Ayo,
My name is Bread (He/Him) 23 years old. I've been wanting to run Monsterhearts 2 ever since I first learned about it 2 years ago. I attempted to way back when but I was nowhere near experienced enough to run this game how it called for. I needed hard rails or else I was lost. However now after playing and Dming a bunch of different systems and working out how I am as a game master, I think I'm ready to dive in. I will most likely make mistakes and it won't be perfect, however, I feel confident now that I can create a game that I can be proud of.
Some things to keep in mind: (Borrowed from another post I found)
•Keep Your Hearts Safe: Monsterhearts is a system that can deal with heavier topics, such as dysfunctional relationships, teen sexuality, coercive power, trauma, abuse, violence, and queer marginalization. It is a game that encourages us to dive deep into the psychology and mental psyche of the characters. We won't shy away from more difficult subjects and you should be warned of that.
•None May Pierce The Veil: While all I said above is true, we will also have firm red lines that will most likely be established in session 0. This is still a game, primarily intended to be fun. The players and MC will have their chances to express what they are comfortable or not comfortable with. Subjects that fall into the later category will either not be displayed at all in the game or be exclusively fade to black scenes.
Game Synopsis:
You are entering your senior year at River Fork High. Have you been there all 4 years? Are you a new student? Whatever you decide to be one thing is for sure. Your life is messy. Your life is complicated, along with everyone else in this small town we call Sinsdale, Illinois. This town has been around for hundreds of years. A once thriving town centered around the chopping and selling of the finest, and strongest wood in the United States has quickly turned into a shell of its former self. Although you most likely don't care about that. You're just trying to survive high school. The Bullies, the Jocks, the Nerds, the Popular kids. All in their own groups and in their own heads. Where will you find yourselves? Who will you relate to? Who will you try to be?
In any case, how will you fit into not only this school but the entire town? The town that never seemed quite right, that always seemed that no matter how hard or little you looked, it wasn't completely normal. Maybe that is why this particular phrase is used by the oldest or most weary occupants of Sinsdale: Be Back Before Ten.
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While it may seem like I have the entire setting figured out, in reality, all I have figured out is the name of the town and a very brief history that can change. I have the name of the school, and a catchy tagline which depending on what we do in the game can become more real or just stay as it is.
At every step of the way, especially during session 0 I will be asking you questions to fill out the town and the school and overall the world. Im ultimately looking for players who will take risks and initiate drama in the messiest of senses. We will be collaborating in real-time to tell the exaggerated story of these monsters in teen form and if that sounds like a story you are wanting to be a part of, feel free to apply!

• We will be using Discord for voice and cameras are really encouraged but not mandatory. I most likely will be using a webcam. What is important is a quality enough mic.

-We will be using Roll20 to roll.
-This game is 18+ Only
-I am leaning towards not allowing custom skins but am still mulling it over.
If all that sounds good to you. Please fill out the form here and I will get back to you when I can to talk over voice! https://forms.gle/Zc2tGsqYUPvd9c4d7

For reference, I'm lvl 98 galactic commander and I've played at least 100 games with the spear against the automatons, and a couple of times against the bugs.
The spear is supposed to be an anti-tank weapon that can lock on to distant enemies. Not that complicated in terms of design, yet it fails to do either consistently.
We are all aware that the lock on is jank, which already makes it frustrating. But even when it does lock on and you manage to fire the missile before it forgets its target, this does not gurantee the target dies.
I cannot stress how bad it feels to finally get the missile to launch, watch it fly towards it's target, and either miss completely (gunships) or watch it collide with a tank, and it just calmly turns around as if all I did was knock on the door. So I load another round, watch it make contact with the same tank a second time, and IT'S STILL ALIVE. WTF? I can only carry THREE missiles on my back. You're telling me I need ALL THREE to kill ONE TANK? It's an anti-TANK missile. You can't look me in the eye with a straight face and tell me this apple doesn't taste like bacon.
I've even watched the missile collide with fabricators and not kill them. I've tried repositioning so the missile will hit the top half of the fab, and I watch the missile collide again doing nothing. If the third doesn't blow it up, I straight up log off. I usually pair the spear with the shield relay and 2 sentries, and I can't blow up the fab with stun grenades so I'm just stuck there waiting for someone else to blow it up or call in supplies/new spear just to waste 3 more rockets and not blow it up. (While I'm thinking about it, why can't the autocannon sentry blow up fabs? Or hell, why not the mortar? Honestly seems like a bug to me seeing as they will both waste all their ammo trying to blow up fabs, and they both work for bug holes)
It just feels like a slap in the face that the highest level anti-tank weapon can't even kill a tank without using all the ammo on your back. The auto-cannon can kill a tank from behind in like, what, 3-5 shots? Leaving over 90% of it's ammo supply still available for engagements? If the auto cannon is the king of balance for support weapons, then they have to make the spear more consistent so you don't blow through all your ammo on one heavy/fab.
Factory striders and bile titans I understand not being one shots. (However, I don't understand why the spear one shots Bile Titans to the face while EAT and recoiless do not - face contains brain, you hit face with rocket = brain dead. That's how it should work) Regardless, I have seen the spear one-shot tanks, and I think this only happens when the missile comes down from above making contact with the TOP of the cannon. If it hits the side of the cannon, you're SOL. I swear I've even watched it make contact with the heat-sink and it didn't explode.
I'm not sure how to properly fix this. If you change the Spear trajectory, it might not be able to properly target a Bile Titans face anymore. And if you nerf the parts on the tank, you might end up with certain weapons being able to kill tanks when they shouldn't.
IMO, they should buff the damage on all of the anti tank launchers. Make it so spear can two-shot titans in the same spot, one-shot tanks without hitting weakspot, and so EAT and recoiless can one-shot titans to the face. This would not only improve the spears inconsistency with tanks and bile titans by decreasing the minimum amount of shots to kill, but also make more variable loadouts useful against the bugs because you won't feel as forced into taking anti-titan eagles/orbitals if someone on your team brings an AT-launcher. Titans are too tanky anyways. There's no reason they should be able to tank over 6-7 rockets, that's just absurd and drags out encounters when you don't have strategems available. Bile titans should never take more than 4 shots from EAT/recoiless and no more than 2 from spear in the same spot. Anything more just feels unreasonable. Same goes for spewers, like why tf does a rocket launcher not one-shot the super bloated bug filled with liquid when a tiny grenade does?
Fabricators could probably be fixed pretty easily by using the same durable part value for the entire structure, instead of having weird pockets with higher armor that prevent the spear missile from doing any damage. And for the love of liberty, either let the sentries blow up fabs, or remove fabs from the sentry targeting list. They don't appear to be armored and they contain delicate manufacuring equipment so just let the sentries blow them up.
I can't shake the feeling that when they finally release the spear fix, it's just going to be a targeting consistency improvement, which is very welcome, but I'm really hoping they go the extra mile and make this thing the beast it deserves to be. Remove striders and shriekers from the target list and change the poi pickups to replenish 2 missiles. That alone will make the spear feel much better. Also, I don't think the spear should ever miss gunships. Gunships fly through the air extremely slow, even after the movement buff. If the spear missile flies past it should always try to circle back and correct itself.
I hope the super earth engineer who designed the spear missiles/targeting system is being properly reeducated

