An over the counter product like proactive
Unauthorized Products That Are Less Than Spectacular
2015.06.15 00:58 zeekyboy Unauthorized Products That Are Less Than Spectacular
A place for your weird bootlegs, terrible copies, and obvious ripoffs. The crappier the better! Please no store brands or Oreos.
2015.03.03 20:26 kittydentures Skin care for people over 30
Skin care is a pretty big deal, and we love subs like /SkinCareAddiction, however we felt there needed to be a sub that deals specifically with skin that's over 30. Share your questions, frustrations and triumphs!
2009.07.01 08:37 sliackymartin Infographics
2024.05.19 17:18 shreee_04 Digital marketing
 | Best digital marketing courses in allahabad submitted by shreee_04 to shrirang_04 [link] [comments] Digital Marketing Tools You'll Master Being a digital marketer means interacting & working with multiple digital marketing tools daily. Here are some of the tools that you will master during IIDE's online digital marketing course. you can do this digital marketing course even if you are from any country. An online course gives you the flexibility of learning digital marketing from your home. Here are some institutes of allahabad 1.GTF Technologies 2.WEBPECKERS 3.SEO Rig 4.KDM 5.Sapience Technologies GTF technologies : GTF technologies strive to continuously be the best we can be in everything we do and deliver the quality work for our clients which leads to an unstoppable success. We work to design the whole marketing procedure in light of client needs.With over 15 years of expertise and more than 500 satisfied clients, we are experts in digital media planning, shaping people business requirements into profitable venture WEBPECKERS: Webpeckers is a young organization that provides Digital Marketing training and aims to educate more number of young graduates and help them acquire digital marketing skills so that they are ready to work with corporate houses. We also take care of the placement of the students by providing 100% job placement support. Webpeckers is also a full-service digital marketing agency. We provide web design, internet marketing, SEO, social media, PPC, email marketing, and content writing services to businesses that are looking to grow their business online more efficiently. We are committed to the ideas that founded our success; highest quality standards, results-driven innovation, and exceeding client expectations." SEO Rig: SEO Rig is Best SEO training institute in Prayagraj, we are dedicated to providing you with top notch SEO services in Prayagraj, including YouTube SEO, Social Media Marketing, and Local Search SEO for Prayagraj Businesses. We are experts in YouTube video production and Optimising your digital presence on various platforms. Our services encompass PPC, Google Ads, and Facebook Ads, along with GMB SEO and effective business listings in Prayagraj. KDM: Digital Marketing Institute in Allahabad, King of Digital Marketing is an integral part of Devweboic Pvt. Ltd. and leading Digital Marketing Courses provider in Delhi Since 2013. We are Working in Prayagraj since 2018 as Online Trainer. Now We have offline classes available. Our Course is designed by professional digital marketers and faculties to impart the best theoretical and practical knowledge. We have designed various modules of Digital Marketing training so that, you understand all things easily and practically. You must have a clear understanding and clear concept of all the aspects of Digital Marketing to get a certification and further stand out in the market. We Provide Web Design and SEO SMO Services too. Sapience Technologies:Sapience Technology stand out and proved that they are one of the best digital marketing agency in allahabad. They have been nothing but open and honest with clients. Sapience is best with the services like social media marketing, rank high through SEO process, built and design unique websites and run ads in Google to increase particular reach. Wishing you all the best as you embark on this exiting journey!! |
2024.05.19 17:14 CurlyGoneFrizzy Changed to hims serum while shedding, should I change back?
Hi folks, I've been shedding since Feb this year and wanted to get your thoughts on it.
I started on the Hims fin&min spray in Sept 2023. I immediately got some shedding, but that stopped and by Jan 2024 it felt like my hair was getting thicker. Then in early Feb I starting shedding, and then as some people are probably aware, Hims had an issue with crystallisation for their spray so I got changed over to the fin&min serum in mid March (I actually prefer it because it doesn't irritate my scalp).
Unfortunately I'm still shedding now, so it's been 1 month shedding with the spray, and 2 more months shedding with the serum. I am posting because I think my hair is noticeably less thick now :(
As the shedding started before I changed to the serum, it's hard to know whether the shedding has continued because of the change to the serum, or it's just a phase. Could a shed lasting this long after changing product still be a "good shed" due to the serum working?
Hims say the crystallisation issue has resolved now, so I'm thinking of going back on the spray. What do you all think, should I stick with the serum or change back to the spray? TIA
submitted by CurlyGoneFrizzy to tressless [link] [comments]
I started on the Hims fin&min spray in Sept 2023. I immediately got some shedding, but that stopped and by Jan 2024 it felt like my hair was getting thicker. Then in early Feb I starting shedding, and then as some people are probably aware, Hims had an issue with crystallisation for their spray so I got changed over to the fin&min serum in mid March (I actually prefer it because it doesn't irritate my scalp).
Unfortunately I'm still shedding now, so it's been 1 month shedding with the spray, and 2 more months shedding with the serum. I am posting because I think my hair is noticeably less thick now :(
As the shedding started before I changed to the serum, it's hard to know whether the shedding has continued because of the change to the serum, or it's just a phase. Could a shed lasting this long after changing product still be a "good shed" due to the serum working?
Hims say the crystallisation issue has resolved now, so I'm thinking of going back on the spray. What do you all think, should I stick with the serum or change back to the spray? TIA
2024.05.19 17:09 StonedApeDudeMan I think I know what's going on - OPENAI has had AGI once November 2023
God, there's so much evidence of this it's ridiculous. This all lines up perfectly.
OpenAI had a massive breakthrough and has been utilizing that breakthrough to accelerate their workflow. They got AI working on its own development on top of their team. And that's why they haven't released GPT-5 yet, despite it being well over a year since GPT-4. We all know they have it—training finished ages ago, and there's no good reason for them not to have released it yet. They just keep doing iterations of gpt4 over and over, and then on the side they just dropped these ridiculous updates...
Then, we suddenly get this demonstration, and have been getting demonstrations ever since, showing the Sora Video Model, and it's stupid good. Like, light-years ahead of the competition. It's straight-up magical at this point, so far beyond our understanding of what's going on with this stuff. Sora, unveiled February 15, 2024, it's so far ahead of everything else that it's very mind-boggling how they ever could have possibly gotten to that point so fast. It's so fucking good..
And that is exactly what is freaking all of them out big-time. Except not Sam Altman at first—he saw some amount of opportunity for humanity, mixed with seeing the power to be had, and how massive it would be if he came out the other side as a savior for humanity. So he embraced the breakthrough and kept going full force ahead. And he wasn't wrong to do that—it's his Oppenheimer moment.
China is going all in on it, that's for damn certain. Which means we have to go all in on it, safety and precautions be damned as they slow the development of AI down. Falling behind to China could potentially be catastrophic; we need to stay ahead. So of course the Pentagon got involved, working on a Cooperative Research and Development Agreement (CRADA) with OpenAI announced on January 31, 2024, to leverage AI for defense purposes. The military saw something that triggered them to get involved, and while they're helping with cybersecurity, you can bet your ass they're leveraging AI to the fullest extent for all their warfare. They kind of need to, or else we're going to fucking die.
Sam Altman has been looking pretty exhausted and always tired during that entire stretch. Now their safety department has completely disbanded. This just happened, and they all got hit with NDAs of one year on their way out, meaning none of them can talk about it or they lose their stocks in the company. So, Sam Altman, instead of recoiling in fear and horror during the lifting of the veil that they were witness to behind closed doors sometime shortly before his ousting, he went the other direction instead and embraced it and was excited for the prospects. That is all because they discovered AGI sometime around the middle of November 2023. And while some of the employees for deeply troubled by all of this and Disturbed and scared perhaps, Altman showed excitement and exuberance over it, hence the entire ousting of Altman in November 2023. And because he showed excitement, I understand why all sides felt as they did and they are rightfully justified. Just before his ousting, Altman mentioned in an interview how they were witnessing significant advancements and saw it as a momentous period in AI development, which he felt honored to be part of: "I can't imagine anything more exciting to work on, and on a personal note, just in the last couple of weeks, I have gotten to be in the room, when we sort of like push the sort of the veil of ignorance back and the frontier of discovery forward and getting to do that is like a professional honor of a lifetime. So, it's just so fun to get to work on that"
With the last update we got, it is very clear that they aren't showing us everything. The products are not quite what we were hoping for, but they are insanely good and enough to keep people happy. The shit they can do with the voice now is getting released to the public next month. It can sing, change vocal expressions, and do all sorts of crazy shit that nobody else is near. We all come to find out later that that was just the beginning of all these updates, we have 3D model generation coming, the dolly image generation that's integrated into it is phenomenal and can do consistent characters and it can do text like nobody's business, it's so fucking good, and then we have insanely fucking fast speeds for these models, you're able to speak to these models and get responses like right away just as fast as a human will respond it's not faster and that it's able to do that it's just so mind-boggling. Just think, you have like a fraction of a second for it to go and like break down everything that you said so have that all transcribed and then take that and then crap the response and then say that out through the audio model. And they're doing this all at insanely fast speeds the text generation is so crazy fast and it is now only half the price of what it was before. This type of progress is nuts, what other industry or what other time of history have we seen progress being made at this pace, there's no comparison this is batshit crazy. And it feels off because things don't quite add up as far as what they are giving to the public and what they very obviously have or should have AKA gpt5 something that is multimodal and is an agent that can go out and do everything.
For them to have all of that and yet not have a model significantly better than GPT-4 from a year ago is silly. They have a model, and it's GPT agents set up to code really well. They can tell these models to go and do things on the internet like creating various accounts, setting up the accounts with APIs, codes, and all of that, and then downloading all the necessary things and setting it up in whichever program. It's like these super assistants that are insanely smart. That's what we should have out there. If Sora is out there, then 100% we should have that, and that is AGI. It can do shit on its own and follow up with tasks and goals in mind. It's wild.
So, this next section is borrowing heavily from this Reddit post that was from February of 2024 in which much of this was predicted to a T. This post is so spot on, here's a link to it on an archive site
https://archive.md/rtZHg
It's like the methods magicians use to figure out other magicians' tricks. You look for what is required to be there and is (like the magician's hat on the table), and what is not required to be there but is anyway (like the curtain covering the space under the table).
But then there's the misdirection—the bullshit and distractions. A company with AGI is going to want to feed it as many GPUs as possible while delaying the AGI announcement. They'll throw smoke bombs, release amazing new products, and make cryptic statements to keep people guessing. Their actions will seem more and more chaotic and unnecessarily obtuse. Customers will be happy but frustrated.
They'll start releasing products that are unreasonably better than they should be, with unclear paths to their creation. There will be sudden breakdowns in staff loyalty and communication. Firings, resignations, vague hints from people under NDAs. And then, the military will suddenly take a huge interest, and all PR from the company will go quiet.
That's when you know it's real. When the curtain comes down, everyone stops talking, but the checkbooks keep opening wider than ever, with investors and state departments pouring in resources. Bottlenecks will be reached for multiple industries. A complete drought of GPUs, etc.
And I'm telling you, with everything we're seeing from OpenAI, it's looking more and more like AGI every damn day.
submitted by StonedApeDudeMan to u/StonedApeDudeMan [link] [comments]
OpenAI had a massive breakthrough and has been utilizing that breakthrough to accelerate their workflow. They got AI working on its own development on top of their team. And that's why they haven't released GPT-5 yet, despite it being well over a year since GPT-4. We all know they have it—training finished ages ago, and there's no good reason for them not to have released it yet. They just keep doing iterations of gpt4 over and over, and then on the side they just dropped these ridiculous updates...
Then, we suddenly get this demonstration, and have been getting demonstrations ever since, showing the Sora Video Model, and it's stupid good. Like, light-years ahead of the competition. It's straight-up magical at this point, so far beyond our understanding of what's going on with this stuff. Sora, unveiled February 15, 2024, it's so far ahead of everything else that it's very mind-boggling how they ever could have possibly gotten to that point so fast. It's so fucking good..
And that is exactly what is freaking all of them out big-time. Except not Sam Altman at first—he saw some amount of opportunity for humanity, mixed with seeing the power to be had, and how massive it would be if he came out the other side as a savior for humanity. So he embraced the breakthrough and kept going full force ahead. And he wasn't wrong to do that—it's his Oppenheimer moment.
China is going all in on it, that's for damn certain. Which means we have to go all in on it, safety and precautions be damned as they slow the development of AI down. Falling behind to China could potentially be catastrophic; we need to stay ahead. So of course the Pentagon got involved, working on a Cooperative Research and Development Agreement (CRADA) with OpenAI announced on January 31, 2024, to leverage AI for defense purposes. The military saw something that triggered them to get involved, and while they're helping with cybersecurity, you can bet your ass they're leveraging AI to the fullest extent for all their warfare. They kind of need to, or else we're going to fucking die.
Sam Altman has been looking pretty exhausted and always tired during that entire stretch. Now their safety department has completely disbanded. This just happened, and they all got hit with NDAs of one year on their way out, meaning none of them can talk about it or they lose their stocks in the company. So, Sam Altman, instead of recoiling in fear and horror during the lifting of the veil that they were witness to behind closed doors sometime shortly before his ousting, he went the other direction instead and embraced it and was excited for the prospects. That is all because they discovered AGI sometime around the middle of November 2023. And while some of the employees for deeply troubled by all of this and Disturbed and scared perhaps, Altman showed excitement and exuberance over it, hence the entire ousting of Altman in November 2023. And because he showed excitement, I understand why all sides felt as they did and they are rightfully justified. Just before his ousting, Altman mentioned in an interview how they were witnessing significant advancements and saw it as a momentous period in AI development, which he felt honored to be part of: "I can't imagine anything more exciting to work on, and on a personal note, just in the last couple of weeks, I have gotten to be in the room, when we sort of like push the sort of the veil of ignorance back and the frontier of discovery forward and getting to do that is like a professional honor of a lifetime. So, it's just so fun to get to work on that"
With the last update we got, it is very clear that they aren't showing us everything. The products are not quite what we were hoping for, but they are insanely good and enough to keep people happy. The shit they can do with the voice now is getting released to the public next month. It can sing, change vocal expressions, and do all sorts of crazy shit that nobody else is near. We all come to find out later that that was just the beginning of all these updates, we have 3D model generation coming, the dolly image generation that's integrated into it is phenomenal and can do consistent characters and it can do text like nobody's business, it's so fucking good, and then we have insanely fucking fast speeds for these models, you're able to speak to these models and get responses like right away just as fast as a human will respond it's not faster and that it's able to do that it's just so mind-boggling. Just think, you have like a fraction of a second for it to go and like break down everything that you said so have that all transcribed and then take that and then crap the response and then say that out through the audio model. And they're doing this all at insanely fast speeds the text generation is so crazy fast and it is now only half the price of what it was before. This type of progress is nuts, what other industry or what other time of history have we seen progress being made at this pace, there's no comparison this is batshit crazy. And it feels off because things don't quite add up as far as what they are giving to the public and what they very obviously have or should have AKA gpt5 something that is multimodal and is an agent that can go out and do everything.
For them to have all of that and yet not have a model significantly better than GPT-4 from a year ago is silly. They have a model, and it's GPT agents set up to code really well. They can tell these models to go and do things on the internet like creating various accounts, setting up the accounts with APIs, codes, and all of that, and then downloading all the necessary things and setting it up in whichever program. It's like these super assistants that are insanely smart. That's what we should have out there. If Sora is out there, then 100% we should have that, and that is AGI. It can do shit on its own and follow up with tasks and goals in mind. It's wild.
So, this next section is borrowing heavily from this Reddit post that was from February of 2024 in which much of this was predicted to a T. This post is so spot on, here's a link to it on an archive site
https://archive.md/rtZHg
It's like the methods magicians use to figure out other magicians' tricks. You look for what is required to be there and is (like the magician's hat on the table), and what is not required to be there but is anyway (like the curtain covering the space under the table).
But then there's the misdirection—the bullshit and distractions. A company with AGI is going to want to feed it as many GPUs as possible while delaying the AGI announcement. They'll throw smoke bombs, release amazing new products, and make cryptic statements to keep people guessing. Their actions will seem more and more chaotic and unnecessarily obtuse. Customers will be happy but frustrated.
They'll start releasing products that are unreasonably better than they should be, with unclear paths to their creation. There will be sudden breakdowns in staff loyalty and communication. Firings, resignations, vague hints from people under NDAs. And then, the military will suddenly take a huge interest, and all PR from the company will go quiet.
That's when you know it's real. When the curtain comes down, everyone stops talking, but the checkbooks keep opening wider than ever, with investors and state departments pouring in resources. Bottlenecks will be reached for multiple industries. A complete drought of GPUs, etc.
And I'm telling you, with everything we're seeing from OpenAI, it's looking more and more like AGI every damn day.
2024.05.19 17:04 sunkenglades Feeling completely incompetent at my practicum. How do I survive the next 4 months?
Hey everyone! I'm only two weeks into my remote summer practicum (unpaid), and I’m already so overwhelmed. I feel like my supervisor and I aren’t communicating well with each other leading to some misunderstandings about the project and what he is actually looking for.
Basically, I met with my supervisor last week to go over project details. I also don’t actually know much about program evaluation, so I had asked if maybe he could refer me to some resources or existing frameworks to help guide me. And he didn’t really answer my question, just kind of told me to brainstorm ideas.
This week I presented my ideas to him asking for feedback, and it seemed like he went into a completely different direction than what he initially asked for. So, basically I spent an entire week creating something that he wasn’t even looking for. He keeps telling me to refer to the outline with the project goals if I get lost, but the outline doesn’t actually have the goals on it. I think he realized this, because he sent me a message after the meeting to clarify the goals and provided a bit more direction on what he is looking for. I don’t understand why he didn’t just give more direction to start with unless he doesn’t just want to spoon feed me ideas which is fine, except I feel like with evaluations there are so many different ways to do it, so a bit more direction would have been helpful.
I’m still not even entirely sure if I understand the project completely, and I’m not sure what to do to be more proactive. I was hoping someone could give me some advice. Like is this just a normal part of the practicum experience that everyone go though?
Thanks for listening to my rant.
submitted by sunkenglades to publichealth [link] [comments]
Basically, I met with my supervisor last week to go over project details. I also don’t actually know much about program evaluation, so I had asked if maybe he could refer me to some resources or existing frameworks to help guide me. And he didn’t really answer my question, just kind of told me to brainstorm ideas.
This week I presented my ideas to him asking for feedback, and it seemed like he went into a completely different direction than what he initially asked for. So, basically I spent an entire week creating something that he wasn’t even looking for. He keeps telling me to refer to the outline with the project goals if I get lost, but the outline doesn’t actually have the goals on it. I think he realized this, because he sent me a message after the meeting to clarify the goals and provided a bit more direction on what he is looking for. I don’t understand why he didn’t just give more direction to start with unless he doesn’t just want to spoon feed me ideas which is fine, except I feel like with evaluations there are so many different ways to do it, so a bit more direction would have been helpful.
I’m still not even entirely sure if I understand the project completely, and I’m not sure what to do to be more proactive. I was hoping someone could give me some advice. Like is this just a normal part of the practicum experience that everyone go though?
Thanks for listening to my rant.
2024.05.19 16:54 InsaneAdam Update: What 100 lbs off looks like. Day 112.
 | 320-220 submitted by InsaneAdam to fasting [link] [comments] March 2023 320 January 2024 303 May 2024 220 On day 112, going to day 200. 112 days of swapping between OMAD and extended water fasting. With 30 minutes of walking daily for first 100 now it's 1hr walk daily, will add weights next week. Here is what I take daily with a gallon of water. Walmart. Salt/peppeSeasoning isle. For the pink Himalayan salt, potassium no salt substitute. Walmart supplement isle for Magnesium and multivitamin. 2.5g-5g SODIUM, THAT'S SODIUM, not salt Sodium is inside salt. It makes up a big but not whole part of salt. So make sure you're measuring by the sodium amounts and not the salt amounts For my pink Himalayan salt, it comes out to 1 tablespoon (the bigger spoon), not the 3x little tea spoon ones 3.5g potassium mixed into a gallon of water. For my no-salt potassium, it also comes out to 1 heaping teaspoon (the smaller spoon), not the big table spoon. A flat teaspoon is 2.8g for me. 400-600mg Magnesium pills. 2x daily multivitamins. That's what I take during a water fast. Now, if I'm over two weeks, I'll add vitamin C, b12/B-complex, calcium, and D3. Himalayan Chef Pink Salt 1lb Bag https://www.walmart.com/ip/359695093 Keep your caffeine and nicotine levels the same during the fasts as it was before the fasts. Drink a gallon of electrolyte water a day if you can, but you got to really try. Take a multivitamin or 2x daily. Have over-the-counter heartburn medicine on hand. Break the fasts with food and an Anti-dierrehhrial like immodium. Don't weigh during the extended water fast. Wait two days after. Follow up extended water fasting with OMAD and a diet of 50% protein, 40-50%fat 0-10% carbs. Count calories a day or 2 or 3 days every few months to help keep an idea of what each meal is actually getting you in terms of macro and micro nutritional contents. -Adam |
2024.05.19 16:51 DifferentSound1473 The letter I'm sending to my wife next week
Some context:
Dear Wife,
It is with great sadness that I write this letter, but also with great joy for having finally understood what is wrong between us and what the definitive solution is.
Every single day of my life, from July 2009 to today, I have spent time trying to establish a dialogue with you and get your attention without success.
You are always there in body but never in mind.
When I'm able to talk to you, you are present for only a few moments, briefly respond, and then retreat into your beloved thoughts to converse with yourself instead of with me, or to do something else (important or not).
I have tried hundreds of times to express to you how all this makes me feel, how much it hurts me, how I long with all my heart to be in contact with you like we were in 2008, but there was no way to make you understand.
Thus, for all these years of our life, the following scheme has gone on:
This has existed since that July of 2009, as I was telling you, look here: (some email screenshots from 2011) Further examples below (other screenshots)
These are some of the emails I’ve recovered.
It’s useless to say:
Look the other day:
The only moment I feel connected to you is during sex, but that's 20 minutes every how many days? Does that seem normal to you? When we're older and without sex, won't we even look at each other anymore?
With the baby's arrival, all this has come out like a frog from a boiling pot. Our Daughter sees it, senses it, perceives these dynamics, and it hurts her.
I'm sorry but I have reached my limit.
You are the only person I can't talk to, but with whom I desperately want to talk, share ideas, opinions, thoughts, etc., even 24 hours for 30 consecutive days (like we did in 2008).
You are the only one who brings out the long faces; my best friends, my grandmother, other friends, and former colleagues bring out smiles, jokes, the best of me.
