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I (f 30) am the youngest of two. My older sister (f 36) lives in the same state but a few hours away. She never came home after college because she was in a relationship. When we were younger she was a total mother's girlie girl and I was a daddy's girl. With that dynamic you can conclude that me and mom (f 55) weren't very close back then. When my sister went to college and it was just me and mom, we clashed all the time. I couldn't wait to go to college and be free. Unlike my sister, when i graduated from college I went back home and lived with my mom. While in school she found out she had cancer and I realized how important she was to me, during the summer I would take care of her. I became super protective because my dad (m 60) had died the second part of my freshman year. I guess realizing you only get one dad and mom did something to me and our relationship changed. Strangely, while in college I transformed into a girlie girl with all female roommates that treated me like a toy by dressing me up and taking me to parties. So, when I came home I started working right away. Had some messy relationships and crappy jobs, but my mom always supported me. From what I seen my mom and sister were still close, even with the distance. When Shawn would come home her and mom hung out, sometimes she would stay with us, sometimes not but they talked often. Note, I don't know if it was the age difference or what but me and my sister never got along. Somewhere in my 20's I realized that we were never going to be "those sisters" and called it for what it was. We are blood, but not friends, and I know if we weren't related we would never befriends on purpose. Don't get me wrong, I love her and if Shawn was hurt or in trouble I would help her but for now, for my mom's sake I talk to her on major holiday's and important family matters, but not to just catch up or anything. I honestly don't care. Sadly, if other family member didn't ask "how is your sister", I could probably go years without thinking about her. Anyways, it started off slow, like Shawn would come to town not stay with us, then she would come to town and not reach out until she was leaving, and then we wouldn't know she was in town at all unless she called my grandmother or posted something on social media in a familiar place. It was weird because they would always link up. Shawn loves mom's cooking and would come home just for that. Mom would go visit her and go to work events with Shawn, at the last one mom said they got into an argument because she was tired from driving 5 hours, going to the event without a nap and being on her feet all night. After the event mom just wanted to go back to Shawn's apartment and rest, but there was an after party she wanted to go to. Not wanted to go to the after party mom just wanted her to walk her back to the apartment and then Shawn could go. Shawn wanted mom to go with her and said they wouldn't be there long, but mom was tired. She was trying to convince her that she would only stay for 30 minutes, but we both know when Shawn is in a room she will talk to everyone and 30 minutes could turn into 3 hours real quick. When mom put her foot down and asked her to take her home Shawn got upset and started yelling "this is mom's side of the story", you never want to do anything, ugh, why can't you just have fun, ugh..... She said Shawn was just yelling her on the corner of the street while people were walking. Shawn stays in town where a lot of people walk and everything is close by. Then she agreed to walk mom back but walked super fast and mom couldn't keep up. She is shorter than me and my sister. When they got back, she let mom in, changed her shoes and went back out. When mom came home and told me what happened I was so confused. It isn't like them to argue. I guess you can say this was the beginning of the end. Shawn stopped calling her as often, went out of the country and said nothing about it until the day of. There were just a lot of things she was doing without communicating with mom, it came to a head when our phone plan bill went up 100's of dollars. See, the bill is in Shawn's name but mom pays the bill, well she use to until Shawn got an iPhone and added the cost of the phone to the bill. Mom and I have Samsung's. She did this without telling mom and because the bill was automated it took mom while to notice. When she did, she told Shawn to start paying the bill for the portion of the phone itself. She agreed but wouldn't pay it on times, there were times that my phone was off but didn't notice because I was always near wifi. Somewhere in the middle of this she got another iPhone and the bill went again. Shawn didn't know that just because she got another phone didn't mean she wouldn't have to pay off the other one. They went back and forth on the phone one day arguing, Shawn claiming she paid and mom asking her to go through the payment history and tell her where...... the arguing ended when she started yelling at mom, saying "you're triggering me, you're triggering me" my mom just stared into the phone in disbelief... We're black and raised in a very much black household so for those who know, know those are words that we just don't say..... Well that was last week and this past weekend was mothers day and Shawn didn't call mom.... We have a family group chat of about 23 people and she said it there but not directly to mom or sent a card or anything.... I asked her the Thursday before if she would be sending mom something on mother's because we usually work together to get her something or she send me money and I get her something and Shawn will send a card. But nothing. She didn't even call our grandmother.... I went to my boyfriends house after then mother's day dinner at my grandmother's house, where I stay most weekends and while there she called me. Mom calls when she says things are too much to text. bet she went home and found a package with a 15 pound weight in it and a note saying "I hope your mother's day brought you some joy",.... Um what??? I want someone to tell me why she picked this as a mother's day gift.... and just one ... one 15 pound weight, not a set. Mom works out but already has a set for 5,10,15, and 20 pounds weight that I know Shawn knows she has. Mom was really sad and she isn't the super emotional one of us 3, the emotional one is me. If there is one thing I hate is my mom feeling bad, but then for it to be caused by her own child was different. Shawn NEVER answers the phone like NEVER, I had to tell her our dad passed away via text after calling almost 100 times. Mom sounded like she wanted to cry and just kept asking me " Brit, what did I do wrong, I don't know what I did wrong". Dang, that broke me. Now I'm the bigger of the two of us, and my sister knows me well enough that she don't want these problems so instead for even calling I sent a long text, basically saying I was disappointed to call her my sister and she should be ashamed of how she is treating our mother because when she got fired and unemployment wasn't paying enough to cover her bill's mom paid. Shawn never paid her back. Over all she is one of the most selfish people I know. I just asked her how hard is it to say happy mother's day or send a card. I didn't expect a response, but she did, in only 15 minutes. She said " I appreciate your concern and believe me, this runs much deeper than a phone bill. I don't have the same relationship with mom as you. You only know what you experienced and what happened to you. So, I'm not going to try and explain the various dynamics between mom and I that led to where we are now. It maybe hard for you to understand today. Pls don't blame it all on me. I love you. " I don't even know what that means. I responded something like other than physical, emotional, or mental harm i don't know what could have happened so bad that she couldn't call and say happy mothers day though. I can't imagine my mom doing any of those things. but again she gave some therapy like response and asked me to give her time to heal.... Mom has no clue what various dynamics she is talking about. I'm asking for advice because I feel like she is going down the same path she did with our dad. After our parents marriage ended and we were living with dad, mom still came over 3 times a week and cooked, had us on weekends. It was like she never left the only difference was she didn't sleep at home. When the arrangement changed, dad came 2 weekends in a row. then every other weekend, then once a month, then we were lucky if we saw him at all. It broke my heart in high school when a boy in my class told me to tell my dad that he would be late for practice. I was confused and bugged him all day to explain what he meant. I found out that my dad was coaching baseball across the street from our subdivision about 3 times a week with games on the weekend. So, he could see random boys at my school almost everyday for at least 3 hours and couldn't come over before or after to see his own kids? I actual walked over to the park one day because I refused to believe it, but there he was. We never talked about it. I just started walking there and sitting in the dugout to be near him and he would drive me the 2 minutes back home. All of the players lived in our neighborhood and dad had a flat bed so he would drop them off too. When Shawn graduated high school she never talked to our dad again after that day. She never told me why. He also developed cancer while I was in college and was very sick, when he got better he tried to get back in our lives and I let him in mine, called him on holidays but he did some messed up stuff to me my first year of college so I pushed back a little between that dad would call me and tell me to call my sister on 3 way, if she answered she was forced to talk to him. She wouldn't say much and would always say she was busy or had to do something to do and promise she would call him back and never would. So, now .... as part of my trying to figure out what my mom did, I reminded her how she cried when she found out our dad passed and she just kept saying she thought she had more time and who would walk her down the ail when she gets married and never got a chance to fix things. I would hate for that to happen with our mom too. I know because of our relationship once mom passes away we will most likely not talk or see each other ever again. So, I asking what did my mom do to her? What can I do to help fix this or should I even try? Anyone have any suggestions or ideas, also sorry for the typos or misspelled words or if its hard to follow, but I ask for anyone's input if they have experience this type of situation? Side note, idk if this helps but when Shawn came to town the last few times she stayed with our Aunt Carla. She has baby of the family syndrome, where she thinks she had hard but was actually spoiled rotten and believes all her sisters and brother and their wives are jealous of her. It's total BS but once when mom and I weren't getting along and I stayed with her, she told me some crazy stories about mom sleeping around, getting drunk, trying to fight her and someone else and some other stuff. This was when I was in college and I believed what she said mom and I continued to be on the outs for awhile before I found out about her cancer and became her protector and caregiver for a while. I don't believe those stories so much now be her and mom had issues before, Carla has actually had issues with all her siblings at one point and finds the need to the the main character of her own story and everyone else's. Simply she's a "One Upper". Aunt Carla getting in Shawn's ear is one idea I believe, also Shawn's friend have ummmmm "other people problems" like mellow dramatic soap opera drama and she maybe internalizing their issues. But yeah help, where do I go from here?

My Nomad has seriously revolutionized my ability to be organized in my life despite my ADHD and unrelated severe memory issues. I'm on meds and have decent coping skills, so I already had that down, but everything I've tried to make myself more organized or remember better have failed anyway.
I've tried a lot of things:

• Typing up notes is great, but I'm not always somewhere I can comfortably type and I often need more free-form notes that have math, diagrams, drawings, and so on. I love compiling my handwritten notes into one well-formatted page on Notion or Obsidian or similar, but quick notes never work well for me through text. Linking notes makes it all worth it in the end.
• Dictating notes requires me to listen back to them or suffer with how much speech-to-text struggles with my voice.
• Paper notebooks always got lost if I had more than one, got crazily out of hand if I only had one, and couldn't do a lot of things I came to rely on after trying digital notetaking (image/PDF insertion, re-arranging + adding + removing pages with such ease, selecting text to move it, easily having ruled + grid + dot grid + blank pages in one notebook).
• Goodnotes 5 on my iPad was great for a while, but I never loved the feeling of notetaking on an iPad and didn't want to sacrifice visual quality and nib strength for Paperlike. Still, it was the closest to what I needed. Goodnotes 6 being a subscription service, despite the company insisting that they'd never go subscription-based, caused me to explore more.

Eventually, I got my Nomad, and holy shit. Not only does it have everything else I want, but the battery life is crazy, the feel of notetaking is perfect, and most importantly: links.
As far as I know, Supernote is one of the only handwritten notetaking options with the ability to turn your own handwriting into links, which has enabled me to make a "second brain" like in Notion or Obsidian, but with handwritten notes. I journal daily and link to what I work on each day, so I never worry about forgetting. I make my own pseudo-wikis with headers that lead to tables of contents with links to specific topics, both for work and for my personal projects like worldbuilding or analyzing my favorite media. If a PDF is relevant to what I'm writing down, I can just link to it.
I almost feel spoiled with how much it helps me day-to-day be more organized and stress about my memory loss less. My largest issue is, honestly, just waiting for the A5X2.
Has anyone else had this experience? Does anyone else with ADHD have any tips I might have missed? I've not even had this thing for a month, so I'm still learning, but I want to utilize it to its absolute best. Any other experiences would also be great to hear, too!

Tw: discussion of death in the family
About 2 months ago, I finally blocked my parents. My aunt, my nmom's youngest sister, passed away. She was pretty young, only about 50, and that of course is very sad. I have never been close to my extended family and it had been over 15 years since I had seen or spoken to my aunt, so while it's sad, I wasn't exactly grieving. My mother wordlessly texted me her obituary with no other text or explanation, and I was wary of this.
A while ago, I think a little over a year, my grandmother died, and nmom did the same thing. I also posted about that on this page, and about my suspicion that it was manipulative, and my guilt over thinking that. In the end, I reached out to give my condolences and offer help if she needed it; which she then used to ensure access to me and pressured me into communicating with her. When I attempted to pull away, she would cite sadness from her mother dying to guilt me into staying engaged. Because of this, when I received my aunts obituary, I was worried about falling into a similar situation.
I talked to my wife and decided to take a little time and collect my thoughts before responding, to make sure it was worded well and conveyed what I meant, with little room for manipulation.
However, when my mother didn't get the immediate response she had received the last time, she started sending pictures of me and deceased aunt together, from when I was around 4 years old.
I was horrified. For everything my mother has done, using the recent death of her baby sister in order to get a response from me is a pretty disgusting low. I couldn't believe she would weaponize something like that. I have put up with a lot of abuse from her my entire life, but this was the straw that broke the camels back. I was furious, and blocked both her and my edad, because I didn't trust that she wouldn't try to use him or his phone to try and contact me once she realized that she couldn't get ahold of me on her own.
I'm still traumatized by that family, and still angry over a lot of what she did, including this, but over the past couple months I've been talking about it in therapy and occasionally forgetting my nmom even exists; and god, it's so peaceful when I do.
But then, two days ago, I received two voicemails from my mother.
Apparently, with my provider, when a number is blocked, I wont see that theyre calling, but I'll still receive their voicemails, unless I contact the provider and have someone manually block their access to my voicemail inbox. I immediately panicked and felt sick. I didn't listen to them, I couldn't bring myself to. I had theories of what they were. They were both short, around 12 to 20 seconds each (I deleted them and can't check), so they weren't some big tirade. I suspected that since mothers day just passed and I didn't call or text like I normally did for holidays, she had called to either, a) demand to know why, b) tell me how awful of a daughter I was, or c) doing the sweet and kind guilt method of asking why I would do this to her and make me question blocking her at all. I knew no matter which it was, I wasn't okay. But I was terrified that maybe something had happened to my dad, who was also blocked and is an enabler, but I have still always been closer to. I firmly believe he's also a victim of my mother who just never stood up for me, but that's another rant for another time. Because of that, I was scared to just delete them right away.
I already has therapy scheduled for that afternoon, and I talked to my therapist about it. We decided the best thing for me was to have my wife listen to them and delete them for me, and then if there was any emergency with my edad, they could tell me. When I got home we did just that, I gave them my phone and left the room, and came back when they were finished and the messages were deleted. I was tense as hell and ready for the worst.
They were pocket dials. My wife said it sounded like the Bluetooth on my mother's phone had hooked up to the car and she had called accidentally through it.
Of all the outcomes I was preparing myself for, that wasn't one of them. It completely took the wind out of my sails. I felt so stupid for panicking, and ended up just laying with my wife and crying. I just made myself feel crazy again, and went through the whole rigamarole of telling myself "see, you overreact, you weren't abused, you're just crazy," which they corrected of course. But it's so easy to slip back into that place.
I was tense and raw the rest of the night and following day, but started to feel a little better.
And then, that night, my edad left me a voicemail.
I wasn't staying at home that night because I was petsitting, but I texted my wife a screenshot of the voicemail notification and said that maybe the calls my nmom made weren't accidental after all. Either that, or my edad also pocket dialed me within 7 hours of my mother, which seemed awfully coincidental.
My wife found a way for me to forward the voicemail to them and I did, and they listened to it for me again. It was a real voicemail this time, in which my ndad called me by my deadname and then pointed out they hadn't heard from me in a while.
My theory is this: The first voicemail from my mother was an accident, hooked up to the cars Bluetooth on her way to work, which, since she is blocked, went directly to voicemail. She noticed this, and tried a second time, resulting in the second voicemail she left, confirming that her calls went straight to voicemail. Then, when she got off of work and saw my edad, she told and convinced/demanded for my father to call from his phone, to probe and see if he could get through to me, or if his went to voicemail too.
I knew I was right to block him too. I knew she would use him to get to me.
This all went down the day before yesterday, and I'm still tense and shaken up about it. I hate being so terrified of a voicemail, I hate knowing that my dad is just a tool for her, I hate knowing that even blocked she has this much power over my health. I'm just so exhausted from this whole thing.
I'm debating contacting my provider to cut off their access to my inbox, but for some reason I'm scared, and I'm also worried I might be overreacting. I'd appreciate any thoughts or advice on this.