An the title says, I am starting a new homebrew story in the world of Monte Cook's games Numenera, a Sci-Fantasy setting with any number of strange sights and experiences in it.
If you have never played Numenera, or the Cypher System before, that's fine! My friends and I would be happy to show you the ropes. It's not a super crunchy system, and it provides for a more cinematic and dynamic storytelling than I find I can get in D&D 5E. I would much rather have someone who meshes well with the table and can learn Numenera, than a Numenera expert who isn't focused on the same kind of stories as the rest of the table.
I am very much interested in players who are outgoing, and want to tell stories filled with drama. We all like to have fun while a character 'chews the scenery' and expresses themselves to the NPCs in the world, and tells their deepest secrets to the other PCs.
To apply, you would need to answer a short questionnaire, have a 20-30 minute voice chat with me, your humble GM, about what kinds of things are important to you in TTRPGs, and then if all has gone well, meet the rest of the table for a hangout and discussion of 3 campaign pitches and potential characters and connections.
If you are looking for a game that focuses on the interplay between characters as they take on strange adventures, I encourage you to give Numenera a chance, and apply today.

Hey everyone. I am trying to use a VPN in order to connect to Xbox cloud gaming from a country that is not supported. I have an account with Express VPN. Is there a way to simply download Express VPN and run it from game mode? Or do I have to go through the runaround of using konsole in desktop mode?

Downloads

Stable - Gaiman (Recommended)

Android, Linux, OS X, Windows

Experimental (Not recommended)

Automated Installation

Catapult Game Launcher (3rd party, pretty convenient, more details in the link)
CDDA Game Launcher (3rd party, pretty convenient, more details in the link)

Manual Installation

Android, Linux, OS X, Windows
iOS

Compiling Guide

Controls (not up to date, controls for mobile can vary)

Helpful Guides

• Item Database
• Skill Training (Siersha - up to date for build #10626)
• Modding
• Detailed Guide (mlangsdorf)
• Quickstart Guide (DracoGriffin & AMurkin)
• Improved Text Readability (Bilb0)
• Tutorials
• Video Guide (Vormithrax)
• More Video Guide (GrandpuhTy)
• Written Guide (Pr0manTwitch)

Featured Let's Players

Individuals that are currently known for playing C:DDA. List is subject to change (maintain active and current streamers), send modmail if you'd like to be added.

Player(s)	Twitch	YouTube
Vormithrax	Link	Link
TheMurderUnicorn	Link	Link
TheCritsyBear	Link	Link
RyconRoleplays	None	Link
Orange01gaming	None	Link
nonsonogiucas	None	Link
GrandpuhTy	Link	Link

Memorial

Individuals that used to play C:DDA but have gone on hiatus or stopped streaming. These are mentioned here as requested by the community for being noteworthy.

Player(s)	Twitch	YouTube
flakaby	Link	None
Pr0manTwitch	Link	None
CromulentArcher	None	Link

Semi-Multiplayer - WatchCDDA.net

WatchCDDA.net is hosted by r7st and allows for semi-multiplayer ASCII version of Cataclysm: Dark Days Ahead. It can be a bit confusing to get started so make sure you check out the Instructions page for more details and join that Discord to communicate while playing. Any issues need to be expressed on WatchCDDA's Discord, not the subreddit - any troubleshooting posts will be removed.

• Requirements:
• WatchCDDA.net Account (set up is on Instructions page)
• SSH client (like PuTTY)
• Willingness to use ASCII (no tilesets yet)

FAQ

• How do I use this subreddit?

If you're new here, make sure to read through the above. Secondly, any simple questions should be confined to this weekly announcement post. If you've found a bug or a new strategy, or wondering what type of playthrough to try, you should make a separate post about those.

• Flairs? What are those?

There are two types of flairs: user flairs (which are currently customizable) and post flairs. If you make a post, make sure you're flairing it appropriately for others. There are some exclusive flairs you cannot pick but should be on the lookout for, such as:
Changelog - these posts have very informative posts regarding changes.
Fixed - these posts generally have a solution to a bug or problem.
Lastly, if you flair a post [Help Wanted] and someone answered satisfactorily, make sure to re-flair it with [Solved] so others can find the solution instead of looking through tons of posts.

• Oh no, my anti-virus says the launcher is a threat!

Antivirus products are known to detect the launcher as a threat and block its execution or delete the launcher. The reason for this is uncertain, but most likely due to a launcher component, PyInstaller, that is commonly flagged as a threat by antivirus software. A sufficient workaround is to add the launcher binary to your antivirus' whitelist, or to select the action to trust this binary when detected. More information can be found from the launcher's FAQ on Github.
If you are paranoid, you can always inspect the source code yourself and build the launcher from the source code. However, you are still likely to get false positives.

• The UI is broken or weird, is this normal?

If you think the UI isn't set up correctly, make sure to press } to access the UI Settings panel. You will be given a choice of several different styles, with "Labels" being the recommended setting for new players and "Classic" for veteran players.

• I think the subreddit should have ... or The subreddit should change ...

Great! The modteam is always looking for feedback, please make a post about your purposed change or idea and let the community decide through voting and debate. If it's something that is a bit more sensitive, please send it through modmail.

