Guten Tag
Greetings from Mexico. My name is Ricardo and I am planning on studying on Germany later this year so I am reaching out looking to make German friends (or foreigners living in Germany) in order to get acquainted to the country and its people before arriving (lifehacks and explanations of the customs are more than welcome too). Here in Mexico I am more on the introvert side but since we Mexicans are cranked up to 11 in the social aspects I suppose I could say I am an extrovert in most aspects. I am very reflexive and calm and tend to overthink things yet I like to joke a lot and be easygoing. I speak Spanish (of course), English (as you can read) and French (although badly).
Some of the things I like are: * I love reading fiction, non-fiction, poetry, manuals and whatever written work that seems interesting. I like to write, but to be honest I do it quite rarely. Some of my favorite authors are Virginia Wolf, Julio Cortázar, Ernest Hemingway, Rosario Castellanos, Antonio Tabucchi, Ismail Kadare, Neil Gaiman, Ray Bradbury, Jorge Luís Borges and many others. One of my dreams is having a small book store-coffe shop. * I also love movies and my imposible dream has always been being a filmmaker. My favorite movie ever is a tie between Apocalypse Now and L’illusionniste (French animated movie by the director of The Triplets of Belleville). Choices that I think say a lot about me, but what can I say, I am large, I contain multitudes. Just as with books I enjoy all kind of movies, my favorite directors are Scorsese, Kurosawa and Del Toro, but I also love the MCU and dumb horror movies. Although, recently I have started to watch TV more, which I still thing can be amazing, but I just don’t love as much as movies. My favorites series would be Mad Men, Bob’s Burgers, The Wire (don’t worry, if you haven’t watched it I won’t pester you into doing it), The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel, The Simpson (90’s kid after all), Better Call Saul (which is better than Breaking Bad and that’s the last time I will say it, to prevent arguments), Aggretsuko, Seinfield, Brooklyn 99, BoJack Horseman and Community. * Music is also a passion of mine, I enjoy all kinds of genres and like to waste my time doing dumb playlist after even dumber playlist. I would love if you share yours with me. * I like playing videogames too. Top 5 of all time: TLoZ: Twilight Princess, Super Mario World, Bloodborne, Resident Evil 4 and Red Dead Redemption 2 I enjoy walking around cities, exploring them, trying new food and sharing it with people I love, visiting museums and buildings. I like to cook, especially desserts and pastries, and spending times with friends and family, just talking and eating or dancing some cumbias (I can teach you if you want. Also, I am not that great of a dancer). Well, so this is goodbye for now. Thanks for reading through all this rambling.
Auf Wiedersehen

Hello tarkov reddit, i've been playing tarkov since the beta release, i probably have around 10.000+ hours if not more of total playtime, used to stream for a while 2 years ago (golden era imho) i'm what you might consider a "chad" you can check some of my old clips here
Video di MADKRAUSS - Twitch
2 days ago i killed a streamer lvl 65 russian streamer twice, both times he reported me (i will link the VOD but i'm not sure how long it will stay up)
10000ч 3300+чвк Борьба с Крепкими Мужчинами на просторах Таркова !settings !боссы !discord Политика оff. - Twitch
1st game 5:42:00 he's fighting some dude in red i kill him from behind, he reports me for no reason
2nd game 5:48:00 he fights me directly in kitchen, i wallbang 1 hit him behind the door, from his POV it looks like a classic desync tarkov moment, from my POV i saw his whole body (ofc i don't have it as i don't record every single game i play)
he's clearly very angry and reports me again (i don't understand russian but he's clearly saying i'm cheating)
fast forward 2 days i just logged in and my account is perma banned.
i'm 100% sure it's a manual ban as i never used any cheats.
i already appealed through official means but we've all read the stories here on reddit and i know nothing will come out of it.
i know i won't get unbanned as i'm not anyone famous (like dylhero situation), this is my farewell to tarkov it's been a fun(?) 5 years
Just wanted to share my story, especially considering what's going on right now, obviously i'm frustrated as i never got any email i just found out my account got permabanned today, hopefully i can raise some awareness on the situation but my hopes are 0 in this BSG right now
Thank you for your attention.
An honest player that never gave up on the game.

