and prayed that my exile from Benny’s home would end, and in a roundabout and terrible way, my prayers were answered.
A year later, Benny was pulled from class, after which he disappeared for a week. His home, which was next to mine, sat dark and empty. For a whole week I heard nothing from him, not any social platform or messaging medium. When I finally did hear from him, it was no longer Benny. It was the shell of a person that had once been a child. It was Benny, aged eons.
The broken shell that had been Benny stumbled into class. He said nothing, and looked at no one. It wasn’t until lunch period that I finally got anything out of him, and when I did, I don’t think I could ever have been ready to hear it.
That day that Benny had been pulled out of class was the day that his mother had been arrested for the murder of his father. She was found in his study, and according to police, was basically mid act. How the police were alerted so quickly as to show up with the crime in progress was never fully revealed to Benny personally, but news coverage afterwards revealed that an anonymous tip had arrived at the police station.
Benny’s mother would stand by her innocence until the very end, but the fact that she was witnessed by police in the middle of committing the act made it indefensible. Her trajectory to the lethal injection room was one of the swiftest the state had ever seen.
It was tragic. Benny was out both parents, and it was all the more tragic because Benny didn’t have any other family. His last grandparent had passed the year prior. He was due to go into foster care, but God bless my parents, because they took him in. Benny got to stay in town, with a family that loved him nearly as much as his own had.
Benny stayed in my life, it was the reverse of what had happened the year prior when his father had found us listening to the internet on the old machine. Now Benny was in my life more than ever, but also not.
Physically he was there. Benny and I shared a room, and we hung out all the time. Mentally, or perhaps even spiritually, Benny just wasn’t with me anymore. His soul was in some godsforsaken elsewhere. His inner self was closed off to me. My mind didn’t have the words or wisdom to say what was wrong, only that despite being around him nearly 24 hours a day, he felt absent.
It wasn’t until later, much later, years later really, when Benny and I were well into our teens that I felt like I saw the real him again. His home, and everything in it, the things that had once been his father’s, were his. He’d never cared much about that. He’d never even mentioned his not exactly meager inheritance beyond the vague idea that he supposed he would move into his old home once he became an adult. Other than that he made no mention of his old home, which sat dim and forgotten next to mine. He hadn’t so much as stepped inside of it since he left for school on the day of the murder.
But one day, on the porch, while the sun was beginning to die on the horizon, Benny asked me if I would go into his old house with him. We were pushing seventeen, and college bound so I supposed at the time that he was seeking a kind of closure. Despite the vast chasm that Benny’s depression had carved between us, I wanted to be there for my best friend, so I agreed to go along with him.
Once we were at his old doorstep, Benny produced a small, unopened, envelope. He tore it open, and produced a key that he used to open the door to his old home. I watched him do this and felt a pang in my heart that was something more than sadness. I didn’t have a name for it. I just knew that it was coming from Benny. The straw that broke the camel’s back was Benny looking behind him to see me, and flashing me the barest hint of a smile that was filled with the same sadness that panged in my chest a moment ago. It was the tiniest crease on the corner of his mouth, but it broke me. That crease was the most genuine thing I’d gotten from him in years.
I wish I had been brave enough to cry, but I swallowed those tears. Drowned out all emotion, because I thought that was what the burgeoning man I wanted to become would have done.
We entered the house, which was dark and smelled awful. There was a rot in there that had settled into the very foundation.
“Augh,” I let out, “what is that?”
“I– Uhm… I don’t now.” That’s what he said, but something told me that he did know. He just didn’t want to say it out loud for some reason.
In my role as supportive best friend, I still hadn’t asked why Benny had wanted to come back here. So I decided to do that then, but as he ascended up the stairs I knew there was only one destination he had in mind. His father’s study. The old machine.
I kept my mouth shut, but I wonder sometimes if maybe I should have started protesting. I wonder if maybe I should have dragged Benny back out the door, kicking and screaming, but those are just what ifs and meaningless regrets. Even if I dragged him out then and there, so what? He would just come back without me. If I had barred him in any way he would just choose a different time and place, and he would be doing it alone. No. I had no choice. It was inevitable. There’s no stopping the inevitable. So I did nothing.