We live together and have been dating for almost 5years. I currently work full time and am in school full time as well and do pretty much all of the household chores (ie: laundry, cooking, cleaning, grocery shopping). We’re not married… yet I find myself doing all of the wifely duties. How this happened, idk… but I let it happen overtime so I’m partially to blame for that. I’m tired, overworked, and maybe I’m the issue, but I’m feeling a little used here. He works full time as well, but often in his free time he’s playing video games with his friends, playing golf, or going out with his friends.
I recently have been feeling overwhelmed and have told him that I’m no longer doing his laundry. I will do my own, but the rest is up to him. He told me this is not something he is looking for in a woman and finds it unattractive. Additionally, 3-4 weeks of him complaining every few days that he had no clean clothes got really old really quick so I started doing it again just out of sheer frustration. We did compromise and now we try and BOTH do a few loads a week to keep me from getting overwhelmed by the laundry.
I also have very little free time because my schedule is so rigorous right now (not his fault but he has been supportive of me so far). Sometimes when I get home from my 12 hour shifts, I like to decompress and relax and mindlessly scroll on my phone for like 30 minutes because it’s the only time I’ve had to be mindless all day. I then usually go back to studying for school for the rest of my evening before bed. He’s recently mentioned to me a lot that he finds it extremely unattractive that I’m “so addicted” to my phone. Shit maybe I am addicted but I think of it as just a quick release after critically thinking all day.
There are other examples but these are the most common. He’s said to me at least 7-10 times that he finds what I’m doing unattractive and I’m usually taken aback by it.
What should I say in response to these comments?
Are these comments he’s making normal?
I’ve told him before that when he makes comments about the things I do being unattractive it hurts my feelings.. to which he responds along the lines of “you like to say that when I express my feelings to you or when you hear something you don’t want to hear”.

“Pick one of the weapons inside, and you'll be a warrior." Guardmaster Harian stood with his thick arms folded over the embroidered livery on his tabard. “Pick your feet up and put’em down, boy.” He was frowning at Broin Ven’Maerl, the candlemaker’s son. “I’ve no time for dawdling.”
“Yessir.”
Paidrag leaned out from his position last in line and watched Broin duck a halfhearted cuff from the Guardmaster and hurry through the armory door. A moment later, he called out to the Guardmaster, his voice muffled by the stone wall.
“Something’s holding this sword, sir. Won’t budge.”
Guardmaster Harian tilted his face to the ceiling and heaved a great sigh. “If you can not lift the blade, it is not for you. Choose another.”
Sullen silence followed, and a few minutes later, Broin emerged from the armory holding a polished steel Warhammer. Guardmaster Harian stopped him with an outstretched hand, examined the weapon, looked the boy over, grunted, and motioned for Broin to keep moving. “Report to the Proving Ground.”
Paidrag watched the other three boys in front of him all enter the armory one after another and emerge with their chosen weapons held awkwardly in hands lacking the callouses to wield them. They were grinning proudly. And why shouldn’t they? The Guardmaster went through the same ritual with these three as he had with Broin, inspecting their weapons and looking them over, his face impassive. He then waved them away. “Get you to the Proving Ground.”
There was one boy left in front of Paidrag—the shoemaker’s son. Harian called the lad forward, and Paidrag’s mind turned inward.
Which weapon would he choose when it was his turn? Not a bow; that was not the warrior way. Last year, his brother picked a fine-looking blade of folded steel honed on both sides to a razor edge with a leather-wrapped hilt and cross guard fashioned to resemble two claws. Paidrag had tried Jarrod’s blade, but it felt awkward and unwieldy in his hand; a sword was not the weapon for him. What then? He was a fair hand with a quarterstaff, more than fair; he’d won the games earlier this year in the weapons category. Youngest to ever take the top spot in Keep history.
“Come on, boy,” Guardmaster Harian’s deep growl broke into Paidrag’s thoughts. His great red beard bobbed as he spoke. “Haven’t got all night for you to stand there like a simpleton. Wife has supper waiting, and I need to get to it. Move.”
Paidrag felt his cheeks flush and heard snickers from the nobles and wealthy merchants gathered within the Keep’s armory to witness the once-a-year Quendling when each boy from the lower villages would choose his weapon and become a man, a warrior in training.
He swallowed and stepped forward, looking at the arrogant faces of men dressed in silks and satins worth more than he’d earn in a lifetime. But they didn’t matter. His heart pounded. Sweat beaded his brow. This was his moment.
He stepped through the door.
Inside, shelf after empty shelf covered the stone walls. Footprints made crazed patterns in the dust on the floor, and the only weapons in sight rested on an ornate emberwood rack traced in ivory and gold.
Seeing nothing else, he shuffled over to the rack and felt his eyes drawn past an exquisitely crafted sword with a jeweled handle, past a handsome spear carved to look like a red dragon, to a weapon the likes of which he’d never seen before. He reached out with a trembling hand and laid a finger on the long handle, polished until it gleamed warmly in the torchlight. It looked like a quarterstaff, carved with mighty griffons in silver and boasting leather to strengthen his grip. But this was no ordinary quarterstaff. A foot of fine steel glinted from one end, a blade slightly curved and engraved with fancy scrollwork. A blade that, when he touched it, left a hair-fine line of red weeping from his thumb.
Paidrag yelped and yanked his thumb away, lifting the cut to his lips, his brows rising at such a sharp edge. Then he grinned.
He lifted it from the rack with trembling hands and gave it a gentle spin, slow and careful at first but putting on speed as he went until it whirred in a blur through the air. He worked the bladed staff around the back and over his head, made a figure eight in front of him, grinning in surprise at how perfectly balanced it was, like no steel graced the end.
The staff whirled to a rest at his side, the blade pointed at the ceiling. An odd feeling came over him just then, warm and brotherly, a sense of acceptance. Almost as if the weapon itself approved of him. He shook it off and made his way out of the armory.
Guardmaster Harian’s eyes nearly bulged out of their sockets when he caught sight of the bladed staff resting on Paidrag’s shoulder. He recovered quickly.
“Hold there, lad,” the Guardmaster said, moving forward and extending a muscled arm to bar Paidrag’s way. “Auscheral chose you?”
Paidrag stopped. He glanced at his new staff. “You mean this?” he said, gesturing at the weapon.
“Aye.” Harian eyed the bladed staff with a mixture of reverence and surprise. “Weapons forged of magic have a mind of their own. They choose the hand to wield them. None have bonded in all the years I’ve been a guard here, nor in the days of my father and his father before him. That's why Broin couldn't lift the sword.”
Paidrag felt a stir of fear in his gut. Why was everyone so quiet? Why were they staring at him? He recognized the look staining their faces. Fear.
In Paidrag’s experience it wasn’t good to make men with title afraid.
“Fetch him to the Sage,” he heard someone say. And the next hour was a whirlwind of faces, questions and hands shoving him down winding corridors deep into the Keep and to a room lit by a single candlestick on a polished desk. Books filled the shelves built into the walls from the floor to the ceiling save where a stone hearth glowed red with sputtering embers. An old man sat there swaddled in deep purple robes with a ring of fine wispy white hair on the back of his head. His face was beyond ancient, spotted, deeply lined and paper thin, but his eyes reflected the candle’s fire and showed the vitality of the spirit within.
The Sage peered at him with those fathomless eyes. “Sit,” he said, and Paidrag found himself sitting in a rather uncomfortable wooden chair on his side of the desk but didn’t recall actually moving. He suppressed a yawn with the back of his hand. His eyes felt itchy.
“Yes,” the Sage said, taking Paidrag’s chin in skeletal fingers and looking into his eyes. “There is power here, a well vast and deep, but your future is uncertain.” His bushy white brows drew together. “Clouded. I cannot see the infinite lattice of your destiny. Yet, power churns around you like a sea in a storm.”
The Sage released his chin and sat back, regarding him with an unreadable expression. Paidrag didn’t like this conversation almost as much as he disliked the two hulking guards posted to either side of the chamber’s door.
The old man stirred from his thoughts. He drew out his pipe, stuffed the bowl with tabac, muttered a word Paidrag did not understand and it burst alight. “Such potential,” the Sage muttered in a voice soft as silk. “Could it be? After all these years…”
The Sage fell silent, puffing on his pipe and staring at Paidrag until the boy fidgeted in his seat. Then, the old man’s eyes refocused, sharp as dagger points. He leaned forward and spoke through the coiling smoke.
“Who are you?”
Paidrag opened his mouth to answer but the Sage cut him short.
“They fear you, fear what it means that a weapon chose you.” His eyes glittered with mischief. “They are right to fear.”