This is our main problem.
If you had managed to maintain communication with me over time as in 2008, you would have a very close person, who would treat you like a queen, who would do everything to keep you happy, but you continuously reject and despise me.
Besides all this, in recent years, there have also been:
The affection has totally disappeared; I'm writing now after more than 8 days without receiving a kiss, a cuddle, a caress from you (yes I count them).
Wife, in a loving couple, this has no place, it’s not normal, it’s not a demonstration of love. It’s totally out of the question. There has never been a time when you said: Wow Husband, you're right, I sincerely apologize, now for the next 2 hours I will put down the phone, this, that, and talk to you. NO.
You don't even think of that.
I am telling you that for me, we have reached the end. You don't listen to me and don't talk to me.
You don't care about the problem; everything is okay for you, and I have to solve it on my own.
I have been fighting for years; in recent months, I have written over and over again, but nothing.
As Biden in February 2022 left no room for compromise with Putin regarding the Ukraine issue, forcing him to proceed, I do the same.
I want divorce and I do not want to live with you anymore.
submitted by DifferentSound1473 to Marriage [link] [comments]
- I (36M) (throwaway account)
- Wife (45F)
- Daughter (3.7 yo)
- Married since 2017, we were together since 2008 (the year we first met)
- I did the big/huge/monster mistake to continue this relationship despite this obvious problem that you're going to read about. I think I did that because I was deeply physically attracted to her, she was the first love of my life (girlfriend then wife) and because I always believed I could bring back the person she was in 2008, where she was so present, so in touch with me, always available to talk and have deep discussions (but that was just the honeymoon phase of a first love and I didn't know this because it was my first experience)
- I think that with the baby's arrival all the things that didn't work before the arrival, only exploded because of the amount of stress we went through
- I'm not searching for advice or anything, I just want to share my pain with you
Dear Wife,
It is with great sadness that I write this letter, but also with great joy for having finally understood what is wrong between us and what the definitive solution is.
Every single day of my life, from July 2009 to today, I have spent time trying to establish a dialogue with you and get your attention without success.
You are always there in body but never in mind.
When I'm able to talk to you, you are present for only a few moments, briefly respond, and then retreat into your beloved thoughts to converse with yourself instead of with me, or to do something else (important or not).
I have tried hundreds of times to express to you how all this makes me feel, how much it hurts me, how I long with all my heart to be in contact with you like we were in 2008, but there was no way to make you understand.
Thus, for all these years of our life, the following scheme has gone on:
- I try to establish contact with you multiple times during the day.
- You don't pay attention / you respond with monosyllables / you are not involved in the conversation / you respond rudely.
- I feel rejected because you don't want to talk to me; I understand that I can't talk to you, I'm not important to you, and by necessity, I shut down because there is no communication and sharing (what you call a long face). You notice the long face and do everything to get me out of it because you hate it, but not what you should do (i.e., insist on asking what’s wrong to establish the contact that was not established before, and then be available to talk the next times). Lately, your solution has been to attack me verbally or physically to force a change in me (e.g., "Enough with these damn long faces! Smile, damn it! Don't sit there like a fool"). This is devastating for me because not only can I not talk to the person I love, but I am also insulted when I expose the problem.
- When you want to spend quality time, as you call it, on weekends when you are calmer and more relaxed, you are fine, but I am devastated and no longer want to spend quality time with you because I don’t feel well and am upset with you.
This has existed since that July of 2009, as I was telling you, look here: (some email screenshots from 2011) Further examples below (other screenshots)
These are some of the emails I’ve recovered.
It’s useless to say:
- Now there's the baby.
- Before it was work.
- Before it was something else.
- Before it was another thing.
Look the other day:
- I gave you 1 hour to rest asking you if we could talk.
- I start talking and you get up to take your medicine (because in your head it’s always "oh, he's talking, so meanwhile I can take care of something else"), and after I start talking about this problem, you start telling me "With all the damn problems we have, you have time to talk about this nonsense?" and then told me "Don't you know that people can do other things while you're talking and still be present, hear you and have a conversation with you?"
- You are perpetually distracted, absorbed in your head and your thoughts, you have a much deeper level of introversion than mine from which you can't easily emerge, you create situations, conversations, battles, etc.
- You think in terms of projects and things to do: in 2011 (I remembered) you were working respectively on 3 different projects (a crazy amount). Obviously, I was getting the leftover attention from this combo. Now there’s the baby, and I am just a satellite orbiting around the two of you, only useful to procure food and necessary things.
- You get very stuck on things and don't want to let go of your fixations. It's likely that you have the hyperfocus of people with ADHD, read more about it here in detail. Regarding the last point, I'll copy and paste the most relevant parts: Hyperfocus in an adult with ADHD allows one to concentrate attention on a single task, often achieving extremely high productivity at the expense of everything around, such as a family member talking or a pot on the stove.
- Manipulation: "Oh, come on, you're the one who's fixated, of course we talk, what are we doing now, excuse me?"
- Insult: "These damn things again? Do you want the truth, Husband? You're a pain in the ass."
- Ultimatum: "If you want, you change, I won't change" "I'm going to the lawyer"
- When cornered: sex and that's it
The only moment I feel connected to you is during sex, but that's 20 minutes every how many days? Does that seem normal to you? When we're older and without sex, won't we even look at each other anymore?
With the baby's arrival, all this has come out like a frog from a boiling pot. Our Daughter sees it, senses it, perceives these dynamics, and it hurts her.
I'm sorry but I have reached my limit.
You are the only person I can't talk to, but with whom I desperately want to talk, share ideas, opinions, thoughts, etc., even 24 hours for 30 consecutive days (like we did in 2008).
You are the only one who brings out the long faces; my best friends, my grandmother, other friends, and former colleagues bring out smiles, jokes, the best of me.
This is our main problem.
If you had managed to maintain communication with me over time as in 2008, you would have a very close person, who would treat you like a queen, who would do everything to keep you happy, but you continuously reject and despise me.
Besides all this, in recent years, there have also been:
- Heavy insults
- Constant threats
- Spits in the face
- Kicks and slaps
The affection has totally disappeared; I'm writing now after more than 8 days without receiving a kiss, a cuddle, a caress from you (yes I count them).
Wife, in a loving couple, this has no place, it’s not normal, it’s not a demonstration of love. It’s totally out of the question. There has never been a time when you said: Wow Husband, you're right, I sincerely apologize, now for the next 2 hours I will put down the phone, this, that, and talk to you. NO.
You don't even think of that.
I am telling you that for me, we have reached the end. You don't listen to me and don't talk to me.
You don't care about the problem; everything is okay for you, and I have to solve it on my own.
I have been fighting for years; in recent months, I have written over and over again, but nothing.
As Biden in February 2022 left no room for compromise with Putin regarding the Ukraine issue, forcing him to proceed, I do the same.
I want divorce and I do not want to live with you anymore.
2024.05.19 16:50 Infinite_Scallion_24 Observability and repeatability, as well as other YEC misrepresentations of science
I think one of the worst things that you see a lot of the big YEC speakers do is the misrepresentation of science and the scientific method. It's one thing to argue with the evidence, this I accept as it is at least an attempt to engage in actual scientific discourse (excluding those who just baselessly decry the science). Even Tomkins with his apparent inability to do genomics is at the very least attempting to perform scientific experiments. However, these attempts to re-define science in a way that is beneficial to a creationist agenda is insanely frustrating, since it totally ruins all form of good-faith debate, and heavily misinforms people without a scientific education, and who don't really know how scientific process takes place.
To bring this point to light - I'm going to discuss this article from AIG: https://answersingenesis.org/what-is-science/what-is-science/. It displays basically all of these claims, and I consider it to contain some of the worst of AIG's mental gymnastics.
The article opens with a spiel about how science originated in Christian Europe, and refer to how Johannes Kepler, Francis Bacon, Isaac Newton and Galileo Galilei were all Christians who believed in a young Earth. Funnily enough, However - they fail to mention that Galileo was arrested by Christians due to his ideas contradicting a literal interpretation of the Bible - that being geostaticism (the idea that the Earth is stationary). I wonder why they excluded this piece of information?
They also state that "If the universe is a product of random chance or a group of gods that interfere in the universe, there is really no reason to expect order in nature". I could probably write an entire post on why this statement is false, so I won't go into this here. Maybe I'll do a follow up to this one just about this idea.
Now comes one of AIG's points that annoys me to no end - the ideas of 'Operational Science' and 'Historical Science'. AIG frames these terms as such:
Operational: "deals with testing and verifying ideas in the present and leads to the production of useful products like computers, cars, and satellites."
Historical: "involves interpreting evidence from the past and includes the models of evolution and special creation."
These terms do not exist in actual academia. They only exist within AIG's fantasy science land where they decide the rules, so that they can lend a fraction of legitimacy to their outdated ideas. The main reason they do this is to boil the argument down to one of faith. 'Evolutionism' vs Creationism is just a debate between two religions - same as Muslims and Christians arguing over which god is the real one. They present this in a slightly different way, but the meaning is the same: "The argument is not over the evidence—the evidence is the same—it is over the way the evidence should be interpreted." Essentially, 'we have different interpretations of the same stuff, so it's a matter of faith'.
What AIG are doing here is creating an unnecessary distinction. The worst bit is the reference to 'evidence from the past'. What they really mean here are things like the fossil record, radiometric dating, the geologic column - all the things that completely and utterly gut their belief in a 6000 year old created Earth. Instead of addressing them, they claim that it's a matter of interpretation.
Actual science doesn't create this distinction. Its purpose is to provide us with a method that lets us explain things we cannot observe directly, by looking at the things we can observe. No human has ever seen an atom with their own eyes - they are too small. Instead, we used observable evidence to figure out their structure, such as Rutherford's alpha particle scattering experiment - showing how most of the gold foil he was shooting the particles at allowed them to pass through, implying atoms being mostly empty space. Now Rutherford never saw an atom, but he inferred this about them through observation, as well as repetition of an experiment to minimise error. This is how science works. Of course, AIG would call Rutherford's work 'Operational Science', so we'll have to go somewhere else.
Let's use murder as an analogy (jolly, I know) - a person was killed 3 days ago, and their body was just discovered: we never saw them die, and we can never repeat their murder - because they are dead (truly groundbreaking stuff here). However, there is a gash across their neck, and a bloodied knife sat next to them. Moreover, this knife is covered with a person's fingerprints. We can then go to the house of the person who these fingerprints match, and ask them if they know anything - which they deny, despite lacking any alibi and having a definite motive. Do we have enough evidence to determine how the person died, as well as who killed them? Absolutely we do - there's a gash, and a knife covered in blood that matches the victim's: conclusion, they were killed with that knife. The knife is covered with fingerprints that lead to a person with no alibi at all, and a good motive: conclusion, they're the murderer. Now all of these data are from the past - the blood was put on the knife in the past, the wound was made in the past, the fingerprints were put on the knife in the past - by all metrics, this murder case falls into AIG's 'Historical Science'. As such, convicting this person is simply a matter of interpretation. We can only interpret that the fingerprints perfectly match those of the suspect. Who are we to say that they didn't somehow change over time? See how nonsensical this distinction is?
AIG then go on to the subject of theories - and again, they separated 'operational theories' from 'historical theories'. The idea is pretty much the same as discussed above, though there are a few points that I want to address. Firstly, they don't do the thing that I see many creationists (and other science deniers) state - that being the 'it's just a theory' thing, and draw a distinction between the colloquial and scientific definitions, though not without the prerequisite 'Evolutionists claim' line. This point has been beaten into the ground already, so I'll just leave it at that.
They go on to discuss how biological evolution is not an 'operational theory' as it contains 'interpretations of past events' and is 'not as well founded as testable scientific theories like Einstein’s Theory of Relativity or Newton’s Theory of Gravity'. It seems that AIG don't know that while Newton's law of universal gravitation remains as a very well-substantiated piece of science, his actual mechanism for how gravity works was in fact supplanted by Einstein's theory. Good scientific knowledge from AIG, as always. The big part of this section is how they refer to predictability as a method of validating a scientific theory: "These theories offer predictable models and the ability to conduct experiments to determine their validity in different circumstances." Once again, they conveniently omit the immense predictive power of evolutionary theory, instead choosing to claim that it lacks such a property - even going as far to directly claim "Molecules-to-man evolution does not offer this opportunity because these events happened in the past", once again ignoring that one of the key tenets of evolutionary theory is that it both has happened, and is currently happening - considering that we've observed speciation events occurring in the wild: https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.0911761106; https://www.cell.com/current-biology/fulltext/S0960-9822(09)01925-301925-3); https://evolution.berkeley.edu/evo-news/speciation-in-real-time/. The predictive power of evolution is immense, and we are only getting better at making evolutionary predictions as science progresses:
https://ncse.ngo/predictive-power-evolutionary-biology-and-discovery-eusociality-naked-mole-rat,
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9850016/#:~:text=Evolutionary%20predictions%20are%20often%20based,will%20adapt%20to%20their%20environment.
There's also the brief bit where they conflate evolution and abiogenesis "molecules to man evolution". They're two different ideas - and YECs reading this post, stop conflating scientific theories, they are distinct ideas. Evolution deals with how life adapts and develops, it has nothing to do with how life on Earth began - that's abiogenesis. It's the same thing as the Big Bang: it only deals with how the universe formed, not what came before it.
There's a short aside about naturalism, but in order to stop this post turning into a thesis, I'm going to gloss over it and move onto the next bit. Here, AIG describe how "Evolution also relies heavily on the assumption of uniformitarianism— a belief that the present is the key to the past. According to uniformitarians, the processes in the universe have been occurring at a relatively constant rate.". Of course, they fail to consider that, as is the case with all other science, we have evidence to infer that processes do occur at a constant rate. They proceed to discuss rock formation erosion as one of these thing which we assume to have a constant rate - even though I'm pretty sure this is not the case - and that the rate at which these processes takes place is highly variable. To me, this feels like them taking the worst example - and borders on a straw man. Correct me if I'm wrong though - I'm not a geologist, so my understanding is limited here.
I have no doubt that the actual aim of this paragraph is also to sow doubt about other systems reliant upon constant rates of change - such as radiometric dating. Yes, if decay rates were not constant, the values given by radiometric dating would be highly inaccurate, and it would be a useless dating method. However, this would also require a total rewrite of fundamental physics - as the concept of constant nuclear decay rates is backed up by a literal mountain of maths and physical evidence.
submitted by Infinite_Scallion_24 to DebateEvolution [link] [comments]
To bring this point to light - I'm going to discuss this article from AIG: https://answersingenesis.org/what-is-science/what-is-science/. It displays basically all of these claims, and I consider it to contain some of the worst of AIG's mental gymnastics.
The article opens with a spiel about how science originated in Christian Europe, and refer to how Johannes Kepler, Francis Bacon, Isaac Newton and Galileo Galilei were all Christians who believed in a young Earth. Funnily enough, However - they fail to mention that Galileo was arrested by Christians due to his ideas contradicting a literal interpretation of the Bible - that being geostaticism (the idea that the Earth is stationary). I wonder why they excluded this piece of information?
They also state that "If the universe is a product of random chance or a group of gods that interfere in the universe, there is really no reason to expect order in nature". I could probably write an entire post on why this statement is false, so I won't go into this here. Maybe I'll do a follow up to this one just about this idea.
Now comes one of AIG's points that annoys me to no end - the ideas of 'Operational Science' and 'Historical Science'. AIG frames these terms as such:
Operational: "deals with testing and verifying ideas in the present and leads to the production of useful products like computers, cars, and satellites."
Historical: "involves interpreting evidence from the past and includes the models of evolution and special creation."
These terms do not exist in actual academia. They only exist within AIG's fantasy science land where they decide the rules, so that they can lend a fraction of legitimacy to their outdated ideas. The main reason they do this is to boil the argument down to one of faith. 'Evolutionism' vs Creationism is just a debate between two religions - same as Muslims and Christians arguing over which god is the real one. They present this in a slightly different way, but the meaning is the same: "The argument is not over the evidence—the evidence is the same—it is over the way the evidence should be interpreted." Essentially, 'we have different interpretations of the same stuff, so it's a matter of faith'.
What AIG are doing here is creating an unnecessary distinction. The worst bit is the reference to 'evidence from the past'. What they really mean here are things like the fossil record, radiometric dating, the geologic column - all the things that completely and utterly gut their belief in a 6000 year old created Earth. Instead of addressing them, they claim that it's a matter of interpretation.
Actual science doesn't create this distinction. Its purpose is to provide us with a method that lets us explain things we cannot observe directly, by looking at the things we can observe. No human has ever seen an atom with their own eyes - they are too small. Instead, we used observable evidence to figure out their structure, such as Rutherford's alpha particle scattering experiment - showing how most of the gold foil he was shooting the particles at allowed them to pass through, implying atoms being mostly empty space. Now Rutherford never saw an atom, but he inferred this about them through observation, as well as repetition of an experiment to minimise error. This is how science works. Of course, AIG would call Rutherford's work 'Operational Science', so we'll have to go somewhere else.
Let's use murder as an analogy (jolly, I know) - a person was killed 3 days ago, and their body was just discovered: we never saw them die, and we can never repeat their murder - because they are dead (truly groundbreaking stuff here). However, there is a gash across their neck, and a bloodied knife sat next to them. Moreover, this knife is covered with a person's fingerprints. We can then go to the house of the person who these fingerprints match, and ask them if they know anything - which they deny, despite lacking any alibi and having a definite motive. Do we have enough evidence to determine how the person died, as well as who killed them? Absolutely we do - there's a gash, and a knife covered in blood that matches the victim's: conclusion, they were killed with that knife. The knife is covered with fingerprints that lead to a person with no alibi at all, and a good motive: conclusion, they're the murderer. Now all of these data are from the past - the blood was put on the knife in the past, the wound was made in the past, the fingerprints were put on the knife in the past - by all metrics, this murder case falls into AIG's 'Historical Science'. As such, convicting this person is simply a matter of interpretation. We can only interpret that the fingerprints perfectly match those of the suspect. Who are we to say that they didn't somehow change over time? See how nonsensical this distinction is?
AIG then go on to the subject of theories - and again, they separated 'operational theories' from 'historical theories'. The idea is pretty much the same as discussed above, though there are a few points that I want to address. Firstly, they don't do the thing that I see many creationists (and other science deniers) state - that being the 'it's just a theory' thing, and draw a distinction between the colloquial and scientific definitions, though not without the prerequisite 'Evolutionists claim' line. This point has been beaten into the ground already, so I'll just leave it at that.
They go on to discuss how biological evolution is not an 'operational theory' as it contains 'interpretations of past events' and is 'not as well founded as testable scientific theories like Einstein’s Theory of Relativity or Newton’s Theory of Gravity'. It seems that AIG don't know that while Newton's law of universal gravitation remains as a very well-substantiated piece of science, his actual mechanism for how gravity works was in fact supplanted by Einstein's theory. Good scientific knowledge from AIG, as always. The big part of this section is how they refer to predictability as a method of validating a scientific theory: "These theories offer predictable models and the ability to conduct experiments to determine their validity in different circumstances." Once again, they conveniently omit the immense predictive power of evolutionary theory, instead choosing to claim that it lacks such a property - even going as far to directly claim "Molecules-to-man evolution does not offer this opportunity because these events happened in the past", once again ignoring that one of the key tenets of evolutionary theory is that it both has happened, and is currently happening - considering that we've observed speciation events occurring in the wild: https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.0911761106; https://www.cell.com/current-biology/fulltext/S0960-9822(09)01925-301925-3); https://evolution.berkeley.edu/evo-news/speciation-in-real-time/. The predictive power of evolution is immense, and we are only getting better at making evolutionary predictions as science progresses:
https://ncse.ngo/predictive-power-evolutionary-biology-and-discovery-eusociality-naked-mole-rat,
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9850016/#:~:text=Evolutionary%20predictions%20are%20often%20based,will%20adapt%20to%20their%20environment.
There's also the brief bit where they conflate evolution and abiogenesis "molecules to man evolution". They're two different ideas - and YECs reading this post, stop conflating scientific theories, they are distinct ideas. Evolution deals with how life adapts and develops, it has nothing to do with how life on Earth began - that's abiogenesis. It's the same thing as the Big Bang: it only deals with how the universe formed, not what came before it.
There's a short aside about naturalism, but in order to stop this post turning into a thesis, I'm going to gloss over it and move onto the next bit. Here, AIG describe how "Evolution also relies heavily on the assumption of uniformitarianism— a belief that the present is the key to the past. According to uniformitarians, the processes in the universe have been occurring at a relatively constant rate.". Of course, they fail to consider that, as is the case with all other science, we have evidence to infer that processes do occur at a constant rate. They proceed to discuss rock formation erosion as one of these thing which we assume to have a constant rate - even though I'm pretty sure this is not the case - and that the rate at which these processes takes place is highly variable. To me, this feels like them taking the worst example - and borders on a straw man. Correct me if I'm wrong though - I'm not a geologist, so my understanding is limited here.
I have no doubt that the actual aim of this paragraph is also to sow doubt about other systems reliant upon constant rates of change - such as radiometric dating. Yes, if decay rates were not constant, the values given by radiometric dating would be highly inaccurate, and it would be a useless dating method. However, this would also require a total rewrite of fundamental physics - as the concept of constant nuclear decay rates is backed up by a literal mountain of maths and physical evidence.
However, the Bible makes it very clear that some events of the past were radically different from those we commonly observe today. Noah’s Flood, for example, would have devastated the face of the earth and created a landscape of billions of dead things buried in layers of rock, which is exactly what we see.Another claim that would take up a post on its own - so I'll skip this and tackle it later. Honestly though, just watch Gutsick Gibbon's stuff on the Genesis flood - she gives a far better explanation than I ever could.
Just as evolutionists weren’t there to see evolution happen over several billion years, neither were creationists there to see the events of the six days of creation. The difference is that creationists have the Creator’s eyewitness account of the events of creation, while evolutionists must create a story to explain origins without the supernatural.More totally neutral and unbiased claims by AIG, as expected. There is no 'story' being created - scientists observe the (sometimes literal - pun very much intended) mountains of evidence for evolution. The fact that they have to make up a nonsense distinction to split science in two, so that they can put the bits they don't like (Big Bang cosmology, fossils, radiometric dating, geologic column, etc.) in a separate spot to the bits they do like, such as technology and medicine.
Just because many scientists believe the story does not make the story true.Ironic, considering how much Ken Ham loves to show his lists of creationist scientists. Practice what you preach buddy.
2024.05.19 16:47 Unlucky_Loss_5074 Is there a reason to be hopeful about the future of psychiatric diagnosis and treatment (including non-pharmacological interventions) ? Will we ever get precise and personalized psychiatric care in our lifetime ? What timeline do you think? I really need hope right now.
