How to make fake guillotine a

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!!!

In a world where ruling governments have weapons of mass destruction and severely outgun the men and women they rule over, how can we make any change? In a world where corporations have TRILLIONS of dollars at their disposal to buy off our leaders, is there ANY hope of climbing the economic ladder? When war was fought with nothing but blades and muskets, any common man could go head to head with the tyrants breathing down his neck. In this modern age, such feats are unreachable. This begs the question: HOW can the common people of this world fight for a better life? Gone are the days of guillotines and protest… but THERE IS AN ANSWER. the answer is right in front of us; we attack the wallets of those who seek to hold us beneath the tides of poverty. We unite as one people, under one cause. Our involvement with this stock is written off as a meme, but trust me when i say THIS is just the newest means of revolution!!! Hold strong. UNITED WE FUCKING STAND!!!!

I'm 19F. I live with my mom, grandma, and younger brother. I graduated high school last year.
Im not sure what to do. My mom is causing a hit to my already bad mental health. (I also can't afford to move out yet.) From the outside, our relationship may look great. As long as I can keep it together and fake smiling and interactions our relationship is mostly good. She knows I'm diagnosed with Autism, Major Depression and Generalized Anxiety Disorder.
I've been getting treatment for years but only about a month ago started seeing a therapist who I think genuinely helps. What is so bad about this relationship is l've been basically trained my emotions don't matter. Some things she has said include "you're acting like a lunatic", "if I was your boyfriends parent, l'd make him distance himself from you", "you're acting irrational" ect. About 85% of them time when I express how I feel it becomes an argument. And it's not feelings about her that l express but general feelings I'm struggling with. She usually goes to say "well have you tried this this and this" or says "well I'm stressed too or I'm that too!" But meanwhile if I ever ask her if she doing okay any other time she doesn't say anything is wrong. I feel guilty because she pays for me to live here obviously and pays for my therapy. But emotionally my needs aren't being met and a lot of the stuff she says to me is becoming my own inner voice that I can't escape. My dad is out of the picture too as he's a drug addict. How do I cope? I don't want to be ungrateful but l do feel resentment towards her. My therapist said it sounds like we have a codependent relationship with me lacking independence, having guilt and wanting validation while she wants control, never apologizes, makes everything about me and my siblings yet still hurts me emotionally(some are moved out), guilt trips. Literally a couple weeks ago she told me, "well maybe you're interpreting it like that because you're autistic because no one else says that!" this was after I told her how she hurt me while i attempted to be assertive. I need help. Assertiveness, saying sorry (even when I'm not at fault) or any other response from me doesn't help. What do I do?

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!!!