People keep ignoring that the best LLM's are 0.1% the size of the human brain, trained on 0.1% of the data of the human brain, largely trained on 1 modality, we have 5, and given no time to think. A house mouse brains is literally bigger(1 trillion synapses) or at least comparable than the best models.
Now GPT-4o has been released, it has more modalities, way faster and even better. When will people realize?We can add even more modalities to it like:Video(continually embedding images/pixels only which fluctuations), 3D(possibly utilizing gaussian splatting), Weather(herein: temperature ,wind ,pressure, air quality(several molecules), sea level, gravitational waves, amino acids, protein structures, .video games(each video game can kind of count as its own modality, and can help both as simulators, embodiment, but also as learning to think) and I can keep going. Some might seem crazy but they are not they all help make the models converge to a perfect world model, as well as thinking and reasoning about abstract representations.
These models can compress huge amount of data down to a much smaller size, you don't just do that magically, u need to create abstract representation(like how light shines and bounces) to utilize and chain together to create stuff like a specific image. These models learn similarities between all kinds of stuff, even stuff we might never have thought of, which is why a huge amount of data and different modalities are crucial, even if a modality might seem unconventional.
We have all the data in the world. The best models are trained on 15 trillion tokens which is 44GB tokenized, but YouTube has 1.500.000.000GB of data alone.It is all about how much is enough now, not if it is possible, but of course these systems will start gaining superhuman abilities before we reach full ASI, and many tasks don't need anything near human-level intelligence.
There are skeptics that I respect the opinion of like Yann Lecun. I don't have any problems with object driven ai, and think Jepa is both really promising for world model building as well as efficient search, but he admits it himself(in Lex Fridman podcast), the problem is really just that generative architectures is a very inefficient way, and has several problems. But still generative architectures def. have perks in how easy it is to modify, utilize, RL etc. Still there are many things being worked on that will help it, even simple ones like multi token prediction or token level search, and still these are just efficiency gain and not a bottleneck. Q* is of course one such attempt, which is why ASI might be closer than it appears :).
Also confabulation/hallucination are just discrepancies in the dataset, and models have very low certainty for predictions of names and similar, so you can indeed look at the models percentage accuracy of prediction to infer its certainty. Everything lies between certainty and uncertainty to an intelligent observer, there are no facts, as you cannot trust your brain. Like how people with dementia are certain of an occurence that has not happened before. The dataset could say that unicorns exist on the moon in the dataset, and without anything directly stating it can still say they don’t like if they have read fantasy books they won’t say necrophages exist, so in a way confabulations are what make them great.These things will improve with scale, RL, thought etc, and interpretability could give a number of the model certainty on certain stuff.
Reasoning isn’t a pretty prevalent in biological brains, generally only in mammals, and specifically really just Humans. There are so many shortcomings to develop high reasoning and cognitive capability through evolution. Human brains have so many biases and are not wired to be math experts, doctors, and computer scientist. Most importantly we have no text modality, making us remarkably inefficient at obtaining knowledge, and matching patterns in huge data sets. Remember ai doesn’t have the same constraints; it doesn’t matter if it takes several trillion dollars, tera-watts, hectares of datacenters, 10+ modalities and Exa-Bytes of data.
With the current post training paradigms I think a Mixed-Modal, Sparse-MoE utilizing XOT will get us there in under 2 years.

So, here is part 2 of my entitled employee story. We left off with discovering Sally’s retaliation of giving me trash as a Christmas gift after her latest write-up.
So, the next several weeks, I am noticing more problems, but here’s some of the highlights.

1. Ever since we had issues of the office’s checks going randomly missing, Sally had apparently decided to just stop throwing any envelope away when opening the mail. She would supposedly search the envelopes/paperwork & then keep the envelopes with the paperwork. So, instead of doing her job better, she would decide to just stop doing the job at all. After all, you can’t get in trouble for screwing it up if you aren’t doing it, right? However, this resulted in items getting left with the paperwork (which sometimes wouldn’t get touched for several weeks due to being busy) that had needed to be collected or addressed right away.
   
2. Sally’s careless mistakes continued at about the same rate (average of 2 to 3 a week). She would put deposit slips/emails with the wrong office’s report, put one office’s mail in another office’s bin, put one office’s funding papers in another office’s bin, put one office’s bills in the folder for their correspondence & vice versa, put one office’s bills in the folder for another office’s bills, put the new month’s bills in the folder without taking out the old month’s bills so they would get mixed up. I could go on & on.
   
3. Sally would still ask for help on things she shouldn’t need help on anymore, ‘cause I had helped her many times on items exactly like it in the 2 years she’s worked here. I mean, the whole point of asking for help when learning new things on a job is so you can take the input you’re given & use it to get better at the job so you don’t have to ask for help anymore. I mean, what kind of office works by their employees constantly needing to be walked through everything every day? Sally would even ask for help on things no one would need to ask for help on. For example, she asked me, “An office took a deposit to the bank without showing it on their report. How do I write that up in the letter to fax to them?” Um, exactly what you just said to me. Or another time, she asks how long she should wait before calling an office back. Well, how long do you think you should give them? Just use your good judgment. You don’t need help with that! Again, you’ve been here 2 years!
   

On Jan 26, I take the Dec bills, correspondence faxes, & timesheets out of their folders to scan them into the computer. Now, one thing the bills should always have on them are the check number used to pay for this purchase & the date it was paid. The offices themselves are supposed to write this on there, but they don’t always, which is why it is our job to write it on there if it’s missing. I had noticed when I scanned Nov’s bills around Nov 30 that a lot of Sally’s offices don’t have that info written on them. So, I explained to her what needed to be written on every bill/receipt. I now flip through the Dec & Jan bills of her offices really quick to check them. There are quite a few of them with no info written down on them. There’s strike one for noncompliance.
Another task we would do several days a week (that’s Sally’s responsibility) is to check the bank accounts online. She is to look at the bank balances & report any low balances to Greg (or me if Greg isn’t there). She is then to look at the transactions in order to see if anything looks fraudulent. Since we are a loan company, check fraud is very common for us. So, we look at the checks for anything funny-looking, & we look to see if there are any auto debits (like when you use your bank account online to pay for a bill) that would tell us if someone got hold of our bank account info.
On Jan 30, at 1:15 p.m., I asked if any of the bank balances were low (Greg was out of town for a few days). Sally said she had forgotten to check the bank accounts that morning. Weird, ‘cause you had to check the Dallas office to make sure the money we sent them had shown up. How did you get the login sheet out to look in their bank account but then forget about checking all the bank accounts? This just further cemented in my mind that she was NOT checking these bank accounts the way she should. I was 100% positive that all she does when logging into these bank accounts is checking the balances to give to Greg but then never checks the transactions. I know this ‘cause, 1) I’ve observed Sally only logging in to write down the balances & then logging back out (she had some flimsy excuse ready when I asked her about it), 2) there have been auto debits that appeared in bank accounts that we didn’t find for weeks until I happened to see it for some reason & guess what? She never pointed those out to us, & 3) Sally hadn’t bothered to check the bank account balances since Greg was out of town, so clearly she only felt the need to check the balances. There’s strike two for noncompliance.
& even more bad mistakes or decisions:

1. At the end of Jan, we discovered that Sally had mailed the employees’ W2s to the managers’ home addresses instead of to the offices to distribute to their employees!
   
2. We had an office that moved locations to right across the street, so the only thing that changed in their address was their street number (12 Main Street instead of 11 Main Street). I explained this to Sally & gave her an updated list of the office’s addresses. 3 weeks later, we get a call from that office saying that mail we send to them keeps going to their landlord’s house. I check the address labels Sally had created for herself. Sure enough, it had the wrong address on them. I go to grab the lease, & at the top is where the tenant’s new address is listed. & all the way at the bottom of the page in the paragraph titled “RENT” where it lists where to send the rent is the landlord’s home address. & that’s the address Sally had chosen to be the new office’s address on her address labels.
   
3. Sally hadn’t been faxing the offices to ask for bills/receipts that never made it to us.
   
4. I used the last towel on a roll of paper towels, so I went to the cabinets to grab another. We were out. Sally is in charge of keeping track of supplies that need ordering, so I go to Sally & say we’re completely out of paper towels, we need to order some. Sally response: “No one ever tells me when they grab the last roll so I know when to order them.” Um, excuse me, since when is it our job to tell you to do your job? It’s your responsibility to keep track of supplies. You should be checking the level of paper towels, toilet paper, Kleenex, etc., to see when you need to order them.
   

So, I knew she needed a second warning write up for carelessness cause of the numerous mistakes since the first warning write up in the middle of Dec, & I would be giving Sally a first warning write up for negligence cause of her not asking the offices for missing bills & not writing the info on the bills I had told her to do at the end of Nov. However, it was only a few days from Feb, which was the time for performance reviews. So, rather than doing a write up now & then in a week or so doing a performance review that was one of the worst performance reviews I’ve ever heard of, I decided to just do it in one fell swoop. You know, just get it all out of the way with one bad conversation, one bad day, & then both of us can hopefully put it behind us & move on.
I decided to do the performance review & write ups on Feb 5 (Monday). It went much smoother ‘cause Greg was there, so Sally couldn’t really give me lip or lash out by showing attitude & anger like she had previously.
On Feb 7 (Wednesday), I log in to get the transactions for an office who is switching banks. I wanted to get an updated list of outstanding checks so they know how many checks are left before they can close the old bank account. & what do I see? Someone had used the bank account to pay $100 on their AT&T bill. I call the office & find out it was actually them, so no fraud there. But I then ask Sally if she had seen that when checking the bank accounts. She said she didn’t remember. Obviously, I have found my proof that she is either not checking them or isn’t paying attention when she does. I have a discussion with Greg about it, & we decide I need to have a sit down with her about her not doing her job. She is sick on Thursday, so I plan to talk with her the next day she comes in.
On Feb 9 (Friday), I begin the conversation about checking the bank accounts & how important it is. I am planning to say things like, we expect you to do this job, you’ve been told multiple times to do this task, if you’re not going to do the job, then you’re welcome to go find another one, etc. But she cuts me off at the beginning with an excuse of, “Well, I didn’t know what I should be looking for, now I know.” & it broke me. She does this exact thing every time I have to have a conversation with her. She has an excuse ready to go on the tip of her tongue, always spins it around so it’s not actually her fault. It’s always, “Well, I didn’t know that, but now, I do.” & I was just done. I didn’t continue the conversation, even though I needed to, ‘cause I just broke down in tears from the stress of having to discipline her & knowing that nothing will ever come of it, but having our hands legally tied to be able to fire her right now. I cried nonstop for over 4 hours.
On Feb 12 (Monday), I sat down to continue the conversation, this time with a written statement for her to sign.
Me: You respond a lot of the time that you don’t know how to do things, which is very frustrating, ‘cause you’ve been shown multiple times how to do these tasks. It’s very inefficient & wasteful that I have to constantly check all of your work & retrain you on the same thing over & over again. This needs to change. This job is about accuracy & accountability.
Sally: You’re not giving me a chance to improve. I never hear “Good job,” from you. All I ever hear is, “You’re doing a bad job, sign this paper.” I get in trouble every time I ask for help, so I guess I’ll just follow the instructions & hope I’m doing it right.
The problems with that response:

1. You’ve worked here for 2 years, Sally. You’ve had plenty of time to improve.
   
2. The reason you never hear “Good job” is ‘cause you’re not doing a good job. How am I supposed to tell you “Good job,” but also need to give you a write up for doing a bad job? If you’re getting multiple write ups for doing a bad job, don’t you think that’s a sign that something is wrong? I mean, she thinks that managers should be telling their employees good job on everything they do right. No, you’re expected to do these tasks. We’re not going to congratulate you every time you do your basic job requirements like some toddler that needs constant positive reinforcement so they know that doing something right is a good thing! You will hear “Good job” when you are doing a really good job on something, when you go above & beyond!! I mean, do you think Greg tells me “Good job” when I’m just doing my job as expected?!! NO!!! I’ve never had a manager constantly tell me “Good job” all the time!!!! (Whew. Sorry about that. Kinda went on a crazy rant there. I’m good now.)
   
3. Here’s another example of her mentality of “if I don’t do the job, I can’t get in trouble for doing it wrong.” She’s going to stop asking for help instead of using the help I’ve given her to do better. I mean, if you’re making these mistakes when you ARE asking for help, how many more are you going to make when you stop asking for help? How does this make any logical sense?!
   