Hey docs and other practicioners,
I'm 27 yo M from continental Western-Europe. In DSM/ICD categorical terms, I suffer from GAD, MDD (multiple episodes, too many to count, started around 19, 1 suicide attempt, active and passive suicidal ideation typical during episodes), ADHD, nicotine dependecy (+possibly ASD/social anxiety/sleep apnea/convergence insufficiency but they're all things we've yet to explore).
Psycho-socially speaking I've had a very difficult childhood to say the least (though I do not feel traumatized by it, it'd be a suprise if it didn't impact my nervous system's development), dysfunctional family, in the closet as an atheist and gay man from an Arab/Muslim family, poverty, live alone on social security, never had a job, been trying to get a higher education degree since forever etc. All a complicated mess.
Mental health issues have wrecked my life and destroyed all of my dreams and ambitions, even though on paper I have the intellectual abilities to achieve them.
I thought initially that how I felt was normal, just some "shit life syndrome", so for years I've tried on my own with no success. It was only when I talked to all these people with similar backgrounds, who didn't have the same devastating mental experience as me, that I realized there was something fundamentally different about my experience of my shit life. These folks had very difficult lives and were doing ok and managed to actively work in spite of all determinisms to make it better one day, without losing hope and persevering. Some of them are already succeeding, other are still working and not giving up. Other are ok with where they are and not that pressed about their issues.
Anyway, saw a bunch of psychiatrists over the years who all ended up with the same basic diagnoses (ADHD, GAD, MDD), tried a bunch of meds with little success. Sticking with the current one because we have a good therapeutic relationship,we started everything from scratch after almost a year with no meds.
Anyway, I'm on 50mg Vyvanse, 20mg escitalopram, current psych encouraged me recently to start psychotherapy which I did, the psychologist seems good too.
It's been months now. Mentally I'm nowhere near my worst, though far far away from well, functionally there doesn't seem to be much improvement. Plus after 4 weeks on 20mg escitalopram where it felt like I was getting better, the last 3 days that uncomfortable depression/anxiety feeling is starting to creep back in out of nowhere. I'm hoping it's an anomaly.
I'm not suicidal rn but I don't know if I'll be able to spend a lifetime like this. My life is passing me by. I just want to live, move on and instead I'm this dysfunctional mess. Even if I were to stabilize, how long before tolerance/poop-out kicks in, and then back on the medication trial-and-error carousel, back on the "try this psychotherapy modality" carousel.
I don't miss a single appointment with the psychiatrist (and since recently psychologist), never miss taking meds, stopped (chain-)smoking tobacco, stopped my precious coffee. I know vaping isn't healthy but working on it. Trying to fix my sleep schedule (I have heavy "bedtime resistance") etc. I don't know what else I'm supposed to do.
My only hope is future psychiatry/psychology managing to give me at least a couple of years of mental peace. If not, I'm thinking of discussing euthanasia with my doctor cause I can't spend a lifetime like this. I'd rather stop suffering now.
TLDR: little solid mental and functional advancements made for now in my mental health journey, afraid I'll spend my life trying, current options seem limited and unsustainable, thinking of opening the discussion on euthanasia if I won't ever manage to live a productive life I can be at least a little proud of.
submitted by Unlucky_Loss_5074 to AskPsychiatry [link] [comments]
I'm 27 yo M from continental Western-Europe. In DSM/ICD categorical terms, I suffer from GAD, MDD (multiple episodes, too many to count, started around 19, 1 suicide attempt, active and passive suicidal ideation typical during episodes), ADHD, nicotine dependecy (+possibly ASD/social anxiety/sleep apnea/convergence insufficiency but they're all things we've yet to explore).
Psycho-socially speaking I've had a very difficult childhood to say the least (though I do not feel traumatized by it, it'd be a suprise if it didn't impact my nervous system's development), dysfunctional family, in the closet as an atheist and gay man from an Arab/Muslim family, poverty, live alone on social security, never had a job, been trying to get a higher education degree since forever etc. All a complicated mess.
Mental health issues have wrecked my life and destroyed all of my dreams and ambitions, even though on paper I have the intellectual abilities to achieve them.
I thought initially that how I felt was normal, just some "shit life syndrome", so for years I've tried on my own with no success. It was only when I talked to all these people with similar backgrounds, who didn't have the same devastating mental experience as me, that I realized there was something fundamentally different about my experience of my shit life. These folks had very difficult lives and were doing ok and managed to actively work in spite of all determinisms to make it better one day, without losing hope and persevering. Some of them are already succeeding, other are still working and not giving up. Other are ok with where they are and not that pressed about their issues.
Anyway, saw a bunch of psychiatrists over the years who all ended up with the same basic diagnoses (ADHD, GAD, MDD), tried a bunch of meds with little success. Sticking with the current one because we have a good therapeutic relationship,we started everything from scratch after almost a year with no meds.
Anyway, I'm on 50mg Vyvanse, 20mg escitalopram, current psych encouraged me recently to start psychotherapy which I did, the psychologist seems good too.
It's been months now. Mentally I'm nowhere near my worst, though far far away from well, functionally there doesn't seem to be much improvement. Plus after 4 weeks on 20mg escitalopram where it felt like I was getting better, the last 3 days that uncomfortable depression/anxiety feeling is starting to creep back in out of nowhere. I'm hoping it's an anomaly.
I'm not suicidal rn but I don't know if I'll be able to spend a lifetime like this. My life is passing me by. I just want to live, move on and instead I'm this dysfunctional mess. Even if I were to stabilize, how long before tolerance/poop-out kicks in, and then back on the medication trial-and-error carousel, back on the "try this psychotherapy modality" carousel.
I don't miss a single appointment with the psychiatrist (and since recently psychologist), never miss taking meds, stopped (chain-)smoking tobacco, stopped my precious coffee. I know vaping isn't healthy but working on it. Trying to fix my sleep schedule (I have heavy "bedtime resistance") etc. I don't know what else I'm supposed to do.
My only hope is future psychiatry/psychology managing to give me at least a couple of years of mental peace. If not, I'm thinking of discussing euthanasia with my doctor cause I can't spend a lifetime like this. I'd rather stop suffering now.
TLDR: little solid mental and functional advancements made for now in my mental health journey, afraid I'll spend my life trying, current options seem limited and unsustainable, thinking of opening the discussion on euthanasia if I won't ever manage to live a productive life I can be at least a little proud of.
2024.05.19 16:46 E_Latimer The old lady in the Bodega isn’t what she seems.
I think a lot about signals. Signals that show people what groups they belong to. Signals that hide the truth. Everybody uses signals to blend, entice, or trap.
Grandma Pearl died not long after her stroke, and I've been making bad decisions ever since. Maybe my expectations are too high, or I'm just an idiot. Either way, I ran away from the group home to be with people who called themselves my "family." They were the wrong people. They used the words family, brother, sister, and love like lock picks, stealing trust, and taking self-respect.
The only person I remember using the word family correctly was Grandma Pearl. She was a small woman who toured the US as an actress before settling with Granddad above their theatrical rentals shop. I was three when the car accident took Granddad and Mom, so I don't know if they used the word "family" correctly, but I hope they did.
I was never as outgoing as Grandma, but that didn't bother her; she taught me how to watch people. How to see their signals, and how to listen. When she died. I forgot a lot of those lessons for a while.
They called it a "family". The "family" moved product. That product could be goods, drugs, or people.
The uninitiated, like me, were distracted with food and a dry place to sleep, but it didn't take long to see behind the curtain. Things got too intense with the new "family" and I ran.
I ran back to my old neighborhood. The buildings were familiar even if my home was gone. The old theatrical shop had been turned into a microbrewery.
After an appropriate amount of self-pity, thirty minutes, I wandered the alleys, picking up cans or scavenging for bits and pieces that could be recycled, used, or bartered.
I recognized old faces, but I tried to stay out of sight. It was safer that way.
The only place I allowed myself to be seen was the old Lutheran church on the park's far side. Most people who might have known me had aged out of the congregation or died. It was worth the risk because St. Lazarus had a food pantry in the basement and gave out lunches most days, so I wasn't always hungry, which was nice.
I found a dry spot near the library to sleep, which seemed like a stroke of luck until it wasn't.
I had the contentment that came with being in a familiar place. Little bits of comfort let me believe, for a moment, that I wasn't a screw-up and hadn't trusted the wrong people. That moment scurried away when Stick found me.
Stick was a scary asshole. He technically wasn't in charge of the " family," but he made it work. He got things done. I have no idea how old he was. He was all corded muscle and could clock in between twenty and fifty. He looked half-starved and moved like a stalking predator, even with his limp.
His left leg was stiff. The knee didn't bend, and anytime he sat, his left leg would be splayed to the side like a kickstand on a bike. The leg was why he walked with a cane. The cane and how he used it was why we called him Stick.
I don't know why he took the time to track me down. It's not like I was wanted. Maybe it was that I had become property. Property shouldn't just wander off.
Sometimes, you feel a person before you see them. The air is different. When Stick was around, the air felt dead and motionless. I knew I was being watched before I opened my eyes.
Stick was sitting on a milk crate, his bad leg cocked to the side and his forehead resting on his cane. I pushed myself out from beneath the ductwork of the HVAC unit I had been sleeping under and slapped the dirt off my jeans.
"I thought that was you," Stick said as his sharp grin curved up to his unblinking dark eyes.
Stick wanted my discomfort. I'd seen him play the intimidation game too many times. He'd act too friendly, and then when you were good and worried, quick movements, a hand around the back of your neck, and violence would be next. Then he'd act like the whole mind fuck was a big joke, like you were friends, and isn't it great that you can joke around with someone who "really" cared.
It worked, too. If you were the unfortunate focus of Stick's attention, you would be grateful when he smiled and said, "Just a joke, kid. Don't be so sensitive." I'd seen the pattern enough times to know Stick trained people like dogs with his hot and cold game. I didn't like the game, or the fear, so I changed the pattern.
"Hey, Stick, did you come to help pick up cans?" I asked, making sure my smile reached my eyes. I was trying to be pleasant while ignoring the burning nervousness in my gut.
It was still dark out, but I could see Stick's expressions well enough.
Stick tapped his cane on the sidewalk and squinted at me skeptically before answering. "Just checking on my little brother."
We were not related.
Stick liked to call the uninitiated his little brothers or little sisters. He forced intimacy into his language. I didn't argue the point. Interactions went best with Stick when you agreed with everything he said.
"Thanks, man," I complimented, trying to sound genuine and ignorant as I stepped forward and offered him my hand.
Stick didn't move, but I could see that this conversation wasn't going as planned for him, and I forced myself not to react to his confusion. I couldn't break character, or he would know I was playing him.
Stick tapped his cane on the ground twice, grasped my hand, and stood. He watched me. I held his stare, but in an open, naive, guileless way that I had perfected in front of the mirror as grandma gave acting advice while she put her face on.
I once asked Grandma Perl why anyone would practice acting stupid. She pointed her mascara brush at me and, in her ditsiest Minnesota Nice character, said, "It's easier to be forgiven when people think you're a little dumb, don't ya know?" Like with most things, Grandma was right.
Before I understood what had happened, Stick pulled me into his side and slung an arm around my shoulder.
"You don't have a name yet. Everyone gets a name, but they don't get to pick it." He paused and gave me a Cheshire cat grin. "I have a name for you, little brother. You are going to be called Slide." Then he held my chin and forced eye contact." Your name will be Slide because I have never seen anyone slide out of shit faster than you. I can't tell if you do it on purpose or not, and I've been watching. I watch everybody. You do, too. Hell, this might be the first time I've ever heard you talk. So let's celebrate your name, Slide." Stick's smile slipped as he pulled me out of the alley. "We'll go do something special."
I stayed silent, knowing full well what was coming. Being named meant doing something you could never take back. It was public and would put you in prison if the police ever took the time to look for you. It meant severing yourself from your life before and relying entirely on the "family." I had been absent each time naming seemed to be in the cards, but I couldn't duck out this time.
There was only one place to go at this time of night that would have an impact, the Bodega.
The Bodega was a red hole in the wall with a glass door papered over with grocery ads years outdated. Canned salmon two for one seemed to be the dominant theme. Although there were two large windows, one on either side of the door, you could barely see in. The right window was a tapestry of cigarette promotions. The left window displayed the only swath of uncovered glass with a view of the interior. From the outside, the view was of tobacco, lottery scratchers, and Old Lady Imitari.
Old Lady Imitari owned the store. She was a short, dark-haired woman who always wore a long floral tank top. Grandma Pearl loved the old woman but said Imitari looked like an old man's thumb all the years she had known her, and Grandma moved to the neighborhood with Grandad thirty years ago. Imitari was a local legend even then because the Bodega was open twenty hours a day, three hundred sixty-five days a year, and no one else worked in the store. Grandma used to make an extra strong coffee called Barako and chat with Imitari sometimes when work in the shop was slow.
I would sneak out at night and try to catch Imitari sleeping. No matter the time, I never caught her snoozing, and she always saw me peeking at her through the window. I know she saw me because she would uncross her arms and wave her flyswatter at me.
All these memories flicked through my mind as Stick smiled his too-wide smile and pushed me into the Bodega.
Imitari flicked her fly swatter at me in acknowledgment, and her attention returned to the small TV she had nestled beside the cash register, which seemed to be the old woman's only real tether to the world outside her shop.
The inside of the Bodega was just a long hallway with shelves of convenience foods, drinks, home supplies, candy, and cold meds covering every available surface from floor to ceiling. The only break in the tunnel of products was the glass counter at the back corner of the store; Imitari presided over her mini domain by casually ignoring her shoppers. I tried to make eye contact with the old woman again as Stick pushed me to the back of the shop, but after her initial acknowledgment of our entrance, Imitari's eyes stayed focused on her TV.
As casually confident as possible, I walked to the cooler and grabbed an iced tea. "Want a drink," I asked over my shoulder, my voice unusually steady, given the electric current of anxiety flowing through me.
Stick sneered and tapped his cane twice on the ground. His eyes found all the security cameras in the tiny store, a frown creasing his angular features.
I followed his line of sight and finally realized what had bothered him. The cameras were fake. They looked like security cameras, but they weren't. There were no wires or lenses, just rectangles and circles in a security camera shape.
Stick took a deep breath and tapped his cane on the ground again. " There… is … so… much… here… to… see… but… no… one… is… watching," he said with a singsong. Then his sneer turned into a cruel smile.
I knew Stick wanted an audience for what he would force me to do. The fact that the security cameras were fakes meant that whatever was going to happen would now have to be significant. An event that the neighborhood wouldn't be able to ignore. My stomach twisted with the thought.
Stick waggled his eyebrows at me. He had been watching. He had seen my thoughts, and we both knew he had something terrible in mind.
The cane twirled in Stick's hand and then tapped twice on the shop tile.
"I think I want a little bit of this," Stick said, gesturing wildly with his cane, sending a row of soup cans tumbling to the floor. "And a little bit of that," Stick added as another wild gesture sent cups of ramen spinning and knocking glass bottles of hot sauce to the floor.
I stood paralyzed, unable to run. I was trapped with nowhere to duck away to. I didn't want Stick to hurt Old Lady Imitari, and I didn't want Stick to hurt me, either. The truth was, he would hurt both of us no matter what I did. That was just the way Stick was. I'd seen him. I'd seen him show us who he was every day.
Then I realized Imitari hadn't moved. She was watching her TV and chuckling at the sitcom as if nothing had happened.
Stick glanced at me, confused. I almost felt sorry for the sociopath. His night was not going to plan.
Imitari chuckled at her TV again, and a crease formed in the middle of Stick's forehead, letting me know that he was beyond angry. He was calm, dangerous, and vicious. People had been left for dead when Stick got this way.
Stick raised his cane and flipped it so the handle jutted like a pickax. He was going to attack Imitari.
Somehow, I moved. I didn't do much, but when I slid forward and grabbed the back of Stick's shirt, the cane missed Imitari, and the sharp handle punctured the thick glass top of the counter just above a roll of Lotto scratchers.
Old lady Imitari slowly looked up into Stick's eyes and smiled. Her wide, gentle frown was replaced with a look of joy and something else, something primal, something hungry. Her pupils were blown, and I had the uneasy feeling that I was watching someone be served their absolute favorite meal.
Before Stick could pull his cane from the punctured glass, Imitari casually reached forward, grabbed the cane, and pulled the wirey man forward. Small, old, and wrinkled, Imitari stared into Stick's eyes and overpowered him.
Stick fell forward across the counter. He tried to push himself back, but Imitari's hand clamped down on his wrist like a vice.
Bones ground together as Imitari pulled Stick's hand to her mouth, and with a swift, subtle movement, she bit off the tips of Stick's pinky and ring finger like she was sampling a cookie.
I jumped back next to the cooler as a thin spray of blood arched toward me.
Stick screamed and thrashed, but Imitari's small form was static and immovable. Stick was a fly in a trap. No matter how much he struggled, punched, poked, or kicked, he could not break the old woman's hold. Then, slowly, she took another bite.
It was strangely fascinating watching the frail form of this old woman I had known for years take bite after bite out of Stick. This man, whom I thought of as a predator, a hunter, an enforcer, was crying and begging while an old woman, who looked like a wrinkled thumb in a floral top, quietly devoured him.
I was surprised by the lack of blood after the first spray. I'm sure it was Imitari's crushing grip that stanched the flow of blood. The flesh of Stick's arm looked white from the pressure.
Hand over hand, Imitari pulled Stick forward. Bones cracked as she gripped higher on Stick's arm, clamped down with her long leathery fingers, and fed the flesh and bone, one concise bite at a time, into her open smiling maw. It was rhythmical in its simplicity: chomp, crunch, chew, chew, swallow. Over and over, the pattern continued until the begging stopped.
Stick wasn't dead. He gave up. Not struggling, he laid over the glass counter like a rag doll. He watched me glassily as Imitari took bite after bite, and I knew he wasn't there anymore. Whatever made Stick Stick had either curled up and hidden in a dark corner of his mind or had been devoured with his arm.
The old woman seemed displeased that her meal had stopped struggling. She shook him, but he flopped, and his head lulled from side to side. Imitari frowned, let go of Stick's arm, and pushed down on the limp man's back. Blood gushed from the ragged stump, and Imitari lowered her mouth and drank from the wound like she was sipping from a garden hose.
Stick didn't move. He just grew pail, and eventually, his panicked, shallow breaths ended, and the blood stopped flowing.
Then Imitari stood. With a quick tug, she pulled Stick's body over the counter and let it flop to the floor at her feet. Her eyes closed. A contented smile bloomed on her face as the explosive sound of crunching and cracking bones echoed through the small shop.
The deafening sound of crunching stopped, and only the buzzing of the drinks cooler reverberated through the small space. Imitari opened her eyes and watched me, a broad smile still on her lips. At that moment, I realized I could hear the drinks cooler so well because I had crawled into it, wedged between the glass door and the shelves.
Imitari held me with her gaze as cords of pink flesh lowered from the ceiling and efficiently tidied up Stick's mess, lapping up blood and hot sauce, placing cans on shelves, and scooping up cups of ramen with whip-like tendrils. Then, the cords of flesh nudged me forward, and I stood before Old Lady Imitari.
The thing that I had always thought of as a stern old woman handed me Stick's cane. With the same benign smile I remembered from buying red hots from it as a ten-year-old, it waved me away with its flyswatter, and the cords of flesh pushed me out the door onto the sidewalk.
submitted by E_Latimer to nosleep [link] [comments]
Grandma Pearl died not long after her stroke, and I've been making bad decisions ever since. Maybe my expectations are too high, or I'm just an idiot. Either way, I ran away from the group home to be with people who called themselves my "family." They were the wrong people. They used the words family, brother, sister, and love like lock picks, stealing trust, and taking self-respect.
The only person I remember using the word family correctly was Grandma Pearl. She was a small woman who toured the US as an actress before settling with Granddad above their theatrical rentals shop. I was three when the car accident took Granddad and Mom, so I don't know if they used the word "family" correctly, but I hope they did.
I was never as outgoing as Grandma, but that didn't bother her; she taught me how to watch people. How to see their signals, and how to listen. When she died. I forgot a lot of those lessons for a while.
They called it a "family". The "family" moved product. That product could be goods, drugs, or people.
The uninitiated, like me, were distracted with food and a dry place to sleep, but it didn't take long to see behind the curtain. Things got too intense with the new "family" and I ran.
I ran back to my old neighborhood. The buildings were familiar even if my home was gone. The old theatrical shop had been turned into a microbrewery.
After an appropriate amount of self-pity, thirty minutes, I wandered the alleys, picking up cans or scavenging for bits and pieces that could be recycled, used, or bartered.
I recognized old faces, but I tried to stay out of sight. It was safer that way.
The only place I allowed myself to be seen was the old Lutheran church on the park's far side. Most people who might have known me had aged out of the congregation or died. It was worth the risk because St. Lazarus had a food pantry in the basement and gave out lunches most days, so I wasn't always hungry, which was nice.
I found a dry spot near the library to sleep, which seemed like a stroke of luck until it wasn't.
I had the contentment that came with being in a familiar place. Little bits of comfort let me believe, for a moment, that I wasn't a screw-up and hadn't trusted the wrong people. That moment scurried away when Stick found me.
Stick was a scary asshole. He technically wasn't in charge of the " family," but he made it work. He got things done. I have no idea how old he was. He was all corded muscle and could clock in between twenty and fifty. He looked half-starved and moved like a stalking predator, even with his limp.
His left leg was stiff. The knee didn't bend, and anytime he sat, his left leg would be splayed to the side like a kickstand on a bike. The leg was why he walked with a cane. The cane and how he used it was why we called him Stick.
I don't know why he took the time to track me down. It's not like I was wanted. Maybe it was that I had become property. Property shouldn't just wander off.
Sometimes, you feel a person before you see them. The air is different. When Stick was around, the air felt dead and motionless. I knew I was being watched before I opened my eyes.
Stick was sitting on a milk crate, his bad leg cocked to the side and his forehead resting on his cane. I pushed myself out from beneath the ductwork of the HVAC unit I had been sleeping under and slapped the dirt off my jeans.
"I thought that was you," Stick said as his sharp grin curved up to his unblinking dark eyes.
Stick wanted my discomfort. I'd seen him play the intimidation game too many times. He'd act too friendly, and then when you were good and worried, quick movements, a hand around the back of your neck, and violence would be next. Then he'd act like the whole mind fuck was a big joke, like you were friends, and isn't it great that you can joke around with someone who "really" cared.