I've been trying to set up a gate that will open when a button is pressed however something is happening with the .state which is causing the game to crash when tested and I'm not sure what I have my code being used here and a crash log here:

ERROR in action number 1 of Step Event0 for object OBJ_Gate:
Variable .state(100029, -2147483648) not set before reading it. at gml_Object_OBJ_Gate_Step_0 (line 4) - state = buttonobj.state;
gml_Object_OBJ_Gate_Step_0 (line 4)

I'm really not sure what's going on...

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

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

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

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

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

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.”

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

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

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

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

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

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I'm assuming this is the right subreddit to ask this in. Recently my boyfriend has started playing a video game with online friends who live in the states, which means he doesn't come to bed until 2am ish, and I've been going to sleep at around 11-12. He is currently unemployed and I work 9-5 and typically wake up around 7 or earlier. With this new routine of his where he's playing this game every night, he comes into the bedroom to come to bed and I wake up as I'm a really light sleeper. I've expressed annoyance about this as I feel like it's making my sleep quality worse and I'm a lot more tired during the day, but he's saying there's no way it can be having an impact as I'm usually back to sleep within 10-15 minutes. He thinks I'm being ridiculous to be annoyed about this - am I or would this actually affect my sleep quality? We've just had an argument about it and he's said he's going to sleep downstairs and I can't tell if he's being dramatic or I am. Thanks

I had a great time with this one. I'm a relative newcomer to the series and didn't grow up playing the games. My first FF was FFX, and FFIV is the first game in the series I've played prior to VII. I know the 3D look of the DS games is polarizing, but for me having never played any 2D FFs before, the 3D felt like a natural extension of the style that VII / VIII / IX have. For some reason, the original NES/SNES pixel graphics of FF feel like a taste I haven't quite acquired yet, even though I've played lots of old 2D games from other series.
I've read that FFIV DS is the hardest final fantasy game, or at least arguably so. And it was definitely challenging at times. I ended up using a guide for boss strategy, because if I hadn't it probably would have taken me way too long to finish. Also, I would have been completely lost on how to find/use the Augments without a guide, so unless you want to mindlessly re-tread every area in the game multiple times (and over multiple playthroughts) hunting for them, I recommend it. The game just doesn't telegraph how that system works really at all.
Aside from that though, the difficulty wasn't too bad. In FF games that are less combat-oriented, battles can really start to feel repetitive and cause me to lose engagement with the game. FFIV DS's regular combat encounters were just challenging enough to keep me on my toes in a way that was enjoyable. I did not like the ATB system when I first played VII. I'm still not the biggest fan of ATB and prefer traditional turn-based systems. However, ATB was more enjoyable in FFIV and I think it's used well here, which makes sense since FFIV introduced it.
I enjoyed the 3D cutscenes and even the voice acting was serviceable. Nothing amazing but never bad enough to take me out of the experience. It beat my expectations.
I think the game was well paced. I don't know if this was part of the original game, but in the DS remake there's a system where you get rewards to fully exploring each section of a dungeon. It was fun to walk around exploring every nook and cranny to see that explored % tick up, and this caused me to do more combat encounters in the process, which kept me well leveled. Aside from maybe once or twice early game I never had a moment where I felt like I needed to intentionally set aside time to grind up. Compared to FFX, which for me required multiple hours of dedicated grinding to feel prepared for the final boss, this was a welcome change.
Finally, the final dungeon was pretty epic. Only having a couple save points in an 13 ~ floor dungeon required strategic judgement in terms of when to press onwards and when to teleport out to save and rest. Probably not everyone's cup of tea, but I enjoyed the challenge.
I think my only complaint is that the game feels extremely linear and aside from the Augment system there isn't much room for player expression or choice in how you develop your party. But I get it, that's not what this game was trying to do.
Next up I'm going to try FFIII DS. I played the 3D remake on Android for a few hours ages ago and it was technically the first FF game I ever played that made me realize I enjoyed the series. I know the PR is much preferred today, but I'm going to dive into the DS version for nostalgia's sake if nothing else. Cheers!