Well, here’s another chance for some malicious compliance. She claimed she didn’t know how to check the bank accounts, right? Well, my job as the manager is to make sure my employees know how to do their job. So, I need to sit down with her & train her how to check the bank accounts. Again. Even though I know she already knows how to do it. So, every time you tell me that the reason why you didn’t do a job is ‘cause you didn’t know how to do it right, well, we’re going to sit down & waste both our times & annoy you having to be retrained on something you do, in fact, know how to do.
Sally continues making careless mistakes & not doing stuff she doesn’t think she should have to do. Like answering the phones. It’s her job to answer the phones; that’s something I as the manager should be delegating to her. However, she never answers the phone unless I literally can’t. So, I had asked her to start answering the phone more. She will wait until the last possible second before answering the phone. By that time, it’s already rung twice, so I have to answer it before it goes on any longer or they hang up. One time, we were both away from our desks when the phone rang. We both went to answer it, but she was closer & got to her desk before me, put her hand on the phone, & watched me until I got to my desk before she picked it up. With a comment of, “Oh, (laughs) I didn’t want to make you walk all the way to your desk.” Well, you did, anyway, you little jerk.
On Feb 27, Sally asks for help on a report. She says that my note stating the office is over-deposited $28 on report 1 but fixed on report 2 by being $28 under-deposited didn’t work out. She says that they were never over by $28 in the first place. I take the report to look it over. Her calculator tape adding up the deposits shows the bank is in balance, but I don’t see deposit slips.
Me: Where are the deposit slips?
Sally: I haven’t gotten them yet.
Me: (trying to comprehend her logic) Then how do you have the deposit amounts added on this tape?
Sally: I got the amounts from the report.
Me: You…(my brain trying not to implode at this point) you can’t add up amounts to see if the bank has too much or too little money in it without knowing what was actually taken to the bank. The amounts on the report don’t always equal what was taken to the bank.
I log into the bank account & discover just that: the report says they took $500 to the bank, but their deposit says $528. They were indeed $28 over-deposited. I then lecture her (for the second time in a few months) on the correct way to account for the deposits at the bank, that we are only to use the dollar amounts on the bank’s deposit receipt. (The first time was her getting the deposit amount from what was written on the deposit slip instead of what the bank gave us credit for on their printed receipt. The bank had shorted us $500, & we never knew until her deposits didn’t work out when reconciling the bank statement at the end of the month. We were missing $500 for 4 weeks! It’s a miracle we didn’t overdraw the account.)
Another task that we do several days a week is checking the CFPB website. This is a government website that uses federal regulations to monitor financial institutions. It’s like the Better Business Bureau, but more official. Customers can make complaints through them, prompting an investigation to make sure we’re following the federal guidelines. We have 2 weeks to respond to a complaint before it is past due.
On Feb 29, Greg just happens to be looking at an email inbox that he never checks, ‘cause after all, we’re checking the CFPB website, so he doesn’t have to look there, right? There is a complaint in 2 of the portals that have been in there since Jan 22. He immediately marches out & tells Sally about them.
Greg: Aren’t you checking the CFPB sites?
Sally: Yeah, I am.
Really? Then how come you didn’t print this complaint off to give to Greg in the last 6 weeks? She came back from lunch to a second warning write up given by me for negligence.
On Mar 5 (Tuesday), we are working on reconciling the bank statements so we can close the month of Feb. Sally brings me a Jan bank statement for an office.
Sally: This never cleared in Feb.
I look at the bank statement. It’s an electronic deposit of $254 on Jan 31. I remember this. She had asked me at the beginning of Feb why this deposit wasn’t recorded on the office’s report. I explained that since it didn’t show up in the bank account until the last day of Jan, they might not have known about it before the end of the month & so recorded it on the first of Feb. We will wait until the first report of Feb. If it’s still not recorded, then we’ll bring that to the office’s attention. & here she is, clearly telling me she hadn’t brought it to anyone’s attention all month long.
Me: (staring at the bank statement as I try to prevent my autistic brain from exploding at her while also trying to prevent a spontaneous stroke) You didn’t keep track of this all month?
Sally: Well, I didn’t know if it was treated differently ‘cause it was OTBP (One Time Bill Pay, which is the electronic deposit). (Oh, what a shocker, she once again didn’t know how to do something.)
Me: But we talked about this. If it wasn’t on the first of the month, we needed to address it.
Sally: Okay, well, now I know that we treat this the same as other deposits. (goes nonchalantly back to her desk like it was no big deal, like she hadn’t just revealed she had once again disobeyed my detailed instructions)
Me: (seeing her flagrant disregard for the seriousness of the situation & wondering just how on earth she could once again think that not doing her job would have no consequences) This is exactly what Greg talks about over & over, about how we can’t leave errors like this to sit for weeks & weeks, that these need to be dealt with as they happen.
Sally: (still as easy-going as if she had simply used the wrong color highlighter) Okay, I’ll make note of that.
Now, I am getting really pissed off. She keeps saying, “Oh, now I know that OTBP is treated the same as everything else.” That doesn’t matter! It doesn’t matter that you didn’t know it’s treated the same! I specifically told you to take care of it if it didn’t appear on the first of Feb! It didn’t matter what kind of deposit it was! I said to tell me if it wasn’t on the first of Feb!
Now, this was right before she leaves at 3:30, so by the time I’m finished with my text conversation with Greg (‘cause he isn’t there that afternoon), she has already left. But I’m telling Greg that I have once again caught her being negligent, & she’s already had 2 written warnings about this, which means our next step is letting her go. Not to mention, her carelessness is still continuing. He said that he supports my decision to let her go. By the way, the final decision happened an hour after she left. If I had known before she left that we were indeed going to fire her, I would have done it before she left so she didn’t have to come all the way to work in the morning just to leave again.
So, on Mar 6 (Wednesday), I arrive early to work so I can be prepared. I am standing at my desk, watching her come in. This is unusual, so she frowns as she approaches me.
Me: Sally, we need to talk.
Sally: (still frowns at me)
Me: (handing her the typed up notice) We are going to read this together. “When reconciling the month of Jan, around Feb 5, it was brought to my attention that we had a deposit that hadn’t been reconciled. I gave you instructions to wait a report to see if it works out. If not, you would need to bring it to mine & the office’s attention for further instructions. This wasn’t done. It wasn’t until Mar 5 that you brought this to my attention again. You have been told many times the importance of reconciling the financials of the office. You have been warned several times of negligence. This is another example of negligence with respect to your job. All you had to do was follow my instructions. It is for this reason that it is now time to terminate your employment.”
Sally: When did you tell me to do this?
Me: (thinking, “Um, I kinda just told you when I told you do that, but, okay.”) When you showed me the Jan bank statement—
Sally: Yesterday?!
Me: You showed me the Jan bank statement a month ago when you were reconciling Jan. I told you to wait for the first of Feb & then—
Sally: You did no such thing!
Me: Yes, I did, Sally.
Sally: When does Greg get here?
Me: Around 9, like usual.
Sally: I’m calling him, ‘cause this is ridiculous. You’ve had it out for me from the very beginning.
Me: No, I haven’t.
Sally: Yeah, you have. Just like the other 2. (sets her bags at the front door, goes outside, & calls Greg)

1. How could I have had it out for you from the very beginning when we didn’t have problems for the first year & a half you worked here? If I’d had it out for you from the beginning, you wouldn’t have had a job the past 6 months. Need I remind you what Greg told you about the timesheet thing being something we fire someone for on the spot, but that Molly had gone to bat for you & gave you a second chance? Why would I have done that if I had wanted you gone from the start?
   
2. “Just like the other 2.” She’s talking about Irene (who had left in Feb 2023) & another employee (who we’ll call Phil). Phil had been fired (by Greg, by the way) for continuing to watch movies on his phone at his desk despite being told multiple times by Greg to not do that. & Irene? She wasn’t fired. She gave her 2 weeks’ notice. & we then discovered when going through the work she’s been doing as we started taking over her tasks that she didn’t just not do jobs. She would actually forge the work so she wouldn’t have to work. “A bank imbalance of $2.65? Well, I’ll just add it to the imbalance that’s been building up for who knows how many months & just label it as an over-deposit from the end of the month. That way, I don’t have to look into why the bank isn’t balancing.” But no, I had it out for them, apparently.
   
3. Does she really think that calling Greg was gonna reverse my firing her? Does she really think I would do something as drastic as writing her up or firing her without discussing it with my supervisor first? Did she really think I would do this behind his back?
   

Apparently, she did, ‘cause Greg confirmed that Sally tried telling him about all the stuff I’ve been doing to her as if he didn’t know. She hung up on him when he explained that he’s been told everything as it happens & he supports this decision.
Sally: (storming back into the office & towards her desk) I’m not signing anything.
Me: Ok.
Sally begins packing up her desk. I had known she kept a lot of personal items at the office, so I had gotten a big box or 2 out & placed them nearby for her to use to pack up her desk.
Me: We can give you a box if you need it.
Sally: I don’t need sh** from you guys.
Me: The only thing we’ll need is your office key.
Sally: You’ll get it when you get it. I’m packing my desk.
Me: Ok.
I go back to work, keeping an eye on her as she packs to make sure she doesn’t take anything she’s not supposed to or damage any company property. Sally at some point decides to use the boxes she didn’t want from us to pack up her many items. She takes both boxes to the front door where her bags are & sets them down to put the last of her things in. She picks up one box to take outside.
Sally: You are the worst manager ever. (goes out the door)
Me: (shrug)
Sally: (comes back in for the final box) Seriously, you’re the most evil person I’ve ever met. (leaves)
Really? I rank worse than the guy that beat you up? I’m worse than him?
I continued watching her to see if she’s going to come back to give up her office key. As she packed up her car, another employee had arrived (we’ll call him Randy). He had run into her on the way in & asks me if Sally quit. I explained, no, she was let go. I then see that Sally has gotten behind the wheel of her car without coming back to give us the office key.
Me: Well, I guess we’ll just change the locks.
Randy then takes it upon himself to go out to her car. He phrased it very gently by saying he wanted to spare her having to come back in to turn the key in.
Sally: I guess Molly didn’t have the balls to do it herself. (hands the key over)
& then…she was gone. Despite having to do the entire corporate office’s work all by myself & falling steadily behind little by little, I have never been more happy. I had forgotten how much I loved my job & how much I couldn’t wait to get to work. I haven’t been this stress-free in 6 months, & it feels fantastic! & the great part is, I’m not really falling as far behind as I expected to without her. Having to do 2 people’s jobs by myself is only affecting me a little. Really goes to show you how bad she was for the company & for my job when she disrupted everything that much. For example, me & her would get through maybe 5 to 6 offices’ reports between us in a single day when playing catch up after closing the previous month. One day? I caught up on 10 offices’ reports in a single day. By myself.
Oh, did I mention she smoked marijuana most days on her way to work or while on her lunch break? We could never actually prove it. But, come on, you don’t smell that strongly of marijuana on only select days if you aren’t smoking it recently. If it was leftover from the smell of your house or car, you would smell like that every day. But it was only some days she would come into work or back from lunch smelling like that. Obviously, smoking on the job. So very glad to be rid of her & her awful skunk smell. Although, I do wish her well on a new job search. I don’t wish ill on anyone, ever. But I am just glad she’s no longer my problem to deal with.
(Added 2 months after she was fired): By the way, I am actually gaining on my work. I’m not only not behind on my work, I’m actually getting it done soon enough to work on extra stuff. Also, out of the blue, we’ve started getting about 3 to 4 sales & scam calls every day since Sally left (for things like better Medicare benefits, better retirement benefits, & even one time recently where “Walgreens” was calling to ask if I still had diabetes). I’m convinced Sally signed us up for calls as retaliation. I hope they die down soon, especially as they are starting to get rude. (Our response to every one of these is “Sorry, this is a business.” This one guy responded to me with, “This is my job.” I said, “I understand this is your job, but this is a business. I am not allowed to take personal calls.” He said, “Why?” I said very slowly & firmly, “Because I’m working!” He started to say, “Can you explain to me why—” I hung up. Jerk.)

I’m desperate for answers 😭 I’m generally tweaking because I feel like I’m doing something wrong like I am the problem…
My boyfriend is really sweet and started our relationship with crazy princess treatment. We hang out almost every day and text constantly; he needs constant updates about what I'm doing. He tells me when he’s in his car, about to shower, etc., and expects me to do the same. For me, that's a bit too much.
He's very protective, always holding onto me in public to show I'm his girl because sometimes men will look at me. I think he knows I could do better on physical attraction, not gonna lie.
It’s only been a month, but he acts like we’re married. He gets annoyed if I hang up the phone without saying goodbye and telling him who’s calling. I can’t have or talk to my guy friends when he’s around, which feels restrictive.
Whenever I express my needs, he says "we both need" instead of addressing my feelings individually. For example, yesterday I was busy washing my hair, blow drying it, and on FaceTime with friends, so I didn’t text him for 3-4 hours. He knew I was busy, but when I called him later, he was upset and said, "If you didn’t call me in five minutes, I would've gone to sleep." I felt guilty but realized I needed space.
This morning, he apologized for making me feel bad, and I said I needed some space to think. He responded with, "I feel we both need space to recollect ourselves." This is the second time he’s done this when I address an issue about how he made me feel.
What does he need space for? How should I handle a situation where my boyfriend says we both need what I need instead of addressing my feelings individually?
TL;DR: My boyfriend is sweet but extremely attentive and protective, expecting constant updates and restricting interactions with male friends. He often says "we both need" when I express my individual needs. It's been only a month, but I feel overwhelmed by his level of commitment. How should I handle this?

So, here is part 2 of my entitled employee story. We left off with discovering Sally’s retaliation of giving me trash as a Christmas gift after her latest write-up.
So, the next several weeks, I am noticing more problems, but here’s some of the highlights.

1. Ever since we had issues of the office’s checks going randomly missing, Sally had apparently decided to just stop throwing any envelope away when opening the mail. She would supposedly search the envelopes/paperwork & then keep the envelopes with the paperwork. So, instead of doing her job better, she would decide to just stop doing the job at all. After all, you can’t get in trouble for screwing it up if you aren’t doing it, right? However, this resulted in items getting left with the paperwork (which sometimes wouldn’t get touched for several weeks due to being busy) that had needed to be collected or addressed right away.
   
2. Sally’s careless mistakes continued at about the same rate (average of 2 to 3 a week). She would put deposit slips/emails with the wrong office’s report, put one office’s mail in another office’s bin, put one office’s funding papers in another office’s bin, put one office’s bills in the folder for their correspondence & vice versa, put one office’s bills in the folder for another office’s bills, put the new month’s bills in the folder without taking out the old month’s bills so they would get mixed up. I could go on & on.
   
3. Sally would still ask for help on things she shouldn’t need help on anymore, ‘cause I had helped her many times on items exactly like it in the 2 years she’s worked here. I mean, the whole point of asking for help when learning new things on a job is so you can take the input you’re given & use it to get better at the job so you don’t have to ask for help anymore. I mean, what kind of office works by their employees constantly needing to be walked through everything every day? Sally would even ask for help on things no one would need to ask for help on. For example, she asked me, “An office took a deposit to the bank without showing it on their report. How do I write that up in the letter to fax to them?” Um, exactly what you just said to me. Or another time, she asks how long she should wait before calling an office back. Well, how long do you think you should give them? Just use your good judgment. You don’t need help with that! Again, you’ve been here 2 years!
   

On Jan 26, I take the Dec bills, correspondence faxes, & timesheets out of their folders to scan them into the computer. Now, one thing the bills should always have on them are the check number used to pay for this purchase & the date it was paid. The offices themselves are supposed to write this on there, but they don’t always, which is why it is our job to write it on there if it’s missing. I had noticed when I scanned Nov’s bills around Nov 30 that a lot of Sally’s offices don’t have that info written on them. So, I explained to her what needed to be written on every bill/receipt. I now flip through the Dec & Jan bills of her offices really quick to check them. There are quite a few of them with no info written down on them. There’s strike one for noncompliance.
Another task we would do several days a week (that’s Sally’s responsibility) is to check the bank accounts online. She is to look at the bank balances & report any low balances to Greg (or me if Greg isn’t there). She is then to look at the transactions in order to see if anything looks fraudulent. Since we are a loan company, check fraud is very common for us. So, we look at the checks for anything funny-looking, & we look to see if there are any auto debits (like when you use your bank account online to pay for a bill) that would tell us if someone got hold of our bank account info.
On Jan 30, at 1:15 p.m., I asked if any of the bank balances were low (Greg was out of town for a few days). Sally said she had forgotten to check the bank accounts that morning. Weird, ‘cause you had to check the Dallas office to make sure the money we sent them had shown up. How did you get the login sheet out to look in their bank account but then forget about checking all the bank accounts? This just further cemented in my mind that she was NOT checking these bank accounts the way she should. I was 100% positive that all she does when logging into these bank accounts is checking the balances to give to Greg but then never checks the transactions. I know this ‘cause, 1) I’ve observed Sally only logging in to write down the balances & then logging back out (she had some flimsy excuse ready when I asked her about it), 2) there have been auto debits that appeared in bank accounts that we didn’t find for weeks until I happened to see it for some reason & guess what? She never pointed those out to us, & 3) Sally hadn’t bothered to check the bank account balances since Greg was out of town, so clearly she only felt the need to check the balances. There’s strike two for noncompliance.
& even more bad mistakes or decisions:

1. At the end of Jan, we discovered that Sally had mailed the employees’ W2s to the managers’ home addresses instead of to the offices to distribute to their employees!
   