We ascended up the stairs together. The smell of deep seeded rot grew heavier. It was in the stairs, in the walls, in wood and the furniture. Apart from the smell, everything looked normal, as if frozen in time. I could practically envision us running down the hallway playing tag.
That changed in the study.
Benny and I reached the door. Yellow police tape from when this was an active crime scene was still there. The rot was strongest here. Had the site of the murder never been cleaned?
As Benny turned the knob I swallowed back some anxious energy, and stowed it away in the same place that I threw that soul breaking pang in my heart.
Inside we found the desk, the books shelves, his father’s office chair. All of it was as it once was, except that now every inch of it was covered in a film of something that was muddy red. The sticky red room.
There was only one part of the study that was disturbingly clean of the muddy red source of the rot. The old machine.
It sat perched on the desk, slumbering and waiting. It was pristine. Its comically mundane beige casing was clean, and every piece and peripheral like the keyboard and attached phone were in mint condition. It was alien, how clean it was compared to everything else in the room.
Benny took a heavy breath, and stepped forward. He approached the old machine, examining it in the dying light of the sun.
“I’m going to need your help carrying this back home,” he said.
This would have been my second opportunity to say “no”. I should have, but again, why? All it would mean was another trip or two for him on his lonesome, and then I would just be the friend that bailed out on him halfway through something that seemed very important for him. So I said “okay.”
We gathered up the odd ends of the old machine. Benny carried the monitor, and I carried the thinking guts, and between us we shared the weight of the peripherals.
Once we were home, Benny got to work putting the thing back together. He seemed to fly into a manic fugue state. He worked rapidly to put the old machine together, connecting every odd end, beginning to sweat as he did so. His eyes became deranged, and then suddenly, with only the power cord left to plug in, he stopped.
He stared into the black abyss of the old machine’s monitor, and did nothing for a long minute that stretched out into eternity. Benny put the power cord down and shoved it into a box. I didn’t question this. If anything I was relieved. I hadn’t realized it until just then, but as Benny was putting the thing together I had started to feel a deadly pressure building in the back of my skull. I didn’t dare ask why he stopped, worried that I might accidentally reignite his resolve.
Together we chose to forget the old machine. Or so I thought.
The last few months of our senior year passed, and they were the best months I’d had with Benny in a long long while. I think collecting that beige heap of plastic, that old machine, it had brought something to a close for him. Whether it was simple catharsis or something more I’ll never know, but I’ll cherish those last few months for the rest of my life. It was the last I’d ever see of Benny again.
With college came real distance, and although we kept in touch through video and text, we never met in person, the times just never lined up. Benny was his own man, and although it brought a small amount of heartbreak to my parents that their adoptive son never seemed to find the time to visit them, they were more than anything glad to see that he at least seemed to be enjoying life. That was definitely the facade he sold on social media.
It was at the start of my second year at college that I got the first wisp that something was wrong with Benny. He sent me something, a file that I couldn’t open, in a format that I didn’t recognize. I thought it must be some kind of obscure meme, but when I couldn’t decipher it, I got a pit in my stomach and I sent him a brisk “wtf?”
He never replied.
It was the last of anything I would ever get from Benny personally. A few weeks later my parents contacted me to tell me that Benny had killed himself.
What followed was a rapid procession of life. That I somehow managed to continue to turn in my school work for the next week or so, was a fact. That I then used the following fall break to attend Benny’s funeral was also true. Mixed in there was a meeting with a lawyer that let me know that I was the sole inheritor of Benny’s estate. This all happened, and I have a very superficial recollection of it all. But in truth I was half a ghost myself. My body– no –my soul, had gone into a form of catatonia. I became an unchanging statue, a rock in the ever flowing stream of life. Things happened, but they seemed to flow past me in a ceaseless stream of almost memories.
On the last day of the fall semester, in a fit of pique depression, looking for something to occupy the void of my soul, I remembered the message that Benny had sent me. I redoubled my efforts to decipher the unknown file type, and scoured the internet for a decoder or playback device that would be able to read it for me. Eventually I stumbled on the answer. It was a type of sound file. With that information it was surprisingly simple to find an app to play it back.