It worked, too. If you were the unfortunate focus of Stick's attention, you would be grateful when he smiled and said, "Just a joke, kid. Don't be so sensitive." I'd seen the pattern enough times to know Stick trained people like dogs with his hot and cold game. I didn't like the game, or the fear, so I changed the pattern.
"Hey, Stick, did you come to help pick up cans?" I asked, making sure my smile reached my eyes. I was trying to be pleasant while ignoring the burning nervousness in my gut.
It was still dark out, but I could see Stick's expressions well enough.
Stick tapped his cane on the sidewalk and squinted at me skeptically before answering. "Just checking on my little brother."
We were not related.
Stick liked to call the uninitiated his little brothers or little sisters. He forced intimacy into his language. I didn't argue the point. Interactions went best with Stick when you agreed with everything he said.
"Thanks, man," I complimented, trying to sound genuine and ignorant as I stepped forward and offered him my hand.
Stick didn't move, but I could see that this conversation wasn't going as planned for him, and I forced myself not to react to his confusion. I couldn't break character, or he would know I was playing him.
Stick tapped his cane on the ground twice, grasped my hand, and stood. He watched me. I held his stare, but in an open, naive, guileless way that I had perfected in front of the mirror as grandma gave acting advice while she put her face on.
I once asked Grandma Perl why anyone would practice acting stupid. She pointed her mascara brush at me and, in her ditsiest Minnesota Nice character, said, "It's easier to be forgiven when people think you're a little dumb, don't ya know?" Like with most things, Grandma was right.
Before I understood what had happened, Stick pulled me into his side and slung an arm around my shoulder.
"You don't have a name yet. Everyone gets a name, but they don't get to pick it." He paused and gave me a Cheshire cat grin. "I have a name for you, little brother. You are going to be called Slide." Then he held my chin and forced eye contact." Your name will be Slide because I have never seen anyone slide out of shit faster than you. I can't tell if you do it on purpose or not, and I've been watching. I watch everybody. You do, too. Hell, this might be the first time I've ever heard you talk. So let's celebrate your name, Slide." Stick's smile slipped as he pulled me out of the alley. "We'll go do something special."
I stayed silent, knowing full well what was coming. Being named meant doing something you could never take back. It was public and would put you in prison if the police ever took the time to look for you. It meant severing yourself from your life before and relying entirely on the "family." I had been absent each time naming seemed to be in the cards, but I couldn't duck out this time.
There was only one place to go at this time of night that would have an impact, the Bodega.
The Bodega was a red hole in the wall with a glass door papered over with grocery ads years outdated. Canned salmon two for one seemed to be the dominant theme. Although there were two large windows, one on either side of the door, you could barely see in. The right window was a tapestry of cigarette promotions. The left window displayed the only swath of uncovered glass with a view of the interior. From the outside, the view was of tobacco, lottery scratchers, and Old Lady Imitari.
Old Lady Imitari owned the store. She was a short, dark-haired woman who always wore a long floral tank top. Grandma Pearl loved the old woman but said Imitari looked like an old man's thumb all the years she had known her, and Grandma moved to the neighborhood with Grandad thirty years ago. Imitari was a local legend even then because the Bodega was open twenty hours a day, three hundred sixty-five days a year, and no one else worked in the store. Grandma used to make an extra strong coffee called Barako and chat with Imitari sometimes when work in the shop was slow.
I would sneak out at night and try to catch Imitari sleeping. No matter the time, I never caught her snoozing, and she always saw me peeking at her through the window. I know she saw me because she would uncross her arms and wave her flyswatter at me.
All these memories flicked through my mind as Stick smiled his too-wide smile and pushed me into the Bodega.
Imitari flicked her fly swatter at me in acknowledgment, and her attention returned to the small TV she had nestled beside the cash register, which seemed to be the old woman's only real tether to the world outside her shop.
The inside of the Bodega was just a long hallway with shelves of convenience foods, drinks, home supplies, candy, and cold meds covering every available surface from floor to ceiling. The only break in the tunnel of products was the glass counter at the back corner of the store; Imitari presided over her mini domain by casually ignoring her shoppers. I tried to make eye contact with the old woman again as Stick pushed me to the back of the shop, but after her initial acknowledgment of our entrance, Imitari's eyes stayed focused on her TV.
As casually confident as possible, I walked to the cooler and grabbed an iced tea. "Want a drink," I asked over my shoulder, my voice unusually steady, given the electric current of anxiety flowing through me.
Stick sneered and tapped his cane twice on the ground. His eyes found all the security cameras in the tiny store, a frown creasing his angular features.
I followed his line of sight and finally realized what had bothered him. The cameras were fake. They looked like security cameras, but they weren't. There were no wires or lenses, just rectangles and circles in a security camera shape.
Stick took a deep breath and tapped his cane on the ground again. " There… is … so… much… here… to… see… but… no… one… is… watching," he said with a singsong. Then his sneer turned into a cruel smile.
I knew Stick wanted an audience for what he would force me to do. The fact that the security cameras were fakes meant that whatever was going to happen would now have to be significant. An event that the neighborhood wouldn't be able to ignore. My stomach twisted with the thought.
Stick waggled his eyebrows at me. He had been watching. He had seen my thoughts, and we both knew he had something terrible in mind.
The cane twirled in Stick's hand and then tapped twice on the shop tile.
"I think I want a little bit of this," Stick said, gesturing wildly with his cane, sending a row of soup cans tumbling to the floor. "And a little bit of that," Stick added as another wild gesture sent cups of ramen spinning and knocking glass bottles of hot sauce to the floor.
I stood paralyzed, unable to run. I was trapped with nowhere to duck away to. I didn't want Stick to hurt Old Lady Imitari, and I didn't want Stick to hurt me, either. The truth was, he would hurt both of us no matter what I did. That was just the way Stick was. I'd seen him. I'd seen him show us who he was every day.
Then I realized Imitari hadn't moved. She was watching her TV and chuckling at the sitcom as if nothing had happened.
Stick glanced at me, confused. I almost felt sorry for the sociopath. His night was not going to plan.
Imitari chuckled at her TV again, and a crease formed in the middle of Stick's forehead, letting me know that he was beyond angry. He was calm, dangerous, and vicious. People had been left for dead when Stick got this way.
Stick raised his cane and flipped it so the handle jutted like a pickax. He was going to attack Imitari.
Somehow, I moved. I didn't do much, but when I slid forward and grabbed the back of Stick's shirt, the cane missed Imitari, and the sharp handle punctured the thick glass top of the counter just above a roll of Lotto scratchers.
Old lady Imitari slowly looked up into Stick's eyes and smiled. Her wide, gentle frown was replaced with a look of joy and something else, something primal, something hungry. Her pupils were blown, and I had the uneasy feeling that I was watching someone be served their absolute favorite meal.
Before Stick could pull his cane from the punctured glass, Imitari casually reached forward, grabbed the cane, and pulled the wirey man forward. Small, old, and wrinkled, Imitari stared into Stick's eyes and overpowered him.
Stick fell forward across the counter. He tried to push himself back, but Imitari's hand clamped down on his wrist like a vice.
Bones ground together as Imitari pulled Stick's hand to her mouth, and with a swift, subtle movement, she bit off the tips of Stick's pinky and ring finger like she was sampling a cookie.
I jumped back next to the cooler as a thin spray of blood arched toward me.
Stick screamed and thrashed, but Imitari's small form was static and immovable. Stick was a fly in a trap. No matter how much he struggled, punched, poked, or kicked, he could not break the old woman's hold. Then, slowly, she took another bite.
It was strangely fascinating watching the frail form of this old woman I had known for years take bite after bite out of Stick. This man, whom I thought of as a predator, a hunter, an enforcer, was crying and begging while an old woman, who looked like a wrinkled thumb in a floral top, quietly devoured him.
I was surprised by the lack of blood after the first spray. I'm sure it was Imitari's crushing grip that stanched the flow of blood. The flesh of Stick's arm looked white from the pressure.
Hand over hand, Imitari pulled Stick forward. Bones cracked as she gripped higher on Stick's arm, clamped down with her long leathery fingers, and fed the flesh and bone, one concise bite at a time, into her open smiling maw. It was rhythmical in its simplicity: chomp, crunch, chew, chew, swallow. Over and over, the pattern continued until the begging stopped.
Stick wasn't dead. He gave up. Not struggling, he laid over the glass counter like a rag doll. He watched me glassily as Imitari took bite after bite, and I knew he wasn't there anymore. Whatever made Stick Stick had either curled up and hidden in a dark corner of his mind or had been devoured with his arm.
The old woman seemed displeased that her meal had stopped struggling. She shook him, but he flopped, and his head lulled from side to side. Imitari frowned, let go of Stick's arm, and pushed down on the limp man's back. Blood gushed from the ragged stump, and Imitari lowered her mouth and drank from the wound like she was sipping from a garden hose.
Stick didn't move. He just grew pail, and eventually, his panicked, shallow breaths ended, and the blood stopped flowing.
Then Imitari stood. With a quick tug, she pulled Stick's body over the counter and let it flop to the floor at her feet. Her eyes closed. A contented smile bloomed on her face as the explosive sound of crunching and cracking bones echoed through the small shop.
The deafening sound of crunching stopped, and only the buzzing of the drinks cooler reverberated through the small space. Imitari opened her eyes and watched me, a broad smile still on her lips. At that moment, I realized I could hear the drinks cooler so well because I had crawled into it, wedged between the glass door and the shelves.
Imitari held me with her gaze as cords of pink flesh lowered from the ceiling and efficiently tidied up Stick's mess, lapping up blood and hot sauce, placing cans on shelves, and scooping up cups of ramen with whip-like tendrils. Then, the cords of flesh nudged me forward, and I stood before Old Lady Imitari.
The thing that I had always thought of as a stern old woman handed me Stick's cane. With the same benign smile I remembered from buying red hots from it as a ten-year-old, it waved me away with its flyswatter, and the cords of flesh pushed me out the door onto the sidewalk.
2024.05.19 16:37 t4t0626 ♟️ RC is winning this 5D Chess with Multiverse Time Travel: the S-3 IS NOT dilution, Is a chess CHECK by GameStop. Here is why.
 | I want to share a theory that's been brewing in my mind since the last S-3 filling. This is my own Due Diligence, but for the benefit of the doubt, i'll post it as speculation/opinion. submitted by t4t0626 to Superstonk [link] [comments] I think it's crucial for us to understand what might be happening behind the scenes with the recent Form S-3 filing from GameStop. Spoiler alert: this isn't about dilution. It's about offering the shorts, DTC and SEC (the whole system) an exit strategy. https://preview.redd.it/0zwxf9bj2e1d1.jpg?width=624&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=bebefb79bc2316098dad9ae3779e8e357a88b8b5 A Look Back: December 2020In December 2020, right before the January frenzy, GameStop made a similar move, registering the option to offer up to 300,000,000 shares when only was 75,000,000 (aprox) outstanding. Shorts did not accept the offer then and the frenzy ensued. Fast forward to this week with the share price shooting again to $80 in premarket ($320 pre-split). And now GameStop is offering up to 1,000,000,000 shares with 300,000,000 currently outstanding.Why This Matters:IMHO, If the shorts didn't accept the offer, we have two possible interpretations for why...A) They Believe Their Thesis: They think their bet against GameStop is still valid, even though we know it's fundamentally flawed (and they likely do too). B) They simply Can't Close: They know their thesis is invalid, but they can't close taking the offer because doing so would reveal the extent of their naked short positions, possibly over 1 billion shares. Ryan Cohen and the team are essentially saying: "Here's your chance to close and exit". If the shorts don't take this offer, it exposes a critical point: They can't close because the naked shorts are too massive, possibly over 1 billion shares, which means they are in deep trouble, way beyond simple bad bets, and they understand that closing their positions would end them, expose their fraud to the world and cause a systemic event (which would probably cast doubts on the whole concept of "ownership" in the American market). What Does This Mean for Us?This move isn't just a financial maneuver; it's a strategic 5D Chess with Multiverse Time Travel play. Cohen is putting the shorts in a checkmate position:A) Accept the offer: Admit their crime and start closign with the offered shares, turning into longs committed to the company (the new positions must be book). B) Decline the offer: Expose the enormity of their fraudulent activities, making it clear to the SEC and the public that the shorts are in an untenable position. A Signal to RegulatorsThis filing isn't just a message to the shorts; it's also a demonstration to the SEC of GameStop's willingness to resolve the situation constructively. It's a clear indication that GME is not responsible for any market turmoil that follows if the shorts refuse to close.The Big PictureFrom an investor's perspective, this is a brilliant move. It's beneficial for us in the medium to long term, and it's the best strategy for the company across all timelines. It shows GME's proactive stance in tackling the short issue head-on and ensuring they're not blamed for any systemic risk caused by the shorts' fraudulent activities.RC is not playig 4D chess... is playing 5D Chess with Multiverse Time Travel, offering a solution that avoids a systemic collapse caused by shorts. In other words: GME is saying \"we are not to blame for this situation or what may result from it\". ConclusionThis isn't about diluting the shares. It's about offering the shorts a way out and proving to regulators that GameStop is doing everything in its power to handle this situation responsibly. If the shorts accept, they reveal their crimes and shift to supporting the company. If they don't, they dig a deeper hole, exposing the true scale of their misdeeds.It is a theory, my theory, but I believe it is the most coherent and logical. What do you think? Let's keep our eyes peeled, stay informed, and continue sharing our findings. Together, we're stronger, and our collective knowledge is our greatest weapon. Hang in there friends! Whatever happens, MOASS will ensue: in an organized and beneficial way to everyone or in an explosive and uncontrolled way in which the value of our shares will tend to infinity. Only the criminals will choose which way out they want. |
2024.05.19 16:31 BigSa1mon Recon Rework Suggestion
I know this is long, but I thought about Recon for a while and what recon could/should be and am wondering if any in the community would agree at all.
Recon was there to mainly punish invisible, but left everyone else in a match feeling punished, with (almost) no room for counter play and therefore interactivity.
submitted by BigSa1mon to thefinals [link] [comments]
Recon was there to mainly punish invisible, but left everyone else in a match feeling punished, with (almost) no room for counter play and therefore interactivity.
Before I address that sentence as a whole, I want to address just Recon and reworking it and how it reasonlessly punished with no room for counter or interaction; The rework would have a filter over the screen with ambiguous, colored "auras" ranging in size based on distance, as to force some guesswork on WHAT is detected and WHERE. Now, WHAT is being detected for Recon 2.0 would be equipped, put down, and/or in-use specializations AND items (launch pad, mines, C4, etc.) This means there is NO SPAMMING REASONLESS PUNISHMENT but PUNISHING REASONLESS SPAMMING of specializations and making you rethink where you place things and when you use them. Counters to detection could/should be goo grenade walls and smoke grenades. (So heal behind goo wall or smoke before breaching with c4 or demat). This with the ambiguous aura would mean that UNLESS DIRECTLY SIGHTED, both the USER and OPPONENT can put thought into how the aura works, even with something as simple as placement. E. G. Do I put my turret on the ceiling where itd be almost obvious it's a turret? Maybe use that to predict where the enemy would decide to make entry from? Or do I put it on the ground where it could be anything, like a Heavy's barricade? Is that a turret in a corner on the other side of the wall? Or a medium with his demat equipped and ready to pop through the wall? Is that C4 or a barricade by the cash out? IMO, the specialization should not be a timer, but a sort of usage bar that does NOT start until detection does, with an increase in rate based on how close you are to the detection. This does not stop until either unequipped or used up, both of which should have distinct audio cues. Now, addressing the aforementioned sentence as a whole. Recon (at least felt like it) was meant to counter the invisible specialization. I think the reworked version of Recon (one focused on ACTUALLY doing Recon) should REPLACE the invisible SPECIALIZATION on Light. Heavy has his shield, and barricade and bubble. Medium has guardian and ap turrets. Giving Light a reworked Recon when it has Sonar and Thermal would IMO help flesh out its identity with a core build. The devs have mentioned wanting Light to have a scout identity—I feel like this is the move to do it.TL; DR—Recon gives auras of specs and items either equipped or used/put down; aura size depends on distance and is always ambiguous to add guesswork. No timer but stamina bar with rate based on distance detecting. Should be countered by goo walls and smoke grenades. Should replace Invisible specialization (keep potion) on Light to further flesh out Scout identity.
2024.05.19 16:30 winbatch Need help from the Plex Hive Mind - at my wit's end!
Ok, so I've tried for a few weeks to figure this out on my own but I have acknowledged defeat.
I have been a plex guy for probably 10 years now (plex pass, etc) and have read a lot here and elsewhere and so I feel pretty well versed, but this has stumped me.
On to my issue. At some point I used unmanic to convert a lot of my content from 264 to HEVC 265. While that appeared to go ok (lots of space savings, etc), I started getting some complaints from my users (content not loading, or fast forwarding takes forever, etc). In doing some testing, I too am having some trouble with the reported content, even on my own network. In many cases, I say screw it and just redownload it and it works fine. (both 264 and 265). However, I would like to be proactive and seek out which of my content has the issue. But I can't seem to find a pattern to identify, as it's not all files that had been converted. I'm trying to use 'mediainfo' (this is an Ubuntu based plex server) to try to differentiate content that works and content that doesn't. (Bit rate? Encoder? What??) My goal is to find whatever is the problematic culprit/pattern and go ahead and replace that content with fresh copies, and leave the rest alone (because it's 20+TB). I of course don't want to attempt to watch all my content just to test it. So hoping I can script something that gives me the 'bad' list and go from there.
Note, this is does appear to be a transcoding or subtitle issue or anything like that. I have the same trouble whether it's with my iphone or browser (even same machine as the server). Roku however seems to work ok for playing the video, but if I attempt to fast forward, it automatically restarts the video from the beginning. In this particular test/reproduction using iphone, the server doesn't acknowledge the stream for a good 10 seconds and when it does it says buffering for something like 2 minutes before it starts playing. It does start playing after the 2 minutes. Note that content that works by contrast shows up immediately and takes a second only.
If you look at the screen shots, this is direct play, and the amount of data the server is sending to the client is crazy (is it trying to download the whole thing before playing??). The file itself is only 850 MB. It plays fine in VLC. I'd be happy to upload the content itself if someone wants to take a look. Also note that I had already deleted my 'Codec's folder and it redownloaded them but the content still has the issue.
Media info: https://pastebin.com/1JfnHbW0
Plex dashboard: https://imgur.com/a/ulXcdAG including Tautulli screenshot (and plex logs)
As for Plex logs, it does show errors, but from googling they seem to be somewhat common and doesn't seem to reference this content attempting to be played (please correct me if I'm wrong) and again, it does play after 2 minutes of seemingly doing nothing except sending huge amounts of data over the network.
In case it matters:
submitted by winbatch to PleX [link] [comments]
I have been a plex guy for probably 10 years now (plex pass, etc) and have read a lot here and elsewhere and so I feel pretty well versed, but this has stumped me.
On to my issue. At some point I used unmanic to convert a lot of my content from 264 to HEVC 265. While that appeared to go ok (lots of space savings, etc), I started getting some complaints from my users (content not loading, or fast forwarding takes forever, etc). In doing some testing, I too am having some trouble with the reported content, even on my own network. In many cases, I say screw it and just redownload it and it works fine. (both 264 and 265). However, I would like to be proactive and seek out which of my content has the issue. But I can't seem to find a pattern to identify, as it's not all files that had been converted. I'm trying to use 'mediainfo' (this is an Ubuntu based plex server) to try to differentiate content that works and content that doesn't. (Bit rate? Encoder? What??) My goal is to find whatever is the problematic culprit/pattern and go ahead and replace that content with fresh copies, and leave the rest alone (because it's 20+TB). I of course don't want to attempt to watch all my content just to test it. So hoping I can script something that gives me the 'bad' list and go from there.
Note, this is does appear to be a transcoding or subtitle issue or anything like that. I have the same trouble whether it's with my iphone or browser (even same machine as the server). Roku however seems to work ok for playing the video, but if I attempt to fast forward, it automatically restarts the video from the beginning. In this particular test/reproduction using iphone, the server doesn't acknowledge the stream for a good 10 seconds and when it does it says buffering for something like 2 minutes before it starts playing. It does start playing after the 2 minutes. Note that content that works by contrast shows up immediately and takes a second only.
If you look at the screen shots, this is direct play, and the amount of data the server is sending to the client is crazy (is it trying to download the whole thing before playing??). The file itself is only 850 MB. It plays fine in VLC. I'd be happy to upload the content itself if someone wants to take a look. Also note that I had already deleted my 'Codec's folder and it redownloaded them but the content still has the issue.
Media info: https://pastebin.com/1JfnHbW0
Plex dashboard: https://imgur.com/a/ulXcdAG including Tautulli screenshot (and plex logs)
As for Plex logs, it does show errors, but from googling they seem to be somewhat common and doesn't seem to reference this content attempting to be played (please correct me if I'm wrong) and again, it does play after 2 minutes of seemingly doing nothing except sending huge amounts of data over the network.
In case it matters:
- CPU very low, server is not working hard at all to serve this content - Linux office 6.5.0-35-generic #35-Ubuntu SMP PREEMPT_DYNAMIC Fri Apr 26 11:23:57 UTC 2024 x86_64 x86_64 x86_64 GNU/Linux - sudo snap info plexmediaserver ..etc.. plexmediaserver: simple, enabled, active snap-id: 85SmCU9pNtVq5DHmKJwbZsgbNqkG7wPR tracking: latest/stable refresh-date: 31 days ago, at 22:04 EDT channels: latest/stable: 1.40.2.8395-c67dce28e 2024-04-18 (436) 91MB - latest/candidate: ↑ latest/beta: ↑ latest/edge: ↑ installed: 1.40.2.8395-c67dce28e (436) 91MB -Help!!!
2024.05.19 16:25 Deathstar699 If we had other paths besides the ones we currently have, how do you think they will work, what would you do to make them stand out compared to other paths?
Basically the title although I have a few concepts of my own that I will share.
Remembrance: Sounds like a path to keep the team alive, Abundance does so with healing and preservation does so with shields and taunts. So I am guessing that the Remembrance can specialize in defensive buffs and stalling. Like giving allies buffs that reduces the damage they take, not to a degree that it powercreeps say Preservation but enough that they won't get one shot out of the blue. I am thinking they can do things like increase effect res, make them take less dot damage, and for 5 stars who have more unique niches they could for example freeze allies to stop them from taking actions but make them unable to be targeted by enemies for the duration, or maybe having an ultimate that rewinds the entire team's health states back to a prior point, so if you have some members who go down this ultimate can save your run. Those are just some ideas I have thought about.