2. We had an office that moved locations to right across the street, so the only thing that changed in their address was their street number (12 Main Street instead of 11 Main Street). I explained this to Sally & gave her an updated list of the office’s addresses. 3 weeks later, we get a call from that office saying that mail we send to them keeps going to their landlord’s house. I check the address labels Sally had created for herself. Sure enough, it had the wrong address on them. I go to grab the lease, & at the top is where the tenant’s new address is listed. & all the way at the bottom of the page in the paragraph titled “RENT” where it lists where to send the rent is the landlord’s home address. & that’s the address Sally had chosen to be the new office’s address on her address labels.
   
3. Sally hadn’t been faxing the offices to ask for bills/receipts that never made it to us.
   
4. I used the last towel on a roll of paper towels, so I went to the cabinets to grab another. We were out. Sally is in charge of keeping track of supplies that need ordering, so I go to Sally & say we’re completely out of paper towels, we need to order some. Sally response: “No one ever tells me when they grab the last roll so I know when to order them.” Um, excuse me, since when is it our job to tell you to do your job? It’s your responsibility to keep track of supplies. You should be checking the level of paper towels, toilet paper, Kleenex, etc., to see when you need to order them.
   

So, I knew she needed a second warning write up for carelessness cause of the numerous mistakes since the first warning write up in the middle of Dec, & I would be giving Sally a first warning write up for negligence cause of her not asking the offices for missing bills & not writing the info on the bills I had told her to do at the end of Nov. However, it was only a few days from Feb, which was the time for performance reviews. So, rather than doing a write up now & then in a week or so doing a performance review that was one of the worst performance reviews I’ve ever heard of, I decided to just do it in one fell swoop. You know, just get it all out of the way with one bad conversation, one bad day, & then both of us can hopefully put it behind us & move on.
I decided to do the performance review & write ups on Feb 5 (Monday). It went much smoother ‘cause Greg was there, so Sally couldn’t really give me lip or lash out by showing attitude & anger like she had previously.
On Feb 7 (Wednesday), I log in to get the transactions for an office who is switching banks. I wanted to get an updated list of outstanding checks so they know how many checks are left before they can close the old bank account. & what do I see? Someone had used the bank account to pay $100 on their AT&T bill. I call the office & find out it was actually them, so no fraud there. But I then ask Sally if she had seen that when checking the bank accounts. She said she didn’t remember. Obviously, I have found my proof that she is either not checking them or isn’t paying attention when she does. I have a discussion with Greg about it, & we decide I need to have a sit down with her about her not doing her job. She is sick on Thursday, so I plan to talk with her the next day she comes in.
On Feb 9 (Friday), I begin the conversation about checking the bank accounts & how important it is. I am planning to say things like, we expect you to do this job, you’ve been told multiple times to do this task, if you’re not going to do the job, then you’re welcome to go find another one, etc. But she cuts me off at the beginning with an excuse of, “Well, I didn’t know what I should be looking for, now I know.” & it broke me. She does this exact thing every time I have to have a conversation with her. She has an excuse ready to go on the tip of her tongue, always spins it around so it’s not actually her fault. It’s always, “Well, I didn’t know that, but now, I do.” & I was just done. I didn’t continue the conversation, even though I needed to, ‘cause I just broke down in tears from the stress of having to discipline her & knowing that nothing will ever come of it, but having our hands legally tied to be able to fire her right now. I cried nonstop for over 4 hours.
On Feb 12 (Monday), I sat down to continue the conversation, this time with a written statement for her to sign.
Me: You respond a lot of the time that you don’t know how to do things, which is very frustrating, ‘cause you’ve been shown multiple times how to do these tasks. It’s very inefficient & wasteful that I have to constantly check all of your work & retrain you on the same thing over & over again. This needs to change. This job is about accuracy & accountability.
Sally: You’re not giving me a chance to improve. I never hear “Good job,” from you. All I ever hear is, “You’re doing a bad job, sign this paper.” I get in trouble every time I ask for help, so I guess I’ll just follow the instructions & hope I’m doing it right.
The problems with that response:

1. You’ve worked here for 2 years, Sally. You’ve had plenty of time to improve.
   
2. The reason you never hear “Good job” is ‘cause you’re not doing a good job. How am I supposed to tell you “Good job,” but also need to give you a write up for doing a bad job? If you’re getting multiple write ups for doing a bad job, don’t you think that’s a sign that something is wrong? I mean, she thinks that managers should be telling their employees good job on everything they do right. No, you’re expected to do these tasks. We’re not going to congratulate you every time you do your basic job requirements like some toddler that needs constant positive reinforcement so they know that doing something right is a good thing! You will hear “Good job” when you are doing a really good job on something, when you go above & beyond!! I mean, do you think Greg tells me “Good job” when I’m just doing my job as expected?!! NO!!! I’ve never had a manager constantly tell me “Good job” all the time!!!! (Whew. Sorry about that. Kinda went on a crazy rant there. I’m good now.)
   
3. Here’s another example of her mentality of “if I don’t do the job, I can’t get in trouble for doing it wrong.” She’s going to stop asking for help instead of using the help I’ve given her to do better. I mean, if you’re making these mistakes when you ARE asking for help, how many more are you going to make when you stop asking for help? How does this make any logical sense?!
   

Well, here’s another chance for some malicious compliance. She claimed she didn’t know how to check the bank accounts, right? Well, my job as the manager is to make sure my employees know how to do their job. So, I need to sit down with her & train her how to check the bank accounts. Again. Even though I know she already knows how to do it. So, every time you tell me that the reason why you didn’t do a job is ‘cause you didn’t know how to do it right, well, we’re going to sit down & waste both our times & annoy you having to be retrained on something you do, in fact, know how to do.
Sally continues making careless mistakes & not doing stuff she doesn’t think she should have to do. Like answering the phones. It’s her job to answer the phones; that’s something I as the manager should be delegating to her. However, she never answers the phone unless I literally can’t. So, I had asked her to start answering the phone more. She will wait until the last possible second before answering the phone. By that time, it’s already rung twice, so I have to answer it before it goes on any longer or they hang up. One time, we were both away from our desks when the phone rang. We both went to answer it, but she was closer & got to her desk before me, put her hand on the phone, & watched me until I got to my desk before she picked it up. With a comment of, “Oh, (laughs) I didn’t want to make you walk all the way to your desk.” Well, you did, anyway, you little jerk.
On Feb 27, Sally asks for help on a report. She says that my note stating the office is over-deposited $28 on report 1 but fixed on report 2 by being $28 under-deposited didn’t work out. She says that they were never over by $28 in the first place. I take the report to look it over. Her calculator tape adding up the deposits shows the bank is in balance, but I don’t see deposit slips.
Me: Where are the deposit slips?
Sally: I haven’t gotten them yet.
Me: (trying to comprehend her logic) Then how do you have the deposit amounts added on this tape?
Sally: I got the amounts from the report.
Me: You…(my brain trying not to implode at this point) you can’t add up amounts to see if the bank has too much or too little money in it without knowing what was actually taken to the bank. The amounts on the report don’t always equal what was taken to the bank.
I log into the bank account & discover just that: the report says they took $500 to the bank, but their deposit says $528. They were indeed $28 over-deposited. I then lecture her (for the second time in a few months) on the correct way to account for the deposits at the bank, that we are only to use the dollar amounts on the bank’s deposit receipt. (The first time was her getting the deposit amount from what was written on the deposit slip instead of what the bank gave us credit for on their printed receipt. The bank had shorted us $500, & we never knew until her deposits didn’t work out when reconciling the bank statement at the end of the month. We were missing $500 for 4 weeks! It’s a miracle we didn’t overdraw the account.)
Another task that we do several days a week is checking the CFPB website. This is a government website that uses federal regulations to monitor financial institutions. It’s like the Better Business Bureau, but more official. Customers can make complaints through them, prompting an investigation to make sure we’re following the federal guidelines. We have 2 weeks to respond to a complaint before it is past due.
On Feb 29, Greg just happens to be looking at an email inbox that he never checks, ‘cause after all, we’re checking the CFPB website, so he doesn’t have to look there, right? There is a complaint in 2 of the portals that have been in there since Jan 22. He immediately marches out & tells Sally about them.
Greg: Aren’t you checking the CFPB sites?
Sally: Yeah, I am.
Really? Then how come you didn’t print this complaint off to give to Greg in the last 6 weeks? She came back from lunch to a second warning write up given by me for negligence.
On Mar 5 (Tuesday), we are working on reconciling the bank statements so we can close the month of Feb. Sally brings me a Jan bank statement for an office.
Sally: This never cleared in Feb.
I look at the bank statement. It’s an electronic deposit of $254 on Jan 31. I remember this. She had asked me at the beginning of Feb why this deposit wasn’t recorded on the office’s report. I explained that since it didn’t show up in the bank account until the last day of Jan, they might not have known about it before the end of the month & so recorded it on the first of Feb. We will wait until the first report of Feb. If it’s still not recorded, then we’ll bring that to the office’s attention. & here she is, clearly telling me she hadn’t brought it to anyone’s attention all month long.
Me: (staring at the bank statement as I try to prevent my autistic brain from exploding at her while also trying to prevent a spontaneous stroke) You didn’t keep track of this all month?
Sally: Well, I didn’t know if it was treated differently ‘cause it was OTBP (One Time Bill Pay, which is the electronic deposit). (Oh, what a shocker, she once again didn’t know how to do something.)
Me: But we talked about this. If it wasn’t on the first of the month, we needed to address it.
Sally: Okay, well, now I know that we treat this the same as other deposits. (goes nonchalantly back to her desk like it was no big deal, like she hadn’t just revealed she had once again disobeyed my detailed instructions)
Me: (seeing her flagrant disregard for the seriousness of the situation & wondering just how on earth she could once again think that not doing her job would have no consequences) This is exactly what Greg talks about over & over, about how we can’t leave errors like this to sit for weeks & weeks, that these need to be dealt with as they happen.
Sally: (still as easy-going as if she had simply used the wrong color highlighter) Okay, I’ll make note of that.
Now, I am getting really pissed off. She keeps saying, “Oh, now I know that OTBP is treated the same as everything else.” That doesn’t matter! It doesn’t matter that you didn’t know it’s treated the same! I specifically told you to take care of it if it didn’t appear on the first of Feb! It didn’t matter what kind of deposit it was! I said to tell me if it wasn’t on the first of Feb!
Now, this was right before she leaves at 3:30, so by the time I’m finished with my text conversation with Greg (‘cause he isn’t there that afternoon), she has already left. But I’m telling Greg that I have once again caught her being negligent, & she’s already had 2 written warnings about this, which means our next step is letting her go. Not to mention, her carelessness is still continuing. He said that he supports my decision to let her go. By the way, the final decision happened an hour after she left. If I had known before she left that we were indeed going to fire her, I would have done it before she left so she didn’t have to come all the way to work in the morning just to leave again.
So, on Mar 6 (Wednesday), I arrive early to work so I can be prepared. I am standing at my desk, watching her come in. This is unusual, so she frowns as she approaches me.
Me: Sally, we need to talk.
Sally: (still frowns at me)
Me: (handing her the typed up notice) We are going to read this together. “When reconciling the month of Jan, around Feb 5, it was brought to my attention that we had a deposit that hadn’t been reconciled. I gave you instructions to wait a report to see if it works out. If not, you would need to bring it to mine & the office’s attention for further instructions. This wasn’t done. It wasn’t until Mar 5 that you brought this to my attention again. You have been told many times the importance of reconciling the financials of the office. You have been warned several times of negligence. This is another example of negligence with respect to your job. All you had to do was follow my instructions. It is for this reason that it is now time to terminate your employment.”
Sally: When did you tell me to do this?
Me: (thinking, “Um, I kinda just told you when I told you do that, but, okay.”) When you showed me the Jan bank statement—
Sally: Yesterday?!
Me: You showed me the Jan bank statement a month ago when you were reconciling Jan. I told you to wait for the first of Feb & then—
Sally: You did no such thing!
Me: Yes, I did, Sally.
Sally: When does Greg get here?
Me: Around 9, like usual.
Sally: I’m calling him, ‘cause this is ridiculous. You’ve had it out for me from the very beginning.
Me: No, I haven’t.
Sally: Yeah, you have. Just like the other 2. (sets her bags at the front door, goes outside, & calls Greg)

1. How could I have had it out for you from the very beginning when we didn’t have problems for the first year & a half you worked here? If I’d had it out for you from the beginning, you wouldn’t have had a job the past 6 months. Need I remind you what Greg told you about the timesheet thing being something we fire someone for on the spot, but that Molly had gone to bat for you & gave you a second chance? Why would I have done that if I had wanted you gone from the start?
   
2. “Just like the other 2.” She’s talking about Irene (who had left in Feb 2023) & another employee (who we’ll call Phil). Phil had been fired (by Greg, by the way) for continuing to watch movies on his phone at his desk despite being told multiple times by Greg to not do that. & Irene? She wasn’t fired. She gave her 2 weeks’ notice. & we then discovered when going through the work she’s been doing as we started taking over her tasks that she didn’t just not do jobs. She would actually forge the work so she wouldn’t have to work. “A bank imbalance of $2.65? Well, I’ll just add it to the imbalance that’s been building up for who knows how many months & just label it as an over-deposit from the end of the month. That way, I don’t have to look into why the bank isn’t balancing.” But no, I had it out for them, apparently.
   
3. Does she really think that calling Greg was gonna reverse my firing her? Does she really think I would do something as drastic as writing her up or firing her without discussing it with my supervisor first? Did she really think I would do this behind his back?
   