At the world’s top college of magic and technology, every day brings a new discovery -and a new disaster. The advanced experiments of the college students tend to be both ambitious and apocalyptic, with the end of the world only prevented by a mysterious time loop, and a small handful of students who retain their memories.
Surviving the loops was hard enough, but now, in his senior year, Vell Harlan must take charge of them, and deal with the fact that the whole world now knows his secrets. Everyone knows about Vell’s death and resurrection, along with the divine game he is a part of. Now Vell must contend with overly curious scientists and evil billionaires hungry for divine power while the daily doomsday cycle bombards him with terrorists, talking elephants, and the Grim Reaper himself -but if he can endure it all, the Last Goddess’s game promises the ultimate prize: power over life itself.
[Previous Chapter][Patreon][Cover Art]
“Should I be worried?”
Why would you be worried?” Kim said. “Dean Lichman loves us.”
Dean Lichman had asked the two of them to stop by his office, though his brief message had not said what for. That left Vell to concoct nightmare scenarios in his head.
“He doesn’t love all of us.”
“Alex doesn’t count as ‘us’,” Kim said. She was a looper in purely a technical sense, mostly due to her own refusal to be a team player. “Besides, she’s been behaving lately. She’s only been an asshole, not an active liability.”
“That we know of.”
“If we don’t know about it, Dean probably doesn’t either,” Kim said. “It’s fine, Vell, he probably just wants to ask us for advice or deal with some problem he has.”
“That’s not much better,” Vell said. “How weird would things have to be that the Dean is asking us for help personally?”
“Only one way to find out,” Kim said. She gestured to the door to the Dean’s office.
Kim entered first, and found it in much the same state as it always was. The desk piled high with paperwork, a small bowl of assorted candies shoved into the corner of the desk, and Dean Lichman behind it, frantically tapping away on a laptop. Vell had not been in this office for several years, and it was vastly different than the last time he’d been here.
“Ah, there you are, come in, have a seat,” Dean Lichman said. “Unless you’d rather we have our conversation elsewhere, Vell.”
“Why would I want that?”
“Well, it’s my understanding you haven’t been in this office since my, uh, predecessor,” Dean Lichman said.
“Oh, right, the kidnapping,” Vell said. “No, I’m good, I don’t really get traumatized by things anymore.”
Vell had been killed too many different ways in too many different places to have a functional trauma response. A few days ago he’d gotten his legs chewed off by a vending machine, and still stopped by it to pick up a soda on his way to the office.
“That’s a very concerning response, Mr. Harlan.”
“Yeah. Anyway, what did you need?”
Dean Lichman gestured for the duo to take a seat, and both did so. He folded desiccated hands in front of himself before beginning to speak.
“I would like to ask you two to take a look at an experiment that will be occurring later this week,” Dean Lichman said. “I don’t have any reason to believe it poses a threat, but I would like to be assured it is a safe and ethical environment, and, well, you two have a knack for identifying trouble spots.”
“You could say that,” Kim said. It was more accurate to say that trouble had a way of identifying them -and then leaping at them and ripping their heads off.
“I’d appreciate it if the two of you could simply examine the laboratory and give it your approval, or disapproval, as the case may be,” Dean Lichman said. “Though if you’re too busy, I fully understand.”
“If you don’t think this is dangerous, why are you asking for our help anyway?”
“Simply for my own peace of mind, frankly,” Dean Lichman said. “The school’s policies on animal experimentation are...satisfactory, I suppose, but I do want to take extra precautions when the subject is a creature as smart as an elephant.”
“An elephant?”
“Yes, a resident of a reserve in Thailand,” Dean Lichman said. “An older elephant by the name of Mae Noi. She has cancer, apparently, and she is submitting to experimental treatment in the hopes it will be useful for younger elephants.”
Kim’s digital face briefly flashed with a facial expression of concerned skepticism.
“‘She’ is submitting to treatment? As in the elephant?”
“Yes. Apparently the elephant can talk,” Dean Lichman said. “No, I don’t know how it works, they said it was ‘more impressive in person’.”
“Well now I kind of want to go just to see the talking elephant,” Vell said.
“Same.”
“Well, do try to take a few glances at the experiment’s safety while you’re there,” Dean Lichman said.
“Sounds like a plan,” Vell said. “Thanks for the heads up.”
“I’ll be there too,” Kim said.
“Excellent. Thank you both, and I’ll try not to take up too much of your time,” the Dean said. He then bid them both a polite goodbye and returned to his mountains of paperwork. Vell took a step out of the office and then took a sip from the soda he’d recently retrieved from the evil vending machine.
“So, what do you think?”
“I think I really do want to see the talking elephant,” Kim said.
“Obviously, yeah, we all want to see the talking elephant,” Vell said. “I mean the whole situation. You think the elephant thing is going to be the daily apocalypse for that day?”
“Well, on the one hand, an elephant seems like the kind of thing that would kill us,” Kim said. “But on the other, I feel like the fact we have advance warning means it’s not going to happen.”
“True. The universe probably wouldn’t make it that easy for us.”
“Yeah, but the elephant thing still feels pretty threatening,” Kim said. “Only way to find out is to wait a few days, I guess.”
A FEW DAYS LATER
“Hello you two,” Dean Lichman said. “And Hawke.”
“Hey,” Hawke said.
“He also wanted to see the talking elephant,” Kim explained.
“Well, that’s not a problem, it was an open invitation,” Dean Lichman said.
“Thanks. Still, sorry for not saying I was going to show up in advance,” Hawke said. “It took me a long time to make up my mind whether I was more interested in or afraid of a talking elephant.”
“They are rather large, aren’t they? I suppose that could be intimidating.”
“I’m okay with elephants on their own, it’s the talking part that doesn’t sit right with me,” Hawke said. “What if the elephant doesn’t like me? What if I’m the first person to ever get insulted by an elephant?”
“You’re less afraid of getting trampled by an elephant than insulted by one?”
“I’m a little afraid of trampling, but elephants are chill,” Hawke explained. “They wouldn’t attack unless provoked. I kind of feel like one might call me a dipshit unprovoked, though.”
“You have oddly specifics fears, Mr. Hughes,” Dean Lichman said.
“Yeah.”
In spite of those fears, Hawke happily stepped through the door to the zoology lab. It did not take a long time to locate the elephant in the room, as it was a literal elephant. The towering pachyderm was in a makeshift pen in the center of the lab, with an ample supply of food and a strange pedestal in front of her.
“Dr. Chanthara,” Dean Lichman said, with a polite wave to one of the researchers in the room. “Good to see you. These are the students I told you about.”
“Hm. Nice to meet you,” Dr. Chanthara said. He was, perhaps not unreasonably, skeptical of why three seemingly random students were in charge of a safety inspection. The fact that one of the three was a robot made him even more skeptical.
“Hi, nice to meet you too, and, uh, don’t mind us,” Vell said. “We just have an eye for weird things other people might miss.”
“Sure. I- wait. Aren’t you that kid who got chosen by a god?”
“Yeah, that’s me,” Vell said. “And her too, technically.”
Kim shrugged. She didn’t care for any extra attention on that point.
“Right,” Chanthara said. He was beginning to see why these students might know their stuff. “I suppose we should start by introducing you to Mae Noi. Say hello, Mae.”
The elephant shifted on her feet and poked her trunk at the wide pedestal in front of her twice.
“Hello. Friends,” a synthesized voice droned. Vell stepped a little closer to the pedestal, just enough to see that there were an array of buttons on the side facing Mae Noi.
“Oh, it’s kind of like a keyboard,” Vell said. He’d seen similar things used with dogs, though usually in a much simpler fashion. Mae Noi seemed to have a few dozen buttons at her disposal.
“Smart,” Mae Noi said, with another prod of her trunk.
“We initially put it into our sanctuary as a bit of a novelty, something elephants could choose to interact with,” Dr. Chanthara explained. “Mae Noi took to it a bit better than most. Especially once she found out she could use it to ask for food.”
“Food. Pumpkin. Pumpkin. Pumpkin.”
“No, Mae, no food until after experiment,” Dr. Chanthara scolded.
“Experiment,” Mae Niko said with a prod. “Pumpkin.”
“Yes, experiment then pumpkin,” Dr. Chanthara said.
“That’s not really a talking elephant, is it?” Hawke said.
“It’s more talking than most elephants,” Dr. Chanthara said.
“Elephant. Smart,” Mae Niko said. “Smart.”
“Yes, uh, right, elephant smart,” Hawke said. He took a step back, to avoid any further offense and any further risk of being insulted by Mae Noi.
“You’re very impressive, Mae, don’t mind him,” Kim said. “How many words does she know?”
“Our platform back home has around three hundred words, though she’s still learning some of them,” Dr. Chanthara said. “The ‘travel’ version we put together only has a hundred, just enough to make sure she can get her basic needs met and communicate about the experiment.”
“Right, speaking of, I do believe we should put some time into our reason for being here,” Dean Lichman interjected. “You’re welcome to stick around afterwards, at Dr. Chanthara and Mae Noi’s discretion, of course, but we should get underway.”
“We probably should get to business, yeah,” Kim said. She tapped the side of her metal head. “I’m going to scan the lab. Vell, you talk to the elephant and make sure everything’s above-board.”
“Abov- oh, right,” Vell said. “Sorry, not exactly used to being able to ask animals if they agree to animal experimentation.”
“Experiment,” Mae said.
“Yeah, experiment,” Vell said, as he turned to Mae. “So, Mae Noi, this experiment might hurt, do you know that?”
“Experiment. Hurt. Elephant,” Mae Noi prodded. “Experiment. Help. Elephant. Help. Baby.”
“Help baby?”
“Baby. Baby. Elephant. Sick. Baby. Sick.”
“We’ve explained the nature of her condition to Mae Noi as best we can,” Dr. Chanthara said. “She has several children, and is concerned they might be similarly affected.”
“Help. Baby,” Mae Noi said. “Experiment. Help.”
The way Mae Noi frantically tapped the buttons tugged at Vell’s heartstrings, but he choked those emotions down.
“So you want to do this experiment to help baby, got it,” Vell said. “Even if it hurts you?”
“Elephant. Old,” Mae Noi said. “Hurt. Okay. Help. Baby.”
“Huh. Well, that does sound like informed consent to me,” Vell said. “Passes ethical muster, at least.”
The campus rules allowed students to be experimented on, with their consent, so Vell saw no reason not to apply the same standard to an elephant.
“You speak up if you change your mind about the experiment, okay?”
“Stop. Stop. Stop,” Mae said, mashing the same button a few times. “Yes.”
“You got it. I’m going to go help my friends check things out,” Vell said. “Good talking to you, Mae.”
“Good. Talk. Friend,” Mae said. She waved goodbye with her trunk, and Vell waved back. He wandered away from Mae Noi’s pedestal and found Kim and Hawke carefully examining rows of beakers and various other supplies.
“Nothing sus yet, boss,” Hawke said.
“Nothing caustic, mutagenic, or explosive?”
“Well, something mutagenic, but it’s supposed to be,” Kim said. She had scanners built into her body much like those that had once been in Vell’s glasses, allowing her to analyze the complex chemical formulas at a glance. “They’re going for some gene editing similar to what we’ve tried to do on human cancer patients. Low success rate, but not harmful. Some adaptations to work on elephants, of course.”
“Run it by any of our chemistry and biology student friends yet?”
“A few,” Kim said. “Haven’t gotten anything back yet, though.”
“Maybe run it by Skye, too,” Vell said. “She’d recognize anything that’d mutate an animal.”
“She does love to mutate things,” Kim said.
“Benevolently,” Vell insisted. “Just show her. I’m going to check for any stray equipment.”
The presence of an unusually large test subject had resulted in the lab being rearranged and reshuffled, so Vell did a quick scan for any misplaced equipment that might pose a threat. He found, to his surprise, a tidy and well-organized environment, with any and all extraneous materials securely locked away. There wasn’t so much as a shrink ray out of place. Vell did another loop just to be sure, but returned to his friends empty-handed.
“This place has less safety hazards than my lab,” Vell said. Hawke stared at him for a while.
“Why does your lab have safety hazards?’
“I do runecarving, there’s like, hammers and chisels,” Vell said. “Those can hurt people.”
“Mm, true,” Hawke said. “So you really didn’t find anything?”
“Nothing,” Vell said. “This place is secure as I’ve ever seen a lab be.”
“It’s like I said,” Kim began. “We got an actual warning about it, so obviously nothing’s going to go wrong. That’d be too easy.”
“Maybe,” Vell said. “Things can get teleported in, or someone could cast a spell, or something.”
“Yeah, but that applies to anywhere, at any time,” Kim said.
“Kim’s right,” Hawke said. “I say we go business as usual.”
“I guess,” Vell said. “We have to branch out a little, at least. Can’t keep an eye on one room all day.”
The trio stopped sulking around the outskirts of the lab and returned to Dean Lichman and Dr. Chanthara.
“Everything looks good,” Kim said. “Probably the safest lab I’ve ever seen.”
“I’ll choose to take that as a compliment,” Dr. Chanthara said.
“We have very high safety standards here at the Einstein-Odinson,” Dean Lichman said, defensively. “Relatively speaking. Innovation requires some risk.”
“I understand perfectly. So does Mae.”
“Hurt. Okay,” Mae said.
“Not that okay,” Vell said. “Nice meeting you, Dr. Chanthara. You too, Mae.”
“Wait.”
Mae prodded one of the buttons on her pedestal and then pointed her trunk at the three of them. Hawke looked deeply concerned, but stepped forward alongside Vell and Kim. Mae Noi appraised them with massive brown eyes, and then moved her trunk back towards the pedestal. Vell noticed a distinctive scar on the bridge of her long nose just as Mae Noi pressed another button.
“Joke.”
“...Joke?”
Dr. Chanthara sighed and rolled his eyes.
“Just go along with it,” he said. “She likes to tell her joke.”
“Uh, okay,” Vell said. “Let’s hear it.”
“What. Elephant. Favorite. Part. Tree.”
“Umm...I don’t know, Mae,” Vell lied. He’d heard this joke from a kid, once. “What part?”
“Trunk,” Mae said. She gave a loud bray of amusement and then slammed her trunk down a few more times to emphasize the punchline. “Trunk. Trunk.”
“Oh, ha, I get it,” Kim said, hoping her feigned laugh was convincing. She’d never tried to lie to an elephant before. “Good one, Mae.”
Mae Noi shifted from side to side, looking pleased with herself, while the trio took a step back and stopped their feigned laughter.
“Did you give her buttons just to tell that joke with?”
“She gets upset,” Dr. Chanthara said. “I’m not even sure she understands the pun, she just likes people’s reactions.”
“As long as she’s having fun,” Hawke said.
“We’ll get out of your hair now,” Vell said. “Good luck with the experiment, feel free to let us know if you need a hand with anything.”
“I’ll keep it in mind,” Dr. Chanthara said. Some of his earlier skepticism seemed to have softened, but he did not seem entirely onboard with three strangers mucking about with his experiment. Vell and his friends left before they stretched what little goodwill they had any further. Mae Noi waved her trunk goodbye as the three left the lab and stepped back onto the quad.
“I’m going to try and sneak some classes in,” Hawke said. “Later.”
“I’ll check some of our usual hot spots,” Kim said, before she too left. Once again alone, Vell headed to one of his own classes, and called up Samson.
“Hey, Samson,” Vell began. “See anything interesting while we were playing with the elephant?”
“Well, I thought I clocked someone acting suspicious, but it turns out he was only sneaking around to go see his boyfriend,” Samson said. “Nothing apocalyptic, but I did get called a homophobe, which is pretty emotionally devastating.”
“I’m sure you’ll recover someday,” Vell said. “Keep an eye out. Usually the safer things look, the more dangerous things end up being.”
“Will do,” Samson said, before saying goodbye and hanging up.
***
Vell got increasingly nervous the longer the day went without its daily disaster. He thought about checking in on Mae Noi again, but then recalled Kim’s warning about it being too obvious, but then remembered that nobody had seen anything suspicious anywhere else, but then remember that Mae Noi’s lab had looked perfectly safe-
“Vell.”
“Huh?”
“You’re spiraling,” Kim said.
“I’m not spiraling, I’m just,” Vell said, with a pause for contemplation. “Considering multiple options.”
“In a spiral fashion,” Kim said. “Eat the damn french fries. Honestly, what’s the point of ordering so many if you’re just going to let them get cold?”
“It’s not like they’re going to go to waste,” Vell said. The same time loop that allowed him to eat massive amounts of french fries without fear of gaining weight also allowed him to avoid food waste. One of the upsides of life in a time loop.
“Just eat, Vell,” Kim said. “You worry too much about all this shit.”
“I’m in charge, it’s my job to worry about it,” Vell said.
“It’s your job to handle it,” Kim said. “There’s no point thinking about this shit before it happens, you spend all day thinking about an elephant and then the universe drops, like, a bat with tentacles on your head. Just deal with as it comes, Vell.”
Vell leaned on the table and managed to chomp down on a french fry or two.
“You know, next year, when I’m not running the show anymore, I’m going to call and see if you still think it’s that easy.”
“I sure hope so,” Kim said. “I’m saying all this shit trying to make myself believe it too.”
“Oh good, you’re lying to both of us,” Vell said. “That’s cool.”
“Fake it ‘til you make it, Vell, that’s how it goes,” Kim said. “Eat your damn french fries.”
Vell rolled his eyes and returned to his fries, which were now starting to cool. Thankfully he would not have to worry about finishing them. A loud crash from across campus interrupted him mid-bite and nearly made Vell choke on his fries. He painfully swallowed the half-chewed food and then looked over his shoulder.
“Son of a bitch, finally,” Vell said. A few years ago he’d found it weird whenever he was relieved about a disaster, but now he was just genuinely glad to get it over with. The waiting was as killer as the apocalypse. He tossed his fries in the trash and headed toward the sound of chaos, with Kim right behind him.
“Already told everybody?”
“Well, I may or may not have left Alex and Helena out of the loop…”
“Kim.”
“They’d find out anyway,” Kim said. “I got to use my brain parts to get in touch with them, even over wi-fi that shit feels dirty.”
“Just get in- stop.”
Vell held out his hand. Kim froze in place and did not move. Not intentionally, at least. There was a small amount of unintentional movement. The ground was vibrating.
“Always love a good earthquake,” Kim said.
“That’s not a quake,” Vell said. “That’s...footsteps!”
Vell grabbed Kim and dove out of the way just in time for something to barrel through the walls of the dining hall and stampede across the room. Tables, chairs, and more than a few students were crushed under the feet of a hulking, brown-furred behemoth as it charged. Kim picked herself and Vell up off the floor and tried to trail its progress.
“That’s a- oh fuck me,” Kim said. “Please don’t say you told me so.”
Vell got his bearings and looked across the room at the titanic form of a woolly mammoth. Though it was definitely recognizable as an archaic mammoth, the ancient creature was also heavily mutated, unnaturally large even by mammoth standards, and with multiple curled, jagged tusks protruding from a slobbering maw.
“Well that could be unrelated,” Vell said. “Mammoths can come from a lot of places, cloning accidents, time machines…”
The mammoth reached a wall, and rather than barreling through, turned around, facing directly towards Vell. A prominent scar covered the bridge of its broad trunk.
“Oh, nope, that’s definitely Mae,” Vell said. The scar was in the same place and at the same angle. Even a clone wouldn’t have an identical scar.
Once the revelation had struck, Mae took her turn. Vell found himself staring straight down the barrel of a very angry mammoth coming right at him at Vell-squishing velocity. Luckily he’d been charged at by a lot of creatures over four years of looping.
Vell jumped up and to the side, and latched on to one of the curled tusks, which made for very convenient handlebars. Kim did the same on the opposite side of Mae, and punched her in the head.
“Wait, wait, hold off on the violence for a second,” Vell shouted. He tried to wave at Kim to stop, but Mae was thrashing so violently he had to grip the tusks with both hands.
“Good plan,” Kim shouted. “Can you get Mae on board?”
Another set of tables got crushed underfoot. Thankfully the other students were out of trampling range by now, but Mae Noi’s feet were still coated in the blood of earlier victims.
“Mae’s smart, maybe we can calm her down,” Vell said. He then ducked to dodge a swat from Mae’s mutated trunk.
“Call me crazy, Vell, but I think this is more than just a bad mood,” Kim said, as she climbed up Mae’s seven jagged tusks like a ladder.
“We have to try,” Vell said. The loopers rule against hurting other intelligent life forms had some flexibility for blood-crazed mutants on violent rampages, but they had to at least try to reason first. Vell climbed up on of Mae’s tusks and looked into one of her bloodshot eyes for any sign of recognition. “Mae! It’s Vell, do you remember?”
The only response Vell got was an enraged trumpet, which he didn’t think was a “yes”.
“Come on, bud,” Vell said. “What’s an elephant’s favorite part of a tree, right? The trunk?”
The massive brown eye staring at Vell blinked, and he felt a brief glimmer of hope. He then felt a brief glimmer of his lungs being crushed as Mae swung her head and slammed her tusks into the wall, and Vell along with them. Kim punched Mae in the throat and then jumped across the tusks to grab Vell and carry him to safety.
“You okay, Vell?”
He opened his mouth to respond, and a pint or two of blood came out instead.
“Apparently not,” he mumbled. “I might be down a few ribs. And a lung. Or two.”
Kim carried Vell a safe distance from the fight and set him down on the ground, where he promptly spat out another mouthful of blood.
“Okay, uh, you just lie there and try to die peacefully, I guess,” Kim said.
“Way ahead of you.”
***
“Was that last bit as funny as I thought it was?” Vell asked. “I think the blood loss was affecting my sense of humor.”
“It was kind of hard to appreciate in the moment,” Kim said. “But as far as dying jokes go, it was pretty good.”
Vell and Kim walked into the lair for their morning meeting and joined the loopers that had already gathered.
“Okay, what’d I miss while I was dead?”
“Well, after Alex was done getting herself killed,” Samson began.
“You’re saying that as if it’s something to be ashamed of,” Alex said. “Vell also died.”
“Yeah, but he got killed trying to do something good. You got killed trying to do something stupid.”
“Trying to eliminate a threat is not stupid,” Alex said.
“We don’t kill intelligent creatures,” Hawke said. “Sometimes we punch them into a coma, but we don’t kill them.”
“When a dog bites, you put it down, I don’t see why the same principle doesn’t apply to a mammoth that’s crushed seventy people.”
“That wasn’t Mae’s fault,” Vell said. “She got mutated, or something. On that note: did you guys figure out what happened to Mae Noi?”
“Nothing,” Hawke said. “Looked like Mae smashed up the entire lab, trampled everyone involved in the experiment too. Nothing left to investigate, and nobody left alive to interrogate.”
“Typical,” Vell sighed. “At least we have an easy out. Dean Lichman was really concerned about the ethics of that whole experiment. We raise some kind of complaint, we could probably get the whole thing shut down.”
“The problem is getting the complaint,” Hawke said. “That lab was airtight, Vell.”
“Apparently not completely airtight,” Kim said. “I can camp out in the lab and raise an entirely justifiable stink whenever something capable of making a murder-mammoth shows up.”
“And what if it happens so suddenly you can’t complain about it?” Samson asked. “For all we know that could’ve been some kind of dimensional rift, or time anomaly, or something. It might not be as simple as somebody just putting in the wrong syringe at the wrong time.”
“He’s got a point,” Vell said. “We might want to shut this down before it gets there.”
“Seems like our best option is to plant evidence, then,” Alex said.
Everyone else at the table spent a few seconds brainstorming ways to prove her wrong, and much to their frustration, could not.
“Okay, fine,” Vell said. “But it needs to be something incidental, not something anyone would get blamed for. We want to cancel the experiment, not get anyone in trouble.”
“I could have a seizure on some sensitive equipment,” Helena offered. “It’ll break something and nobody would dare get mad at me.”
“Can you fake a seizure?”
“No, but I’m allergic to elephants, so I’d probably have one anyway the moment I stepped in the lab,” Helena said.
“I don’t feel entirely comfortable sending you into anaphylactic shock for a bit,” Vell said.
“Offer’s on the table,” Helena said. “I’ll live. Wouldn’t have made it through that trip to the zoo otherwise.”
“Anybody have any non-medical emergency suggestions?”
“Seagull in the air vents,” Kim said.
“Will that work?”
“It happens now and then,” Kim said. “Seagull gets in, and Dean has to close down the whole lab for potential material damage and biohazard risks if they shit in the vents.”
“Really? We’ve never had to deal with anything like that,” Hawke said.
“It may shock you to learn that sometimes minor, tedious bullshit happens that we have nothing to do with,” Kim said.
“That is kind of surprising, actually.”
“Enough. Kim, can you grab a seagull?” Vell asked. He shouldered his bookbag, and stuck a hand into the extradimensional pocket that existed within it. “I can probably smuggle it in with my bag.”
“Yeah, I can get you a seagull,” Kim said. Since she did not need to sleep, she had to find ways to keep herself entertained at night, seagull-grabbing being among them.
“Alright, we’ll go grab one and put it in the bag,” Vell said. “The rest of you, be ready to meet us when I call.”
***
Roughly three minutes later, Vell put out the call and they reconvened in front of the biology lab.
“Yeah, that was much faster than I thought it would be,” Vell said.
“I’m great at grabbin’ birds,” Kim said. Seagulls were among the easier birds to snatch, even. They were suckers for food, and many of them were attracted to her shiny metallic body anyway.
“Let’s just get this over with,” Vell said. “I want this thing out of my bag ASAP.”
Even though the seagull was safely within a pocket dimension, Vell would swear he could still feel the bird thrashing and squawking inside his bag. He tightened his grip on the shoulder strap and led the way towards the zoology lab entrance. He grabbed the handle and held it as he froze for a second.
“Vell, what’s up? Is this bird escaping?”
“No, the handle’s vibrating,” Vell said. It was shaking the same way a wall near an incredibly loud speaker might. He pressed his ear to the door and listened closely. He opened the door immediately, and let all his friends hear the frantic trumpeting of a panicked elephant.
Inside the lab, Mae Noi was stomping her feet and trumpeting as loud as he long trunk would allow. She swayed from side to side in her pen, bumping against the walls not quite hard enough to damage them, but hard enough that it was clear she was doing it on purpose.
“What the heck is happening here?”
“Ah, Vell,” Dean Lichman said. He hustled over to Vell’s side and gestured to the entire room. “Maybe you can figure out what’s going on.”
Mae Noi stopped braying long enough to start mashing her trunk against her pedestal, mashing out the word “Bad” over and over again.
“Our test subject, Mae Noi, has been throwing an absolute fit ever since she got here,” Dean Lichman said. “Dr. Chanthara, these are the students I was telling you about earlier.”
While Vell reintroduced himself to Dr. Chanthara, Kim and Hawke stepped up to examine Mae Noi and her enclosure. It was a far cry from the peaceful, orderly scene they had examined on the first loop. They were half an hour earlier this time than before, but Kim found it unlikely that they had been able to calm Mae Noi down, clean everything up, and get back to work in such a short amount of time. They hadn’t mentioned any of this panic on the first loop either. They were soon joined in their confusion by Chanthara and Vell.
“We’ve tried everything; food, water, her favorite toys, even videos of her children,” Dr. Chanthara said. “We’ve even offered to call off the experiment, but she won’t listen.”
“She is an animal,” Alex said. “Sometimes they do things arbitrarily.”
“Not Mae,” Dr. Chanthara said. “Some of our sanctuaries residents from traumatic backgrounds can have outbursts, but Mae was injured in the wild. She’s never been like this.”
“Maybe some experiment on the island is upsetting her,” Vell said. “A sonic experiment only she can hear, or something…”
Vell stopped and thought about it. If there had been such an irritant, it would’ve been there on the first loop too. Everything always repeated exactly the same, except for-
“Could you, uh, take a step back for a second?” Vell mumbled. “I want to try talking to her.”
“Don’t get close,” Chanthara warned him.
“I’m not, I’m not,” Vell said. He didn’t need to get very close to tell a joke.
The massive brown eyes of Mae Noi stayed locked on Vell as he approached, and she continued to mash the “Bad” button on her pedestal.
“I know, I know, bad,” Vell said. “But, uh, do you want to hear a joke?”
Mae Noi stopped. She locked eyes with Vell for a few seconds, and then cautiously tapped a button on her pedestal.
“Joke.”
“Right, joke,” Vell said. He tried to recall the exact sequence of words Mae had used on the first loop. “What elephant favorite part tree?”
Mae didn’t blink.
“Trunk,” Vell said.
After a moment of contemplation, Mae Noi let out one final, fervent, trumpet, and then started mashing buttons on her pedestal again.
“Bad. Help. Help. Experiment. Bad. Help. Bad. Help.”
“Yeah, bad help, one second,” Vell said. He turned away from Mae Noi to look at Dean Lichman. “Hey, uh, excuse me, Dean? Hey, uh, if I remember correctly there are some pretty complicated rules on having intelligent animals on campus, yes?”
“Well, yes,” Dean Lichman said. After hearing of some questionable ethical practices involving an octopus back in first year, he had instituted a few clauses into the school’s ethical code of conduct regarding intelligent animals like elephants, octopuses, and dolphins. “Mae’s presence here is a bit of an outlier, but there were workaround, given her apparent consent to the experiment.”
“Yeah, about that, is she, uh,” Vell began. “Is she registered as a student?”
“Yes.”
Vell pursed his lips. It took a few seconds for his friends to catch on.
“You have got to be fucking kidding me,” Samson snapped. He turned his back on the crowd and leaned against a wall while Hawke put his head in his hands.
“The first rule of looping,” Alex said quietly. “Loopers are randomly selected-”
She looked up and locked eyes with Mae Noi.
“From all registered students.”