Elation: Sounds like the Trickster in Dragon's dogma, they would be able to change taunt priority and use misdirection to harm enemies, they can as an example place traps so that if an enemy attacks a specific ally they take a bunch of damage and suffer specific penalties, they could also gain unique buffs like elusive which lets them negate the enemy's next attack, and inherently they have very low taunt so enemies are unlikely to target them at all. Which gives them the freedom to set up traps and other devious counter effects on the battlefield to cause a lot of problems for enemies.
Voracity: I picture this path as sort of like an extreme version of Jing Liu. The characters following this path are a detriment to their party but would be nothing without them, they would constantly absorb ally buffs, hp and in some cases be able to consume an ally to power up a really strong attack like Chen Gong from FGO. They would also be beefy with lots of hp and the more your allies give up to them, the stronger they become over time turning into a raid boss on your team. Can be useful for more difficult and drawn out battles.
But what do you think guys? I don't think we will get other paths but its nice to speculate ideas for what they could be.
submitted by Deathstar699 to HonkaiStarRail [link] [comments]
Remembrance: Sounds like a path to keep the team alive, Abundance does so with healing and preservation does so with shields and taunts. So I am guessing that the Remembrance can specialize in defensive buffs and stalling. Like giving allies buffs that reduces the damage they take, not to a degree that it powercreeps say Preservation but enough that they won't get one shot out of the blue. I am thinking they can do things like increase effect res, make them take less dot damage, and for 5 stars who have more unique niches they could for example freeze allies to stop them from taking actions but make them unable to be targeted by enemies for the duration, or maybe having an ultimate that rewinds the entire team's health states back to a prior point, so if you have some members who go down this ultimate can save your run. Those are just some ideas I have thought about.
Elation: Sounds like the Trickster in Dragon's dogma, they would be able to change taunt priority and use misdirection to harm enemies, they can as an example place traps so that if an enemy attacks a specific ally they take a bunch of damage and suffer specific penalties, they could also gain unique buffs like elusive which lets them negate the enemy's next attack, and inherently they have very low taunt so enemies are unlikely to target them at all. Which gives them the freedom to set up traps and other devious counter effects on the battlefield to cause a lot of problems for enemies.
Voracity: I picture this path as sort of like an extreme version of Jing Liu. The characters following this path are a detriment to their party but would be nothing without them, they would constantly absorb ally buffs, hp and in some cases be able to consume an ally to power up a really strong attack like Chen Gong from FGO. They would also be beefy with lots of hp and the more your allies give up to them, the stronger they become over time turning into a raid boss on your team. Can be useful for more difficult and drawn out battles.
But what do you think guys? I don't think we will get other paths but its nice to speculate ideas for what they could be.
2024.05.19 16:17 LoganWY How I self-advocated (Long story no TL:DR)
Today I want to tell my story of how I self-advocated and what I did to achieve that goal. I'm telling my story to help those who are in a similar position to what I was in and to inspire those to self-advocate.
To recap from my earlier posts. I have ADHD and fell under the "multiple disabilities" characterization. My high school teacher claimed that I have autism (Not diagnosed). I personally don't believe I have autism or at the very least I have a high functioning autism. Throughout most of my school career, I was in a self-contained classroom with kids with severe disabilities. Even if I was in the general population I had a paraprofessional or peer tutor. I never believed that I should have been in that position. As a consequence, I never really learned any social skills, I was segregated, and felt like that people didn't want anything to do with me because I was sped. The reason why I ended up in this position was probably a combination of me having the "multiple disabilities'' characterization and me testing low in three year revaluation tests. If you want more info on this then feel free to search my profile. This is an alt account and is primarily used to ask questions about special ed so It's really easy to find stuff about me.
Before I get into my story I just want to make it clear that I'm not against special ed. There's good and bad people in every profession. I believed I was in danger for myself and for my future. I don't believe that my teacher was evil and had the best of intentions but he was putting me in a position that was hurting me and I had to act. If you have any questions or feedback feel free to let me know in the comments. Another thing is that this post has been really hard to make. It opened up some old wounds and as a result took several days to write.
Here's my story: So in late middle school I was tired of the placement that I was in. I was tired of not having friends, Not being able to socialize with my peers, not being able to date. I also was thinking about what my life will look like after high school, I was concerned that I was going to never have friends, Never be in a relationship, and not have the social skills to make those friends. I was generally very concerned for my future. So I decided that for my 8th grade year (2017-2018) I would do my absolute best for both my behavior and academics. Throughout the year nothing changed. I was hoping that me doing well would show that I didn't need any support but at the end of the year I still had paraprofessionals in most of my classes and was being pulled out for tests. In the summer between middle school and high school all I can think about is I want high school to be different. I wanted friends, I wanted a relationship, and I had dreams of me in the student council. When I got into high school I had peer tutors along with paraprofessionals (Peer Tutors are general ed students who sign up as an elective to help special needs kids. They basically serve the role as paraprofessionals with less responsibility). I did everything again and had the exact same result. In January of 2019 (freshmen year) I decided that my current strategy wasn't working. They also started making the peer tutors fill out behavioral checklists for their student(s) by grading them on how well they behaved/followed directions and gave them badges that say "peer tutor" which made me feel singled out. Because of that the peer tutors felt more like babysitters then someone that is an equal. So I went to my special ed teacher and asked him to remove the paraprofessional and the peer tutors. He told me no and said that I needed them. I changed my strategy again and I was going to ask for the Peer Tutors to be gone first, then focus on removing the paraprofessionals. I was more concerned about the peer tutors over the paraprofessionals because I was concerned that since they were part of the student body that this was going to affect me when I was running for the student council. I was worried that they'd tell others I was special needs then people would think I was incompetent. So every 2 weeks I would ask him again to remove them and each time he would give me a different excuse on why I couldn't be alone. Here's some of the excuses he gave me: "The peer tutors need to be there to collect data", "You need to prove that you can do the work yourself", "It's not up to me. It's the general education teacher that decides if you need a peer tutor or an aide", "Peer Tutors are supposed to represent a trainer for a job. If you refuse training then you're going to get fired". I brought it up again during my yearly IEP which took place in March. Once again my teacher said no, bringing up another excuse. As far as I can remember, my parents were neutral about the aide situation. Later one peer tutor was removed, what happened is that the peer tutor moved to a different town and they didn't bother on sending a substitute. A win is a win so I celebrated it. At the end of my freshman year I was pretty much defeated and didn't achieve the goal of being 100% independent. Over the summer I took a look at my situation and decided that my current plan is not working. I knew that when my sophomore year of high school starts I will have aides and peer tutors in classes. I knew that if I wanted to get what I wanted I would have to do something big. I knew that I would have to put up a fight, and put in a lot more effort. Over the summer I developed a war mindset inspired by two quotes from Sun Tzu:
"Victorious warriors win first and then go to war, while defeated warriors go to war first and then seek to win”
“If you know the enemy and know yourself, you need not fear the result of a hundred battles. If you know yourself but not the enemy, for every victory gained you will also suffer a defeat. If you know neither the enemy nor yourself, you will succumb in every battle.”
I knew that I can't be going into sophomore year blind, so I started drafting a plan. I created a Google doc outlining my goals and what I wanted to accomplish. I knew that I won't be able to win every battle and that I need to choose which fight is worth fighting for. I thought to myself, “Well the peer tutors we're given training on the first day of school and probably have strategies to deal with poor behavior but what about planned well organized protests?” So I began researching strategies on how paraprofessionals/peer tutors dealt with negative behavior and reverse engineered those tactics. I read forms, I Watched YouTube videos and found as much information that I could find. For the peer tutors I didn't know too much about them. I didn't know if it was something that only my school did or if other schools did it. I did some research and found out that other schools had a peer tutor program and some have uploaded training videos on YouTube. Some peer tutors told me that they did babysitting and did nanny work so I looked up babysitting tips. I reverse engineered all of those tactics and came up with strategies to counter those techniques and put all that information that I learned into a google doc that I can use for future reference. During this time I also researched how to become a better negotiator and started learning a little bit of psychology. The plan was to first negotiate and if that doesn't work I will protest and make demands and negotiate. Over the summer I got really good at negotiating and practiced a lot on my father and my sister (they were totally oblivious). To this day I use those negotiating tactics. After I created my document and was satisfied with all the information, I went to bed that night and knew that I have already won and that my sophomore year will be my last year that I 1-1 peer tutor or aide.
Fast forward to the first day of school, as expected I had peer tutors and aides assigned to me in classes. My sped teacher had a chalkboard On the back wall full of sticky notes that had everyone's schedules and a name of someone was assigned to that student for each class. This time around I only had one peer tutor outside of the special ed classes. This is a big improvement over the three I had before but I still have my original goal of having none. For the paraprofessionals I had 2 in Gen classes.The goal was to first remove the peer tutors then the paraprofessionals. Even though this seems to be an improvement I continued with the plan. Since this was the first day, the peer tutors were in another classroom learning policies and other stuff they needed to know so I was alone for the day. I walked over to my special ed teacher and ask him one final time to remove the peer tutor he says no and then I asked him to let me be alone for 2 weeks so I can prove I don't need help and he still denies me. I then tell him that I will allow the peer tutor for 2 weeks and after that she needs to go. My teacher doesn't respond. (To add context the peer tutor that I had, she was a peer tutor in my math class in the prior semester so I already know who she was. We used to talk a lot and was surprised when I saw that she was assigned to me.)
For 2 weeks she mostly left me alone with her occasionally checking up on me. For those 2 weeks I purposely close my self off and adopted a body language that would subconsciously discourage her from approaching me. I did this by keeping my head low and staying as focused as possible. The only thing she did was confront me when I start packing up 2 minutes before the bell rings. She tells me that I shouldn't be packing up and to pull my stuff out again. I tell her no and hold my ground. She writes in my planner that I packed my stuff up early and refuse to pull it out. That happened like 2 or 3 times. On Thursday on the second week my class was tasked to create a PowerPoint. FYI this was a mythology class, while I was doing this PowerPoint I decided instead of manually trying to type in the locations and people from this mythology which the names were very long and complicated. I decided would be easier just to copy and paste them in. My peer tutor sees me doing this and doesn't say anything. At the end of class she writes that I plagiarized in my planner and tells my special ed teacher in person what happened. My sped teacher pulls me out of class (I had his math class right after mythology) and starts telling me that my peer tutor has seen me copy and pasting paragraphs and goes on this lecturing on why plagiarizing is bad. I explained to him that I wasn't copying paragraphs It was only copying names and locations and explain my reason for it. He didn't believe me but he didn't make me retake the assignment. After that I was pissed off and the next day I confronted her about it. I forgot what her reasoning for not telling me was but I told her that she needs to look into things before she makes false reports. After that incident, I decided to wait a week before I ask my teacher to remove her. Also during those first 3 weeks I turned down help from peer tutors and paras if possible In the special ed classroom. I did this to prevent sending any mix signals. I personally didn't mind if I had to work with a peer tutopara or not In the actual sped classroom. I only cared if it was in any of the general education classes. I just thought it would look contradictory if I was accepting help in the sped class and then requesting peer tutors to be removed from my gen classes.
At the beginning of the fourth week I went to school early and went to my sped teacher's class before first hour starts and then I again asked him to remove the peer tutor and the paraprofessionals. He says no again and brings up that I was being academically dishonest by plagiarizing. I tell my side of the story once again on what happened and he still doesn't believe me. At this point I leave and more pissed off. At this point negotiations didn't work so I started small protests by preventing the peer tutors from filling out my planer and the behavioral checklist. Most of them didn't care since there was other students they can fill out and they only need to fill out one to be graded for the day. One peer tutor gave me the puppy dog eye treatment and I eventually cave and let her fill it out. I still let the one peer tutor that was assigned to me in the gen class due to me being the only student and my intention wasn't to ruin, her grade. During the fourth week I began brainstorming ideas on how I can do a massive protest.
On Thursday of the fourth week of school, a walk into the mythology class and it started out like any other day. Class started and my teacher starts talking. I pull up my phone to respond to some messages and my peer tutor sees me. She asks me to hand my phone over to her and I tell her no. She tells me that I can't be on my phone and I tell her okay but I'm still not giving it to you. She then pulls out her phone and puts it on the table. She then tells me to put my phone on the table. I tell her no again. A few minutes past and the teacher finishes up talking. She passes the assignment and immediately my peer tutor begins to try and help by reading the questions. I slide the packet over closer to me and start ignoring her. I was hoping that she will get the hint and leave me alone. She doesn't so put on my hoodie and tried to mentally block her out. I don't remember what she said during all this since I was blocking it out but I do remember her touching me and the general ed teacher coming over and start assisting the peer tutor. It was a lot of pressure and I was actually about to give up because it was too much. But they both gaved up before I did and I was very relieved. After that, the class was pretty much quiet. The peer tutor wrote an entire paragraph on what happened. I walked to my math class and sat down. I then see my peer tutor walking into class and ask for my sped teacher. I already knew it was about me. I see them talk for 2 minutes and sure enough I see my teacher calling me over. I walked outside the classroom and me and the teacher begin to go at it. We end up saying the same things we have said before. However, my teacher this time mentioned that if I keep up my behavior that he's going to call in a meeting with my parents. The rest of math class was pretty much the same. However, my English class with the same teacher he went on a rant about using accommodations seeing that he had a disability growing up which was tourette's and he were love to have a peer tutor. I was quiet for the whole class since I was already exhausted because of everything else that had already happened. For the rest of the weekend, I've been coming up with plans on how I would be able to pull off a massive protest.
Now for the good news. On the fifth week of school, I noticed that my peer tutor was missing. My teacher pulled me aside again and told me that he decided that he was going to pull her for 2 weeks to see how well I would do without her. I told him thank you, that's what I wanted since the beginning of the school year. After those 2 weeks he didn't reinstate her and I didn't have a peer tutor or paraprofessionals in gen classes since. The deal moving forward was as long as I had a D or better he wasn't going to send any support unless I asked for it. My relationship with that sped teacher also had improved significantly. Later in my Junior year of high school I ran in my school's election and won. I was given the social media position.
In hindsight, I'm glad I didn't have to pull off a big protest. But the same time I wish that this situation could have ended in a different way.
Everything that I just told you is only the tip of the iceberg. There's so much detail that I had to leave out just to make this story shorter. Lot of it I'm still processing even though I found great strength in myself fighting back against a system that I believe was ruining my life. That war mindset hasn't left my mentality yet. I'm still dealing with the consequences of me being in special ed. Everything I told you happened 5 years ago and I'm still living through it like it just happened. I'm mentally recovering and eventually I will recover. Right now I'm in therapy and I'm writing down everything I can in a Google doc to process everything emotionally. Maybe one day I'll give that story to a writer and make a book out of it.
If you have any questions feel free ask them, I would love to answer them.
submitted by LoganWY to specialeducation [link] [comments]
To recap from my earlier posts. I have ADHD and fell under the "multiple disabilities" characterization. My high school teacher claimed that I have autism (Not diagnosed). I personally don't believe I have autism or at the very least I have a high functioning autism. Throughout most of my school career, I was in a self-contained classroom with kids with severe disabilities. Even if I was in the general population I had a paraprofessional or peer tutor. I never believed that I should have been in that position. As a consequence, I never really learned any social skills, I was segregated, and felt like that people didn't want anything to do with me because I was sped. The reason why I ended up in this position was probably a combination of me having the "multiple disabilities'' characterization and me testing low in three year revaluation tests. If you want more info on this then feel free to search my profile. This is an alt account and is primarily used to ask questions about special ed so It's really easy to find stuff about me.
Before I get into my story I just want to make it clear that I'm not against special ed. There's good and bad people in every profession. I believed I was in danger for myself and for my future. I don't believe that my teacher was evil and had the best of intentions but he was putting me in a position that was hurting me and I had to act. If you have any questions or feedback feel free to let me know in the comments. Another thing is that this post has been really hard to make. It opened up some old wounds and as a result took several days to write.
Here's my story: So in late middle school I was tired of the placement that I was in. I was tired of not having friends, Not being able to socialize with my peers, not being able to date. I also was thinking about what my life will look like after high school, I was concerned that I was going to never have friends, Never be in a relationship, and not have the social skills to make those friends. I was generally very concerned for my future. So I decided that for my 8th grade year (2017-2018) I would do my absolute best for both my behavior and academics. Throughout the year nothing changed. I was hoping that me doing well would show that I didn't need any support but at the end of the year I still had paraprofessionals in most of my classes and was being pulled out for tests. In the summer between middle school and high school all I can think about is I want high school to be different. I wanted friends, I wanted a relationship, and I had dreams of me in the student council. When I got into high school I had peer tutors along with paraprofessionals (Peer Tutors are general ed students who sign up as an elective to help special needs kids. They basically serve the role as paraprofessionals with less responsibility). I did everything again and had the exact same result. In January of 2019 (freshmen year) I decided that my current strategy wasn't working. They also started making the peer tutors fill out behavioral checklists for their student(s) by grading them on how well they behaved/followed directions and gave them badges that say "peer tutor" which made me feel singled out. Because of that the peer tutors felt more like babysitters then someone that is an equal. So I went to my special ed teacher and asked him to remove the paraprofessional and the peer tutors. He told me no and said that I needed them. I changed my strategy again and I was going to ask for the Peer Tutors to be gone first, then focus on removing the paraprofessionals. I was more concerned about the peer tutors over the paraprofessionals because I was concerned that since they were part of the student body that this was going to affect me when I was running for the student council. I was worried that they'd tell others I was special needs then people would think I was incompetent. So every 2 weeks I would ask him again to remove them and each time he would give me a different excuse on why I couldn't be alone. Here's some of the excuses he gave me: "The peer tutors need to be there to collect data", "You need to prove that you can do the work yourself", "It's not up to me. It's the general education teacher that decides if you need a peer tutor or an aide", "Peer Tutors are supposed to represent a trainer for a job. If you refuse training then you're going to get fired". I brought it up again during my yearly IEP which took place in March. Once again my teacher said no, bringing up another excuse. As far as I can remember, my parents were neutral about the aide situation. Later one peer tutor was removed, what happened is that the peer tutor moved to a different town and they didn't bother on sending a substitute. A win is a win so I celebrated it. At the end of my freshman year I was pretty much defeated and didn't achieve the goal of being 100% independent. Over the summer I took a look at my situation and decided that my current plan is not working. I knew that when my sophomore year of high school starts I will have aides and peer tutors in classes. I knew that if I wanted to get what I wanted I would have to do something big. I knew that I would have to put up a fight, and put in a lot more effort. Over the summer I developed a war mindset inspired by two quotes from Sun Tzu:
"Victorious warriors win first and then go to war, while defeated warriors go to war first and then seek to win”
“If you know the enemy and know yourself, you need not fear the result of a hundred battles. If you know yourself but not the enemy, for every victory gained you will also suffer a defeat. If you know neither the enemy nor yourself, you will succumb in every battle.”
I knew that I can't be going into sophomore year blind, so I started drafting a plan. I created a Google doc outlining my goals and what I wanted to accomplish. I knew that I won't be able to win every battle and that I need to choose which fight is worth fighting for. I thought to myself, “Well the peer tutors we're given training on the first day of school and probably have strategies to deal with poor behavior but what about planned well organized protests?” So I began researching strategies on how paraprofessionals/peer tutors dealt with negative behavior and reverse engineered those tactics. I read forms, I Watched YouTube videos and found as much information that I could find. For the peer tutors I didn't know too much about them. I didn't know if it was something that only my school did or if other schools did it. I did some research and found out that other schools had a peer tutor program and some have uploaded training videos on YouTube. Some peer tutors told me that they did babysitting and did nanny work so I looked up babysitting tips. I reverse engineered all of those tactics and came up with strategies to counter those techniques and put all that information that I learned into a google doc that I can use for future reference. During this time I also researched how to become a better negotiator and started learning a little bit of psychology. The plan was to first negotiate and if that doesn't work I will protest and make demands and negotiate. Over the summer I got really good at negotiating and practiced a lot on my father and my sister (they were totally oblivious). To this day I use those negotiating tactics. After I created my document and was satisfied with all the information, I went to bed that night and knew that I have already won and that my sophomore year will be my last year that I 1-1 peer tutor or aide.
Fast forward to the first day of school, as expected I had peer tutors and aides assigned to me in classes. My sped teacher had a chalkboard On the back wall full of sticky notes that had everyone's schedules and a name of someone was assigned to that student for each class. This time around I only had one peer tutor outside of the special ed classes. This is a big improvement over the three I had before but I still have my original goal of having none. For the paraprofessionals I had 2 in Gen classes.The goal was to first remove the peer tutors then the paraprofessionals. Even though this seems to be an improvement I continued with the plan. Since this was the first day, the peer tutors were in another classroom learning policies and other stuff they needed to know so I was alone for the day. I walked over to my special ed teacher and ask him one final time to remove the peer tutor he says no and then I asked him to let me be alone for 2 weeks so I can prove I don't need help and he still denies me. I then tell him that I will allow the peer tutor for 2 weeks and after that she needs to go. My teacher doesn't respond. (To add context the peer tutor that I had, she was a peer tutor in my math class in the prior semester so I already know who she was. We used to talk a lot and was surprised when I saw that she was assigned to me.)
For 2 weeks she mostly left me alone with her occasionally checking up on me. For those 2 weeks I purposely close my self off and adopted a body language that would subconsciously discourage her from approaching me. I did this by keeping my head low and staying as focused as possible. The only thing she did was confront me when I start packing up 2 minutes before the bell rings. She tells me that I shouldn't be packing up and to pull my stuff out again. I tell her no and hold my ground. She writes in my planner that I packed my stuff up early and refuse to pull it out. That happened like 2 or 3 times. On Thursday on the second week my class was tasked to create a PowerPoint. FYI this was a mythology class, while I was doing this PowerPoint I decided instead of manually trying to type in the locations and people from this mythology which the names were very long and complicated. I decided would be easier just to copy and paste them in. My peer tutor sees me doing this and doesn't say anything. At the end of class she writes that I plagiarized in my planner and tells my special ed teacher in person what happened. My sped teacher pulls me out of class (I had his math class right after mythology) and starts telling me that my peer tutor has seen me copy and pasting paragraphs and goes on this lecturing on why plagiarizing is bad. I explained to him that I wasn't copying paragraphs It was only copying names and locations and explain my reason for it. He didn't believe me but he didn't make me retake the assignment. After that I was pissed off and the next day I confronted her about it. I forgot what her reasoning for not telling me was but I told her that she needs to look into things before she makes false reports. After that incident, I decided to wait a week before I ask my teacher to remove her. Also during those first 3 weeks I turned down help from peer tutors and paras if possible In the special ed classroom. I did this to prevent sending any mix signals. I personally didn't mind if I had to work with a peer tutopara or not In the actual sped classroom. I only cared if it was in any of the general education classes. I just thought it would look contradictory if I was accepting help in the sped class and then requesting peer tutors to be removed from my gen classes.