Hello! I am hoping to get some advice / consulting from those that are more knowledgeable about current hardware and what it takes to min/max and optimize a custom PC build. I worked in IT years ago and for the last 20 or so years I've always built my PC. I am at a loss now though with what I should do to either upgrade or optimize my current build to maintain the speed and power that my work and hobbies demand.
I frequently utilize real-time render programs such as Unreal Engine, Adobe Premier and After Effects. I also play games like Helldivers and a few other higher end ones. I have found lately that my machine doesn't seem to be as fast as it should/could be and I am not sure what could be the bottleneck. I will post info below and hoping that I can get some insight on possible solutions, upgrades and maintenance procedures / best practices.
Processor: AMD Ryzen 9 3950x 16-Core Processor 3.5GHz
Motherboard: MSI MEG X570 ACE Gaming Motherboard AMD AM4 SATA 6Gb/s M.2 USB 3.2 Gen 2 Wi-Fi 6 ATX
Video Card: MSI Gaming GeForce RTX 3080 10GB GDDR6X PCI Express Gaming Z TRIO
Memory: Corsair VENGEANCE RGB PRO DDR4 32GB (2x16GB) 3200MHz CL16 Intel XMP 2.0 iCUE Compatible Computer Memory x2 (64gb total)
Drives:
1. Samsung SSD 980 PRO 2TB (Temp Data)
2. HGST HDN 4TB (Archive)
3. Samsung SSD 970 EVO Plus 1TB (Operating System)
4. SanDisk SDSSHD3 2 TB (Temp Data)
Power Supply: GAMEMAX 1050W ATX 3.0 & PCIE 5.0 Power Supply, 80+ Gold Certified, Addressable RGB Sync, Fully Modular ATX Gaming Power Supply, RGB-1050
CPU Cooler: H100i Platinum SE Cooler
My CPU is in a large warehouse/studio. The side panel is off and the warehouse is almost always around 76 degrees F. Should I elevate the machine so it's not on the ground? The floor is concrete.
TLDR: I feel my computer should be running faster and I am not sure what I should do to check/test and troubleshoot before upgrades.
I am not sure how to provide PCIE Lane info or other windows settings like virtual memory etc. I know I should start with my drives first and clean those up.
Is there anything that is blatantly holding me back? How often should I be applying thermal paste?
Do I need to post my BIOS settings?

My boyfriend and I have been together for 3 years. We clicked immediately and he moved into my place about 4 months in. In the beginning the sex was super hot and often, if anything the problem was that he didn't last super long but that was never brought up and I'm almost certain it is not anything that he has any insecurity about. Once he moved in, it dropped severely. I figured it was stress and change in routine etc but after 3 months of this I decided to bring it up. I don't remember what excuse he gave but he listened and said he'd do better. A year after he had moved in…nothing had changed. I knew he was stressed about work and his health was suffering. He was constantly sick and started having frequent pain that he still deals with on a daily basis. He gained weight as well and that messed with his self-esteem. He fell into a depression. I did the math and made some adjustments and proposed that he take some time off work to get his mind right and I could support the both of us financially. He jumped at the opportunity. Throughout our relationship, the conversation has come up several times, sometimes it's me expressing my feeling of rejection/feeling undesirable or him telling me that he feels inadequate and embarrassed but these conversations come with less frequency as time passes. It has gotten heated a couple of times but never yelling or break ups. He always listens and understands but I've become tired. The disappointment that follows every one of these conversations has led me to stop initiating, the panic that sets into my chest in anticipation for the rejection is hard to surpass most of the time. Sometimes I can push through it and get out a measley “hey…do you think we can have some sexy time soon?” and sometimes he'll be up for “helping me masturbate” (playing with my nipples or caressing me while I use my vibe) or sometimes he'll have an apathetic yes but most of the times it's a “maybe later”. We have sex on the weekends and I know he enjoys it but I'd say about half of the times, it seems he does it out of obligation. I'm trying not to be pushy, especially since it is an improvement. I'm trying to give him the space he needs and be understanding of where he's coming from but sometimes it's hard to see past my own emotions about this.
We are in an enm relationship but aren't super active in the community partly because of this (I'm not comfortable introducing other people when there's this much insecurity in our relationship) and partly because I work 60 hours/week making it hard to find the time. He is an amazing partner outside of the bedroom. We are in love. PDA is frequent and unapologetic. I don't want to end things. I want to believe he is trying his best.
He's been on a journey of self improvement for a while. He's taught himself how to cook, he reads frequently and maintains the home. He cut down on video games severely and is trying to get more activity in. He's even trying to learn Spanish(my first language).
Yesterday he brought up a new way that he wants to improve himself. He called me at work to tell me he wants to stop masturbating and watching porn.This was surprising to me as I wasn't even aware that he was masturbating and watching porn often enough to warrant him thinking he needs to stop. Masturbation and porn are not frowned upon in our relationship, we're both ok with the other doing it/watching it. I asked him how often he was doing it and he said “2-3x a week, sometimes like 4 or 5 but mostly 2-3” This felt like a punch to the gut. I'm still not sure what about it bothers me exactly. I didn't say anything other than some words of encouragement and expressed my surprise at the frequency. He also said some sexy stuff about missing me and wanting me so bad. I came home from work and everything was normal, like any other weekday. When we went to bed he put on some sexy music instead of our usual sleep sounds and sorta caressed me a little bit but I couldn't bring myself to reciprocate or react. I just ignored him. I feel horrible. This is the first time that I've rejected his advances. He hasn't brought it up at all. This morning I got emotional as I was leaving and kissing him goodbye. He asked why and I told him that I didn't want to go to work and I just wanted to spend the day with him. He said he understood and he was sorry and that maybe I could take a mental health day soon. I'm not sure where to go from here….
p.s first time posting - please excuse any faux pas I might have committed.