I’m 19F. I live with my mom, grandma, and younger brother. I graduated high school last year.
Im not sure what to do. My mom is causing a hit to my already bad mental health. (I also can’t afford to move out yet.) From the outside, our relationship may look great. As long as I can keep it together and fake smiling and interactions our relationship is mostly good. She knows I’m diagnosed with Autism, Major Depression and Generalized Anxiety Disorder. I’ve been getting treatment for years but only about a month ago started seeing a therapist who I think genuinely helps.
What is so bad about this relationship is I’ve been basically trained my emotions don’t matter. Some things she has said include “you’re acting like a lunatic”, “if I was your boyfriends parent, I’d make him distance himself from you”, “you’re acting irrational” ect. About 85% of them time when I express how I feel it becomes an argument. And it’s not feelings about her that I express but general feelings I’m struggling with. She usually goes to say “well have you tried this this and this” or says “well I’m stressed too or I’m that too!” But meanwhile if I ever ask her if she doing okay any other time she doesn’t say anything is wrong. I feel guilty because she pays for me to live here obviously and pays for my therapy. But emotionally my needs aren’t being met and a lot of the stuff she says to me is becoming my own inner voice that I can’t escape. My dad is out of the picture too as he’s a drug addict. How do I cope? I don’t want to be ungrateful but I do feel resentment towards her. My therapist said it sounds like we have a codependent relationship with me lacking independence, having guilt and wanting validation while she wants control, never apologizes, makes everything about me and my siblings yet still hurts me emotionally(some are moved out), guilt trips. Literally a couple weeks ago she told me, “well maybe you’re interpreting it like that because you’re autistic because no one else says that!”this was after I told her how she hurt me while i attempted to be assertive. I need help. Assertiveness, saying sorry (even when I’m not at fault) or any other response from me doesn’t help. Please please I need advice.