Apparently, she did, ‘cause Greg confirmed that Sally tried telling him about all the stuff I’ve been doing to her as if he didn’t know. She hung up on him when he explained that he’s been told everything as it happens & he supports this decision.
Sally: (storming back into the office & towards her desk) I’m not signing anything.
Me: Ok.
Sally begins packing up her desk. I had known she kept a lot of personal items at the office, so I had gotten a big box or 2 out & placed them nearby for her to use to pack up her desk.
Me: We can give you a box if you need it.
Sally: I don’t need sh** from you guys.
Me: The only thing we’ll need is your office key.
Sally: You’ll get it when you get it. I’m packing my desk.
Me: Ok.
I go back to work, keeping an eye on her as she packs to make sure she doesn’t take anything she’s not supposed to or damage any company property. Sally at some point decides to use the boxes she didn’t want from us to pack up her many items. She takes both boxes to the front door where her bags are & sets them down to put the last of her things in. She picks up one box to take outside.
Sally: You are the worst manager ever. (goes out the door)
Me: (shrug)
Sally: (comes back in for the final box) Seriously, you’re the most evil person I’ve ever met. (leaves)
Really? I rank worse than the guy that beat you up? I’m worse than him?
I continued watching her to see if she’s going to come back to give up her office key. As she packed up her car, another employee had arrived (we’ll call him Randy). He had run into her on the way in & asks me if Sally quit. I explained, no, she was let go. I then see that Sally has gotten behind the wheel of her car without coming back to give us the office key.
Me: Well, I guess we’ll just change the locks.
Randy then takes it upon himself to go out to her car. He phrased it very gently by saying he wanted to spare her having to come back in to turn the key in.
Sally: I guess Molly didn’t have the balls to do it herself. (hands the key over)
& then…she was gone. Despite having to do the entire corporate office’s work all by myself & falling steadily behind little by little, I have never been more happy. I had forgotten how much I loved my job & how much I couldn’t wait to get to work. I haven’t been this stress-free in 6 months, & it feels fantastic! & the great part is, I’m not really falling as far behind as I expected to without her. Having to do 2 people’s jobs by myself is only affecting me a little. Really goes to show you how bad she was for the company & for my job when she disrupted everything that much. For example, me & her would get through maybe 5 to 6 offices’ reports between us in a single day when playing catch up after closing the previous month. One day? I caught up on 10 offices’ reports in a single day. By myself.
Oh, did I mention she smoked marijuana most days on her way to work or while on her lunch break? We could never actually prove it. But, come on, you don’t smell that strongly of marijuana on only select days if you aren’t smoking it recently. If it was leftover from the smell of your house or car, you would smell like that every day. But it was only some days she would come into work or back from lunch smelling like that. Obviously, smoking on the job. So very glad to be rid of her & her awful skunk smell. Although, I do wish her well on a new job search. I don’t wish ill on anyone, ever. But I am just glad she’s no longer my problem to deal with.
(Added 2 months after she was fired): By the way, I am actually gaining on my work. I’m not only not behind on my work, I’m actually getting it done soon enough to work on extra stuff. Also, out of the blue, we’ve started getting about 3 to 4 sales & scam calls every day since Sally left (for things like better Medicare benefits, better retirement benefits, & even one time recently where “Walgreens” was calling to ask if I still had diabetes). I’m convinced Sally signed us up for calls as retaliation. I hope they die down soon, especially as they are starting to get rude. (Our response to every one of these is “Sorry, this is a business.” This one guy responded to me with, “This is my job.” I said, “I understand this is your job, but this is a business. I am not allowed to take personal calls.” He said, “Why?” I said very slowly & firmly, “Because I’m working!” He started to say, “Can you explain to me why—” I hung up. Jerk.)

Welcome to the weekly match thread!
In this thread, we encourage you to share stories about how your match(es) went: wins, losses, crazy saves, defender blunders/goal line clears—whatever you’d like to share! Take us through the good and the bad in this thread each week.
Note that for this thread, you should post a text based account of your story. If you have videos/pictures to share, we encourage you to make that a post of its own and link to it with your written account of the match.
So, keepers, how were your matches this week?

My boyfriend is really sweet and started our relationship with crazy princess treatment. We hang out almost every day and text constantly; he needs constant updates about what I'm doing. He tells me when he’s in his car, about to shower, etc., and expects me to do the same. For me, that's a bit too much.
He's very protective, always holding onto me in public to show I'm his girl. I think he knows I could do better on physical attraction, not gonna lie.
It’s only been a month, but he acts like we’re married. He gets annoyed if I hang up the phone without saying goodbye and telling him who’s calling. I can’t have or talk to my guy friends when he’s around, which feels restrictive.
Whenever I express my needs, he says "we both need" instead of addressing my feelings individually. For example, yesterday I was busy washing my hair, blow drying it, and on FaceTime with friends, so I didn’t text him for 3-4 hours. He knew I was busy, but when I called him later, he was upset and said, "If you didn’t call me in five minutes, I would've gone to sleep." I felt guilty but realized I needed space.
This morning, he apologized for making me feel bad, and I said I needed some space to think. He responded with, "I feel we both need space to recollect ourselves." This is the second time he’s done this when I address an issue about how he made me feel.
What does he need space for?
TL;DR: My boyfriend is sweet but extremely attentive and protective, expecting constant updates and restricting interactions with male friends. He often says "we both need" when I express my individual needs. It's been only a month, but I feel overwhelmed by his level of commitment. How should I handle this? ed" when I express my needs, making me feel overwhelmed. How should I handle this?

I'm Lewis, 29M from the UK and I'm on the search for a meaningful long term friendship. Someone who wants to take the time to get to know each other on a deeper level and wants to learn about each other. The kind of friendship that feels clingy in the sense you're always wanting to talk because you enjoy their presence in your life. I'm also looking for someone who wants to message daily and share what's going on in each others life.
I don't have many preferences, all I ask is that you're 21+ as I'm looking for someone around my age who has similar life experiences, 21-37 please. Timezones don't matter to me much as I have a crazy schedule so I'm awake at all hours of the day.
I don't want to put too much here as I'd rather enjoy talking to you and getting to know you that way rather than walls of text. I enjoy being outdoors, playing video games, listening to music, cycling, computer programming and enjoy deep thought provoking conversations. I have a dark sense of humour and can be very blunt at times. I consider myself to be a very loyal person. I've been hurt but if you get on my good side, you're stuck with me. I'm also 420 friendly. I have a pet cat called Levi (bonus points if you guess where the name is from).
Here's a picture of me: https://imgur.com/a/Z17J0qs
Let's break the ice by telling me what's been going on in your life lately, plans for 2024 or what show you're currently watching. Please include a photo of yourself as I like to put a face to things and know who I'm speaking to.

I've not read Infinite Jest since I was a teenager, and I've recently started a job where I can listen to stuff on headphones the whole time so I've been blowing through audiobooks and podcasts like crazy. I really want to give this book a listen and I've heard good things about it's narration in the audiobook version. However I'm kind of confused about how the endnotes are handled.
From what I gather there's a version where the endnotes come as an attached pdf, which doesn't work for me because I can't really stop what I'm doing whilst working to read it. And there's another version with the endnotes in a seperate audio file to the main text. This is better but still far from ideal as I can't really be pausing and fiddling with switching the file that's playing every few minutes, knowing how frequent they eventually become it would get frustrating and also interrupt my flow at work.
Does anyone know if there's a version of the audiobook with the endnotes inserted into the main text so it just flows continuously? It seems very strange if not because they are an essential part of the book and not an optional attachment, as the releases of the audiobook seem to suggest.

So long story short I broke up with my boyfriend on the 7th of may so two weeks ago and I’ll start by saying he was absolutely wonderful and we had an extremely healthy relationship. I ended it because I am chronically depressed I have BPD and a host of other mental health issues however I never treated him horribly or lied, when I felt myself going into a bpd episode I’d just withdraw and explain to him, we were together a year and half, however towards the end I started to realise that I was spiralling and I was not as healed as I believed and that if this continued I was going to hurt him just by being emotionally up and down I won’t bore you with the details but when we did breakup we sat and spoke for hours, were calm and expressed how much we had helped each other grow in just a year, and how much we loved and respected one another, he obviously didn’t want it to end but he understood and respected my decision and even said he knows he has stuff to work on before commitng into a long term relationship he just didn’t want to admit it beforehand because our relationship was so good.
Anyways it’s two weeks later I am utterly depressed first week was actually okay but this week…he was the only person I have in my life to speak to and now I’m so stressed and depressed and wished I hadn’t said we shouldn’t text each other anymore, needless I have texted him a couple times and he’s replied it’s been very simple ‘how are you’ conversations but the conversations don’t go much further and he hasn’t messaged me once only replied to my messages so I get the feeling he wants to be left alone
But today I really want to text him or meet for coffe but I’m scared it might mess with his head or he’ll just be annoyed by my message or think that I’m some crazy undesicive girl - what should I do ?!!!! Any advice would be so appreciated

sorry this is really long id appreciate any support from anyone willing to spend the time reading though, also feel free to skim.
my ex(21f) left me(20m) a week or two ago, it was really toxic. she's diagnosed w bpd but clearly has much worse issues.
ive been feeling really empty without her. the things we'd watch together and do together all feel lonely now without her around and im having trouble finding myself engaging in my interests without being distracted thinking of her.
she emotionally cheated on her ex with me before breaking up w him and dating me which I didn't process that way at the time because she would make justifications that its ok because he has a cuck fetish etc but it made him uncomfortable so it was definitely not in the bounds of that.
around a month into dating me she started getting drunk once a week or so and would yell at me. during the first time she said i was gonna blame my experience with my physically abusive ex, who also had bpd and npd symptoms, on her. i had never blamed her for any of these things though and at the time i remember thinking it felt like a red flag that she was openly accusing me of something that never happened saying it will in the future since it felt more likely that she may end up becoming in some ways abusive in the future if thats how she's acting, sadly that worry came true.
the getting drunk and yelling at me continued a lot. i dont even remember a lot of the times because they just started melding together because of my ptsd.
she hid her friend getting cheated on in order to protect the friend who fucked her bf, and herself for keeping it to herself while it happened for months. she said i just took it personally when i explained how her mocking me had hurt my feelings and was being extreme gaslighty about it saying how i was telling her what she meant by it and that if i feel something then it must be true. what she was referring to was me explaining that she called the thing she mocked icky and was mocking it because of feelings of it being icky to her and that mocking me for that reason inherently is still mocking me for judgemental reasons even if it was meant to not be mean or tease me and that most people would be hurt in a situation where they get mocked for 20 minutes about something that she also already knew i was embarrassed about. my explanation was pretty valid and not claiming anything about how she felt and i even went back in my texts to prove to myself that im not crazy but she treated me like i was an insane gaslighter over getting hurt by it and then started essentially saying she cant say anything and started just apologizing just to end the conversation etc which is an unhealthy behavior she did a lot during times were i finally criticized behaviors.
she has issues around getting really mad if people disagrees with her and yelling etc and after the relationship i had two old friends of hers both confirm their experiences of experiencing the exact same behaviors. she treats it as if everyone who said anything about her behaviors are just "fucked people" and she "doesn't care what they think" despite the fact that one of the friends is someone she had only ever spoke well about. the other person has lying issues so i didn't take everything at face value but they literally also showed me screenshots of her behaviours which made it pretty clear about some things being very clearly true.
like for example my ex would lie about how that friend must secretly be talking shit about her and making her online friend group hate my ex because she no longer got invited to play games with them like among us, but it turned out that when my ex played games with them she would act extremely toxic and like gaslight people to way too much of extremes that it didn't make the game fun by saying shit like she doesn't wanna play with them anymore because theyre just targeting her because she doesn't play games etc. or her talking about how badly she wanted to die and such and thinking that nobody there cares about her and asking for validation extremely often. i was also shown her directly lying that i was gonna be homeless to her friend when i wasn't gonna be and hadn't said anything like that. that friend also knew about her going to bars to make out with guys while in her last relationship and my ex had also told me how she was breaking cheating boundaries a ton around a guy she fell in love with during her relationship with her last ex. when i told her it kinda sounded like cheating she got upset and said her ex didn't give a fuck about her anyway.
its just sad that she had so many disordered behaviors and she essentially just cuts off anyone who may criticize her in any way shape or form. like at the end of the relationship the reason we broke up was because i was criticizing her behaviours and trying to explain she shows disordered symptoms that are affecting me and she said i dont actually know who she is and she can't stay in a relationship with someone who sees her as someone she isn't. some of the behaviors i criticized was that earlier gaslighting thing that she still believed she was right for and i was just being crazy, also her yelling at me and crying saying i would wanna date my friend if we were in an open relationship and calling me a liar etc as i told her no i wouldn't and that it was hurting my feelings, and also criticizing that she had made a hypothetical where she asked me if i would worship her if she was god and got upset that i said no.
when she asked me the god thing at first i said yes because i knew how she may react to me saying honestly that its a hard thing to answer and then she asked me if im being honest and asked me to reassure that i would worship her and i felt uncomfortable and explained that i dont really know what id do in that situation because its not real and worshipping someone else is already something i dont really personally do as I'm not religious.
when i criticized her asking that question and how it was weirdly narcissistic and unhealthy, especially since she got upset and disappointed that i said no, she got mad at me saying i need to not bring it up. she didn't explain why it was bad to bring up or anything she just got pissed at me for bringing up her saying it at all.
this is a common behavior she has, she gets mad when people criticize her or when people disagree and will usually argue and/or yell. this was something both of the friends i talked to had experiences with her doing and one of them even stopped talking to her for awhile because of it at a point. both these friends instantly believed me about her being abusive because of her own behaviors and its so frustrating that shes essentially made it out that everyone except her must be crazy or getting some sort of manipulated idea from me when she is literally actively minimizing her behaviours that multiple other people have already recognized without me saying anything. its such a frustrating situation i had really thought she was the love of my life.
she would do these lovebombing tactics where she told me how she wouldn't be able to live without me and would rather die than break up, would tell me im the best guy she's ever met and shit like that and i have a friend who has bpd and has been in therapy for 8 years and she said those things are all red flags that wouldve made her leave a relationship asap and that its just not healthy and i felt weird about it all at the time but i still ended up convincing myself that it will be ok and she'll seek help.
she would often try to say stuff like she has super good control of her bpd and doesn't split anyone etc because she's been through 6 months of therapy but ive seen her split friends and talk about how little they care etc. i also know that most of the time in therapy she would skip or show up drunk a lot and ive had lots of times where i end up explaining therapeutic techniques to her when shes feeling bad when ive not even gotten to do therapy yet i just spent a lot of time researching on bettering myself for a year after my physically abusive relationship while i was seeking help for my disabilities and ptsd. ive tried to explain to her that ive seen her split people a lot and she said i dont get to decide what is or isnt splitting and got mad at me when i was saying it based on observed behaviors and i just dont know how someone is supposed to tell if shes splitting then is it only splitting if she says so that feels inaccurate because she isnt the type of person to acknowledge something like that.
i guess thats all i have to really write rn thank you for reading i just feel really alone right now im bad at handling situations like this its hard to cope with losing someone i loved so much in such a painful and difficult way.

Hi, guys! I'm back. I've just finished reading Starset's new novel, A Brief History of the Future, and i really needed to share it.
Some of you may know me from my previous posts on the Starset lore:

• In "The Starset lore Part I: Transmissions", I covered the events told in The Prox Transmissions (Starset's first novel) and linked them to the album Transmissions.
• In "The Starset lore Part II: DivisionsThe Starset lore Part II: Divisions", I tried to gather the information we had on the new storyline, mainly based on Divisions content (Horizons hadn't released yet by then) and I shared my speculations about its meaning.