For THH I’d have to say Kyoko is my favorite character. I usually love detective characters in any piece of media and I also really like her relationship with Makoto
My least favorite has probably gotta be Hifumi or Junko. Hifumi was annoying asf and expressed borderline predatory behavior at multiple points in the game
Junko was a fine mastermind in the first game though I still thought the hope and despair thing was pretty dumb and kinda cringe even the first time but she just kept coming back and as a result overstayed her welcome
My favorite case in THH is with no competition 1-2. It had so many twists and turns and memorable moments. The genocider reveal, Byakuya messing with the crime scene which was the first time we experienced antagonistic behavior from one of the students in the series, Chihiro being a boy and Mondo’s sad backstory. I loved the antithesis between mondo and chihiro. Also this case is unique cause the murder was done on impulse and wasn’t pre meditated, in contrast to almost all other murders in the series, which made this case even more real to me.
Worst case was 1-3. Because Celeste is just retarded here and so is the rest of the cast. I mean why would the killer want to show which order they killed the victims in with the numbers of the hammers? Celeste is extremely obvious as the culprit and I am convinced she wasn’t even trying to hide it. Throughout that entire trial whenever the cast figures out something Celeste just outright lies and denies it AND THEN GETS PROVEN WRONG. It’s just her who does this, even if she wasn’t the culprit I probably would have still voted for her for acting so suspicious. The name coincidence with Yasuhiro was super dumb and contrived too. What’s most offending though is that the game is trying to convince you even before Celeste gets executed that she’s a good liar. No dude she’s not a good liar, Gonta would probably be a better liar than her. I don’t really mind the unsympathetic motive weirdly, but the rest was awful
For SDR2 my favorite character is Fuyuhiko with Hajime and Chiaki as close 2nds and 3rds respectively. Fuyuhiko had such great character development and a really emotional trial. Even though he was a Yakuza he debatably was one of the most ethical characters in the cast. We stan Fuyuhiko
My least favorite would have to be Akane. Akane is just a waste of a survivor spot. She’s not useful in class trials, she’s not that interesting (yes I’ve played her FTE I still don’t like her) and her being hungry all the time was not funny. The survivor spot should have been given to Hiyoko who really really sucks as well cause she got no development and died a hatable little bitch. What’s worse is that she was gonna get development. And no it was not worth it for Akane to live for the sake of Nekomaru’s memory cause we already have Sonia being a survivor in Gundham’s memory. I am sorry I really don’t like Akane 🙃
Favorite trial is 2-4 I loved learning how that funhouse worked it was really unique and interesting. Also Nagito’s personality shift in this trial was really good too. Gundham was great here, sacrificing himself for the rest of the group while putting on the mask of the villain so they wouldn’t feel sad plus his relationship with Sonia was really cute and seeing her beg Monokuma not to execute him was heartbreaking. Also this was the only murder in the series which was basically consensual besides V3-2 since both Nekomaru and Gundham were ready to sacrifice themselves for the group
Least favorite is 2-3. I- I don’t think I even wanna get into this. The despair disease is one of the worst things I’ve seen in a video game. Literally if anyone else got Mikan’s disease they’d have killed as well, she killed just because she was unlucky. Hiyoko’s murder isn’t even discussed, it’s like no one cares and everyone just assumes the same person killed them both. Mikan who is the clumsiest character in the game pulls inhumane shit that makes no sense and on top of that they assassinate her character by the end of the trial. This is the worst case in the series, fuck 2-3
For V3 my favorite character is Kokichi, he’s my favorite character in the series and one of my favorite fictional characters. He’s so darn complex and interesting and embodies the themes of the game perfectly. I really don’t like how a lot of the fan base seems to mischaracterise him as either some UwU boy or evil incarnate cause the truth is he is very much somewhere in the middle, probably in the grey area but I’d say he’s leaning towards the good side more. I can literally write a 500 word thesis on why this little lying bastard is peak but I won’t get into it here. I also love Shuichi, Kaito and Maki overall they are my 4 favorite in the franchise. I love v3 if you couldn’t telll
As for least favorite I really don’t think V3 has a single bad character imo they were all used extremely well and are all memorable and unique in their own way but if I had to pick one it’d be Tsumugi. I know she had to stick around for the Mastermind reveal but she’s just so boring throughout the entire game which I know is the point but I still would have much rather have had someone else in her place
For my favorite case I’d have to go with V3-5, it’s my favorite in the series actually. This is probably the most complex case in the entire franchise and it pulls it off really well without feeling too convuluted. There so are many twists and turns and great moments here like Maki confessing her love to Kaito, Monokuma teaming up with you and everyone having to come to terms with the fact that kaito was the one who died. Also the fact that the 2 characters who liked each other the least cooked up a plan to defeat the mastermind, really epic plus it was cool to see that Kokichi really wasn’t all that bad in the end and wanted to end the killing game his own way even if that meant he had to go to extreme lengths to do so.
I really don’t think V3 has a bad case I quite enjoyed them all but if I had to pick one as the least good it’d be V3-3. Crazy how all my least favorite cases are chapter 3’s. But unlike the other 2 this one is not as bad. Yes, Korekiyo’s motive is extremely odd and weird but to me it felt kinda refreshing to see a student that was completely mad and done well, looking at you Celeste. If you do Korekiyo’s FTE you’ll understand why he does the things he does and the fact that he mistook his abusive relationship with his sister as love and as a result became mad. It’s pretty interesting, Kork isn’t just funi seesaw dude. He also killed some the 2 most annoying character in the cast so good on you Kork. Other than that even though I didn’t like Tenko I think she went out in a great way passing down her wishes to Himiko and ultimately making her a better and much more interesting character worthy of being a survivor. There are a lot of great emotional moments with Himiko here. The reason why this is my least favorite trial is because of the missed opportunity of having 2 killers. Before we get to that it should also be noted that most of the trial is spent on tenko’s death which is kinda weird seeing as it’s not the one that matters for the entire cast to survive. The fact that the game gets your hopes up for there to be 2 blackends and the fact that they may have to live with a killer among them is so darn disappointing when you learned that Kork killed them both. Overall even though this trial isn’t on par with the rest of the V3 ones I still think it’s a good one despite a lot of people not liking it

Hello, we are two trans girls new to pathfinder 2e. Both of us have some ttrpg (mainly 5e) experience, though we will probably need a couple of sessions to get out of our shells.
We like playing characters with somewhat unusual playstyles, and felt like pf2e has more possibilities with expressing our characters mechanically.
We probably like a mixture of combat and roleplay in each session, interesting scenarios are more important to us than more fighting or more roleplaying. Haven't played enough to know what kind of themes we are the most interested in, most themes/campaigns would probably interest us.
We are generally not interested in any inter-character sexual or romantic relationships, excessive gore or animal abuse. We are fine with loss of limbs, scarring, death, etc. as long as it isn't overly descriptive.
Looking forward to hearing from anyone interested in gaming with us :), if we missed any info, feel free to ask me or "d.d.tea" on discord!