I honestly feel guilty for even typing that I'm technically not "forever alone" since I have a few people that are friends and that care for me, but I still feel more lonely than ever before. It hurts me to see some of them care about me at all because it feels like wasted energy. I feel guilt for having any friends at all.
I'm a fucking mess, just barely holding together, pretending to be barely functioning most of the time. It feels like I'm selling people a lie. Just doing everything to keep them close while also pushing them away because I don't deserve any love.
And despite all that I still have this great sense of isolation and the laughable desire for romantic contact. I feel fucking ashamed for feeling love or being attracted to people. Everyone I know always assumed I was asexual or somthing because I got that deeprooted fear of showing that side of me. I feel disgusted imagining myself from the outside being in love or sexually attracted to someone to the point I'd feel bad for that hypothecial person. And throughout all those years not a single person has felt any romantic affection towards me anyway. I was only indirectly called ugly a few times, otherwise I avoided those kinds of conversations like the plague or made fun of myself publically to take away any ammunition. Basically being the class clown as a defense mechanism and because I hate myself.
In the end, I may be good enough as a companion but I think everyone realizes that I'm too fundamentally broken to risk loving me. That's a problem entirely on my part. I don't blame anyone for not loving me, it's honestly a smart choice. I just still hate it though I should appreciate it.
People keep telling me that I'm good with others, helpful, kind and even "social", but I feel like that only works because they can keep me at arm's length and don't touch me with a 10 foot pole.
Also of course, I don't look good, am a social recluse outside of mandatory things like school back then or Uni now, so noone really knows me beyond all that. Partially due to familial circumstances I can't control and tried to fix, but I'm too much of a failure for that. Stuck in this life cycle if I want to or not.
Having to "love yourself before you can love someone else" is a sentence I hear way too often and it breaks me because it feels like a sealed deal. There is no way out of this. Being unloved and unwanted makes me hate myself even more so how is this going to end? And I also know plenty of people that are in relationships despite hating themselves to this day.
It's just that I'm most likely fundamentally unnerving. Not even in a typical "creepy" way (god I hope so). It's not like I ever approached anyone romantically because it makes me feel like a creep and disgusted. I'm probably more like a plastic person, pretending to be real, or a chameleon changing depending on the people I'm with. All my sociability is fake and incredibly exhausting. I'm simply uncanny.
And yet I still have people that care way too much about me and I just feel bad for them. I feel awful that they put so much energy into someone that's been destroying himself all his life without an end in sight and that their love cannot replace my stupid fucking desire for romance. Something I never wanted as a kid and yet I still fall for people like an idiot.
And I can't talk to them about this because it'll just make them feel awful, guilty or like I may be blaming them. So I guess I'll vent about it here and eventually take it with me to my grave.

Like probably many of you, I give off sad vibes to people, apparently, even if I'm not sad at the time. It's not really something I can "fix", probably it's ASD at the core, there's a gap between how I feel inside, and what is shown on the outside, if it makes sense.
Yes, if say a therapist prods me enough, they will find a deep sadness, literally a black hole, covered in many layers of self defense. The cause of it is mostly the inability to connect with people, bullying and abandonment for not being "normal", fears that turn true every single time I let my guard down.
I studied ways to appear more charismatic for a job for example; the right things to say, when to say them, how to mimic interest; trained smiling on command in the mirror, recorded myself talk, all of that. I could in theory put on such a mask for a short time say, for a job, for money. I couldn't, however, for relationships. I want authenticity.
I got deeply hurt again recently when I allowed myself to open up and take that mask off. People want happy upbeat people that entertain them constantly and make them feel good.
I am wondering what the point of relationships even is, then. For a job, or even a sugar daddy of sorts, people fake it for money, that's easy. If I want sex I can have it probably relatively easily without either person caring about the other's feelings, since I'm a woman and not physically repulsive, I think.
So, if I don't want for example someone's money, status or connections, literally what's the point? What do I get out of that massive effort of keeping that mask on 24/7? How do I not become so bitter and cynical that I don't start rating people according to how they can be useful for me?

so there’s this boycott going around about mcdonald’s and starbucks supporting palestine when they have no exact evidence of supporting the genocide whatsoever. yes, mcdonald’s did send free meals to israel, but they have stated that they are not sending it to support the genocide at all. in fact, im pretty sure that the company itself didn’t agree to fully transmit meals to isreal either. “but what about the white and blue wrappers?” so what? the wrappers just look like that, they have always looked like that i’m sure, it could entirely just be a coincidence. the posters about it are also fake. people have been attacking me for just enjoying a meal in peace, without actually supporting israel. eating a single burger ≠ 1 bomb sent to gaza, that’s not how it works.
overall in my opinion, i feel like the whole “mcdonald’s supporting israel thing” is WAY over exaggerated. and also, people have been forcing me into boycotting constantly, and it makes me really uncomfortable. to the people who have been forcing me to boycott, please leave me alone. i don’t want to be involved in the war at all, so please just leave me be. i can’t do anything about the war except get stressed from it. please correct me if anything stated was wrong, most of the info i got was from a national news article with many true information contained.
​