Hi all, just after a bit of advice...
Our house rabbit died suddenly late last week...we have only had her since August last year - but her health went down hill all day on Friday and ended up passing away in my wife's arms. Just before she died she had a panic / seizure in my wife's arms before passing so it wasn't a nice experience.
My wife is utterly heartbroken and devistated.
She has been very fortunate to not have had experienced a close pet or even family member passing away and this was her first real experience of death - as a result she has taken it very hard.
She was up all night the first night in constant tears. Every night since she has been up multiple times crying and has since gone back to work and has cried on and off all day.
She has hardly eaten since it happened (half a sandwich is the most she's had) and the slightest thing will set her off crying. I've cleared away any and all of the rabbits bits and bobs per her request to try to get it out of sight and out of mind but this has upset her more.
My concern, which is why I'm after some advice is that 4 days in and the tears remain constant, she continues to not want to eat and says she hates being in the house.
I've tried to be as supportive as I can but I'm struggling as she just seems stuck in a loop that I can't get her out of.
I've suggested watching films / TV to take her mind off it, I've tried suggesting throwing herself into a house project (even if it's just doing some generic jobs around the house) to try and distract herself but just wants to come home and cry.
I just can't help shaking the feeling that it's an extreme response and maybe she needs to additional support either by talking to a professional or maybe some help via some drugs just to calm her emotions. I've suggested both but she just said it was a normal reaction and I was being stupid.
Her physical and mental health are my main concerns but I'm also worried this is having an negative effect on our daughter and myself.
Any advice would be greatly appreciated or even confirmation if I should even be worried and should just let her deal in her own way.
Many thanks

Have a few items i'm trying to clear out all in great condition, noted if games are loose or CIB. Open to discount for bigger bundles.
Shipping starts at $5.00 and Free Shipping on Bundles over $75 with Friends & Family please. Pics upon request.

PS4

Odin Sphere Leifthrasir Storybook Edition SEALED $140
COD : Infinite Warfare Legacy Edition CIB $10
Plants vs Zombies 2 : Garden Warfare $10
FFXIV Complete Edition CIB $10
Has Been Heroes CIB $10
Bulletstorm Full Clip Edition CIB $$20
The Division $5
Deus Ex MD $10
3x PS4 Cases with Double Discs Slots $15

XBox

One Lords of the Fallen $10
Assassins Creed Odyssey $10

PS Vita

Toukiden: Kiwami $35
The Walking Dead: Season 2 $30
Hot Shots Golf World Invitational $30
Legend Of Heroes: Trails Of Cold Steel 1 $60
Dynasty Warriors Next $25
Stranger Of Sword City $30
Earth Defense Force 2: Invaders From Planet Space $30
Ragnarok Odyssey Ace $45
Shantae Half-Genie Hero [Risky Beats Edition] $60
UnEpic SEALED $130
Risk Of Rain SEALED $45
Aqua Kitty SEALED $70
Trillion: God Of Destruction $30
Grand Kingdom Case $10
Toukiden : Kiwami Case $15
Reverie $40
Sir Eatsalot $50

3DS

Legend Of Legacy Launch Edition SEALED $55
Crush 3D Loose in 3DS Case $10
Cubic Ninja $10
Codename S.T.E.A.M $5
Warioware D.I.Y Loose in 3DS Case $30
Smash Bros 3DS CIB $17
Steel Diver CIB $8
OEM Charging Base for original 3DS $20

PS1

Fighter Maker Loose $10
FF Tactics GH CIB $30
FF9 CIB (Case damaged) $15
Crash Bandicoot 2 Loose in Twisted Metal GH Case $15
Sim City 2000 Game+Case (damaged) $15
Oddworld Abes Oddysee CIB $25

DS

Intec DS Case $10
Score 6x Game Cartridge Case $10
Bleach Blade Of Fate Loose $15
Advance Wars 2 Days of Ruin Loose $30

N64

N64 Console with hookups and 1x OEM Grey Controller (Controller is in good condition 8/10 and analog stick is 8/10, console was painted with black acrylic spray paint from previous owner and cartridge slot has been modded to play Japanese N64 carts so doesn't include the slot flaps) $80 shipped
007 GoldenEye Loose $35
Beetle Adventure Racing Loose $20
Snowboard Kids 1 Loose $50