So... I play an MMO, won't be too specific because I know the people this is about use Reddit and I don't want them to start MORE drama with me. And in this MMO, you can have "Free Companies" (Real subtle, I know) that are in game guilds that you and your friends can be a part of.
Now, I used to be a party of a fully active FC and friend group and they are the ones who introduced me to this MMO. One of my friends owned this FC (we will call him R) but within the friend group, a bit if drama went down and about half the FC sided with the owner (I was one of them) and the other sided with the one who started the drama (We will call him P). Now, R never kicked P from the FC and P and his gang never logged on again until a few days ago and left the FC himself to make his own FC.
The drama started last year.
Now, after the drama went down, activity in the FC died down, eventually resulting in me being the only one playing for months. Now when the Owner remains offline for a certain period, ownership will pass down to the last active person, that being me. Now when this was brought up, I made it clear that if R wants me to transfer ownership back to him, I will do so no problem, however, every time he said he didn't care and that he will leave it up to me. Eventually no one but me logged in and they claimed that they lost passion for the game because of the drama.
Seeing as no one was playing and that if everyone remains inactive, FC house will be destroyed, I chose to retain ownership, still expressing I will give ownership back if R asked.
I should also explain (I swear this is relevant) I am sort of the punching bag of our group, often being made fun of (Not in a friendly way) and I pretty often have to take breaks from them because they make me very emotionally vulnerable (As much as I hate to admit that) and often claim that I "stole the FC from R" they also claimed that I "demoted" them in the FC but I never touched their ranks, they got demoted by the game for inactivity.
Fast forward 6 months and I log on one day to see that everyone was leaving the FC. Once I saw that R had left, I DM'd him and asked him why he left and if there is any objects in the FC he wants me to keep for him since I thought they were just going to make their own FC. He told me he wasn't going to make a new FC and said that he left because the FC "just represented 2 splits with old friends, so I don't really like looking at it no more" and that, to me, was the last time I questioned if he wanted the FC back.
Moving forward to today, I found out that one of the people who was on R's side joined P's new FC when he logged back on a few days ago. Now, I made a joke about him being our spy to which he said "Bros talking to me like I'm on good terms with him when he took R's FC" to which I pointed out that ownership was defaulted to me and I was even given permission from R to retain ownership; all he could reply with was a gif saying "I ain't reading all that" and after 3 years of constant "bullying" and antagonising from them, and being told I stole the FC and them acting like I'm everyone's enemy, I can't help but feel like maybe it's me that is in the wrong?
So, AITAH for taking ownership of an inactive FC and then when I asked if the original owner wanted it back, he said no?