I’m a stay at home mom of two baby boys. Married 3 years & dated 6 months prior to marriage & got pregnant a couple of months before getting married.
I’m going to get shit for all my bad decision-making here.
I prayed (out loud) for a man that would meet all this criteria and one month later met my husband. He met all the criteria of my prayer so no matter what bad things happened, I thought God had this purposed for me. I mean like a checklist of 10-20 items all checked off. I was vedy devout in my faith. But, now looking back I feel like maybe it wasn’t God who answered my prayer. Maybe this was like a time in the book of Job where God let Satan attack Job and take everything away from him. I don’t know. Oddly enough, the man that became my husband said he prayed for this, too, one month prior.
He love-bombed me. He devalued me. Later, he threatened to leave me (but never has). While we were dating, when I was pregnant, when we were engaged. He called escorts behind my back. I find out he had sexual relations with a woman in his apartment complex one week before we started dating - he told me three years into our marriage. Before we dated, he also had a two year affair with a married woman (whose husband to this day has no idea about it.) He was meeting her and texting her behind my back 2 weeks into us being officially dating exclusively. I find out because he got arrested and I went to pick up his things on his person at the jail. I guess his passcode in one try and there I see the truth. He lied about this woman - he said she was a best friend with no I love yous and no sexual relations. He even asked me if it was okay to be friends with her and I asked him those two questions. He lied and the proof was right there. We were fairly new so I didn’t read too many texts. I spent one hour on his phone at most and handling a panic attack in between.
I read where he texted escorts, too, and read two other relationships he had while seeing this married woman. My mind was blown. I was done. I screenshoted some evidence for my personal keepsake. I texted the married woman because their I love you was so recent. I told her what happened and said to go get him out of jail because I was done. She blew up my phone with texts. She wanted to know who I was and she wanted to share all the creepy details about this man. She claimed they only had sex twice and it was rape - bullshit. She also said a lot of other things like she knew when he bought me a coffee and knew when he went to the city to meet his friends. She said he said that they could still have sex while he was seeing me. He denied it and said it was the other way around.
When he got out of jail, he contacted me and sent me a video. She texted me to show me he sent her a video, too. Same shirt, same scenery and all filmed back after back. He told her how much he cared about her but he was letting her go. He came to meet me because I took his dog to care after her while he was in jail. He talked me into giving him one more chance. I moved into his apartment to get away from a situation at home. I fell for him hard and believed I was in love. We texted and talked all the time and when we were able, we were together. I went on a trip for a week withoht him to California. I got back and the sheets were washed. He said he did that for me so I can come home to clean sheets. Later over the course of our relationship I noticed he never much stepped up to do the laundry. A lot of chores started falling on me. Before even being married he expected me to coean his whole apartment which seemed to have never been touched once with any cleaning.
We were fighting a lot and I saw some of his anger but I thought he was just frustrated with things he was dealing with in his life. He got sort of pushy with me having intercourse with him at times I told him I didn’t want to because I wanted to wait. That made him angry. I find out that he had been FaceTiming escorts from the first weeks we started dating and found at least one call every month up to the week we were suppose to get married. I was shocked! I had no idea and I couldn’t believe it. We had intercourse so much that he wouldn’t need that so I thought. He said it was like porn to him and he had that habit from before he met me. Keep in mind, I’m religious so I was abstinent most of my life and these red flags weren’t so obvious to me. I thought most men were dogs like this. The biggest factor that blew my mind (of which he explained away) was that these escorts weren’t typical - they were transgender women and some still had their boy parts. After talking with someone who I thought was like a mom to me(I find oht later she wasn’t for me), I went through with the wedding, and besides, I was having his baby.
We moved states. I noticed a lot of verbal abuse starting from typically the night time as we shared a bed. He would cuss at me a lot and get so angry. It was almost every night. I was surprised - thinking who is this guy. He made me cry a lot. It was so stupid, I got screamed at just for rolling over in my sleep. He explained this away later after the problem got better. I began feeling like I made a mistake in marrying him. I was so scared at the same time because this was my first pregnancy. I feared so much about the “what ifs” and what world this baby was coming into.
The abuse got worse. It got physcial from time-to-time. He says I was abusive back but I feel like it was reactive abuse because it became too much for me. I would hit him back. It ate at my mind every day and I had all these hormones because I was going to have a baby soon. When pregnant, he has pushed me, held me down, jumped on me with his hands around my neck. He said things that were horrible like he would walk away from this son like he did his first son (he had a son from an earlier relationship which he had nothing to do with). Fear overcame me and some days I thought ending my life was the only way to escape my life and prevent a nightmare for my son. (These feelings relented later in time.)
One time he held up furniture above his head and he was ready to throw it at my head - I believe this was right after our son was born. We argued a lot because my mistrust in him because what I mentioned I discovered earlier. I wanted him to assure me he was trustworthy so sometimes I asked for his phone. Doing that resulted many times in violence and rage. When he had that furniture held up, I felt like he was going to end me right then and there. He stopped himself and I asked him why. He said because he saw the fear in my eyes.
We fought and made up A LOT. That was our relationship and me asking him where he has been or was he with someone. It was terrible for both of us. I discover later that he lied about a lot of things. I didn’t even know he didn’t have a drivers license until about 1-2 years into our marriage. I didn’t know the pictures of his boy parts I found once while dating were to the escorts. I asked him approximately a thousand times. He doesn’t just lie - he tells a story with details and the whole thing is a lie.
I use to check his phone and browser history because it was never ending place of discovery. I never got confessions out of him but I did get evidence that he thought he hid. He must have gotten better at hiding things because I would find less and less. I got to a point where I don’t check anymore - I know and it’s a damn headache to live like that. All the time he did these things, he swore his love for me. He said I was everything.
I discovered again a lie the first time he went to Miami last year (his first time away from me.) He took advantage and called at least ten eacorts and almost met up with one (or did. I don’t know. There’s no money spent but he lied and said the last escort called was his co-worker. I may never know what happened but his coworkers got weird around me after that trip. They won’t look me in the eye.) I didn’t know all this until December last year where I asked him for his T-Mobile password. He didn’t think I would find this when giving me the password.
I saw a text after that trip and found out he lied. He was awake at 2:00PM after he told me he went to bed on the phone. He told me how he missed me SOOO much. He said he tried putting his arm around me in bed to realize I was not there. We FOUGHT over the phone. He didn’t want me to see the rest of the texts between him and his coworker. He left bruises on my arms pushing and shoving me with all his strength. He overpowered me and I never saw the messages. He said he was hiding the fact ge did cocaine. I lost control because I pulled a knife out at him. Not to hurt him but to intimidate him. (I never lost it like this again -he ALWAYS uses this against me to say I’m the abusive one.)
December he admitted the elaborate cocaine story he gave me was a LIE. He said he did do cocaine but not how he told me. The real thing he was hiding was the escorts. At that time, I find out he kissed a coworker (maybe more but nobody will tell me anything.) Another girl told me he was always flirting with new hires. After I find this out from these girls, he put two holes in the walls and broke the doors at the apartment that was in my name. He also bought me $200 roses and a new marriage ring fo Christmas along with other nice gifts. He even goes to therapy to get better at his lying problem (which he only did for about 3 sessions.) He swore this was the last time I would EVER have this happen to me. He swore he loved me and our family. My second baby was born February after ALL of that.
November, my mom died and left me money. I find all that out after I put money on a house for us - Our first house. I made sure we were good. I made sure my baby had everything he could need. I didn’t even buy myself a new car (backstory I lost my good credit, my 2020 car and had one eviction in this marriage. I was almost $30,000 in debt after all of that. My husband made his bad credit good and how we got the house, too. He still has his car and no evictions on his name. We paid over $5,000 for his traffic tickets and court fees plus his debts.)
I could have left then but I was vulnerable because I was having another baby in two months.I feared all the time because I couldn’t get a job or keep one being pregnant and I worried about having one after because I wouldn’t make enough with him and me working would put us at a negative income. I tried building this website but I have yet to get sales. I knew I needed to get out but one last things I feared was breaking up my marriage. I thought he could get better for all his problems.
His anger reared its head again this past month. I found a book titled “Why did he do that.” My husband fits a lot of those examples of abusers. The book said the nice guy is the mask.
This time when he got angry, he said it was my fault he cheated on me. He said it’s a woman’s fault if a man cheats. He said that women need to keep a man happy. He said he had depression caused by me which he never mentioned before. He always said I made him happier than he ever has been in his life. I didn’t know about the cheating just like I didn’t know about the cause. He endlessly lied to me.
I went to his work and asked his boss about the girl he kissed. He is still lying. He said he told his boss what happened. His boss said they both said nothing when they came in for questioning. My husband got the word out and it turned into drama when those girls texted me.
My husband is two people. Dr. Jekell and Mr. Hyde. I just learned recently he has been reading my journals on my phone and texts between my sister. He read my reddit posts. He lied about this and kept it to himself. I feel like he may have planned trapping me in my marriage so I would have nothing. I feel like he is stalking me, too. I have 30K left locked up in a CD - he wants that when its available to pay off the credit cards in his name. We both spend on those cards for food and needs. I want to keep it as my nest just in case. He scares me sometimes. I feel like he may charm a judge when we fight for custody if I leave. I’m scared he will bring up the knife incident and the baker act (I was bakeracted last year when 5 months pregnant- he said he would cut me off financially and have me and our unborn baby fend for ourselves. I panicked and he was being a monster. I said he was hurting me and he said he didn’t care.) I told a cop I wanted to hurt myself but I wasn’t suicidal - I just feared my husband and wanted to get away from him. It was impulsive and I regretted saying it immediately. He was messing with my mind - he fake called the cops. Never dialed but acted out a conversation. I called right after.
I fear him. He is looking like a pscychopath to me or narcist - he pal ed his whole marriage and family around abuse and lies. He admitted to lying to keep me from leaving him on a few occassions. He would act like a little innocent and hurt boy. I could never see the abuser when he switched.
Would you be scared, too? I feel like no matter what I will never be free from him. My husband has once told me nobody will believe me. Everyone thinks I’m crazy - he said this right after convincing the cops that. (Time where he bent the truth to make it funny - the cops were sold.)