Now that I've read this book, I want to sum up what we have now. Keep in mind that, for obvious reasons, this post is all spoiler content. If you plan to read the book(s) I encourage you to do so, because I'm unveiling some of the main "plot-twists" in the second book. I won't be writing a literal summary of the book's plot (I will focus on the content more than in the "drama"), but key elements of it will appear. Also, I'm taking for granted you are already familiar with the contents in The Prox Transmissions -if not, I recommend you reading my post or just dropping this post altogether and go read the book!
If you have already read the books, don't plan to read them or don't care about the spoilers, stay with me along this long post because you will discover much about Divisions, Horizons... and what's coming next!!
Let's go then!
In a unknown year the novel starts in a world dominated by a state called the New East. it's not explicit in the book, but we have reasons to identify the New East with China: it is a current superpower and the powerful people in control have Chinese names. This state is governed by a Governing Committee, composed by Ministers that stay in charge for 5 years, with an exception: the Minister of Security, also known as MinSec. He is the head of the New East's secret police and he is to remain in charge for life.
Prior to 2024, Aston Wise (remember he was one of the protagonists of the previous novel!) is locked up by the US Government. They force him to create the BMI and its Architecture. In 2024, as I have said, the New East manages to obtain it and the big war starts. This part of the story is also explained deeper in a video (called "Initial Debriefing", available in Starset's YouTube channel since September 9th, 2021), with some minor incongruencies:

In the year 2010, the US Defense Advance Research Projects Agency -or DARPA- began work on a neural link system known as the "Brain Machine Interface" developed under the highest levels of secrecy. This technology was to be used in covert espionage campaigns with the goal of giving the US a major advantage in the ever-growing cyber warfare battlefield. The intention was to use the "BMI" on unsuspecting foreign agents, giving US Intelligence a remote line into their minds. Launched in 2020 to great success, the BMI provided a window into the intentions and secrets of numerous potential adversaries. Then, in 2021, a botched operation allowed this technology to fall into the hands of an undisclosed state who would then use it agains the US itself for over a decade. This state -which came to be known as the New East- used this technology to syphon intellectual property and assert control over the US, allowing it to rise swiftly as a global superpower. In the early 2030s, the crippled US launched an attack to the New East. This was quickly thwarted. However, as the New East was fully aware and prepared, in the end, the US and its allies capitulated and became known simply as the New West. Citizens of the New West, now mostly impoverished laborers, were offered BMI implantation -sold on the wonders of its amazing benefits. Eventually though, all were made to comply. Only then did the true goals of the New East become apparent.

The New West is a de facto and de iure protectorate. The New West has its own local police -that dealt with murder and robbery-, but the military and, most important, the Civil Authorities (CA), are controlled by MinSec -focused on thought crime.
Soon after the end of the war, some people were drafted for the reclamation in Virginia by the New East army. This was a forced-labor suicide mission because it was a fallout zone. The goal was the recovery of documents from the US, such as blueprints for advanced weapons and intel. Those who survived, developed NeuroTIDS (neural tissue interface degeneration syndrome) because of the radiation.
Once in control of the US (now New West), the New East implanted into all citizens the BMI. Now, people deal with three layers of reality: unaltered reality (UR), augmented reality (AR) and virtual reality (VR). Considering the BMI, there are three states:

• BMI glowing white (normal state: people are in UR with elements of AR).
• BMI glowing blue (also called frosting: people are in VR having some pleasant experience, while looking absent and apathetic in the outside). See an example of person frosting in the Diving Bell music video.
• BMI glowing red (also called supplication).

(There also exists the Everything Machine in this storyline. Indeed, people ate only printed food, as real food as reserved for the New East).
On top of this, there’s an intelligent algorythm or artificial intelligence in the Architecture, called the Overseer. It is capable of detecting thought crimes by accessing a person's sensory input and also altering their perceptions (for example, blurring texts from banned books). When a thought crime is detected, CAs intervene and turn the perpetrator into a supplicant. Supplicants are stuck in VR prisons while their bodies wander in the streets or are collected and put into "corrals". See an example of a supplication facility in Where the Skies Ends music video.
The protectorate of the New East upon the New West is mantained thanks to the Quantum Comunicator, which keeps both connected and also connected to the Architecture
On the other hand, there's a rebel network still in function. They manage to meet and develop their plans by modding their BMIs, so that they become undetectable under the eyes of the Overseer. Their plan is to trap the MinSec and use their credentials to get access to the Architecture and destroy it from the inside.
(In Manifest music video you can see examples of people frosting, people supplicated, the modding minor surgery, the rebels, the CAs using their "freezing" weapons and supplicating civilians and a bigwig from the New East, maybe the MinSec himself).
Also, it is said that the New East didn't manage to conquer all the Old West (US) territories. There's rumours about the socalled Western Territories, free land where some former rebels already live, though its real existence it's in never confirmed in book. In The Breach music video we can see how a family leaving in the New West takes the opportunity of escaping into the Western Territories during some sort of shutdown.
The New West capital is established in Philadelphia, where the events in A Brief History of the Future are set. Here's the Quantum Communication Center and the New West Center for Advanced Innovation (CAI), where the most brilliant programming students are sent to develop their skills and work for the New West/East. One of this students is one of the protagonists of this book, Thomas Bell (again, someone whose name we are already familiar...), who quickly proves to be the best one and gets to be chosen as the Director's assistant. Eventually we get to discover the Director is Aston Wise and later on we find out he is the Architect himself.
A feature or app of the BMI that will reveal crucial to the plot is the Shadowcast: one can frost but, instead of being conscious in a VR, "enters" inside a celebrity's mind for an hour and experiences all they are experiencing live (the user is passive and can only perceive, but not intervene or influence the shadowcast celebrity into doing anything). You can see an example of this in Symbiotic music video, where the user is finally able to successfully Occupy the body of the celebrity. In the book, when this happens, the person occupied has their BMI turned purple.
In the book, Occupation will be a tool used by Bell and Wise, but also by the government, in an attempt of using the supplicated bodies to their own purposes. The original project launched by the New East and commissioned to the Director of the CAI (Aston Wise), was called by Wise himself 'Project X'. New East wanted to present it to the citizens as a way of emancipating from work: while working, you can let yourself be occupied by the Overseer, who wil perform your job while you can be having fun in VR. In Icarus music video you can see an ad made by the New East to promote the "benefits" of this technology (called Werk here); the other ads are based on previous BMI technology (AR, VR and Shadowcast). (Fun fact: have you noticed that the actor in 3:12 is the same from the Ricochet music video?).
As I said in the beginning, it is not my goal to sum up the book's plot and even though I have already spoiled you much info and some plot-twists, I'm not telling you here how the story of the protagonists develops and how it ends. However, I can't refrain from telling you this: the last page of the book has a QR that redirects to a video that has me really excited.
In the video, we see a man. He tells us it is 2048. In spring 2026, the New East took over the US. But... guess who's back! Oh, yes, the Order! Or rather they were there all along. In fact, the man who's talking to us is Stephen Browning! On July 4th of 2026, after the New East invasion, the Order tried to launch a spacerocket to get to "a lonely planet" (Prox!), but it was intercepted by the New East and then the army destroyed their base, so they lost all hope in a future on another planet. However, they managed to hide a "time mechanism" (I guess the same they had in The Prox Transmissions) and, finally, sent a message to 2024, warning us about this future that awaits us. Then he sais:

Dear Order friends, the time has finally arrived. We're headed to space. We're going go Prox.

This announcement matches Starset's video from six months ago ("It begins. And it ends. Now."), where we see images of astronauts and spacerockets, evoking space travel. Wow! Did you miss that "space-y" aesthetic, plots and sound from Transmissions and Vessels? Because it sounds like we're getting them back! Note that at the end of this video, the three dots of the BMI are occupied by three symbols:

• The bottom one is the symbol of the Order, appears at the beginning of each chapter in The Prox Transmissions.
• The middle one is the symbol of Divisions album, I'd say it's a symbol of the rebels.
• The top one is... unknown? It is quite similar to me to the symbol in Faultline, but I guess it represents the "following chapter"? Who knows.

It also matches the music video for Starset's last single, Brave New Word! And there's more news: the end of the video linked in A Brief History Of the Future ends with a "to be continued in Spring 2025".
So... Again, there are some questions left unanswered (and I love that!): How are both books linked? Are they the same Aston Wise and Thomas Bell, but in an alternative timeline? From where will the story continue? (The Order in 2048 colonising Prox?). I'm soooo excited to learn what's coming next and to listen Starset's next album (I love Brave New World).
Let me know about your impressions, opinions, theories... feel free to add any info I could have missed, to correct any piece I could be mistaken about, etc. Thank you so much for your attention (I literally created this account only to write these Starset lore posts I feel very invested to and English isn't even my first or second language), I hope you enjoyed it and found it useful!!

Sorry this is long. T and I (18f). S (18mtf).
Backstory:
So I have these two “friends”. Or Had or whatever. I met one back in middle school and the other 1-2 years ago my junior year of high school after I had switched to an alternative school from my regular school. Things were pretty good. I didn’t talk much to the girl I knew since middle school (let’s call her S) because we were in different classes and we havent really spoken since middle school but we were friendly. Whenever we saw each other in the hall or at lunch we would say hi or whatever. The other girl (lets call her T) I talked to the most out of everyone. I was with her pretty much every day during school. I am not the type of person to answer text messages or phone calls or hang out outside of school/work which I guess has always been a problem. For her not for me. Maybe it’s the aquarius in me that wants to be left alone 90% of the time lol. I would hang out with her outside of school sometimes because I wasn’t working much other than a part time job a couple hours after school so I had a little time.
On to the story:
I graduated back in September. T and S got a lot closer after I graduated. I started working full time and didn’t have time or desire to go out whenever anymore. I also really didn’t want to hang out with her either for lots of reasons but mostly because she just was worried about different things. I wanted to graduate as quickly as possible so I can start working full time until I could start EMT school. She was worried about whatever girl she was fighting that week and her ex boyfriends or whatever. And a bunch of other things that annoyed me about her. I didn’t care and I wasn’t worried about those kinds of things anymore. So we didn’t really talk much anymore. She would text me A LOT. I would answer once in a while. It went on like that for months. Last week I had texted her that maybe we could got out to an 18+ club on Friday since she had been wanting to go out. Club’s don’t seem like my type of seem but she likes parties so I figured i’d go and try it out since we just turned 18. S was going to come along as well. Then last Thursday was when things blew up I guess. It was about 11 PM and a show I watch every Thursday at 10 just ended and I was taking a shower to go to sleep because I was tired. Then T and S start blowing me up i’m talking 3-4 phone calls from each of them. I didn’t answer at first because I was going to sleep. Then S texted me talking about she and T got into an argument and T sped off and she heard a crash from her house and thinks she got into a car accident. So I called T. She didn’t answer the first two times. I figured she was talking to an officer or something. The third time she answered and I heard sirens in the background and she told me she got into an accident. I asked if she was okay told her to drop her location and told her I was coming to pick her up and take her home because it was 11:30 at night and the part of town where they stay isn’t exactly the safest. When I got there I didn’t see her and started to call her. She wasn’t answering. I didn’t see any police cars or any crashed cars and I called her maybe 4 times and she wasn’t answering and she had turned off her location and I was just driving around aimlessly and stupidly. So at this point I was thinking this was a set up and I was annoyed and started heading back to my house. Right as I was leaving she finally called me back and said the police cars and tow truck already left and she was waiting for me at their neighborhood park. I told her I just drove past there and I didn’t see her and she said she was walking around looking for me. I was annoyed still and just told her to go back to the park and meet me there. So I finally get to the park and call her. She says she’s sitting on the baby swing and her leg is stuck and wants me to go get her. (I didn’t think this was weird because T is like insanely skinny so she usually fits in baby swings no problem.) I told her no because I was already annoyed and really didn’t want to get out of the car in the part of town we were in and said just pull your leg out and get in the car. She said she can’t and insisted she really was stuck so I got out of the car to help her. As I walked into the park all of a sudden both T and S jumped out the corner at me. Obviously it scared me since it was already at this point midnight and again the part of town we were in. At this point I was mad and just walked away from them got into my car and drove off. They tried to ask me to take S home but I just left. The next morning (the day we were supposed to go to the club) T texted me and asked if we were still going to the club that night. I told her no I didn’t want to go anywhere with them anymore. She said I was “green” (I don’t really know what that means honestly Im assuming it means wrong?? Damn am i getting old? lol) for not coming since it was my idea. I was still mad and didn’t answer. A little later she texted me again and said “alright bet bro im done ✌️ “ again dont know what this meant and honestly didnt care I didn’t answer that text either. S then texted me a while after that and was basically begging me to come with them. I told her no I needed some space from them after last night what you guys did was crazy. Who lies about being in a car accident that’s some crazy shit and wasting my gas and time like that. She went on about how it was just a joke and they didn’t mean to upset me and apologized. I accepted and told her she knows I love her and is just upset right now. She then apologized again and said she hopes I change my mind about that night I liked the message and just left it at that. Throughout the day S kept calling me and I didn’t answer not because of what happened but because I was going pet store to pet store with my sister because we were looking for a puppy. She then texted me again around 6 pm and said she really needed to know if i was coming that night so she could send an uber to my house of not. I told her “no I already told T i’m not coming but you have fun 💙” she replied thank you and that was that. I then got a message from S saying “ T wants to know if you want us to wait for you or meet us there” I was confused because I had JUST told her I wasn’t coming so I just replied to my own message where I said I wasn’t coming with the point fingers emoji at the message. That was the last I talked to them. Im pretty sure T and I aren’t friends anymore which i’m fine with honestly. I am a little sad about S. We haven’t been close since middle school but she’s always been so sweet and adorable but it is what it is I guess.
What do you guys think? Was I wrong?