M21 I'm doubting if it was strict parenting or if it was the drink but I want opinions. She has done a lot but I don't feel entirely satisfied either. But in the days I have drafted this, my doubts only grow.
As a kid my mom hawked over me and now things I wish I could have experienced did not exist, like going to a park or playground with a friend without supervision, whereas she did. Going to the gas station for snack I couldn't, when she asked her parents and was given a quarter when everything was a cent. Riding a bike was limited to the street we live on, and when I was able to leave, I couldn't leave the neighborhood when she walked for a while to make sure her friend got home. Once sitting on my bike at the edge of the sidewalk and she walked over, cursed me out for going on a different street and wouldn't believe me. I couldn't go to a friends house because I was going to do my homework how my teacher taught me instead of hers, which I didnt know and was not taught. At a friends house, she berated me for making her wait in the car for a few minutes longer than the arranged pickup time. By comparison to what it would have been like, it is a magical opportunity lost.
For most of my school years, all I did was go to school, do homework and play games. Despite catching on to lessons quickly, classes were something to pass, nothing more, not even for life skills. Have a B? Make it an A. I did. Is the project due? Make it better. Alright. Taking orchestra and painting was fleeting then and while I enjoyed it, it was only done for practice or assignment. Now I am upset that it was all I did instead of going out and experiencing life: going out with friends, finding a club or sport to do, or just big activity sessions. Never had a curfew because I never left home to start. I may have had fun gaming then, but I lament heavy over that now to where I will not touch one. A future education and the future as a whole I should have taken a lot more seriously than I could possibly have imagined. School did push for it, but I was a fool and did not care.
Other than the occasional family visit, I did nothing and learned nothing. Never taught to cook much, properly clean, shop for necessities, make right finances, etc. Future prospects was left to whatever I would choose, which I would put it later down the road. Never got any real world experience and just been sheltered for so long, both by my doing and my moms. No drive to do anything, nothing of a hopeful future, no being pulled out of whatever I was doing to learn anything or having skills necessary in the world today be incentivized. Aside from making sure I did well in school, I was left to myself.
She always has something to complain about. Streaks of mean and grumpy. Remembered somethings of what we were interested in but other times just an empty face. Who my mom is today is doom and gloom, speaking two different points that are showing the worst of her and nitpicking over every possible detail. Most of who she enjoys in media has an underlying toxic presence to them with name calling. Polarize, prejudice, politicize, judge and bias everything. Norway and Iceland? Too cold and mountainous, how could anyone have settled there? Germany? They all speak the same language and cannot understand anyone in a city that is 30 minutes away. That guy's accent she can't stand and defaulted to being generated, even though he sounds the same speaking Finnish. All for a better planet yet everything is wasted, trashed, or sent to China. Treat others how you want to be and from where I stand, seem like a backtalking coward. Couldn't have a water pitcher because "no one refilled it" to keep the filter going when I made sure to keep it plentiful. If she has a problem she will bring up the one exact same example related to the topic that I have heard plenty before. And most of the negative aspects of society happen more likely than they should. All while bring home a 24, 30 or however many count of budweiser a week at least. I imagine we only got along because I wasn't a brat anymore and did not try to upset her. Falling in line if you will.
Emotions bottled or maybe emotionally dead. The masculinity trap of what is the general expectation of "men". To express myself, to show emotion, to even cry is something I don't want to do out of fear of being seen, which is ironic given the code of the samurai. 6th grade she didn't remember to pick me up even though I said and called and a friend and his friend caught me being emotional and stayed around a bit to comfort me.
The fear that was put into everything. An actual quote went something as "If you get hurt, I'm not going to drive you to the hospital". Another "All girls are evil". And "that sounds too confrontational" when I asked neighbors to clean after their dog. Even questioning if my eyes doing something required a doctor for her to say that my eyes will fail naturally and something about her relative who had an eye problem and didn't see a doctor. Things that made me not do the kinds of things I want to do now. I have been so sheltered then and now that I want to go out but there is the ever scared part of me towards the unknown world. I feel I have been prejudiced into thinking such ways but there's no personal experience to back or challenge said thoughts.
Admittably, parts of me are glad I know what I have and want for morals and mindset, but its also a matter of temptation and theres still so much that I wish to explore. At times I feel I matured too quickly at the cost of a kids stupidity or innocence and now am too serious and heavyhearted for my own good. To be told how I've matured when there wasn't much to mature from. A part of me feels that I have taken after her cold, judgemental, selfish attitude and that makes me fearful to screw up any kind of friendship or relationship, and dreading that I could reflect that onto any child I may have no matter how far away into the future I do have one. I kind of want to hate her but I am so emotionally gone or warped that I can't. If I "rebel" now, or begin to, I feel that might get the fire started.
She would argue with my dad from time to time but then that continued on for days and it was a cold environment lasting days to weeks after a fight. Even prior to their fights, they rarely slept together in the same bed, let alone the same room. She would critique his employer and even his choice of friends. Once he woke up late, thus having us late to get ready for school and she began one for that. I don't remember the exact details but she once criticized him over a coat he got me. All while listening from the top of the stairs to even the bottom where I was covered by a wall. A few times we listened and we made noise that I think made them aware of us but that didn't stop them. Even starting in our presence where we would leave the room. It got to the point where he actually packed lightly to leave for the night or days and my brother and I stopped him just so he could be home. I wish I did let him go then.
I really do believe I could have had it differently if my dad was alive. He made such an effort. When I was in hospital at 4, he made the efforts to get me out and moving around. When I didn't know a swim style, he literally chucked me towards the deeper waters (I was scared, but he was right in the end, one of the fondest memories). He taught me how to use the mower and had a mini shop set up in the garage. I played with him so much and he got me into the complex games he enjoyed as I got older. For as rough we were, he was so gentle. I looked up to him then and even more than ever now. He made the effort to be one worthy of "Dad" and he was damn well worthy of that and no one could be more better for me.
"Faded gray are all the days of yesteryears So much time has turned to memories and to tears" -Valkyrja
I did graduate HS 3 years ago, did a summer program and since nothing. No job, education chances, or life plans. Even though I felt smarter, I was turned off of college simply for cost reasons and "feeding the rich" mindset. Last summer I began to look at my past and future with a whole new look with no physical change taking effect. First week into March this year I realized what I have been doing compared to how others are living through good and bad and I fell into depression hard. Now it persists with great off and on. Where I have been up at 9 in the morning to suddenly be up at 5 or 6 in the afternoon. Throughout the past 3 years, there was no making sure I was ok, no seeing how I felt, no finding out what I wanted to do. And I am still frightened of what may be out there, even when that is the key to the living that I want. I want to go, I need to go. But where? I leave for the good and better of myself, but I also leave behind this place I've called home, yet it's now so far from the one I want to remember with a fond memory. So much happens that seems to have been "normal" when it doesn't seem like it should. The same place with the same inhabitants in the same motions. No going out, no difference, no change, and VERY artificial. Nothing means anything anymore. To let how I feel about the previous years subside in me or blow over...
Always have been insecure, hesitant, second guessing. While others had spent their 18s, 19s and 20s going into the world doing many things, I've had the summer program at 18, nothing at 19, and two days in the big city to attend a concert at 20. Little noteworthy moments under my belt. It seems like love in the immediate family was not two ways or had to be earned. I have not grown. Who I am is not who I want to be at heart.
For 21, I know I should have more skills and be in better places, but theres nothing from anyone. No check-in, no advice, no motivation. Like "the birdling will leave the nest" instead of anyone preparing a boy to what is before him. Its not a snap of fingers or blink of an eye do I learn what is expected. On the grown up part, I feel heavily underprepared for the world and life. Far too long have I stayed and lived in my head. I cannot understand why I am still at home, a part of myself thinks to keep the peace but what peace needs to be kept? Nothing and no one is stopping me from leaving except myself and the thought that they will most definitely want to know where I am if I go, which I do not want to tell anyone. Or that I've been sheltered and not have realised the gates have been unlocked long ago. Things are not ok and I want to stop pretending when I leave. Even with Spring's green grass under a blue sky that ends the day with the orange sunset piercing the clouds to make them blue and pink do I feel grey.
"Watching to the night with tired eyes Waiting for nothing all my life" -Battle Against Time
I feel the kid within me, wanting to do those exciting things, yearning for any kind of companion or fellowship. What daylight reveries I can conjure to make him feel hopeful enough so he can shine soon. The things I want to do to feel happy. I want to water that little guy.
A lot of this I have remembered recently and still am connecting the dots. I already am upset at myself for not doing anything in life, but I want to be angry and I honestly hate myself for not seeing this sooner and listening to her for so long. Despite feeling broken and defunct, I still feel young enough but there's been so little done that it feels many chances are long gone. There is more freedoms I have that I do not know about and ones that I have had before that gathered dust. And now I am in a toss up between beginning college preparation now, leaving states or the country to act on these now childhood regrets. I don't want to be who I am now any longer. I just want to do something. And in between it all, confusion of what to do, how to feel and saddened that I am not who I once was or could have been.

I imagine everyone will have seen people on soccer mentioning City being a traditionally lower league club prior to Sheikh Mansour's takeover (which is used to denigrate City in obvious ways, but is also commonly used to express shock at our revenues). I thought people may be interested in some actual statistics:

• As of the summer of 2008, before the takeover, City were 7th in the all time top flight points table (with all games converted to the three points for a win system). We were on 4397 points (above Spurs and Chelsea).
  
• As of 2006 (which I have chosen as it predates the Shinawatra takeover which could otherwise have been seen to have influenced the value), Forbes ranked City as the 14th most valuable club in world football (https://www.forbes.com/consent/ketch/?toURL=https://www.forbes.com/2006/03/28/cz_06soccer_top25slide.html). This is above Spurs, Everton and Villa in England and above big European teams like Ajax, Dortmund, Porto, Atletico, and I think is perhaps the stat that best demonstrate that City were by no means minnows at the time of the takeover.
  
• In the 07/08 season prior to the takeover, City had the 6th highest attendance in England.
  
• City had a total of twelve trophies as of the time of the takeover (three of these were charity shields, so not always included as major trophies). Depending on how you calculate (as different lists count different trophies), City were around 10th-11th in the English rankings.
  

I thought this could be more useful context for some of our youngenewer fans. I'm sure there'll be rival fans reading this and thinking that this is some form of bragging about our previous (mid-level and moderate achievements, in the grander scheme of things), but that isn't my intention - it's more to dispel a bit of a myth about City not having been one of the bigger clubs in England prior to the takeover.

***My Impersonators (DO NOT TRADE WITH): Right-Trick-5848, righttick_5848 Note the misspellings, note the dash "-" instead of the underscore "_", always verify it is me in PMs
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