I’m a stay at home mom of two baby boys. Married 3 years & dated 6 months prior to marriage & got pregnant a couple of months before getting married.
I’m going to get shit for all my bad decision-making here.
I prayed (out loud) for a man that would meet all this criteria and one month later met my husband. He met all the criteria of my prayer so no matter what bad things happened, I thought God had this purposed for me. I mean like a checklist of 10-20 items all checked off. I was vedy devout in my faith. But, now looking back I feel like maybe it wasn’t God who answered my prayer. Maybe this was like a time in the book of Job where God let Satan attack Job and take everything away from him. I don’t know. Oddly enough, the man that became my husband said he prayed for this, too, one month prior.
He love-bombed me. He devalued me. Later, he threatened to leave me (but never has). While we were dating, when I was pregnant, when we were engaged. He called escorts behind my back. I find out he had sexual relations with a woman in his apartment complex one week before we started dating - he told me three years into our marriage. Before we dated, he also had a two year affair with a married woman (whose husband to this day has no idea about it.) He was meeting her and texting her behind my back 2 weeks into us being officially dating exclusively. I find out because he got arrested and I went to pick up his things on his person at the jail. I guess his passcode in one try and there I see the truth. He lied about this woman - he said she was a best friend with no I love yous and no sexual relations. He even asked me if it was okay to be friends with her and I asked him those two questions. He lied and the proof was right there. We were fairly new so I didn’t read too many texts. I spent one hour on his phone at most and handling a panic attack in between.
I read where he texted escorts, too, and read two other relationships he had while seeing this married woman. My mind was blown. I was done. I screenshoted some evidence for my personal keepsake. I texted the married woman because their I love you was so recent. I told her what happened and said to go get him out of jail because I was done. She blew up my phone with texts. She wanted to know who I was and she wanted to share all the creepy details about this man. She claimed they only had sex twice and it was rape - bullshit. She also said a lot of other things like she knew when he bought me a coffee and knew when he went to the city to meet his friends. She said he said that they could still have sex while he was seeing me. He denied it and said it was the other way around.
When he got out of jail, he contacted me and sent me a video. She texted me to show me he sent her a video, too. Same shirt, same scenery and all filmed back after back. He told her how much he cared about her but he was letting her go. He came to meet me because I took his dog to care after her while he was in jail. He talked me into giving him one more chance. I moved into his apartment to get away from a situation at home. I fell for him hard and believed I was in love. We texted and talked all the time and when we were able, we were together. I went on a trip for a week withoht him to California. I got back and the sheets were washed. He said he did that for me so I can come home to clean sheets. Later over the course of our relationship I noticed he never much stepped up to do the laundry. A lot of chores started falling on me. Before even being married he expected me to coean his whole apartment which seemed to have never been touched once with any cleaning.
We were fighting a lot and I saw some of his anger but I thought he was just frustrated with things he was dealing with in his life. He got sort of pushy with me having intercourse with him at times I told him I didn’t want to because I wanted to wait. That made him angry. I find out that he had been FaceTiming escorts from the first weeks we started dating and found at least one call every month up to the week we were suppose to get married. I was shocked! I had no idea and I couldn’t believe it. We had intercourse so much that he wouldn’t need that so I thought. He said it was like porn to him and he had that habit from before he met me. Keep in mind, I’m religious so I was abstinent most of my life and these red flags weren’t so obvious to me. I thought most men were dogs like this. The biggest factor that blew my mind (of which he explained away) was that these escorts weren’t typical - they were transgender women and some still had their boy parts. After talking with someone who I thought was like a mom to me(I find oht later she wasn’t for me), I went through with the wedding, and besides, I was having his baby.
We moved states. I noticed a lot of verbal abuse starting from typically the night time as we shared a bed. He would cuss at me a lot and get so angry. It was almost every night. I was surprised - thinking who is this guy. He made me cry a lot. It was so stupid, I got screamed at just for rolling over in my sleep. He explained this away later after the problem got better. I began feeling like I made a mistake in marrying him. I was so scared at the same time because this was my first pregnancy. I feared so much about the “what ifs” and what world this baby was coming into.
The abuse got worse. It got physcial from time-to-time. He says I was abusive back but I feel like it was reactive abuse because it became too much for me. I would hit him back. It ate at my mind every day and I had all these hormones because I was going to have a baby soon. When pregnant, he has pushed me, held me down, jumped on me with his hands around my neck. He said things that were horrible like he would walk away from this son like he did his first son (he had a son from an earlier relationship which he had nothing to do with). Fear overcame me and some days I thought ending my life was the only way to escape my life and prevent a nightmare for my son. (These feelings relented later in time.)
One time he held up furniture above his head and he was ready to throw it at my head - I believe this was right after our son was born. We argued a lot because my mistrust in him because what I mentioned I discovered earlier. I wanted him to assure me he was trustworthy so sometimes I asked for his phone. Doing that resulted many times in violence and rage. When he had that furniture held up, I felt like he was going to end me right then and there. He stopped himself and I asked him why. He said because he saw the fear in my eyes.
We fought and made up A LOT. That was our relationship and me asking him where he has been or was he with someone. It was terrible for both of us. I discover later that he lied about a lot of things. I didn’t even know he didn’t have a drivers license until about 1-2 years into our marriage. I didn’t know the pictures of his boy parts I found once while dating were to the escorts. I asked him approximately a thousand times. He doesn’t just lie - he tells a story with details and the whole thing is a lie.
I use to check his phone and browser history because it was never ending place of discovery. I never got confessions out of him but I did get evidence that he thought he hid. He must have gotten better at hiding things because I would find less and less. I got to a point where I don’t check anymore - I know and it’s a damn headache to live like that. All the time he did these things, he swore his love for me. He said I was everything.
I discovered again a lie the first time he went to Miami last year (his first time away from me.) He took advantage and called at least ten eacorts and almost met up with one (or did. I don’t know. There’s no money spent but he lied and said the last escort called was his co-worker. I may never know what happened but his coworkers got weird around me after that trip. They won’t look me in the eye.) I didn’t know all this until December last year where I asked him for his T-Mobile password. He didn’t think I would find this when giving me the password.
I saw a text after that trip and found out he lied. He was awake at 2:00PM after he told me he went to bed on the phone. He told me how he missed me SOOO much. He said he tried putting his arm around me in bed to realize I was not there. We FOUGHT over the phone. He didn’t want me to see the rest of the texts between him and his coworker. He left bruises on my arms pushing and shoving me with all his strength. He overpowered me and I never saw the messages. He said he was hiding the fact ge did cocaine. I lost control because I pulled a knife out at him. Not to hurt him but to intimidate him. (I never lost it like this again -he ALWAYS uses this against me to say I’m the abusive one.)
December he admitted the elaborate cocaine story he gave me was a LIE. He said he did do cocaine but not how he told me. The real thing he was hiding was the escorts. At that time, I find out he kissed a coworker (maybe more but nobody will tell me anything.) Another girl told me he was always flirting with new hires. After I find this out from these girls, he put two holes in the walls and broke the doors at the apartment that was in my name. He also bought me $200 roses and a new marriage ring fo Christmas along with other nice gifts. He even goes to therapy to get better at his lying problem (which he only did for about 3 sessions.) He swore this was the last time I would EVER have this happen to me. He swore he loved me and our family. My second baby was born February after ALL of that.
November, my mom died and left me money. I find all that out after I put money on a house for us - Our first house. I made sure we were good. I made sure my baby had everything he could need. I didn’t even buy myself a new car (backstory I lost my good credit, my 2020 car and had one eviction in this marriage. I was almost $30,000 in debt after all of that. My husband made his bad credit good and how we got the house, too. He still has his car and no evictions on his name. We paid over $5,000 for his traffic tickets and court fees plus his debts.)
I could have left then but I was vulnerable because I was having another baby in two months.I feared all the time because I couldn’t get a job or keep one being pregnant and I worried about having one after because I wouldn’t make enough with him and me working would put us at a negative income. I tried building this website but I have yet to get sales. I knew I needed to get out but one last things I feared was breaking up my marriage. I thought he could get better for all his problems.
His anger reared its head again this past month. I found a book titled “Why did he do that.” My husband fits a lot of those examples of abusers. The book said the nice guy is the mask.
This time when he got angry, he said it was my fault he cheated on me. He said it’s a woman’s fault if a man cheats. He said that women need to keep a man happy. He said he had depression caused by me which he never mentioned before. He always said I made him happier than he ever has been in his life. I didn’t know about the cheating just like I didn’t know about the cause. He endlessly lied to me.
I went to his work and asked his boss about the girl he kissed. He is still lying. He said he told his boss what happened. His boss said they both said nothing when they came in for questioning. My husband got the word out and it turned into drama when those girls texted me.
My husband is two people. Dr. Jekell and Mr. Hyde. I just learned recently he has been reading my journals on my phone and texts between my sister. He read my reddit posts. He lied about this and kept it to himself. I feel like he may have planned trapping me in my marriage so I would have nothing. I feel like he is stalking me, too. I have 30K left locked up in a CD - he wants that when its available to pay off the credit cards in his name. We both spend on those cards for food and needs. I want to keep it as my nest just in case. He scares me sometimes. I feel like he may charm a judge when we fight for custody if I leave. I’m scared he will bring up the knife incident and the baker act (I was bakeracted last year when 5 months pregnant- he said he would cut me off financially and have me and our unborn baby fend for ourselves. I panicked and he was being a monster. I said he was hurting me and he said he didn’t care.) I told a cop I wanted to hurt myself but I wasn’t suicidal - I just feared my husband and wanted to get away from him. It was impulsive and I regretted saying it immediately. He was messing with my mind - he fake called the cops. Never dialed but acted out a conversation. I called right after.
I fear him. He is looking like a pscychopath to me or narcist - he pal ed his whole marriage and family around abuse and lies. He admitted to lying to keep me from leaving him on a few occassions. He would act like a little innocent and hurt boy. I could never see the abuser when he switched.
Would you be scared, too? Am I overthinking his lies and abuse? Do I need to get away now? I feel like no matter what I will never be free from him. My husband has once told me nobody will believe me. Everyone thinks I’m crazy - he said this right after convincing the cops that. (Time where he bent the truth to make it funny - the cops were sold.)