Just a little bit of a back story. I have been sick for the past year and half. My blood levels have been low and the drs don’t know what the cause is, is it it an iron deficiency or something worse. So they began doing a series of infusion treatments on me to see if my blood levels would rise. While this has been going on I was still working but thankfully my employer was understanding and said whenever I needed to go rest just make up the time where I could. I am a contingent employee under contract so I have no pto or sick time. So I cant necessarily miss because I need the money to help support my spouse and children. I also home school one of my children.
During this time because I have not been performing in the bedroom with my spouse because I have been sick and exhausted. It is not like I didn’t want I just physical could not. This past Christmas while I was working I sent a Text to my husband just telling him thanks for taking to me the dr the other day. He responds with I want a divorce. He then proceeds to tell me I am soul eater that I am drag him down and now that he has lost weight he wants to explore more options with his body that couldn’t before and I am not giving him sex everyday like I use to. He asked me for an open relationship. I said this is not a conversation to have via text come home. At that point I was worked up at my desk while working and not feeling the best.
He comes home and completely avoids me. I tried engaging in conversation everything but he went straight to his computer ignoring me. The next morning I woke up and tried engaging in conversation again he ignored me until later that evening. during the conversation he began a by saying he wants to leave because he doesn’t believe I respect him or appreciation him and he doesn’t feel in control of the relationship further more me being sick is exhausting and the children we adopted do not respect him either.
I sat their in a daze because something was not sitting right with me. I asked if there was someone else he initially said no but then I said you’re lying and he confessed he was talking with his ex and that they had been sexting. He said it wasn’t affair because it was not physical however in our first year of marriage he sexted someone and I sat the boundary that it was not ok! Fast forward 10 years he did it again.
On Christmas he decided to leave.. imagine having to tell the 2 kids you just adopted on Christmas it wasn’t their fault because they were blaming themselves due to the comment he made as he was leaving he stated “don’t let your mom get in your head like my mom did when she divorced my dad…” what why would say that! I explained to the kids that we were just in a rough spot and no matter what happens we love them unconditionally and nothing is their fault because our younger son was saying if him and his brother didn’t come in the picture none of this would happen. Worse day of my life especially. The next day he messaged and asked if we were going to his moms to celebrate Christmas and that k got what I wanted he had to sleep in a parking lot. I told him not to sleep in a parking lot and for the sake of the kids come home. But if he were to come home this thing with ex had to stop. The only reason it began because I wasn’t given him attention and she is going through a divorce and gave him everything he needed that she was better than me in all aspects. I sat there and cried. He the canceled my health insurance.
He came home and I went to the bedroom to sleep he texted me and said o you can’t come out here now that I came home. I go outside the room to talk to him and he told me I needed to speak to a therapist that I am crazy and a narcissist. That he is going to stay.
I began speaking with a therapist paying out of pocket and told her everything that occurred and what he had said and done and what I have said and done and that I was really nervous about being a narcissist and if I were a narcissist. After speaking with her for a moments she told me I wasn’t a narcissist but I do suffer narcissistic victim syndrome and that I live with my narcissist. I told her I was having a hard time with forgiveness with the other girl because if she was going through a divorce because her spouse cheated why would she do that to another person. The therapist was to ask her.
So I took her advice and I sent the message. She responded. We had a completely adult conversation she stated she begged my husband not to cheat but he led her to believe we were in an open marriage. She reassured me going for she would not be a bother anymore and I thanked her.
Fast forward a couple of days I get a follow on my instagram from a girl I use to work with. I have spoken with this person in years but i remembered her because she was so nice. So I sent her a private message that literally just said hello how are you? She responded as if I was trying to get intel out of her regarding my spouse and was so nasty. I sat there crying not understanding why this person was so mean and spouse what is it. I said this girl we worked followed me and I sent her message saying hello and she goes off about you what the hell are you telling me people. He said nothing I am not telling anybody anything.
So I messaged her back to shut the conversation down and showed the screen shot of where she followed me and I wasn’t even following her. I told her not to make up lies about my husband then she sends me a screenshot of her and my husband convo he had villianized me to her. I thanked her for the message and blocked her. I fwd a screen shot of the message to his phone and set in silence. He responded “Yeah? And? Be sure to bring that up to your therapist too. Way to send us a whole step backwards because you can't talk to me like an adult. I lied about not knowing because I wanted to see how far you would take it.”
The goodness out of all this is I am no longer a contingent and next month will have health insurance again to start back my infusions treatments to determine why my blood levels are low fingers crossed it is an iron deficiency.
Am I the asshole for wanting a divorce?

My boyfriend and I have been together for a year. I’m 19 “19F” and he’s 23 “23M” and we got together when I was 18 and he was 22. A few months into the relationship he got a job as a bar back. He loves it and he loves his coworkers and I was happy for him in the beginning! He recently got promoted at as a full-time bartender and will start in about a week. He typically stays late after his shifts and says that he is hanging out with his regular “Mark” after work. He’ll be off his phone for hours after he gets off and I trust him that he’s at the bar hanging out with Mark.
However, a few days ago we were in the parking lot of his apartment complex and a girl comes up to us. She says “hey neighbor” to him and completely ignores me and my boyfriend does not introduce me to this girl who clearly knows him. At the end of the brief encounter she said to him “well if you ever want to talk or hangout you have my number” to which he said “yea for sure”. Also she was wearing a transparent shirt so I could see her nipples. I felt uncomfortable and thought it was weird that he agreed to hangout with another girl (who I felt was clearly asking him out and blatantly ignoring me) right in front of me, didnt introduce me as his girlfriend, and he had already given her his number. The next day I was ignoring his texts and he called me 30 times. I just told him how am I supposed to trust that he can say no to drunk girls who will be flirting with him at the bar if he can’t say no when I’m standing right next to him? Am I being dramatic?
Also one night later we went to a concert for his coworker and one of his coworkers asked me if my name was “wren” and said she thought my boyfriend was dating a girl named wren (which my boyfriend- when I asked him about it later- claims to not know any wrens) and she kept telling me how much she LOVES my boyfriend. She said it three times. Another one of his coworkers was showing my boyfriend nudes of some random booty call he had. I explained to my boyfriend that I didn’t really feel like his coworkers were respectful of our relationship. He apologized for their actions but still talks about them a lot and how funny/cool they are when I feel that they have just been rude to me. And honestly I’m concerned because my boyfriend looks up to these people and admires them as people, I just don’t want him to be easily influenced/ tempted. Also all of his coworkers are single and in their late 20- early 40s.
I also found a pair of furry handcuffs in his nightstand a few months ago (that we have never used together) and when I asked him about it he threw them away. This was probably 9 months into our relationship… why did he still have them?
Should I end things with him out of lack of trust? Am I thinking too much into things? I want to trust him but after all this stuff has gone down and after he said yes to hanging out with his neighbor (when we’ve established that neither of us are comfortable with the other hanging out with someone of the opposite gender one on one) I honestly don’t know anymore.
TL;DR: My boyfriend said yes to hanging out/ talking to another girl right in front of me, he had already given her his number, and didn’t introduce me as his girlfriend or mention me at all. He said he’s sorry and that she’s crazy and that he was never actually going to hangout with her but still. I felt invisible and now I feel like I can’t trust him. Should I break things off?

Hi gainers,
I have just finished running Super Squats by Randall J. Strossen and wanted to share my results. There are plenty of discussions of this program out there already, but I figured sharing my experience with the program can't hurt and can hopefully be interesting, or maybe even useful to someone. This was my first time running a "proper" program (i.e. one designed by a prefessional) and it has been by far the most productive training block I have done so far. Since I am a beginner, I'm not calling this a review (I don't have the training experience to offer any kind of expert opinion). This post is meant rather to show my results as a beginner on the program and to share some of my thoughts about it.
[Before, 82kgs, 10 April 2024](https://imgur.com/a/super-squats-before-82kg-10-04-2024-PvPBvIl). NSFW. Pics taken the day after the first workout.
[After, 86kgs, 18 May 2024](https://imgur.com/a/loPa07y). NSFW. Pics taken the day after the last workout.
Background:
M30, 6'2", no athletic background. Typical denizen of this sub in that I could always eat loads and not put on weight blah blah blah. Worked out in my teens with weights in my room but never maintained a consistent schedule long enough to see significant results. Fast forward to 2 years ago when I started doing bodyweight workouts at home and making an effort to gain weight. Had some success and then started going to the gym at the start of this year. Did a 4 day/week UppeLower split with some success. My weight had fluctuated between a very skinny 67kgs to around 73kgs throughout my twenties. Prior to running Super Squats I had already bulked from 74kgs at the start of December to 82kgs at the start of April (I started taking creatine in January which definitely contributed to this weight gain).
The Program:
Super Squats is a book, which is short (less than 100 pages) and contains everything you need to run the program. Although the book was written in 1989, the routine it outlines is based on old-school squatting programs utilized by strongmen from the 1920s onwards. A chapter is devoted to this history of squats, the "master exercise". There are a couple of anachronisms (my favourite is referring to the hamstrings as "thigh biceps") but overall it is well-written and presented.
The program itself is a six week full-body routine, with the choice to run it 2 or 3 days per week. I won't spell out the whole program here (just buy the book), but the core of the routine is, of course, a single set of twenty heavy squats, with the trainee taking at least three deep breaths between each rep. The squats are supersetted with a set of light pullovers or Rader chest pulls to stretch the rib cage. The starting weight for the squats is a weight you can do for 10 reps (and yes, you really do twenty reps with that weight) and the program stipulates that you must add at least 5lbs/2.5kgs every single workout. The program is fairly light on volume (especially if you run it 2 days per week like I did) but what it lacks in volume, it more than makes up in intensity.
There is no way around it: heavy, high-rep squats are deeply, profoundly, brutally unpleasant. There is no stipulation for rep cadence or how long the set should take, you can take as long as you like, but completing 20 reps with good form will require having the bar on your back for at least 3-4 minutes. From week 2 onwards, the single set of squats always took me more than 5 minutes (and it always felt much longer).
Performing warm-up sets slowly and deliberately was crucially important. Before I even got to the warm-up sets I performed a few reps of touchdown-squats on a box, and a few more of goblet squats with a light kettlebell, opening my hips against a resistance band to prime my glutes and quads.
Super Squats is the embodiment of "mind over matter". The book has a whole section on mindset and positive visualization to help trainees to manage the seemingly impossible task of squatting a 10-rep weight for 20 reps. It sounds stupid, but by the second half of the program, I had gotten into a ritual of giving the bar a firm slap, as a jockey would slap his racehorse, before I started the set, cementing my effort to view the bar not as an enemy to overcome but as a friend helping me to achieve my goals.
Reps 11 and 12 were usually the hardest. By the time I got to ten reps my legs were already trembling. My whole body was drenched in sweat, the weight of the bar impossibly heavy resting on my traps, crushing my whole body into the ground. Time had slowed to a crawl, and the thought that I was only half way would be enough to sap my resolve if I let it. Once I got to rep 13, comfortably more than halfway, I no longer had to think about breathing. I was sucking in great lungfuls of air automatically and heaving them out so hard I sprayed the mirror in front of me with droplets of spit (yes, of course I wiped it down afterwards). Once I got to rep 17 I knew I had the set in the bag. No matter how tortuous those last three reps, no matter how long they took, no matter how many heaving breaths I had to take, I could do 3 more reps.
During week 2 I had what I think is the closest I've ever had to an out-of-body experience. It was as if I was watching someone else perform the agonizing reps while I talked myself through the rest of the set: "Breathe, good, deeper, you've got this, next rep, nice. Keep going".
Breathing is the key. The book talks at length about the importance of deep breathing throughout the set. Pretty quickly, I found that deep breathing was the only way to keep from passing out or collapsing mid set, though as I said, deep breathing becomes automatic about halfway through the set (there's simply no other way to stay upright with the weight on your back). A very helpful tip from the book is to suck in an extra gulp of air on top of your already full lungs for each of the last reps.
If all this sounds a bit exaggerated, try the program and see for yourself. But I'm not trying to put anyone off with this description, quite the opposite! The great thing about Super Squats is that the difficulty of the squats is directly proportional to the feeling of giddy elation upon completing the set. I always felt great after the set, and rode the feeling of accomplishment for the rest of the day. The program really pushes you beyond the boundaries of what you think you can do.
My Progress:
I started the squats at quite a low weight of just 40kg. The book recommends erring on the side of starting too light, and then adding more weight if needed, so that is what I did. Remember, the program stipulates a minimum increase of 5lbs/2.5kgs per workout, but there's nothing saying you can't add more. Once I realized the weight was too light (I managed 21 reps for the first workout) I simply increased the weight by 10kgs on the second workout and continued with the 2.5kg increases from there.
Before starting Super Squats I had had a two week break from training due to illness, so I started with too-low weights (I exceeded the target rep range on all exercises). So I increased the weight by 5-10kgs depending on the exercise for the second workout. The program has varying set numbers and rep ranges for different exercises. As a general rule, I increased the weight once I could hit the target rep range for the first two sets of each exercise, but I did not stick to this rule every workout.
The only thing I stuck to was the minimum increase of 2.5kgs for the squats every workout. I managed this consistently until the final week, when I failed on the eccentric of the tenth rep with a weight of 77.5kgs (a 5kg increase on the previous workout). My legs just gave way and I could not get back up. I did two more sets to make sure that I at least performed more total reps than the previous workout. Then, in the last workout, I amazed myself by succesfully performing all 20 reps with the same weight. Definitely the hardest set I have ever done, and I was completely finished afterwards, but the highlight of the program for sure.
Other ups and downs: I lost reps on Bench and Bent-over Rows on both workouts of week five, but got them back in week six and set new PRs on both. A good reminder that progress is rarely linear. My left knee started hurting in the last week, but thankfully the pain hasn't persisted. I guess my form might have broken down a bit too much in one of the last workouts.
Diet:
The book's diet advice is very simple: lots of calories and protein, with the majority coming from healthy whole food sources. Nothing surprising there. The book has two recommendations in addition to meals for achieving these goals: milk and shakes. The book doesn't use the GOMAD acronym, but that's basically what it boils down to: a recommended minimum of 2 quarts (about 2 litres) per day in addition to meals and snacks, with a recommendation to increase to up to a gallon (nearly 4 litres) per day if you can.
I was somewhat surprised to see that the book recommends home-made mass gainer shakes for trainees who struggle to eat enough solid food (the book refers to them as "blender bombs" which I think sounds much cooler).
I am not vegetarian, but I don't eat meat very often. I live with my fiancee, who doesn't like meat, and since we eat dinner, the main meal of the day, together, we eat a lot of plant-based meat substitutes. I did, however, eat meat more often than usual during the program. My typical diet looks something like this:
Breakfast: Usually muesli, with seeds, fruit (apple or banana), yoghurt, and a scoop of unflavoured whey protein.
Lunch: Usually eggs, fried or scrambled in butter, served with wilted spinach on wholemeal toast or with pasta and pesto. If not eggs then leftovers from last night's dinner. My local supermarkets do a rangle of reasonably healthy frozen meals and during the program I ate these a couple of times per week, always going for chicken dishes with plenty of vegetables.
Dinner: Something based around the aforementioned meat substitutes. Favourites include spaghetti bolognese (with plenty of cheese of course), chili with black beans, sour cream and guacomole served with rice, and burgers with fries for a "junk"/"dirty" option.
I don't count calories but I do roughly track protein, aiming for 2g per kg bodyweight and topping up with whey protein as needed.
During Super Squats, I upped my creatine dosage from 3.5g/day to 5g/day, added extra snacks to the above diet (nuts, dark chocolate etc.) and also milk and shakes as the book suggests. For the first three weeks I had a daily shake consisting of whey protein, milk, cocoa powder, banana, peanut butter and oats. The shakes helped with weight gain, but they proved unsustainable, as they led to some, er, digestive issues. Ok, they gave me explosive diarrhoea. See [this review of Super Squats](https://empire-barbell.com/2021/07/23/super-squats-review-of-the-legendary-20-rep-squat-program/) in which the author recounts ingesting a shake according to the book's recipe before starting a work shift and shitting himself during the shift, lol.
I hadn't really drank milk for several years prior to the program (I tend to prefer oat milk with my muesli) but I did increase my milk consumption slowly over the six weeks. For most of the duration I drank a couple of glasses per day, totalling only about 500ml -1 litre. Only in the last week did I make a serious effort to drink at least 2 litres per day. Turns out it's really easy to drink a lot of milk, and a very cost-efficient way to get lots of extra calories and protein. Who knew haha.
Rest and Recovery:
I've been having trouble sleeping lately, which was the reason I opted to do the program 2 days per week from the beginning (the book recommends starting with 3 days and dropping down to 2 if you find you can't recover sufficiently between workouts). I was a very deep sleeper as a child but those days are long gone and these days the slightest noise seems to be enough to wake me. My fiancee gets up early for work during the week (her alarm goes off at 4:45am), ivariably waking me before it does her, and we have a cat, who tends, as cats do, to go crazy in the small hours (her new favourite thing is scratching frantically on the closet doors). I've tired everything I can think of short of getting rid of the cat, which I'm not willing to do for the sake of gains. Hopefully she will mellow as she gets older. If nothing else, I guess it's good practice for when we become parents lol. Suffice to say it's rare that I get an uninterrupted 8 hours of sleep.
I tried to do everything within my power to get as good sleep as I could (making an effort to get to bed earlier, playing with the cat to tire her out, etc.). I still made good gains despite overall poor sleep, but there were definitely some days when I could have gotten to bed earlier.
What I liked about the program:
Super Squats is a simple, easy-to follow program which is practically guranteed to lead to growth. The non-negotiable nature of progression from workout to workout gives a strong incentive to eat enough and get enough rest. I seriously can't see how someone could follow this program, increasing the weight as prescribed, and not grow.
Another thing I liked was making significant progress over a short timeframe while only training 2 days per week, leaving more time for life outside the gym.
By far the biggest benefit of the program, hower, is the lessons it imparts and the mental toughness it inculcates. Lessons you can only learn by standing under the crushing weight of the bar for 20 reps. Put simply, you are capable of more than you think you are, and this program teaches you that in a way that words never could. I feel that I now inderstand intensity as a training variable far more deeply than I did before the program. After running Super Squats I understand why it is so often recommended to beginners.
What I didn't like about the program:
The individual workouts took far too long. This was by far the biggest thing I disliked about the program. The book claims that the Basic Routine should take less than an hour to complete, but I found that I rarely completed a workout in less than 90 minutes, and several times it took me a full 2 hours. Granted, this was partly due to training in a busy McGym, where waiting for equipment is often a factor, and I feel like I spend half my life searching for locking collars, but even so, the long workouts were grinding. Another big factor is just how exhausted you are after that set of squats. I often felt like I was moving in slo-mo, with the stiff-legged deadlifts (themselves no easy exercise) and calf and ab work still to get through.
The other main negative factor was how daunting the squats are. I rarely looked forward to workouts, and often actively dreaded them. I really had to psyche myself up to go to the gym on this program, despite knowing that I would feel great after my workout. That next set of squats was always looming ahead menacingly.
What I would do differently:
The biggest thing I would change is doing the milk properly from the beginning. By "doing the milk" I mean drinking at least the recommended 2 quarts per day. I would also probably leave the shakes out, and make an effort to eat cleaner. I kind of gave myself free reign to cut corners and do what it takes to gain on the program (spooning peanut butter from the jar and ice cream from the tub, eating "junk" meals like burgers and fries or frozen pizzas a couple of times a week, etc.).
I would have chosen a different abs exercise. I did hollow-body crunches, but since these can't be loaded (as far as I know) I had to resort to adding extra reps and then an extra set to add progressive overload. It would have been smarter and more time-efficient to simply choose a weighted abs exercise and increase the load each workout.
I could have been more diligent about consistenly increasing weight/reps on all exercises other than the squats. I feel my progress on the other lifts could have been better.
The book does not mention cardio, and in fact states that trainees should move as little as possible outside of training to allow for maximum recovery. I will definitely add some light cardio in the form of walking the next time I run the program (thanks to u/MythicalStrength for pointing out that since the program is based on old-school principles, it is likely assumed that pretty much everyone would have been doing a fair bit of walking before lifestyles became so sedentary in developed countries). Over the weekend between weeks five and six my mother came to visit, and in the course of showing her around my city I did a lot of walking that weekend (15k steps each day). I think this may have contributed to the failure on the first workout of week 6 by eating into my recovery. Ideally, I would just do, say, a 30-40 minute walk on off days throughout the program.
Most of all, I would trust the process. Of course this is easy to say with hindsight, but there was a point in weeks 3-4 where I got quite demotivated, felt like I coudn't notice the program working (of course not - visual changes take longer than a couple of weeks!) and felt quite tired out from all the eating, so I ended up eating a bit less for about a week in the middle of the program, which quite possibly contributed to the strength losses in week 5. Again, progress isn't linear, but if you stick to the program over six weeks it will pay off.
Conclusion/Next Steps:
Running Super Squats over the last six weeks has been without a doubt the most physically and mentally challenging thing I have ever done, but the payoff has been well worth it. 4kgs gained in 6 weeks and invaluable lessons learned. I'm going to have to go clothes shopping and replace most of my wardrobe. Shirts and T-shirts that were loose are now tight, and my old slim-fit T-shirts now look comically small. Even my straight-leg jeans are now tight fitting (my fiancee said the other day, "Those jeans are a bit tight on you now, huh? But your bum looks great!").
Being on the taller side, I still have quite a lot of frame to fill out, and I still have a lot to learn about training. I will definitely be running Super Squats again in future. I am especially interested in running the Abbreviated Program, consisting of only the squats, pullovers/Rader chest pulls, bench, and bent-over rows. This would solve the problem of workouts being too long, but I imagine it would be extremely challenging, since you should increase the weight on all exercises each workout, not just the squats. With bench and bent-over rows offering less overall muscle fibre recruitment than squats, and 2.5kgs being the smallest weight increase logistically possible (in my gym, anyway), I imagine that this would be challenging in the extreme.
The book suggests running a strength-building training block after the 20-rep squat program, consisting of more sets with lower rep ranges. It even suggests alternating between six weeks on the 20-rep squat program and six on the strength-building program, extending Super Squats well past the initial six weeks. While this approach is intriguing, I want to try something different, and I would rather have more training days in the week in return for shorter individual workouts.
I've ordered a copy of 5/3/1 and will probably run 531 for Beginners, and then see which template I run after that. I have my eye on the BBB Beefcake 3 Month Challenge, but I'll see when I get there. For now, I'm going to dial back on the eating, to around maintenance levels, for at least a couple of weeks (I need a break from stuffing myself all day).
In the meantime, I can't recommend Super Squats enough! You will surprise yourself on this program.
Well, that turned into a huge wall of text. Thanks very much for taking the time to read if you got this far!