I brought the file over to my phone, and loaded it into the app, and hit play. What came out were whispers. I dropped my phone like it was made of hot iron. The phone clattered to the floor, but kept playing the whispers, which remained just at the edge of audibility no matter how far away I retreated from them.
When it finished playing I was relieved. I also realized I had understood none of it. Unlike the whispers I had heard in my childhood, these had been unintelligible. I tried them again, but although I could hear something I could make out nothing. But I knew a way that I could. The old machine.
The next opportunity I got, I went home. I went back up to my room to look for the old machine, but of course it wasn’t there. It hadn’t been there for a long time. Benny had taken it with him when he went his own way during college. I had to ask my parents to help me find it, and they directed me to the garage, where boxes of Benny’s old things were piled up. Things he had taken with him and things that he had acquired while he was away at college. The old machine was packed into one of those boxes, with a sticky note on the screen. A phone number, possibly left there by Benny himself.
I took the box up to my old room and got to work putting the old machine back together. Slowly it came alive, and bit by bit I felt that dreadful pressure building in the base of my skull. As I connected the monitor to the thinking guts I felt a spark of awareness, as if I was suddenly in danger or being watched. As I connected the peripherals, the pressure around my skull grew heavier and I began to sweat. The feeling only intensified as I plugged the thing into the power, and it came to a pique when I finally connected the strange phone stand to the internet. It’s alive! Gods of all faith and creed, help me! It’s alive!
I turned it on.
The screen lit up, and I noticed that I’d forgotten to remove the sticky note that had been placed there. I ripped it off and crumpled it in my palm as I watched the old machine finish its startup sequence.
I’m not sure what I expected. I certainly hadn’t expected it to feel so normal, or look so mundane. The operating system was definitely proprietary but other than that it felt no more alien than Windows, or Apple. Navigating it felt as natural as anything.
I found the program that would allow me to interpret the whisper recording on my phone. It was the same one that would normally connect to the internet, except this time instead of letting the translator hear the bulky beige phone, I would put my smartphone up to the translator while the recording played. I did this, and for a few tense moments nothing seemed to happen, and then I noticed that something had been downloaded onto the desktop.
The file was called “Dad(1)” and for a moment I felt like an idiot. The “(1)” appearing after the word “Dad” suggested that a version of this file was already downloaded, and of course it would be, this was probably where Benny had sent me the file from. I checked the now translated file and saw that it was a video. The thumbnail showed a man sitting at his desk.
Benny’s dad.
My hand trembled as it reached for the mouse, and clicked on the video.
The video was a top down perspective of the study, and it started at 100, there was no buildup or context to what was happening on the screen. Benny’s father was skinning himself alive. The footage of it was grainy, and was twice as disturbing for it, because the more skin that Benny’s father peeled off the more grainy red pixels appeared on screen.
It was difficult to tell how much of this Benny’s father was doing of his own volition. Heavily pixelated expressions of agony played on his face. He twisted and squirmed, he writhed in pain and appeared to yell into the ceiling as he striped reels of flesh from his arm, and then his legs, and then his chest, and on and on. I couldn’t look away. As much as I wanted to look away I couldn’t, I was forced to watch by my own horribly morbid fascination. God help me. No. God forgive me. I. could. Not. Look. Away.
It was Benny’s father’s twisted and pained flailing that covered the study in blood, leaving the room red and sticky. How he produced so much blood, and in fact, how he had been able to remain conscious this whole time was a mystery to anyone. The act didn’t stop until a light appeared from offscreen, and then suddenly Benny’s mother barged into the study to see her screaming husband. He tried to skin her alive as well, but she fought back. They began to wrestle each other, slipping in the wet puddle of his blood. Soon the blood itself stopped being the worst thing on display, as the father’s viscera began to spill out of him, the membrane that had held it together inside his abdomen splitting open in the tussle. It was an awful scene, and still, I couldn’t look away.
The fight continued like that for some time. With the two of them on the ground, fighting for control of the knife that the father had used to skin himself alive. Even with half the father spilt and spread around the room it was a hard won victory for Benny’s mother. She finally managed to wrestle the knife away from the dying man, and plunged it into his chest, just as shadows appeared from the direction of the doorway. The mother broke down as police aimed their guns at her, and then the video ended.
“Did you like it?” appeared in text over the end of the video.