PS3 $6 Each unless Noted

Tales Of Symphonia Chronicles CIB $20
Zone Of The Enders HD Collection CIB $15
Yakuza 3 Loose $15
Metal Gear Solid HD Collection Loose $15
Genji Days Of The Blade $20
Genji Days Of The Blade Loose $10
South Park : The Stick of Truth SEALED $10
Call of Duty : Modern Warfare 3
Call of Duty Ghost
Need for Speed Pro Street
Call of Duty Modern Warfare
Red Faction Guerilla x2
Battlefield 3
MoH Warfighter LE Loose
Darksiders
Darksiders 2
Crysis 2
Deus Ex HR
Call of Duty 2 Steelbook
Mercenaries 2 in Generic Case
Warhawk
Call of Duty MW3 x2
Assassins Creed 4 BF

PS2 $6 Each Unless Noted

MDK 2 Armageddon Loose $10
Need For Speed Hot Pursuit 2 $10
The Getaway $10
Samurai Showdown Anthology $30
007 Agent Under Fire Loose $10
Welcome to Jumppack
Metal Arms in Generic Case
MX vs ATX
Army Men
Rocky
NCAA Football 2004
Army Men : Sarges Hero
Full Spectrum Warrior
FIFA 2001 MLS
NCAA Football 2003
Eye Toy Antigrav with Eye Camera $20
Need for Speed Hot Pursuit 2
Wheel of Fortune
Motorcross Mania 3
Seaworld Deep Sea Adventures
Socom US Navy Seal
Red Faction Case $5
Final Fantasy X-2
ThrillVille

Snes Games

Mortal Kombat 2 (label is damaged) $10

XB360 $7 Each unless Noted

Zone Of The Enders HD Collection Limited Edition SEALED $60
Assassins Creed 1
Assassins Creed 3 Steelbook
The Evil Within
BF3 Limited Edition
Kinect Adventures
Motionsports
Call of Duty Ghosts
3rd Party Controller $10
Darksiders 2
Marvel Ultimate Alliance in Gamestop Case $10
OEM Black Controller with Battery Pack $20

OG Xbox $7 Each unless Noted

TRON 2.0 Killer App $15
Midnight Club 3 Case with Burnout 3 Disc
Wreckless
Unreal Championship 1
Mace Griffon
Cabelas Deer Hunt 2005
Greg Hastings Tournament Paintball

Gamecube

GB Player OEM Case Holder *Missing outer cardboard and Manual $25
NFL2k3 CIB $8
Monopoly Party+Manual in Blockbuster Case $10
Star Wars Rogue Leader+Manual in DVD Case $15
Spiderman 2 Player's Choice (Missing Manual) $15
Megaman Anniversary Collection (Missing Manual) $20
MC Groovez Dance Craze$10
Fifa Soccer 2002 $10
Spiderman 1 Case $5
007 NightFire Case with Fantastic Four Games $5

Switch

TechKen Switch Pro Wireless Controller CIB Purple $20
Ys VIII Lacrimosa Of DANA (PAL Version) CIB $40

Wii

Nights Journey of Dreams in Gamestop Case & Manual $10
Generic Dual Wiimote Charging Dock $10