At the beginning of the fourth week I went to school early and went to my sped teacher's class before first hour starts and then I again asked him to remove the peer tutor and the paraprofessionals. He says no again and brings up that I was being academically dishonest by plagiarizing. I tell my side of the story once again on what happened and he still doesn't believe me. At this point I leave and more pissed off. At this point negotiations didn't work so I started small protests by preventing the peer tutors from filling out my planer and the behavioral checklist. Most of them didn't care since there was other students they can fill out and they only need to fill out one to be graded for the day. One peer tutor gave me the puppy dog eye treatment and I eventually cave and let her fill it out. I still let the one peer tutor that was assigned to me in the gen class due to me being the only student and my intention wasn't to ruin, her grade. During the fourth week I began brainstorming ideas on how I can do a massive protest.
On Thursday of the fourth week of school, a walk into the mythology class and it started out like any other day. Class started and my teacher starts talking. I pull up my phone to respond to some messages and my peer tutor sees me. She asks me to hand my phone over to her and I tell her no. She tells me that I can't be on my phone and I tell her okay but I'm still not giving it to you. She then pulls out her phone and puts it on the table. She then tells me to put my phone on the table. I tell her no again. A few minutes past and the teacher finishes up talking. She passes the assignment and immediately my peer tutor begins to try and help by reading the questions. I slide the packet over closer to me and start ignoring her. I was hoping that she will get the hint and leave me alone. She doesn't so put on my hoodie and tried to mentally block her out. I don't remember what she said during all this since I was blocking it out but I do remember her touching me and the general ed teacher coming over and start assisting the peer tutor. It was a lot of pressure and I was actually about to give up because it was too much. But they both gaved up before I did and I was very relieved. After that, the class was pretty much quiet. The peer tutor wrote an entire paragraph on what happened. I walked to my math class and sat down. I then see my peer tutor walking into class and ask for my sped teacher. I already knew it was about me. I see them talk for 2 minutes and sure enough I see my teacher calling me over. I walked outside the classroom and me and the teacher begin to go at it. We end up saying the same things we have said before. However, my teacher this time mentioned that if I keep up my behavior that he's going to call in a meeting with my parents. The rest of math class was pretty much the same. However, my English class with the same teacher he went on a rant about using accommodations seeing that he had a disability growing up which was tourette's and he were love to have a peer tutor. I was quiet for the whole class since I was already exhausted because of everything else that had already happened. For the rest of the weekend, I've been coming up with plans on how I would be able to pull off a massive protest.
Now for the good news. On the fifth week of school, I noticed that my peer tutor was missing. My teacher pulled me aside again and told me that he decided that he was going to pull her for 2 weeks to see how well I would do without her. I told him thank you, that's what I wanted since the beginning of the school year. After those 2 weeks he didn't reinstate her and I didn't have a peer tutor or paraprofessionals in gen classes since. The deal moving forward was as long as I had a D or better he wasn't going to send any support unless I asked for it. My relationship with that sped teacher also had improved significantly. Later in my Junior year of high school I ran in my school's election and won. I was given the social media position.
In hindsight, I'm glad I didn't have to pull off a big protest. But the same time I wish that this situation could have ended in a different way.
Everything that I just told you is only the tip of the iceberg. There's so much detail that I had to leave out just to make this story shorter. Lot of it I'm still processing even though I found great strength in myself fighting back against a system that I believe was ruining my life. That war mindset hasn't left my mentality yet. I'm still dealing with the consequences of me being in special ed. Everything I told you happened 5 years ago and I'm still living through it like it just happened. I'm mentally recovering and eventually I will recover. Right now I'm in therapy and I'm writing down everything I can in a Google doc to process everything emotionally. Maybe one day I'll give that story to a writer and make a book out of it.
If you have any questions feel free ask them, I would love to answer them.
2024.05.19 16:17 Rusted-1 ARK 8 Chapter 20-Old gods, new hope
 | \"What's a cult? It just means not enough people to make a minority.\"- Robert Altman submitted by Rusted-1 to NatureofPredators [link] [comments] HELLO EVERYONE! I'M BAAAACCKKKKK! Sorry, it's been a while, college and all. Now that I'm Back from college, I should post more regularly. The story shall continue! I might be a bit rusty, but I'm definitely getting back into the swing of things. Hope you all enjoy it. This fanfic is based on the fanfic The Isolationists, by Seeyouon_otherside, and a continuation of the stronger_together series. Constructive criticism is appreciated. Time Since First Contact: Y:0 M:1 W:0 D:0 Memory transcript: Commander Fango Feral, Tiwond of the Enforcers. “Again,” I told Sunclick. He nodded as the security feed from the incident at the mall played once more in front of us. My niece Canilia Lieutenant Feral, Sunclick, along with the commander lieutenants of each district, all observed what was happening on the screen in front of us, from the human known as Sixer interacting peacefully with a couple, then that brat, who came out of nowhere, who was chasing some poor Zeyzell, then Ashina, who came out of the bathroom and slammed the brat on the ground. Then he and his friends left only for the brat, who disappeared before he left the door. “And his friends have no idea where he went?” I asked one of the commander lieutenants. “No, sir. My husband was one of the people on that recovery team, and after heavy interrogation of the kids' friends, he simply disappeared. He left his friends completely abandoned and confused. They don’t know where he went. It was like he just vanished.” One of the commander lieutenants spoke up. “Thank you for the confirmation,” I told him. He swished his tail in acknowledgment and then started talking to the others as they bounced theories and questions off one another. Leaving me and my niece to ourselves, my niece stepped forward. “Sir, I understand this is personal for you, especially since it involved Ashina.” my niece told me. “Thank you for understanding that. You don’t have to call me sir. You are my niece.” “I know, it's just a professional courtesy.” She responded flatly. I nodded. “Thank you. I know you and her didn’t always get along, especially after her parents died, but I’m glad you, too, have become such close friends after we let her in under our roof,” I whispered to my niece. Looking at my niece's face, I wished I could take off that gas mask to see her smile. However, I knew what was under it, and any real chance of her being truly happy was most likely long, long gone. Ever since she lost her gift, she has been bitter and angry, focusing solely on protecting others from the same fate that befell her. Wait a minute, isn’t the staying human Dominic staying with her? “Canilia, how are things with that human? You don’t talk about him much.” She was silent. Then I heard a weird, cracking sound. It was very faint, but I could hear it as she was right next to me. It was coming from her mouth. I know that cracking sound. It’s what’s left of her cheek, curling into a smile. A Small one, but a smile nonetheless. “He is very kind to me. He likes hugs, he likes to talk, and he likes to listen. I like that he likes to help me, although I have yet to show him this.” She gestured to her stomach, where her gift once was. I nodded. She was...happy... I nodded to Sunclick, who then took over the conversation so I could talk to my niece. He drew the attention away from us, allowing us to speak. “Do you think the aliens will be able to help you reclaim your gift?” I asked. She shrugged. “I sure hope so, another thing, however.” She spoke much more quietly. “ I’ve been staring at the neighbors' kids again. I don’t know how long I’ve been doing it, but Dominic’s caught me doing it twice. He knows something, and he will think less of me when he finds out.” She hung her head with despair. With all my heart, I wish I could reach out, grab her by the head, and yell at her that losing your gift isn’t a sign of dishonor. She was wounded in combat. None of it was her fault, and that she should forgive herself. But I know that wouldn’t work, she’s too stubborn like me, one of the few traits. I wish she had never gotten it from me. If my sister was here now, she would kill me. “What has he done about it?” I asked. “When he saw you looking at the little ones.” She moved a little bit, causing her power armor to creek, then looked back up at me with the sort of, well, I don’t know, I've never seen that look in her eyes. It was like Hope and joy, but more. “He knows something is wrong. It’s his medical training that tells him it and his instincts, he’s actually baked a few meats for me, and sometimes when I snap out of it, there’s a blanket over me and a hot cup of…coco, I believe he calls it next to me. He is an excellent caretaker.” I couldn’t help but smile. She finally found someone who isn’t intimidated by her, who is willing to care for her that isn’t me. I felt an odd pride at that, but I’ll take that pride. “Is the great Canilia Feral Smiling? Oh, I never thought I would see the da-.” My niece and I turned at the same exact time. Our combined staring rivals that of any sun's power, with how intense our staring was at the damned soul who dared make a comment like that at her. The moment our eyes landed on the poor soul, he shriveled faster than a drumling that was absorbed into a flesh pit. He quickly hung his head and scurried out of the room to the laughter of the other lieutenant commanders. I turned back to Sunclick, who was having a bit of a chuckle of his own, he looked up at me and gave him the thumbs up, and I returned the gesture. “Have the scanners picked anything up? The cameras, have they picked anything up about this person?” I asked him, the laughter quickly leaving the room as we returned to full seriousness mode. “Sorry, commander, nothing, we’ve picked up absolutely nothing about this guy. We’ve run background checks, and we believe a few leads and we have some units out there checking out all the leads, however, will take some time as there are quite a few, and we don’t really know much about this kid. There are almost no files on him. The only thing we have turned up is a birth certificate and seventeen residences, which cannot be right. However, we did find something rather interesting. After talking to some of the people on the scene, we were able to discern a possible motive, which gave us a very good lead. Then, looking into that motive, we found a few of these.” Sunclick pointed to a stack of extremely old newspapers, the ones the type that came right after the third unification war, when hyperpaper was very rare, and the plants that needed to be used in hyperpaper production were almost all wiped out during the war, and these are made on type of cloth to save hyper paper. I walked over and picked one up, looking at the article that was circled. It read, “Boy's mother, abducted by aliens? Fact? Or postwar terrorist?” I looked at Sunclick. “I remember the post-war terrorist, and I put a few down myself.” My niece spoke out loud as she looked over my shoulder. One of the lieutenant commanders came up, picked up the newspaper stacks, and started handing them out to the others. “Sunclick, I trust your judgment, but can you explain…this?” I asked him. His eyes lit up like a Titan bug after it had ingested a bunch of parasites that were making their way out of its body. “I would love to! You see, this kid, for whatever reason, believes that aliens abducted his mother. Now, post-war terrorists were common, and they are running around, and it might even be true that a post-war terrorist kidnapper killed his mother. However, the body was never actually found like most terrorist killings. After the war, there was so much confusion because people didn’t know what to do, and many were still bitter that we had won. For whatever reason, this kid got this idea into his head that aliens had kidnapped his mother, which everyone was kind of obsessed about, even more so that there are some literally living among us. Much to everyone’s delight, I must say. However, with that single statement, that single line, and what witnesses told us at the scene. We have a much more narrow view of who this kid is, the only problem is, that the kid was never properly documented. He’s a ghost in the system. The good news is his friends have been more than helpful, as they didn’t realize he would go that far. They've been telling us everything about him, but after some digging, it turns out they know just as much as we do, next to nothing. Either this kid is extremely paranoid or…” Sunclick went silent. “Please, Sunclick, tell us.” my niece asked. He took a deep breath. He shifted nervously in his seat. “He’s a part of the cult of the old God.” The emotion and general vibe of the room immediately shifted when the cult of the old god was mentioned: those rat bastards. “Do you think they moved up this far north?” I asked him. “Honestly, I think so, I’ve been working with some of the lesser district managers since all of you guys have been busy with the aliens, which I don’t blame you for. They’re pretty freaking awesome. However, since their arrival, the cult of the old God activity has practically tripled twenty-fold. It’s insane what they’ve been pulling off, from stealing military equipment to assassinating low-level political members-" "WHY IN THE OLD VOID WAS I NOT MADE AWARE OF THIS!?!" I screamed. Everyone in the room winced except my neice. Sunclick, who had received the full force of my explosive outbursts, had his ears pinned on his head and looked somewhat afraid of me now. I sighed and motioned him to continue. "Please continue." "....uh sorry...I was going to tell you eventually, as things are out of hand, which is probably about right now. However, you were busy with the aliens and...never mind, it's not important now. If this kid is a part of the cult of the old God, they’ve gotten extremely bold, and they will become a major problem for the aliens. Their whole goal is to purify the planet and kill the great protector so that their own God, the old God, the one who came before the great protector, can reign again, and we can expand past the red lightning veil and enter the greater galaxy. These aliens represent a massive threat to that ideology. Now they know there’s another life out there, other empires, they will see the aliens as a huge threat. This means they’ll be number one on their bucket list to take out, and if they do that, the aliens could turn against us, seeing us as all hostile, which is not happening at all, considering just how nice they’ve been, they’re also extremely cuddly, I mean, have you seen the way they-.” “Sunclick, I understand you enjoy discussing advanced science with humans, but we need you to focus.” One of the commander lieutenants said. Sunclick stopped and nodded. “Right, right, sorry. As I was saying, the aliens represent a massive threat to their organization. However, this attack could’ve been a totally one-off situation where some random member decided to prove themselves. However, it also could have been something to test the alien's reaction to one of their own getting attacked. The aliens were mad, sure, but they trusted us to keep them safe. The aliens themselves didn’t do much other than send down more equipment for us and some of their own people to monitor the situation.” Sunclick finished. I nodded my head. “Thank you, good work as always.” he smiled and nodded as his ears returned to normal, then returned to his computer. I looked back at the lieutenant command, who had the Zeyzell and citizen who were assaulted under her watch. “How are the two that were assaulted?” She grimaced. “Not great, I'm afraid. The Zeyzell has been having regular panic attacks, and the citizen has refused to come out of their house in the past two days. They’re too scared for their Zeyzell counterpart. The two have become great friends, which is good for AR, though.” She said, “AR?” I asked. “Sorry. Many of the grunts have been using it, and it’s very catchy. It’s called alien relations, AR.” I nodded and turned back to the screen as the scene played again. It was the kid, limping off out of the door, who would then disappear from his friend's arms. I glanced up at the screen a little higher, and that’s when I noticed it. A camera is not connected to the system, barely a pixel on the screen. It’s a private camera. How did we not see that? “Sunclick, look up top of the ceiling on the screen,” I told him. He looked up, and his eyes went wide. “It's a private camera! How could we miss that?” he said out loud. “Not important right now. Can you get access to it?” I asked him. This is the chance I've been waiting for to get this person who would dare assault the alien who's making my daughter so happy. “Yes, sir, I can do that!” he proudly exclaimed. After a few quick taps on his computer, multiple connections, errors, and unknown errors, he punched the computer and got a connection. The tape played this time from the front. The angle was a bit weird, so we couldn’t get a good look at the kid's face, But it was what was around his neck that mattered. “I’ll be damned, a pendant of the cult of the old God.” my niece said as we all looked at it in surprised silence. “ I’m gonna have fun tearing that kid apart.” She said as she flexed her power armor claws. I looked at the pendent in silent anger. "Bold of the kid to wear it around in the open like that." She said aloud, and we all agreed. I turned around to the face of other lieutenant commanders. “This is what we’ve been preparing for. You know the drill: get your districts, alert every enforcement office if possible, and get the enforcers on the streets. Get everyone on higher alert. I want more patrols, and I want everything more. Not enough to alert the population that something is happening yet, just more than usual.” They all nodded and streamed out of the room. I turned to leave. However, an open door caught my eye. I turned and walked through it to see my niece standing on the balcony overlooking the city. I wandered out myself, power armor slightly clanking the entire time, the metal hitting the cold, polished concrete of the floor. I also looked at the sprawling metropolis we had built from this hell hole of a planet, its towering walls lined with guns and cannons to keep out the beasties. I walked up beside her and saw that something was in her hands. “What do you have there?” I asked her. I looked at it closely, and it seemed to be some sort of scarf. I didn’t recognize the design or patterns. “Dominic made this for me. I don’t exactly know why. He just kind of did. He didn’t ask for anything in return. He just gave it to me. He said he didn’t want me to get a cold.” She brought the scarf to her neck, which was a perfect fit. She tied it around just underneath her mask, and when she was finished, she let out a puff of steam from her mask. “It's a perfect fit,” I replied, smiled, and looked back out over the city. Looking over it, I thought about our history, the feral's bloodline, and how we have served as the world’s protectors for so long. Now, it was threatened because only two ferals were left: me and my niece. Now, we have aliens to deal with. They seemed nice so far… I leaned a little farther over the railing. A glint of metal in the sky caught my eye and I looked up to see one of the Zeyzell transports coming down, most likely More Humans. I tracked it with my eyes as it landed in one of the newer landing pads with a loud clang, the landing gear hissing as it landed, and saw a large number of my people standing around there waving signs that said “Welcome!” and “Hello new friends!” and other signs that said similar welcoming messages. I smiled and looked over at my niece. “How has the city’s morale been since the aliens have come here?” She quickly opened her wrist computer and typed minor keys on the tiny keypad. I still don't understand how she can use that, the screen is so tiny. “From last time, when it was already an eighty percent increase, an additional twenty-three point four percent.” I smiled even brighter and looked back down. The Zeyzell transport landed, and everybody cheered, and then the door opened as the Humans and a few Zeyzell came off the transport. My people began shouting names. Most likely for exchange partners. Immediately, the aliens again answered the calls and ran to their new friends. Many embraced in tight hugs and made what I assumed were happy noises based on how their mouths moved, as I could hear very little from up here. A few of the humans even started crying as soon as they embraced the larger frames of my species, practically melting into the "floofy fur" as the humans called it, of our fur. I even saw a pup leap from its mom and “run,” although it was more of a quick waddle over to a human and embrace them, making happy beeping sounds the entire time. The human held them so gently as if they were afraid to break. Then, he immediately started to cry uncontrollably. However, with all of the joy and happiness down there that I so loved, I was a bit disturbed by the crying. What in the world could they have gone through that would make something like a simple hug so unique? No, it wasn't the hug itself. I thought about my time on board the ARK ship and what I had seen. I have seen many humans embracing each other and hugs, giving each other kisses or their equivalent of it, I've also seen them embracing and hugging Zeyzell. I was also aware of a lot of inter-species couples and marriages on board the ARK ship. I thought about it very hard, deciphering everything that I had learned on board the ARK ship, in addition to the information that was sent to us very early on, and-... then it clicked. “They aren't crying because they're being shown love…” “What?” My niece asked. I turned fully to her. “They are not crying because they're being shown love. They are crying because another species is showing them love. They're being shown that someone cares about them other than their own species and the Zeyzell.” I turned back to the landing pad and the ship was leaving as all the aliens had found the people they were looking for and were being carried back to cars, walking alongside them, or simply sitting and talking and sharing a meal. As I stood there, it was as if I could feel the emotions coming from the humans: the joy, the happiness, and the sheer love of being accepted. I couldn't explain it, but I felt as though we shared a deeper connection with humans than we initially thought. “Do you feel it?” my niece asked. I looked at her and nodded. “I can feel the joy, happiness, and love they are feeling right now from all the way over here.” I nodded my head. “I think whoever or whatever they were running from was another alien species, based on the information I gathered from the ark ship, the reactions and emotions of the humans down there, and the information I sent to us early on. I had theories before that it was another species they were running from; I know many other people thought that, too, But I think this almost confirms it: they are definitely running from someone. Or were, but now they feel safe here.” I told her as I gestured to all the people below us. My niece nodded. “When I get home, I'm going to give Dominic a big hug.” We remained silent for a time. Just watching the beautiful scene before us as the snow fell slowly and lightly, the trees swayed in the breeze, ever so slightly bending. The wind made a howling noise as it whipped through the tight streets and architecture of our building. I breathed in and let it out, letting my breath turn to steam. I reached out and let the snow fall onto my hand. I brought my hand close, but the snowflake had already melted. My gaze returned to the Humans and Zeyzell, enjoying the snow alongside my people. I turned to my niece. “Our planet may be trying to kill us in over a thousand different ways, but it’s beautiful, huh?” My niece sighed and looked at me. “Yeah, and it’s going to get a lot better now that we have friends, or lovers for some, from beyond the veil.” I nodded and looked back at the snow that now danced in my vision as the Humans and Zeyzell departed with my people. I sighed, and we both returned inside to see Sunclick waiting for us. “You can go nerd out with the humans now,” I told him. ‘“Thank you, sir!” He shot out of the room and down the hall. I smiled and turned back to my niece. “Do you want to grab something to eat? The snow is great right now.” I asked “Sure. However, before that, we should warn the aliens about the cult, huh?” “Oh, definitely,” I told her. I smiled and we walked over to the communication system connecting us to the Aliens. First/Previous/Next |
2024.05.19 16:13 dotnetian C# heavily depends on tooling, is it good?
With basic CLI tools and a simple text editor like Vim, you're able to write code in many languages like Python and PHP. With a basic text editor like VS Code with a few extensions configured, you can write code in many other languages.
But for C#, you seriously can't write code productively without using an IDE like Visual Studio or Rider. There's also C# Dev Kit for VS Code, but it's so heavy.
Another sign of this is StackOverflow developer survey results. Visual Studio and IDEA are the most popular IDEs, both used for coding in languages that have similar syntax and structure.
So C# heavily depends on IDEs and toolings. It lets developers do complex tasks easier, but it also introduces problems. Overally what do you think about this? Is it an advantage or not?
submitted by dotnetian to csharp [link] [comments]
But for C#, you seriously can't write code productively without using an IDE like Visual Studio or Rider. There's also C# Dev Kit for VS Code, but it's so heavy.
Another sign of this is StackOverflow developer survey results. Visual Studio and IDEA are the most popular IDEs, both used for coding in languages that have similar syntax and structure.
So C# heavily depends on IDEs and toolings. It lets developers do complex tasks easier, but it also introduces problems. Overally what do you think about this? Is it an advantage or not?
2024.05.19 16:12 LoganWY How I self-advocated (Long story no TL:DR)
Today I want to tell my story of how I self-advocated and what I did to achieve that goal. I'm telling my story to help those who are in a similar position to what I was in and to inspire those to self-advocate.
To recap from my earlier posts. I have ADHD and fell under the "multiple disabilities" characterization. My high school teacher claimed that I have autism (Not diagnosed). I personally don't believe I have autism or at the very least I have a high functioning autism. Throughout most of my school career, I was in a self-contained classroom with kids with severe disabilities. Even if I was in the general population I had a paraprofessional or peer tutor. I never believed that I should have been in that position. As a consequence, I never really learned any social skills, I was segregated, and felt like that people didn't want anything to do with me because I was sped. The reason why I ended up in this position was probably a combination of me having the "multiple disabilities'' characterization and me testing low in three year revaluation tests. If you want more info on this then feel free to search my profile. This is an alt account and is primarily used to ask questions about special ed so It's really easy to find stuff about me.