“What the fuck?” I remember saying out loud.
Why hadn’t Benny turned this in? I thought. His mom was dead, sure, but why not clear her name? Why hadn’t he told me straight away what he’d found? Why had he– I didn’t let myself ask that last question. Instead I unclenched my palm, and looked at the crumpled sticky note. If there was a logical answer to any of this, then maybe it was on the other end of that number. That’s what I told myself anyway.
I put my phone away, and picked up the phone attached to the old machine. It took a few tries to get the method of dialing correct– I’d never used a rotary style phone before, and I didn’t know how to spin the wheel to “dial” the number that I needed, but I managed it. The phone rang for a bit, and then the whispers started to erupt from whatever black beyond I called.
I placed the phone on the translator, and on the monitor, the desktop came alive. The old machine’s proprietary web browser opened and landed on a bare bones white webpage. It reminded me somewhat of a dark web directory.
The dark web isn’t as difficult to navigate as you might think. The difference between a dark web site and a regular one is that dark web sites are unlisted, meaning they don’t show up on search engines, and often they require special browsers and specific URLs. Those URLs are usually kept on some kind of surface web directory. This looked a lot like that. A list of URLs ran down the bare bones page in a ladder of blue.
They were hyperlinks, all of them, and one of them stood out to me immediately.
“Do you want to see how he did it?” It read.
It shouldn’t have freaked me out. There was no way that link could be talking about Benny, which is where my mind went first. There was simply no way.
So I clicked it. And I guess… there was. Somehow there was a way.
I won’t say what I saw. It wasn’t nearly as graphic as his father’s death. In that sense it wasn’t nearly as “interesting”, but even still I can’t bring myself to recount it. It’s too personal. In that way it was much much worse, so much worse. The look in his eyes… despair. There was something almost beautiful about it.
No.
There was something beautiful about it.
At the end of the video, a familiar message popped up.
“Did you like it?”
A box beneath the video asked for a reply. I typed one in.
“Do you want to see more?”
Another box. Another reply.
I saw more.

We are under contract currently to purchase a home. The house itself is relatively new (2016), but the previous owner made some odd choices when building that make it look more dated than it actually is. It’s in a relatively HCOL, and is 2,500 square feet. This is what we’d like to do:
-Paint kitchen and 2 bathroom’s cabinets and change out pulls and knobs.
-Replace dated looking granite with a Level 2 or 3 quartz in kitchen and 2 baths. Also replace kitchen backsplash (currently tile) with more modern tile.
-Replace 3 island pendants, 3 medium chandeliers, and 3 (3 light) bathroom vanity lights with more current fixtures.
-remove “glued on” mirrors in the two baths and replace with hung mirrors.
-Replace kitchen sink with new porcelain undermount sink.
-Replace kitchen faucet and three bathroom faucets. Replace hand towel holders in bathrooms.
-Repaint all interior walls of home.
-Remove ornate wooden legs from kitchen island and replace with something more simple/modern.
We are NOT doing any of the following: removing or replacing any flooring, appliances, cabinets, shower tile/glass, or tubs.
Our budget is $70K. Is this at all reasonable? We’ve never done a remodel before, and don’t want to be absolutely laughed at by a contractor at our first meeting so just trying to get an idea if we're at all realistic. Thank you for your advice.

I own a small home decor business specializing in unique cabinet knobs and pulls made from pearls.
Even though we are based in Australia , but most of our clients are in the US, and I want to spread the word, have folks try my product.
We want give away our best sellers knobs for free to design interiors around the world mainly European countries and Canada , shipped with DHL , to gain business and traffic to our website and social media.
Do you guys think it is a make sense or do you guys think it will just waste money ? Even a breakeven will be considered success.
thank you and have a nice day fellow entrepreneur.

I own a small home decor business specializing in unique cabinet knobs and pulls made from pearls.
Even though we are based in Australia , but most of our clients are in the US, and I want to spread the word, have folks try my product.
We want give away our best sellers knobs for free to design interiors around the world mainly European countries and Canada , shipped with DHL , to gain business and traffic to our website and social media.
Do you guys think it is a make sense or do you guys think it will just waste money ? Even a breakeven will be considered success.
thank you and have a nice day fellow entrepreneur.