Like probably many of you, I give off sad vibes to people, apparently, even if I'm not sad at the time. It's not really something I can "fix", probably it's ASD at the core, there's a gap between how I feel inside, and what is shown on the outside, if it makes sense.
Yes, if say a therapist prods me enough, they will find a deep sadness, literally a black hole, covered in many layers of self defense. The cause of it is mostly the inability to connect with people, bullying and abandonment for not being "normal", fears that turn true every single time I let my guard down.
I studied ways to appear more charismatic for a job for example; the right things to say, when to say them, how to mimic interest; trained smiling on command in the mirror, recorded myself talk, all of that. I could in theory put on such a mask for a short time say, for a job, for money. I couldn't, however, for relationships. I want authenticity.
I got deeply hurt again recently when I allowed myself to open up and take that mask off. People want happy upbeat people that entertain them constantly and make them feel good.
I am wondering what the point of relationships even is, then. For a job, or even a sugar daddy of sorts, people fake it for money, that's easy. If I want sex I can have it probably relatively easily without either person caring about the other's feelings, since I'm a woman and not physically repulsive, I think.
So, if I don't want for example someone's money, status or connections, literally what's the point? What do I get out of that massive effort of keeping that mask on 24/7? How do I not become so bitter and cynical that I don't start rating people according to how they can be useful for me?

Hey! I've been looking to upgrade my monitor game. I'm currently using a BenQ XL2546 as my main monitor and I've been looking to upgrade. I have been trying a few monitors and I'm just struggling to get that feel I have with the BenQ's. I actually have had 3 iterations, (3 monitor setup, 2 older BenQ's are secondary monitors).
I have been trying the msi mag 271qpx monitor, and it just hasn't felt "it". The colors are decent, but not as nice as I thought they'd be for an oled. I had to do a lot of editing to get it to a somewhat neutral white balance, but it's still just not as bright as my other monitors. It also seems like it probably puts more strain on my eyes? Maybe being oled? The specs are great, and it seems like it has nice qualities in general, but it doesn't totally feel like my long lasting monitor. I had some people recommend pretty much the equivalent LG ultragear 27inch. That one felt worse... it felt darker, but I will say some of the clarity around edges of things like character models in game seemed slightly better. The color was wack on that one too out of the box.
I don't think I need to use HDR, I find it almost gimmicky right now, as it feels like colors get oversaturated and it feels too fake. I play mostly MOBA's and FPS games, so I'm looking for 240hz. I will say the 360 on the msi actually is nice. But I'd like at least 240 with low latency, again msi had .03, not sure other panels are up to that yet.
I do also do some editing in davinci resolve and affinity photo. SUPER basic editing, no color grading or anything really. Basically edit youtube videos and make thumbnails. That's where I noticed how off the colors were originally.
I have used 24" 1080 monitors for what seems like forever. However, I wanted to try 1440 27" and it's nice but I'm still not sure what I want to do yet.
Mostly I'd like some recommendations. Do I just get the newest Zowie and stick to TN panels, I know they're great for performance in FPS games, but I feel like I'm losing that "juice" by not going for at least something like an IPS. I'd go for an IPS panel from zowie if they had one since I like their monitors (clearly).
I have heard a lot of people talk about the Asus Rog series IPS monitors, and they just announced the oled. But honestly, I don't think I'm going to go for OLED. As nice as some features are, I don't like a few of the things that I think are making it a no for me. I literally had my monitor shutting off on me because I didn't run the pixel thing, and you can't NOT run it after 16 hours. Which I get, for pixel burn, but I was in the middle of a game and I was just like idk what to do... It was SUPER annoying. Granted, I should have just done one earlier, but that's the nature of it, I'm not always going to have a monitor turn off in the timeframe, so that's a big negative for me is the burn.
Really, I'd like to just have a bright, color accurate crisp monitor. I also don't know if it's worth going to 1440 at a 25" or if I should do 27" if I want to do 1440. I've done 1080 for what seems like forever, and it looks like were trying to go to 4k, so why not get those better graphics for the times I would use them. But I don't know if the value of hundreds of extra dollars is worth it.
Current Specs:
Ryzen 7 7800x3d
MAG x670E Tomahawk wifi
GeForce RTX 4800 Super
32GB RAM 6000mhz
Can you get me some insight here?

Hi! New here, so please bear with me. I'm really conflicted about me being the difficulties one in this situation.
So a bit of background: I've been with SO for a few years. We are both in our late 20s, live together, and all in all, I think we have a fantastic relationship. We almost never fight, and if we do, we work it out calmly. We work together, which means we also spend a lot of time together, but it's my favorite part of my job. I adore him, and I love his family and friends, as he does mine.
We live far away from our families, but his is much closer than mine, so we spend more time at my in-laws. Since the start, we all mutually tried to make an effort to get to know each other and to nurture our relationship. From my side, I have given them many gifts, I have cooked, cleaned and tidied extensively whenever I was a guest in her house, I have helped MIL with her work, including handcrafting little souvenirs for her student's summer festival, which took me hours of work; I offer to pay whenever we eat out; I call and listen to her when she is upset, which is often since she is a rather nervous person. I made a huge effort since I saw how happy it made my SO that I was willing to put so much in towards his family, and I started seeing them as my family too.
Since the beginning, MIL was very nice to me, albeit a bit critical. That criticism grew with time, as she was more comfortable around me, and it was often said with a smile in a way I could not get mad: "You should get cellulite treatment so you are more comfortable with yourself" (I never said I wasn't), "don't worry if that swimsuit doesn't look on you the same as in the model" (I wasn't worried, and I certainly didn't ask), "you should not say thank you like that, it sounds fake" (whenever I thanked her for a meal, etc.). All in all, I thought if this was it, it was not too bad, it was probably a generacional thing and I shouldn't hold it against her.
However, she has been getting more blatant and intense lately. This last month was horrible. I felt everything I did was wrong: where I left my shoes, my way of talking, working, even dressing. SO had to get some medical tests done so we were at my I laws for the better part of the month and I did not know where to hice. I thought she was having a hard month, and tried to get over it without saying anything.
Fastforward to last weekend, when SO and I attended a wedding and the bride gave us the bouquet, as a tease, to tell us that we should get married soon. We were so happy that our friends saw us as a long term couple too, and we spent some time in the ride back daydreaming about a possible wedding.
When we arrived home and MIL saw the bouquet, she was upset. Her face fell and she made a comment along the lines of: "uff, you don't need that". I was pretty hurt but I thought I had it well from her. However, when my SO went to talk to her, all hell broke lose. I could hear agitated voice and when I went to the kitchen to look for a glass, I hear her say: "she is very nice, but I am not convinced. You'd be making a huge mistake". Mind you, the kitchen is two rooms away from were she was raining, very loudly and with the door wide open.
I started crying and left before I could hear anything else. When they found me downstairs crying she lost it. Said I was eavesdropping and started screaming she refuse to feel bad for what she said. I didn't say a word except a "don't worry I am just a bit upset, but you don't need to say anything", I was just mostly crying. She kept going on how she didn't have to justify her opinions, and that she tells us how it is. The only reason she gave for her reasoning is that she sees SO stressed about work, and because I work with him (I'm his junior) that is not good for his health. I don't understand, there were a thousands other stressful things going on family related that were far worse-why is she obsessing about our job?
I don't get it. This never came up before. Some of my friends and family insist she is a bit jealous since she is extremely dependent of my SO for everything (for literally every decision she has to make), and that she is scared to lose him. But I have never tried to keep him away from her.
Am I overreacting? I am so hurt. I thought she thought of me as family, and now I just feel she thinks I am a mistake his son is making...