So i hung out with this guy yesterday and its the probably 6th time i've hung out with him but i've know him for years Not sure if im supposed to add our ages so just ask if curious! But i really really really like him and i THOUGHT. He really liked me too... so yesterday we get to his apartment, and instead of us going to his room and watching a movie just like he promised me we would do, he invited his roomate and his friends as well as his roomates girlfriend (Whom i dont know whatsoever but whatever) And so i was like ummmm okay? At first i had no issue with it.. i mean yeah its a small room so im touching shoulders with strangers but he's happy and i guess i was too? But what got me really and why im making this post even was when they all (Roomate, Girlfriend, Friends) got up to head to i think target, The guy im "talking" Too got up, closed the door behind him, did not even look or bat an eye in my direction as he walked up and off after everyone else did and i kid you not 5 minutes later i hear the door opened and close. Sooo he left... ? Ok! I dont know the area im in that well so i was uncomfortable and contemplating calling a friend and leaving, without telling him. I've been there no more than maybe 10 times like i said and why wouldn't he ask me to go? Why was i apparently not invited? Was it that important that you couldn't even tell me or speak up about it? Righttt... so There was also enough room in the car for me to go too, and yet Nobody said a word, and i know for a fact that i havent said nor have i done anything to throw him off THIS hard. I cried for hours about it when i got home this morning in my room because my stupid self spent the night at his apartment with him and got dropped off earlier by him, he hasnt texted me since then and wouldnt kiss me goodbye before i got out of the car. He made it awkward. And you're probably thinking "Ummm leave the dude obviously" but This guy was my best friend before he was anything else to me and i dont wanna lose him tbh. I was fine before him so i know for a fact i'd be fine after him and without him too. but Im starting to feel like Im the problem because so what if he wants to distance himself? Maybe im the crazy person here? But at this point i am rambling, so the moral of the story is that he went from being all over me 25/8, To basically not even wanting to touch me. I dont know wether to chase him or chase the door to leave whatever situation i've now realized that i got myself into. Again Any and all advice would be welcome because i just dont know if theres any other options besides leaving him but if he doesnt see where he already went completely wrong especially if he keeps up this act of "I dont want you near me" or "Dont fucking touch me" i suppose i'll see myself out because all that will do is just piss me off. Im sorry this is so long, Thanks so much for reading if you made it to the end lmfao. Also i hope i put this the right way so people understand it! Thanks again

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.

Please, if you have a spare time with this and give me your honest advice. I’m genuinely so conflicted.
So my boyfriend is really sweet. The relationship started off with him giving me insane crazy princess treatment. And everything is good; we hang out almost every single day. We text every single day; he needs constant updates. He tells me when he's in his car about to go somewhere. He tells me when he's about to shower and he says he does these things so l'm not waiting for his text if he doesn't respond back, which I appreciate, but he also expects me to do the same. For me, that's a little bit too much. I'm not used to that. He is very protective, so whenever we're in public, he always wants to hold onto me to show other people I'm his girl because sometimes men will look at me. I think he knows I could do better on physical attraction, not gonna lie.
All this feels like it's a little bit too much, so I told him that I think he's way too committed to this relationship to the point where I feel like it's more like a marriage, not just dating. I told him that I am not being the perfect girlfriend that he wants me to be because he needs to give me time; it's only been one month. He continues doing things like getting annoyed if l hang up the phone to pick up someone else's call without saying goodbye and telling him who's calling. I understand his perspective, but he still gets annoyed if I hang up the call.
I can’t have guy best friends and especially I cannot call my guy best friends when he’s in the car with me. If they call me, I can’t pick up and have a conversation. Sometimes I do because they are important to me. One thing that really ticks me off is whenever I tell him something, he says “we both could use this or that.”
For example, yesterday I was washing my hair, blow drying it, and I was on FaceTime with friends so I didn’t text him for like 3-4 hours, but he knew that I was busy because I told him. That night when I called him, I could tell he had a little anger in his tone and he was like, "If you didn’t call me in five minutes, I would’ve gone to sleep." We had a conversation about how if I don’t want to FaceTime that night, I should just let him know beforehand. Him waiting and then making that comment about going to sleep within five minutes made me feel guilty, but then I took a step back and thought, "You know I have people over at my house; give me some space. I’m not your wife. It’s been a month."
Also We hang out almost every day by the way because I have a lot of free time and it's like we seeing each other 4- 12 hours every single day. Mind you it's only been a month so for me it's a lot and if we're not seeing each other, it's the constant texting and updates
My main issue right now is that he texted me this morning said:" I'm sorry for being mean yesterday and making you feel like that".
I responded with: " It's OK, I just need some space to think about it."
He responded with: "I feel we both need space recollect ourselves"
What does he needs space for??!?! Everything is throwing me off... this is the second time saying "we both need" when I address an issue about how he made me feel. I understand that he's trying to consider his feelings into the problem, but I'm not crazy.
How should I handle a situation where my boyfriend says we both need what I need instead of addressing my feelings individually?
Sorry it’s kinda long 😭 TL;DR: My boyfriend is very sweet but extremely attentive and protective, expecting constant updates and restricting interactions with male friends. He often says "we both need" when I express my individual needs. It's been only a month, but I feel overwhelmed by his level of commitment. How should I handle a situation where my boyfriend says we both need what I need instead of addressing my feelings individually?

I will start with some background of my relationship. Me and my ex used to be classmates when we were kids. We drifted apart as he switched schools but we reconnected during high school and hit it off. I fell in love first and a couple years later we were in an exclusive relationship. 5 years went by and everything was going great. I had a great relationship with his mom and his sister...actually count everyone in his family. We had our ups and downs which in hindsight involved many incidents of emotional cheating but I didn't know better back then. The year I took admission in Masters, he got admitted in undergrad (there was a gap between our academic years because he took some gap after high school). After he started college which btw was in a different city, he got close with one of his classmates. Let's call her A. So A and my ex started hanging out all the time and even when they were not together they used to talk on call. Even when I called him at midnight, his number came busy and he told me they have some college stuff they need to discuss. This often resulted in a heated discussion between him and me where I got mad at him for not giving me enough time and him saying that I need to give him space and that he has a college life now. It was weird and unfair coz I too was in college and had been for almost last 4 years during which I never ignored him or our relationship. A few months passed by and our fights kept getting worse. There came a point where I was afraid that he was going to cheat on me and I told him that if he ever feels like this he should just drop a text that our relationship is over before acting on it. He called me crazy for even thinking something like this. A month later, he messaged me that he made a huge mistake and that he doesn't deserve me. I knew he had cheated. I asked him what happened and he said that he kissed A. It was a life shattering moment for me. He kept apologising and told me that he wanted to break up with me before he kissed her and that he had planned to end our relationship after the kiss but once it had happened he realized he made a mistake. I still loved him and wanted to forgive him. I also felt bad for A coz he technically misled her by promising a breakup with me. Although she knew what she was getting into so I was mad at her for being stupid and not a girl's girl. I wanted to work on our relationship but he told me that he needs some time to figure things out. We spent next 3 months on talking terms where I still loved him but I felt lonely as he was "taking his space to figure things out". There were days when I craved affection and got nothing. Meanwhile I reconnected with an old friend of mine who himself was recovering from a breakup and was very supportive. I used to have severe anxiety attacks during those 3 months and my friend really helped me through. 3 months later I met my ex as he was in the town. We both used to scroll through each other's phone so when we met I started doing that again while he ordered the food. I opened A's chat and after scrolling for a couple seconds, I came across a message that my ex had sent her where he admitted that "he wanted that moment to last forever". He ofc was talking about their kiss. I was shocked. I confronted him and he got mad at me at that I shouldn't have gone through his phone. I didn't want to create a scene so we had lunch and I left. That was my last straw. Reading that message in person finally made me fall out of love with him. We stayed in contact for next one week but he probably noticed the change in my temperament. He started saying "I love you" again which I asked him not to. He then got mad that I have changed and it's because of that old friend that I have been talking to. I told him that it doesn't matter and that I just don't have feelings for him anymore. He kept blaming my friend and texted him on Instagram that he shouldn't have come between us. I told my ex that I had finally processed his cheating and I don't wanna be with him. He said that if that was the case I should have left 3 months ago and not led him on. I do regret not leaving when he told me he cheated but in my defense it was a lot to take in and we ended up breaking up anyway so I don't think I did anything wrong. I don't think I owed him any explanation at this point as he was getting very aggressive. I blocked him from everywhere. Next day his mom and his sister called me. I didn't pick up the calls but replied to his sister. She asked me if it was true that I had left her brother for someone else. I told her I left him coz he had cheated. She didn't believe me in the beginning but once I told her that he admitted it himself she said I should have left 3 months ago and I was selfish to stay around while needing time to process things. I just told her what's done is done and I can't do anything about it. She said she understand. My ex kept trying to reach me through his friend's phone numbers and begged me to talk to him. I kept blocking every number and didn't respond to any of the messages or calls. Later I found out he had told everyone that I had left him for my friend. AITA for blocking him without giving him any closure?