Before I get into my story I just want to make it clear that I'm not against special ed. There's good and bad people in every profession. I believed I was in danger for myself and for my future. I don't believe that my teacher was evil and had the best of intentions but he was putting me in a position that was hurting me and I had to act. If you have any questions or feedback feel free to let me know in the comments. Another thing is that this post has been really hard to make. It opened up some old wounds and as a result took several days to write.
Here's my story: So in late middle school I was tired of the placement that I was in. I was tired of not having friends, Not being able to socialize with my peers, not being able to date. I also was thinking about what my life will look like after high school, I was concerned that I was going to never have friends, Never be in a relationship, and not have the social skills to make those friends. I was generally very concerned for my future. So I decided that for my 8th grade year (2017-2018) I would do my absolute best for both my behavior and academics. Throughout the year nothing changed. I was hoping that me doing well would show that I didn't need any support but at the end of the year I still had paraprofessionals in most of my classes and was being pulled out for tests. In the summer between middle school and high school all I can think about is I want high school to be different. I wanted friends, I wanted a relationship, and I had dreams of me in the student council. When I got into high school I had peer tutors along with paraprofessionals (Peer Tutors are general ed students who sign up as an elective to help special needs kids. They basically serve the role as paraprofessionals with less responsibility). I did everything again and had the exact same result. In January of 2019 (freshmen year) I decided that my current strategy wasn't working. They also started making the peer tutors fill out behavioral checklists for their student(s) by grading them on how well they behaved/followed directions and gave them badges that say "peer tutor" which made me feel singled out. Because of that the peer tutors felt more like babysitters then someone that is an equal. So I went to my special ed teacher and asked him to remove the paraprofessional and the peer tutors. He told me no and said that I needed them. I changed my strategy again and I was going to ask for the Peer Tutors to be gone first, then focus on removing the paraprofessionals. I was more concerned about the peer tutors over the paraprofessionals because I was concerned that since they were part of the student body that this was going to affect me when I was running for the student council. I was worried that they'd tell others I was special needs then people would think I was incompetent. So every 2 weeks I would ask him again to remove them and each time he would give me a different excuse on why I couldn't be alone. Here's some of the excuses he gave me: "The peer tutors need to be there to collect data", "You need to prove that you can do the work yourself", "It's not up to me. It's the general education teacher that decides if you need a peer tutor or an aide", "Peer Tutors are supposed to represent a trainer for a job. If you refuse training then you're going to get fired". I brought it up again during my yearly IEP which took place in March. Once again my teacher said no, bringing up another excuse. As far as I can remember, my parents were neutral about the aide situation. Later one peer tutor was removed, what happened is that the peer tutor moved to a different town and they didn't bother on sending a substitute. A win is a win so I celebrated it. At the end of my freshman year I was pretty much defeated and didn't achieve the goal of being 100% independent. Over the summer I took a look at my situation and decided that my current plan is not working. I knew that when my sophomore year of high school starts I will have aides and peer tutors in classes. I knew that if I wanted to get what I wanted I would have to do something big. I knew that I would have to put up a fight, and put in a lot more effort. Over the summer I developed a war mindset inspired by two quotes from Sun Tzu:
"Victorious warriors win first and then go to war, while defeated warriors go to war first and then seek to win”
“If you know the enemy and know yourself, you need not fear the result of a hundred battles. If you know yourself but not the enemy, for every victory gained you will also suffer a defeat. If you know neither the enemy nor yourself, you will succumb in every battle.”
I knew that I can't be going into sophomore year blind, so I started drafting a plan. I created a Google doc outlining my goals and what I wanted to accomplish. I knew that I won't be able to win every battle and that I need to choose which fight is worth fighting for. I thought to myself, “Well the peer tutors we're given training on the first day of school and probably have strategies to deal with poor behavior but what about planned well organized protests?” So I began researching strategies on how paraprofessionals/peer tutors dealt with negative behavior and reverse engineered those tactics. I read forms, I Watched YouTube videos and found as much information that I could find. For the peer tutors I didn't know too much about them. I didn't know if it was something that only my school did or if other schools did it. I did some research and found out that other schools had a peer tutor program and some have uploaded training videos on YouTube. Some peer tutors told me that they did babysitting and did nanny work so I looked up babysitting tips. I reverse engineered all of those tactics and came up with strategies to counter those techniques and put all that information that I learned into a google doc that I can use for future reference. During this time I also researched how to become a better negotiator and started learning a little bit of psychology. The plan was to first negotiate and if that doesn't work I will protest and make demands and negotiate. Over the summer I got really good at negotiating and practiced a lot on my father and my sister (they were totally oblivious). To this day I use those negotiating tactics. After I created my document and was satisfied with all the information, I went to bed that night and knew that I have already won and that my sophomore year will be my last year that I 1-1 peer tutor or aide.
Fast forward to the first day of school, as expected I had peer tutors and aides assigned to me in classes. My sped teacher had a chalkboard On the back wall full of sticky notes that had everyone's schedules and a name of someone was assigned to that student for each class. This time around I only had one peer tutor outside of the special ed classes. This is a big improvement over the three I had before but I still have my original goal of having none. For the paraprofessionals I had 2 in Gen classes.The goal was to first remove the peer tutors then the paraprofessionals. Even though this seems to be an improvement I continued with the plan. Since this was the first day, the peer tutors were in another classroom learning policies and other stuff they needed to know so I was alone for the day. I walked over to my special ed teacher and ask him one final time to remove the peer tutor he says no and then I asked him to let me be alone for 2 weeks so I can prove I don't need help and he still denies me. I then tell him that I will allow the peer tutor for 2 weeks and after that she needs to go. My teacher doesn't respond. (To add context the peer tutor that I had, she was a peer tutor in my math class in the prior semester so I already know who she was. We used to talk a lot and was surprised when I saw that she was assigned to me.)
For 2 weeks she mostly left me alone with her occasionally checking up on me. For those 2 weeks I purposely close my self off and adopted a body language that would subconsciously discourage her from approaching me. I did this by keeping my head low and staying as focused as possible. The only thing she did was confront me when I start packing up 2 minutes before the bell rings. She tells me that I shouldn't be packing up and to pull my stuff out again. I tell her no and hold my ground. She writes in my planner that I packed my stuff up early and refuse to pull it out. That happened like 2 or 3 times. On Thursday on the second week my class was tasked to create a PowerPoint. FYI this was a mythology class, while I was doing this PowerPoint I decided instead of manually trying to type in the locations and people from this mythology which the names were very long and complicated. I decided would be easier just to copy and paste them in. My peer tutor sees me doing this and doesn't say anything. At the end of class she writes that I plagiarized in my planner and tells my special ed teacher in person what happened. My sped teacher pulls me out of class (I had his math class right after mythology) and starts telling me that my peer tutor has seen me copy and pasting paragraphs and goes on this lecturing on why plagiarizing is bad. I explained to him that I wasn't copying paragraphs It was only copying names and locations and explain my reason for it. He didn't believe me but he didn't make me retake the assignment. After that I was pissed off and the next day I confronted her about it. I forgot what her reasoning for not telling me was but I told her that she needs to look into things before she makes false reports. After that incident, I decided to wait a week before I ask my teacher to remove her. Also during those first 3 weeks I turned down help from peer tutors and paras if possible In the special ed classroom. I did this to prevent sending any mix signals. I personally didn't mind if I had to work with a peer tutopara or not In the actual sped classroom. I only cared if it was in any of the general education classes. I just thought it would look contradictory if I was accepting help in the sped class and then requesting peer tutors to be removed from my gen classes.
At the beginning of the fourth week I went to school early and went to my sped teacher's class before first hour starts and then I again asked him to remove the peer tutor and the paraprofessionals. He says no again and brings up that I was being academically dishonest by plagiarizing. I tell my side of the story once again on what happened and he still doesn't believe me. At this point I leave and more pissed off. At this point negotiations didn't work so I started small protests by preventing the peer tutors from filling out my planer and the behavioral checklist. Most of them didn't care since there was other students they can fill out and they only need to fill out one to be graded for the day. One peer tutor gave me the puppy dog eye treatment and I eventually cave and let her fill it out. I still let the one peer tutor that was assigned to me in the gen class due to me being the only student and my intention wasn't to ruin, her grade. During the fourth week I began brainstorming ideas on how I can do a massive protest.
On Thursday of the fourth week of school, a walk into the mythology class and it started out like any other day. Class started and my teacher starts talking. I pull up my phone to respond to some messages and my peer tutor sees me. She asks me to hand my phone over to her and I tell her no. She tells me that I can't be on my phone and I tell her okay but I'm still not giving it to you. She then pulls out her phone and puts it on the table. She then tells me to put my phone on the table. I tell her no again. A few minutes past and the teacher finishes up talking. She passes the assignment and immediately my peer tutor begins to try and help by reading the questions. I slide the packet over closer to me and start ignoring her. I was hoping that she will get the hint and leave me alone. She doesn't so put on my hoodie and tried to mentally block her out. I don't remember what she said during all this since I was blocking it out but I do remember her touching me and the general ed teacher coming over and start assisting the peer tutor. It was a lot of pressure and I was actually about to give up because it was too much. But they both gaved up before I did and I was very relieved. After that, the class was pretty much quiet. The peer tutor wrote an entire paragraph on what happened. I walked to my math class and sat down. I then see my peer tutor walking into class and ask for my sped teacher. I already knew it was about me. I see them talk for 2 minutes and sure enough I see my teacher calling me over. I walked outside the classroom and me and the teacher begin to go at it. We end up saying the same things we have said before. However, my teacher this time mentioned that if I keep up my behavior that he's going to call in a meeting with my parents. The rest of math class was pretty much the same. However, my English class with the same teacher he went on a rant about using accommodations seeing that he had a disability growing up which was tourette's and he were love to have a peer tutor. I was quiet for the whole class since I was already exhausted because of everything else that had already happened. For the rest of the weekend, I've been coming up with plans on how I would be able to pull off a massive protest.
Now for the good news. On the fifth week of school, I noticed that my peer tutor was missing. My teacher pulled me aside again and told me that he decided that he was going to pull her for 2 weeks to see how well I would do without her. I told him thank you, that's what I wanted since the beginning of the school year. After those 2 weeks he didn't reinstate her and I didn't have a peer tutor or paraprofessionals in gen classes since. The deal moving forward was as long as I had a D or better he wasn't going to send any support unless I asked for it. My relationship with that sped teacher also had improved significantly. Later in my Junior year of high school I ran in my school's election and won. I was given the social media position.
In hindsight, I'm glad I didn't have to pull off a big protest. But the same time I wish that this situation could have ended in a different way.
Everything that I just told you is only the tip of the iceberg. There's so much detail that I had to leave out just to make this story shorter. Lot of it I'm still processing even though I found great strength in myself fighting back against a system that I believe was ruining my life. That war mindset hasn't left my mentality yet. I'm still dealing with the consequences of me being in special ed. Everything I told you happened 5 years ago and I'm still living through it like it just happened. I'm mentally recovering and eventually I will recover. Right now I'm in therapy and I'm writing down everything I can in a Google doc to process everything emotionally. Maybe one day I'll give that story to a writer and make a book out of it.
If you have any questions feel free ask them, I would love to answer them.
submitted by LoganWY to specialed [link] [comments]
To recap from my earlier posts. I have ADHD and fell under the "multiple disabilities" characterization. My high school teacher claimed that I have autism (Not diagnosed). I personally don't believe I have autism or at the very least I have a high functioning autism. Throughout most of my school career, I was in a self-contained classroom with kids with severe disabilities. Even if I was in the general population I had a paraprofessional or peer tutor. I never believed that I should have been in that position. As a consequence, I never really learned any social skills, I was segregated, and felt like that people didn't want anything to do with me because I was sped. The reason why I ended up in this position was probably a combination of me having the "multiple disabilities'' characterization and me testing low in three year revaluation tests. If you want more info on this then feel free to search my profile. This is an alt account and is primarily used to ask questions about special ed so It's really easy to find stuff about me.
Before I get into my story I just want to make it clear that I'm not against special ed. There's good and bad people in every profession. I believed I was in danger for myself and for my future. I don't believe that my teacher was evil and had the best of intentions but he was putting me in a position that was hurting me and I had to act. If you have any questions or feedback feel free to let me know in the comments. Another thing is that this post has been really hard to make. It opened up some old wounds and as a result took several days to write.
Here's my story: So in late middle school I was tired of the placement that I was in. I was tired of not having friends, Not being able to socialize with my peers, not being able to date. I also was thinking about what my life will look like after high school, I was concerned that I was going to never have friends, Never be in a relationship, and not have the social skills to make those friends. I was generally very concerned for my future. So I decided that for my 8th grade year (2017-2018) I would do my absolute best for both my behavior and academics. Throughout the year nothing changed. I was hoping that me doing well would show that I didn't need any support but at the end of the year I still had paraprofessionals in most of my classes and was being pulled out for tests. In the summer between middle school and high school all I can think about is I want high school to be different. I wanted friends, I wanted a relationship, and I had dreams of me in the student council. When I got into high school I had peer tutors along with paraprofessionals (Peer Tutors are general ed students who sign up as an elective to help special needs kids. They basically serve the role as paraprofessionals with less responsibility). I did everything again and had the exact same result. In January of 2019 (freshmen year) I decided that my current strategy wasn't working. They also started making the peer tutors fill out behavioral checklists for their student(s) by grading them on how well they behaved/followed directions and gave them badges that say "peer tutor" which made me feel singled out. Because of that the peer tutors felt more like babysitters then someone that is an equal. So I went to my special ed teacher and asked him to remove the paraprofessional and the peer tutors. He told me no and said that I needed them. I changed my strategy again and I was going to ask for the Peer Tutors to be gone first, then focus on removing the paraprofessionals. I was more concerned about the peer tutors over the paraprofessionals because I was concerned that since they were part of the student body that this was going to affect me when I was running for the student council. I was worried that they'd tell others I was special needs then people would think I was incompetent. So every 2 weeks I would ask him again to remove them and each time he would give me a different excuse on why I couldn't be alone. Here's some of the excuses he gave me: "The peer tutors need to be there to collect data", "You need to prove that you can do the work yourself", "It's not up to me. It's the general education teacher that decides if you need a peer tutor or an aide", "Peer Tutors are supposed to represent a trainer for a job. If you refuse training then you're going to get fired". I brought it up again during my yearly IEP which took place in March. Once again my teacher said no, bringing up another excuse. As far as I can remember, my parents were neutral about the aide situation. Later one peer tutor was removed, what happened is that the peer tutor moved to a different town and they didn't bother on sending a substitute. A win is a win so I celebrated it. At the end of my freshman year I was pretty much defeated and didn't achieve the goal of being 100% independent. Over the summer I took a look at my situation and decided that my current plan is not working. I knew that when my sophomore year of high school starts I will have aides and peer tutors in classes. I knew that if I wanted to get what I wanted I would have to do something big. I knew that I would have to put up a fight, and put in a lot more effort. Over the summer I developed a war mindset inspired by two quotes from Sun Tzu:
"Victorious warriors win first and then go to war, while defeated warriors go to war first and then seek to win”
“If you know the enemy and know yourself, you need not fear the result of a hundred battles. If you know yourself but not the enemy, for every victory gained you will also suffer a defeat. If you know neither the enemy nor yourself, you will succumb in every battle.”
I knew that I can't be going into sophomore year blind, so I started drafting a plan. I created a Google doc outlining my goals and what I wanted to accomplish. I knew that I won't be able to win every battle and that I need to choose which fight is worth fighting for. I thought to myself, “Well the peer tutors we're given training on the first day of school and probably have strategies to deal with poor behavior but what about planned well organized protests?” So I began researching strategies on how paraprofessionals/peer tutors dealt with negative behavior and reverse engineered those tactics. I read forms, I Watched YouTube videos and found as much information that I could find. For the peer tutors I didn't know too much about them. I didn't know if it was something that only my school did or if other schools did it. I did some research and found out that other schools had a peer tutor program and some have uploaded training videos on YouTube. Some peer tutors told me that they did babysitting and did nanny work so I looked up babysitting tips. I reverse engineered all of those tactics and came up with strategies to counter those techniques and put all that information that I learned into a google doc that I can use for future reference. During this time I also researched how to become a better negotiator and started learning a little bit of psychology. The plan was to first negotiate and if that doesn't work I will protest and make demands and negotiate. Over the summer I got really good at negotiating and practiced a lot on my father and my sister (they were totally oblivious). To this day I use those negotiating tactics. After I created my document and was satisfied with all the information, I went to bed that night and knew that I have already won and that my sophomore year will be my last year that I 1-1 peer tutor or aide.
Fast forward to the first day of school, as expected I had peer tutors and aides assigned to me in classes. My sped teacher had a chalkboard On the back wall full of sticky notes that had everyone's schedules and a name of someone was assigned to that student for each class. This time around I only had one peer tutor outside of the special ed classes. This is a big improvement over the three I had before but I still have my original goal of having none. For the paraprofessionals I had 2 in Gen classes.The goal was to first remove the peer tutors then the paraprofessionals. Even though this seems to be an improvement I continued with the plan. Since this was the first day, the peer tutors were in another classroom learning policies and other stuff they needed to know so I was alone for the day. I walked over to my special ed teacher and ask him one final time to remove the peer tutor he says no and then I asked him to let me be alone for 2 weeks so I can prove I don't need help and he still denies me. I then tell him that I will allow the peer tutor for 2 weeks and after that she needs to go. My teacher doesn't respond. (To add context the peer tutor that I had, she was a peer tutor in my math class in the prior semester so I already know who she was. We used to talk a lot and was surprised when I saw that she was assigned to me.)
For 2 weeks she mostly left me alone with her occasionally checking up on me. For those 2 weeks I purposely close my self off and adopted a body language that would subconsciously discourage her from approaching me. I did this by keeping my head low and staying as focused as possible. The only thing she did was confront me when I start packing up 2 minutes before the bell rings. She tells me that I shouldn't be packing up and to pull my stuff out again. I tell her no and hold my ground. She writes in my planner that I packed my stuff up early and refuse to pull it out. That happened like 2 or 3 times. On Thursday on the second week my class was tasked to create a PowerPoint. FYI this was a mythology class, while I was doing this PowerPoint I decided instead of manually trying to type in the locations and people from this mythology which the names were very long and complicated. I decided would be easier just to copy and paste them in. My peer tutor sees me doing this and doesn't say anything. At the end of class she writes that I plagiarized in my planner and tells my special ed teacher in person what happened. My sped teacher pulls me out of class (I had his math class right after mythology) and starts telling me that my peer tutor has seen me copy and pasting paragraphs and goes on this lecturing on why plagiarizing is bad. I explained to him that I wasn't copying paragraphs It was only copying names and locations and explain my reason for it. He didn't believe me but he didn't make me retake the assignment. After that I was pissed off and the next day I confronted her about it. I forgot what her reasoning for not telling me was but I told her that she needs to look into things before she makes false reports. After that incident, I decided to wait a week before I ask my teacher to remove her. Also during those first 3 weeks I turned down help from peer tutors and paras if possible In the special ed classroom. I did this to prevent sending any mix signals. I personally didn't mind if I had to work with a peer tutopara or not In the actual sped classroom. I only cared if it was in any of the general education classes. I just thought it would look contradictory if I was accepting help in the sped class and then requesting peer tutors to be removed from my gen classes.
At the beginning of the fourth week I went to school early and went to my sped teacher's class before first hour starts and then I again asked him to remove the peer tutor and the paraprofessionals. He says no again and brings up that I was being academically dishonest by plagiarizing. I tell my side of the story once again on what happened and he still doesn't believe me. At this point I leave and more pissed off. At this point negotiations didn't work so I started small protests by preventing the peer tutors from filling out my planer and the behavioral checklist. Most of them didn't care since there was other students they can fill out and they only need to fill out one to be graded for the day. One peer tutor gave me the puppy dog eye treatment and I eventually cave and let her fill it out. I still let the one peer tutor that was assigned to me in the gen class due to me being the only student and my intention wasn't to ruin, her grade. During the fourth week I began brainstorming ideas on how I can do a massive protest.
On Thursday of the fourth week of school, a walk into the mythology class and it started out like any other day. Class started and my teacher starts talking. I pull up my phone to respond to some messages and my peer tutor sees me. She asks me to hand my phone over to her and I tell her no. She tells me that I can't be on my phone and I tell her okay but I'm still not giving it to you. She then pulls out her phone and puts it on the table. She then tells me to put my phone on the table. I tell her no again. A few minutes past and the teacher finishes up talking. She passes the assignment and immediately my peer tutor begins to try and help by reading the questions. I slide the packet over closer to me and start ignoring her. I was hoping that she will get the hint and leave me alone. She doesn't so put on my hoodie and tried to mentally block her out. I don't remember what she said during all this since I was blocking it out but I do remember her touching me and the general ed teacher coming over and start assisting the peer tutor. It was a lot of pressure and I was actually about to give up because it was too much. But they both gaved up before I did and I was very relieved. After that, the class was pretty much quiet. The peer tutor wrote an entire paragraph on what happened. I walked to my math class and sat down. I then see my peer tutor walking into class and ask for my sped teacher. I already knew it was about me. I see them talk for 2 minutes and sure enough I see my teacher calling me over. I walked outside the classroom and me and the teacher begin to go at it. We end up saying the same things we have said before. However, my teacher this time mentioned that if I keep up my behavior that he's going to call in a meeting with my parents. The rest of math class was pretty much the same. However, my English class with the same teacher he went on a rant about using accommodations seeing that he had a disability growing up which was tourette's and he were love to have a peer tutor. I was quiet for the whole class since I was already exhausted because of everything else that had already happened. For the rest of the weekend, I've been coming up with plans on how I would be able to pull off a massive protest.
Now for the good news. On the fifth week of school, I noticed that my peer tutor was missing. My teacher pulled me aside again and told me that he decided that he was going to pull her for 2 weeks to see how well I would do without her. I told him thank you, that's what I wanted since the beginning of the school year. After those 2 weeks he didn't reinstate her and I didn't have a peer tutor or paraprofessionals in gen classes since. The deal moving forward was as long as I had a D or better he wasn't going to send any support unless I asked for it. My relationship with that sped teacher also had improved significantly. Later in my Junior year of high school I ran in my school's election and won. I was given the social media position.
In hindsight, I'm glad I didn't have to pull off a big protest. But the same time I wish that this situation could have ended in a different way.