Someone once described Chuck as one giant plot hole, and they had a point. There are lots of loose ends and inconsistencies that we’re all prepared to overlook because of the overall genuine pleasure of the show. This is Chuck, not Chernobyl. We don’t really care that no one ever gets stuck in traffic in Los Angeles, for example, or that flying to Moscow seems to take maybe half an hour.
But still, people make mistakes, and there often isn’t an accounting for those mistakes. We may not want realism, but we do expect some degree of consistency. Ellie blew it big time with her CIA misadventure, which inadvertently led to her Dad being killed. What on earth was she thinking? We’ll never know. The entire chronicle of Sarah and Chuck the first two and a half years or so is a chronicle of mistakes that they eventually do put behind them, but it’s pretty fraught journey—particularly Sarah’s terrible taste in men (Casey gets this immediately,) and her double standard about Chuck. Morgan’s entire life trajectory is one blunder after another—he’s lucky Chuck doesn’t whack him from time to time, since many come at Chuck’s expense. Whatever happened to the potential lawsuits from Lester and Jeff’s interviews for new female staff? Who knows? The only person who ever seems to pay for any mistake is Casey, who is dismissed by Beckman for serious, but understandable and forgivable, offenses.
Which brings us to Beckman. How on earth did this person get to be a general? Her tenure seems to be a litany of bad judgments and downright blunders, one error after another. Starting with the remarkable judgment (shared by Graham, but not, importantly, enthusiastically embraced by Casey) to have Chuck killed, although he has, as Casey noted, served his country well, and never asked for the intersect in the first place. (Notice they don’t tell Sarah.) This is a completely bonkers decision. The argument that you can’t have two intersects around is nonsense—you probably don’t want them in the same room, but still, that’s no reason to kill the guy. Casey tries to resist the order, but she shoots him down immediately—refuses to even listen. This person is a military leader?
But by far the worst blunder is her repeated and bewildering confidence in Shaw. Not listening to Chuck and Morgan explain about the fake fight is pretty inexcusable, and nearly gets Sarah killed. Moreover, Beckman seems perfectly ok with Sarah working with Shaw even after she learns the truth about the death of Shaw's wife herself. In what universe is this a sound judgment? Shaw makes lots of mistakes, actually, and pays for exactly none of them until the bridge encounter with Chuck. (Shaw was a really good tragic villain, but his spy credentials are never catalogued.) Either Beckman is oblivious, or she’s genuinely stupid. I don’t think you become a general by being stupid. Well, maybe you do. And Beckman seems miraculously unscathed career-wise from any of these (in some cases, potentially fatal) blunders. We never again hear about Shaw’s elevator fake fight, or, more generally, the reasons for Beckman’s blind faith in Shaw when all the evidence should be suggesting otherwise.
Shaw isn’t the only example of Beckman’s poor judgments about people. We can forgive her infatuation with Roan Montgomery because that’s what it obviously is—the two seem to have been a thing. But Montgomery is an old drunk at this point, and even he knows it. Then there’s her belief that the Turners walk on water or something. How oblivious can you get, really. And who can forget Beckman’s expecting Chuck and Sarah to be back in Burbank the next day, following an excruciatingly harrowing experience and Sarah nearly getting murdered by Beckman’s favorite spy. They should have gotten three months off and the opportunity to work for someone less pathological. Instead, we get Beckman prepared to send them off again the next day. Really, doesn’t Beckman actually report to anyone?
And Beckman’s treatment of Sarah is pretty awful too. She knows Sarah’s strengths, but then we also have the ridiculous 49B exercise, which seemed designed mainly to show another attractive woman in skimpy outfits. As a plot device, it barely worked, and still it seems a bit of an over-reaction. Far worse was he decision to send Sarah off on her own to take down the Volkov empire, with Mary. Somehow the two of them were going to do something miraculous or something—it’s never completely clear. Of course, why Sarah agreed with this bonkers plan made as much sense as continuing to hang around Shaw even after he discovered the truth about his wife’s death. But at this point we’re used to Sarah making boneheaded judgments, so we let these slide.
I love Chuck--it's one of my three or four favorite shows ever. But a little more accountability for sheer stupidity wouldn’t have hurt the show one bit.

Does anybody here know how you might change the movement of lips in a video. I’m trying to make a funny celebrity video. you can make fake voices with 11 labs. But the guy who made the video below is also changing the lips and i wonder if any of you wiz kids know how one might go about that.
https://www.instagram.com/reel/C7LhRBvOJG7/?igsh=MWRsNjZsMjQ1c2Vz

Given that information in other posts about available information(if looking for it perhaps, per se), regarding "alternative treatments" for the situation that may be associated with the idea of "depression" and or the other nutritional augmentation/modification related items are somewhat "lesser known" than more "conventional approaches"/"main stream approaches", why are the "main stream approaches" the "main stream approaches" as per majority of physicians etc., general public etc.?
One might argue that these specific referenced items of information in question being "less well known" than more "well trumpeted" items like pharmaceutical medications, etc., amounts to somewhat of a "betrayal" arguably; and hence one might be lead to ask one's self "who is involved" in the betrayal arguably? "What are the mechanisms" via which this "betrayal" is proliferated throughout society, in general?
Well, presumably, this betrayal would involve several key actors.
-Sources of Information,
and
-Framers of Information.
A "source" of said information could essentially be argued to entail/involve organizations like the main-stream-media and/or a run-of-the-mill mainstream medical providers arguably.
Hence one might wonder perhaps, where the source of said issue vis. there associated potential entities/individuals/there associated organizations may lie, perhaps.
To suss this out, one may be "well guided" to potentially asses the sources of revenue etc., for said organizations etc., as appropriate etc.; "Follow the Money", "Qui Bono" etc.(not necessarily always true but at times may be useful "guides" perhaps)
To work from the "ground up" one may hence be "well guided" to asses, for example, the revenue sources of Main Stream Media first, as this is most ubiquitous source for "medical advice" in general perhaps;
-Pharmaceutical companies within group of largest 5 ad spenders vis. main stream media;
https://www.fiercepharma.com/marketing/hey-big-spenders-pharma-ranks-top-five-industries-for-tv-media-spending-says-report
https://www.foxbusiness.com/money/which-pharma-brand-spends-the-most-on-tv
https://www.statista.com/statistics/953104/pharma-industry-tv-ad-spend-us/
-As is somewhat obvious media companies are in general, in some regard, directly or indirectly often effectively "advertising companies", in effect;
https://www.pewresearch.org/journalism/2014/03/26/revenue-sources-a-heavy-dependence-on-advertising/
Further, one can not truly reasonably expect to rely on main stream media coverage alone for decent medically oriented advice unfortunately perhaps in general.
None the less, fortuitously there are run of the mill health care providers. Hopefully they wouldn't have any conflicts of interest with financial behemoths like large pharmaceutical companies right?
Well, unfortunately pharmaceutical company money is very present in both the education of the average western-medicine oriented doctor, as well as in the environment which they may operate in, in a post college etc., "setting" if one will, etc.
For example;
Pharmaceutical companies' "presence" in Canadian medical schooling;
https://www.sootoday.com/around-ontario/canada-how-big-pharma-can-impact-the-education-of-med-school-students-1634906
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3778453/
In US, etc., as well;
https://time.com/6171999/big-pharma-clinical-data-doctors/
https://www.propublica.org/article/we-found-over-700-doctors-who-were-paid-more-than-a-million-dollars-by-drug-and-medical-device-companies
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/19723256/
Well, if pharmaceutical company money is potentially "creating" "conflicts of interest" within medical schools, and among run of the mill doctors, well, certainly, regulators would call them out if they did anything "inappropriate" right?
Unfortunately, there may also be potential "conflicts of interest" present within regulators potentially as well. For example, via the "revolving door", and other there associated phenomena, as well as through funding and other more direct financial conflicts of interest as well; as may be documented via the following perhaps;
https://www.science.org/content/article/hidden-conflicts-pharma-payments-fda-advisers-after-drug-approvals-spark-ethical
https://www.science.org/content/article/fda-and-nih-let-clinical-trial-sponsors-keep-results-secret-and-break-law
https://www.hawaiipublicradio.org/npr-news/npr-news/2016-09-28/a-look-at-how-the-revolving-door-spins-from-fda-to-industry
https://web.archive.org/web/20240415060010/https://www.science.org/content/article/fda-s-revolving-door-companies-often-hire-agency-staffers-who-managed-their-successful
https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/how-corporate-funding-distorts-nih-research/2018/06/22/ad0260c8-7595-11e8-9780-b1dd6a09b549_story.html
Also, within there-associated research institutes/clinics/labs etc., the desire to secure sources-of-funding may also acutely draw in the influence of pharmaceutical companies into the "scientific research" process associated with the field of "medicine" if one will in general for example;
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9302569/
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/19858802/
https://www.propublica.org/article/federally-funded-health-researchers-disclose-at-least-188-million-in-conflicts-of-interest-can-you-trust-their-findings
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iIsMldhzxns
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1y_EkKhs5BQ
Further, within research institutions and research at Universities etc., people would only, even if unduly influenced by pharmaceutical industry or other industry finances etc., directly or indirectly, none the less behave ethically, and in an up-standing and competent way in regards to conducting their research right? They certainly wouldn't produce dubious "scientific" or otherwise "academic" oriented research perhaps right? Surely, they would be concerned with being called out, and the there-associated consequence for doing as such etc. perhaps?
Well, it turns out that quite a lot of modern "scientific research", even if "fancy" and "rigorous" in its supposed "methodologies" "verbiage" etc., is actually of "dubious" origin, and representative of something less than "integrity" and "excellence" potentially, lets just say seemingly;
A large amount of "scientific research papers" submitted to "Academic Journals", are later retracted, etc.;
https://www.theguardian.com/science/2024/feb/03/the-situation-has-become-appalling-fake-scientific-papers-push-research-credibility-to-crisis-point?ref=labnotes.org
Many, if not most of the scientific, etc., papers that clear the review process and are published, are later found to be un-reproducible, vis. results etc., outcomes etc., for "whatever reason", seemingly;
https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-39054778
https://www.sciencenews.org/article/cancer-biology-studies-research-replication-reproducibility
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Replication_crisis
Hence, from the education, to the research, to the regulation of the "medical industry" in the US, etc., one may find, arguably, objectively speaking, a relatively profoundly large presence of "pharmaceutical industry" financial influence involved in practically every stage of the; research, review of the research(if the "research" is even somewhat "legit" to begin with), govt. institution associated actions(for example; "Approval", etc.) associated with said associated "research", and one can even see said same organizations(Ph. Companies) similarly being the leading contributors to the main-stream-media associated "coverage"/"discussions" of said associated items, both directly, via advertising, and indirectly vis. implicit bias of said profit driven or funding driven main-stream media outlets etc.
Hence, arguably, the "influence"-of pharmaceutical companies' "motivations" may have a disproportionate and relatively overwhelming per se, influence upon the "medical" information that is presented-to, and made-easily available to the average member of the public in the "Western World" in general perhaps.
As an aside obviously, if one will, there are many other books, articles, research papers etc., which may somehow none the less, "make it through" this net of biases and still somehow report on it, if one will; on this, there associated variety of topics in question, which one may further perhaps research and analyze as to one's own preferences perhaps.