Everything that I just told you is only the tip of the iceberg. There's so much detail that I had to leave out just to make this story shorter. Lot of it I'm still processing even though I found great strength in myself fighting back against a system that I believe was ruining my life. That war mindset hasn't left my mentality yet. I'm still dealing with the consequences of me being in special ed. Everything I told you happened 5 years ago and I'm still living through it like it just happened. I'm mentally recovering and eventually I will recover. Right now I'm in therapy and I'm writing down everything I can in a Google doc to process everything emotionally. Maybe one day I'll give that story to a writer and make a book out of it.
If you have any questions feel free ask them, I would love to answer them.
2024.05.19 16:09 Paulno90 A follow up to my 'HW3 demo feedback' (HW3 review-ish)
Prefacing the whole thing once again by saying that I'm a long time Homeworld fan, from the original all the way to here, playing hundreds of hours of the series. After the demo I felt so passionately about it that I made this post.
I've just finished the campaign, and I'm happy to say that, Homeworld 3 was a blast. The gameplay was fun, graphics looked beautiful, story was shorter than I hoped and didn't quite have the same impact as the final few missions of HW1/2 (too easy on medium), but I enjoyed it none the less.
The changes they made based on the demo feedback really did hit the spot, and addressed a few of my concerns. It's not a perfect game, and BBI sound committed to making improvements, so I'm really excited about the future. The story leaves things pretty open ended, with an obvious continuation, but we'll see!
I don't envy the task that BBI had here. HW1 is nostalgic not just because of how good it was, but because it was a genre-bending experience like no one had scene before, and the story was incredible, I will never forget the feeling/moment of returning to Kharak to see it burning, or when you arrive at Hiigara in the final mission. HW2 took the game to a whole new level in so many ways, and was memorable not for it's story, but the evolution of it's gameplay. HW3 feels like a fresh start, and I am truly hoping that this is just the beginning of a new era for this franchise, considering what they could do NOW with a Homeworld 4 (or expansion to HW3) gets me reaaaaaally excited.
A few thoughts after playing the game, and seeing some of the reviews:
Any questions, shoot, I'll try to answer!
submitted by Paulno90 to homeworld [link] [comments]
I've just finished the campaign, and I'm happy to say that, Homeworld 3 was a blast. The gameplay was fun, graphics looked beautiful, story was shorter than I hoped and didn't quite have the same impact as the final few missions of HW1/2 (too easy on medium), but I enjoyed it none the less.
The changes they made based on the demo feedback really did hit the spot, and addressed a few of my concerns. It's not a perfect game, and BBI sound committed to making improvements, so I'm really excited about the future. The story leaves things pretty open ended, with an obvious continuation, but we'll see!
I don't envy the task that BBI had here. HW1 is nostalgic not just because of how good it was, but because it was a genre-bending experience like no one had scene before, and the story was incredible, I will never forget the feeling/moment of returning to Kharak to see it burning, or when you arrive at Hiigara in the final mission. HW2 took the game to a whole new level in so many ways, and was memorable not for it's story, but the evolution of it's gameplay. HW3 feels like a fresh start, and I am truly hoping that this is just the beginning of a new era for this franchise, considering what they could do NOW with a Homeworld 4 (or expansion to HW3) gets me reaaaaaally excited.
A few thoughts after playing the game, and seeing some of the reviews:
- I stand by my point from my 'open letter' about this game being a reboot. However, when considering that this is the first game in the franchise in 20 years, and they essentially had to start from scratch with an entirely new game engine and assets and everything, then yeah I'm pretty impressed that the game is as good as it is.
- My demo feedback about how disappointing it was that ship subsystems were dropped, I take that back. While yeah it is still disappointing, the game had to launch SOME TIME, and you can't stuff every single feature you want into it. Sacrifices had to be made, in order to get this game out there.
- Some people say that it's been simplified way too much, again, I think this comes down to having to make sacrifices in order to get the game out there.
- The mission structures in the game feel a little simple when compared to HW2, but again that could be because of the above.
- The whole game looks beautiful, but the cool things I love to watch are the little things, like how ship engines look now, or how Ion Cannon frigate beams look when they fire now.
- Skirmish does feel more fast paced than before.
- The ship population caps in HW3 were more than I expected. 8 Battlecruisers?! That was great. Completely different from my demo experience where I felt like WarGames fleets were too small.
- The way that ships automatically sorted themselves into smaller mixed fleets based on my formation selection was really cool to see.
- Moving away from 'squads' to individual strikecraft, was something I wasn't happy about in the demo, but in the full game it felt fine, I didn't even notice. Mostly because BBI implemented two cool things, 1) Bulk order production for ships, and 2) Ships auto-sorting into smaller fleets as mentioned above.
- Unit abilities feel better. They aren't as overpowered, and have real trade offs. They can be forgotten about in the heat of battle, but in the campaign I remembered them enough to use them sometimes. I.e using the cloak on bombers to run surprise attacks, or using ion cannon overcharge to focus fire larger ships.
- The 'custom' controls were a god send. I chose a mix of both types and customised other hotkeys to make a control scheme that was perfect for me.
- The free movement command feels better than it did in the demo, however, it still is nowhere near as tight as it was in previous entries. 'Shift' for vertical adjustment was great, now please bring back the whole 'highlighting the relative position vertical lines on the movement disc when you hover over them'. I can't get my movement commands precise enough because I can't tell when I'm ordering my units to move to a point of interest or not, on the movement disc.
- Campaign didn't feel long enough :( which is usually a sign that I'm having fun :)
Any questions, shoot, I'll try to answer!
2024.05.19 16:08 ActivateClosure8 Samsung Range turned on by itself
I have a Samsung Range I bought more than 2 years ago.
Over the past few months, it’s been doing the equivalent of a “ghost touch”, but on the touch control panel instead of a phone.
When cooking, obviously there will be steam. I’ve discovered when steam hits the control panel, it triggers some of the buttons. Usually, it triggers the Warming Center which isn’t too big of a deal. Today, it triggered the Broiler.
I smelled smoke and I ran into the kitchen. I turned off the Broiler and quickly opened the oven door and windows.
Having a touch control panel is bad design because things like steam will trigger it, they used to make control panels that required you to actually press hard for anything to happen. The old models never had this issue.
Thank God, there wasn’t any major property damage to anything but an oven mitt.
Has this happened to anyone else? Surely I can’t be the only one with this issue. This issue is major enough for me to lose trust in Samsung products going forward.
submitted by ActivateClosure8 to samsung [link] [comments]
Over the past few months, it’s been doing the equivalent of a “ghost touch”, but on the touch control panel instead of a phone.
When cooking, obviously there will be steam. I’ve discovered when steam hits the control panel, it triggers some of the buttons. Usually, it triggers the Warming Center which isn’t too big of a deal. Today, it triggered the Broiler.
I smelled smoke and I ran into the kitchen. I turned off the Broiler and quickly opened the oven door and windows.
Having a touch control panel is bad design because things like steam will trigger it, they used to make control panels that required you to actually press hard for anything to happen. The old models never had this issue.
Thank God, there wasn’t any major property damage to anything but an oven mitt.
Has this happened to anyone else? Surely I can’t be the only one with this issue. This issue is major enough for me to lose trust in Samsung products going forward.
2024.05.19 16:08 Few_Young_5269 HypeLoOt Presale is more than Half Sold Out
The target was 40M and more than 22Million tokens have been sold out already. Plinko, Crash, Crazy Wheel, and dice are just a few of the many video games available at Hypeloot, a cryptocurrency-based casino. These games aren't the easiest to play, but because the outcomes are shown via the blockchains of Chainlink and EOS, they're also cutting edge and completely verifiable.
Exclusive multiplayer games on the platform also conceal a selection of PlayStation 5 chocolates in containers fashioned like pinnacles. These components have aided in Hypeloot's quick development and increased notoriety. Since its opening in 2022, the cryptocurrency online casino has attracted over 160k active players with over 56 million wagers made.
Currently, the Hypeloot platform is integrating AI to provide an amazing user experience. To accurately collect and address customer feedback, this integration will take the form of a Hypeloot. In 2023, sales at the bitcoin casino exceeded $1 million. It has now moved to engage in the network's expansion by offering its local token, HPLT, for presale, so placing it at risk.
The dynamic world of Hypeloot is powered by HPLT. This money is not necessarily ethereal because it is backed by a well-known product. By protecting it, the platform ensures that holders will have access to continuous financial flow. Customers can purchase HPLT during the presale since Hypeloot has made itself available to them. Those that take advantage of this presale may also be qualified for the following advantages in addition to the early-mover advantage. Lowest rates for HPLT - The presale is divided into several stages, with an increase in the rate of HPLT tokens at each stage. Since the presale is presently only at the first degree, investors can participate in this ideal cryptocurrency at a minimal entry barrier. Obtain casino credits: Additionally, investors who pre-sell could receive limitless credit to spend at the Hypeloot casino. The platform claims that those credits are only taking part because they want to collaborate in the current presale.
Hype NFTs: Hypeloot is also preparing to introduce the following group of outstanding NFTs to the market.Investors may be given early access to these non-fungible tokens, known as Hype NFTs, which they will be able to buy or trade on the Hypeloot market. A part of Hypeloot's existing daily USDT staking rewards may be available to presale traders. Get $HPLT tokens right now! Presale continues as normal and concludes when it does. Key DEX and CEX will have the $HPLT token available. Don't let this opportunity pass you by!
presale.hypeloot.com
submitted by Few_Young_5269 to decentralization [link] [comments]
Exclusive multiplayer games on the platform also conceal a selection of PlayStation 5 chocolates in containers fashioned like pinnacles. These components have aided in Hypeloot's quick development and increased notoriety. Since its opening in 2022, the cryptocurrency online casino has attracted over 160k active players with over 56 million wagers made.
Currently, the Hypeloot platform is integrating AI to provide an amazing user experience. To accurately collect and address customer feedback, this integration will take the form of a Hypeloot. In 2023, sales at the bitcoin casino exceeded $1 million. It has now moved to engage in the network's expansion by offering its local token, HPLT, for presale, so placing it at risk.
The dynamic world of Hypeloot is powered by HPLT. This money is not necessarily ethereal because it is backed by a well-known product. By protecting it, the platform ensures that holders will have access to continuous financial flow. Customers can purchase HPLT during the presale since Hypeloot has made itself available to them. Those that take advantage of this presale may also be qualified for the following advantages in addition to the early-mover advantage. Lowest rates for HPLT - The presale is divided into several stages, with an increase in the rate of HPLT tokens at each stage. Since the presale is presently only at the first degree, investors can participate in this ideal cryptocurrency at a minimal entry barrier. Obtain casino credits: Additionally, investors who pre-sell could receive limitless credit to spend at the Hypeloot casino. The platform claims that those credits are only taking part because they want to collaborate in the current presale.
Hype NFTs: Hypeloot is also preparing to introduce the following group of outstanding NFTs to the market.Investors may be given early access to these non-fungible tokens, known as Hype NFTs, which they will be able to buy or trade on the Hypeloot market. A part of Hypeloot's existing daily USDT staking rewards may be available to presale traders. Get $HPLT tokens right now! Presale continues as normal and concludes when it does. Key DEX and CEX will have the $HPLT token available. Don't let this opportunity pass you by!
presale.hypeloot.com
2024.05.19 16:02 brogflea Boyerstree update 2, year 25
 | Hello everyone, once again welcome to Boyerstree, update 2. 10 years is a long time, even in Banished, yet not that much has changed. Let me give you a quick tour. submitted by brogflea to Banished [link] [comments] Towncentre First up is the towncentre. When I say not much has changed, I mean it, but it's hard to spot under all those trees. Why are there so many trees you wonder? Well, the town is called BoyersTREE after all ;) Jokes aside, since the very beginning I had the idea to fill the space between the two roads up with something. 3 tiles of streets should be enough to stop any potential fire from spreading, but having such huge highways through the village isn't really that nice to look at. In my opinion, at least. So I wanted to fill that empty space with trees because of the random name the village got. That's why I build a forester in the centre, to plant these trees. I still plan to build houses in the (previously) empty spots. Now it might take a bit longer to build them, but that should be allright. Next to the forester I build a Herbalist, because I thought that might be of some use. Also, one comment mentioned to have a Herbalist in the centre prevents the villagers from walking all the way into the forest if they are sick, so there's that benefit as well. What's also new is the cemetery up top. I planned to make one as big as possible, but realized I didn't have the stone to spare. So instead, I split it up into quarters and will build a new quarter if one is necessary. Right now, I have about 20 graves filles out of 40 possible. So while there is still enough space, it showed me that it was about high time I built one. Further up North you can see the newest addition to the village, a Pasteur with 3 whole sheep in it! Trading is starting to pay off, Wool production can officially start soon! I'm looking forward to having warm coats, I think with the conditions on harsh that will be a huge benefit. The final addition is a little harder to spot, just below the cemetery I built additional barns. I've decided to up the production limits of all necessary resources considerably, especially food. As a result, I started to run out of space. These new barns are built just on the edge of the influence area of the Forester as to not reduce it's productivity too much. At the same time, the main culprit why I'm running out of space are these Foresters Hubs, so the barns are quite close to the source, which is nice. The most effort during these 10 years was spent on building up the Traiding-Hub. Trading-Hub Since not that many Traders showed up and they also did not have the resources I required, I decided to improve my chances by adding more Tradingposts. 2 more have been added and I started to add the buildings which actually benefit from the imported goods, mainly the Blacksmith. Fun story here, I wondered why the Traders have not been delivering my custom orders. I later found out that while I have placed custom orders, I had left the slider of when to place custom orders on "Never" instead of "Every visit"... I'm an idiot. Anyway, one of my biggest gripes with the game since Time Immemorial has been that the Blacksmith needs coal for Steel Tools, while the villagers use Coal to heat their homes and there is nothing you can do to give the blacksmith higher priority. And I imagine even if you could, that would not help much because there are many times more houses than Blacksmiths. The only thing you can do is see to it that the Blacksmith gets to the coal first, which is what I'm planig to do here. Ideally that would mean the Trading Hub is far away from the village, but that would not work too since the people need to walk to their working station. And if I place their houses at the Trading Hub, we're back on square one, so I might as well build some houses nearby. As you can see, I plan to expand the village in that area as well, I've even started on a market. While that contradicts my strategy with the Coal delivery, I hope that the impact will not be that severe. Time will tell, as this part of the village won't be settled until I run out of space at the top. All three Tradingposts are stocked with resources, mainly Firewood, Cloth and Herbs, and ready to go. Up until this screenshot I have imported a grand total of 30 iron, but I'm expecting a sharp increase soon. Also I'm impressed how much I was able to build with the provided Stone and Iron alone. And I was afraid of running out of material at the year 15 update... Next up I really want to start the alcohol export going. But for that I need to import the resources first, namely apple. While that might not be the best method mecanically speaking, storywise this is my goal: To establish an export of branded Boyerstree Mountain Cider (it's a valley, but shush). Until I have enough apples, I might substitute in berries. I have plenty of them, but they are a food source and I'd rather not turn food into alcohol. But at small numbers, that might be possible. Also, from just one keg I could by 15 apples, so that is tempting... Eh, we'll see. That might be depending on which Merchant arrives next time. To the South of the Trading Hub I've planned to add a second Pasteur. This is mainly a safety precaution, since herds can get infected with diseases. And if that happens, well you can't do much beside slaughter all livestock and start over. This second Pasteur is my safety measure so I can quickly split the herd and start over right away. Also, yes, I've planed another Forester Hub. Look, you can never have enough, OK? Also as mentioned above, my plan as of now is to expand the village along the river for easy access to trading. More shepp and Foresters because why not? Finally, I'll show you some stats from the Townhall. This is more a detail for those interested, but since I'm posting another long post might as well. The production tab is slightly skewed because I traded some resources away, hence the consumption isn't exactly accurate. https://preview.redd.it/mxtwzijvsd1d1.png?width=1394&format=png&auto=webp&s=9e7f2b2266a6db633695117d7bc073eec2216572 To be honest, I never look to closely at the overview tab. I know some people base their expansion plans on how many kids/students there are or how many homes there are relative to the number of families. I personally tend to just look at the population time range, mostly 5 years, and base my plan on that. As well as if there is a new home built, I have a quick look at who is moving in. If both future parents are in their 30s, I know I have to build more houses. As you can see in the population graph, there was a time when the population actually declined. I realized that, and in a fit of panic, built too many new houses, hence the increase later on. Fun fact, that is also why you saw many paused houses mid construction in the previous screenshots. Right now I want to have a stable population with only a slight increase. There aren't that many new jobs I want to fill and the food/fuel production as of now is just balanced. While I have the tools to increase both productions further, I'd rather not. The reserve is a safety net which should not have to be implemented yet. At the start of graph 3 you can see that we had a rocky start with only a few survivors after a food shortage, and I'm surprised how many years it took (4 to 5) to build back the number of people which you start with. That really was a close call. Graph 4 shows the impact of not having a school at the beginning. I was very surprised to see that in only about 5 to 6 years, the percentage of educated people dropped from 100% to below 25%. I've checked on the internet to see if my gut feeling about the productivity difference was correct and, uh, yeah the impact is definitely noticeable. That school might have saved my village, especially considering how long it took to get back to 90% again. https://preview.redd.it/1mw68xroyd1d1.png?width=1428&format=png&auto=webp&s=4a52035fb3eece686710eae49428218e81c4920a Lastly, an overview over some resources. Nothing special to see here, except maybe you can see the year I decided to massive overproduce food and firewood. Food mainly for reserve, firewood to get trading started. Iron and Stone is only from gathered resourced, except 30 imported Iron. As I said, I'm surprised how long these last. I've still not collected every node I could, but the paths are now very long and the collection is very slow. I think I might have found a trick to speed things up, and that is to place a storage pile in the woods close to the Stone/Iron nodes. The Labours will deposit the resources there, shortening their paths as they now only have to return home to eat and warm up again. That means they can spend more time collecting stuff. Of course, building is a bit slowed down because of the longer paths, but I haven't noticed that big of a difference. Also, once all recourses are gathered up, I destroy the storage pile and let the resources be transported back to the village. Is this efficient? I don't know but it feels as if the gathering goes quicker. Heavy emphasize on FEELS. Well, that's all I got for now. Quick glance into the future, I really need to strengthen my disaster resilience, meaning Hospitals and Wells. That needs stone, which should be arriving shortly. Hopefully. And yeah, Trading needs to be strengthened as well. Maybe I'll add more Trading Posts. As we are entering the 'lategame', something I always do once I feel like the village is turning into a well running town is to build an unnecessary long, yet somehow useful tunnel or bridge. I haven't found a place to do this here yet, so I might go search a spot. The next update will probably be more then 10 years in the future since I feel like not much interesting stuff is going to happen now. Time will tell, if something noteworthy happens I'll be sure to post it here. If you made it this far, thanks for reading :) * edited because of a typo in the first sentence. Dammit. |
2024.05.19 16:01 PLpro12 How do I handle international shipping and customs requirements with Amazon FBA reddit?
Understanding Amazon FBA
Amazon FBA is a game-changer for online sellers, offering a streamlined fulfillment solution that handles storage, packing, and shipping of your products. By leveraging Amazon's vast network of fulfillment centers worldwide, you can reach customers in over 185 countries with ease. This means you can focus on growing your business while Amazon takes care of the logistical heavy lifting.International Shipping Options
When it comes to international shipping with Amazon FBA, you have several options to choose from:Standard International Shipping
Standard international shipping is the most cost-effective option for sending your products overseas. Packages are typically shipped via economy services, which may have longer delivery times but offer significant savings on shipping costs.Expedited International Shipping
For faster delivery times, expedited international shipping is the way to go. While it comes at a higher cost compared to standard shipping, expedited services use premium carriers to ensure swift delivery to your customers' doorsteps.Amazon Global Selling
Amazon Global Selling allows you to list your products directly on international Amazon marketplaces, reaching customers worldwide without the need for separate shipping arrangements. With features like Fulfillment Network Optimization (FNO), Amazon automatically selects the optimal fulfillment center for each order, streamlining the shipping process.Customs Requirements and Documentation
Navigating customs requirements is a crucial aspect of international shipping. Failure to comply with customs regulations can result in delays, fines, or even seizure of your goods. Here's what you need to know:Commercial Invoices
A commercial invoice is a legal document that provides details about the contents of your shipment, including product descriptions, quantities, values, and origin. It is used by customs authorities to assess duties and taxes and ensure compliance with import regulations.Harmonized System (HS) Codes
HS codes are standardized numerical codes used to classify products for customs purposes. Assigning the correct HS code to your products is essential for accurate customs clearance and tariff assessment.Certificates of Origin
Certificates of origin certify the country in which your products were manufactured and are often required for customs clearance. They help determine eligibility for preferential trade agreements and may reduce or eliminate import duties.Import Licenses and Permits
Some countries require import licenses or permits for certain products. Make sure to research and obtain any necessary permits before shipping your goods to avoid customs delays or rejection at the border.VAT, Duties, and Taxes
When importing goods into foreign countries, you may be subject to VAT (Value-Added Tax), duties, and other taxes. These charges vary by country and are typically based on the value and nature of the imported goods. It's important to factor these costs into your pricing strategy to avoid unexpected expenses for your customers.Leveraging Amazon's Expertise
One of the biggest advantages of using Amazon FBA for international shipping is access to Amazon's expertise and resources. From dedicated support teams to comprehensive online resources, Amazon provides sellers with the tools and guidance they need to succeed in global markets. Take advantage of these resources to stay informed and compliant with international shipping and customs requirements.Utilized Amazon Seller Tools
Helium 10, a powerful suite of tools tailored for Amazon sellers, offers indispensable assistance for managing international shipping and customs requirements with Amazon FBA. With its robust features, sellers can streamline operations and ensure compliance with global regulations.
One way this software can aid sellers is through its comprehensive product research capabilities. By utilizing tools like Black Box and Xray, sellers can pinpoint high-demand products with strong potential for international markets, facilitating informed decision-making on global expansion.
Moreover, this tool provides invaluable assistance in optimizing product listings for diverse international audiences. With features like Magnet and Cerebro, sellers can conduct multilingual keyword research, enhancing visibility and attracting more customers in various global markets.
Conclusion
Expanding your business internationally with Amazon FBA opens up a world of opportunities, but it requires careful planning and execution. By understanding the various shipping options, mastering customs requirements, and leveraging Amazon's expertise, you can navigate the complexities of international trade with confidence. With the right strategy in place, you can take your e-commerce business to new heights and reach customers around the globe.Helium 10 - 20% OFF Discount (Limited Time)
An all-in-one Amazon seller tool to easily find, list, and sell 10K+/month products! Disclosure: I get a small kickback if you click through - Thanks for reading! DM if you have any questions :)