Covers, Cases and Manuals

Wii Dragon Quest Swords Manual $7
Wii Monster Hunter 3 Manual $5
Wii Elebits Manual $5
GC Ghost Recon Case & Manual $7
GC True Crime Streets of LA Case & Manual $10
GC Spiderman 1 Case Only $7
GC Dead to Rights Case & Manual $10
GC Splinter Cell Pandora Tomorrow Case & Manual $10
GC Hitman 2 Case & Manual $10
GC MoH Frontline Case & Manual $7
GC Rainbow Six 3 Case & Manual $7
PS2 Call of Duty FH Case & Manual $7
GC NFL 2K3 Case $5
GC Turok Evolution Case & Manual $5
PS4 Nioh Case $5
PS Vita Exist Archive Case $5
PS3 Zone of Enders HD Collection Case & Manual $10
PS2 Dragon Quest 8 Case & Manual $10
PS2 Onimusha 2 Case & Manual $10
PS2 Tekken 5 Case & Manual $10
PS2 Kingdom Hearts 1 GH Case & Manual $10
PS2 Kingdom Hearts 2 GH Case & Manual $10
PS2 Area 51 Case & Manual $10
GC NBA 2K2 Case & Manual $10
PS2 Final Fantasy X-2 Case $ Manual $10
PS2 Starwars Battlefront Case & Manual $10
GC Prince of Persia Cover & Manual $10
GC Viewtiful Joe 1 Manual $20
PS2 Katamari Damacy Cover & Manual $10
GC Burnout 3 Takedown $5
PS2 Nightmare before Christmas Oogies Revenge Cover & Manual $15
PS2 GTA San Andreas Cover & Manual $10
PS2 Capcom Classic Collection Cover & Manual $15
PS2 Virtua Fighter 4 Evolution Manual $5
PS2 Megaman X Collection Cover & Manual $15
PS2 Star Ocean Till the End of Time Cover & Manual $10
PS2 R-Type Final Cover & Manual $15
PS2 Soul Caliber 2 Cover $7
XB Panzer Dragoon Orta Cover & Manual $30
XB Ninja Gaiden Black Cover & Manual $10
PS2 Mad Maestro Cover & Manual $10
PS2 007 Everything or Nothing Manual $5
PS2 Half Life 2 Cover $10
PS2 Devil May Cry 3 Cover & Manual $10
PS2 FF X-2 Cover & Manual $10
PS2 REZ Cover & Manual $15
PS2 Rygar Cover & Manual $10
PS2 Chaos Legion Manual $7
PS2 Zone of Enders 1 Cover & Manual $10
PS2 Final Fantasy 12 Manual $7
PS2 Front Mission 4 Cover & Manual $10
PS2 Metal Gear Solid 3 Subsistence Cover $7
PS2 Escape from Monkey Island Cover $7
PS1 Final Fantasy Chronicles GH Back/Front Cover & Manual $10
PS1 Tenchu 1 Cover & Manual $15
PS1 Final Fantasy 7 GH Front/Back Cover & Manual $15
PS1 Buster Bros Collection Cover & Manual $20
GC Zelda Master Quest Manual + Windwaker $30

Hi BenQ,
I have a BenQ GV1 with the original remote and an Apple TV hooked up through the HDMI to USB C adapter.
My projector is ceiling mounted, and I noticed that the IR signal from the remote is not strong enough to reflect on the wall onto the projector. The projector also doesn’t turn on on the remote’s power button press. After manually turning it on, the remote works just fine from a close distance.
I was wondering if this is normal. If so, what could I do to improve this? I’ve also tried setting up my Apple TV remote which only allows volume up/down but not on/off of the projector.

Posting here, should anyone look for more feedback than just Steam Reviews.
​
Played about 11 hours so far, with a few short games and then one that lasted for about 6 hours to see just how far you can get. Even with it being EA, I was pretty impressed. The game caught my eye based on the C&C visuals and vibe and honestly is playing better than some phone Tower Defense games I have tried out. A long game like the one I had was certainly challenging due to the lack of additional research, but I have it wishlisted and will certainly give the game a more in-depth playthrough when there is more to do.
​
Some thoughts:
Pros:
-Simple game play that might have you losing a few matches at first, but once things can be researched I think it becomes pretty easy to keep growing and expanding.
-While everything is pixeled, the layout and feel is also easy to get used to. It didn't take much to figure out how to build things with some efficiency to keep unlocking more space.
-Pixelation Filter is nice! Feels fun to turn it on and gives that old game vibes, but off the game is pretty clean and sharp looking!
-2x and 4x Speed option is nice and the game doesn't seem to suffer much for it. I know plenty of TD's that just break past 2x speeds, even if they offer higher.
-My Pros list is short as its still EA, but I've already suggested it to a few of my friends as a simple time sink while we have downtime.
Cons/Suggestions:
--The turret audio gets wildly intense at times and I often played with the volume nearly at zero. After several hours on one map, the audio was just a total mess of "under attack/turret lost" and mine + enemy gunfire going rampant. I know this is a hard one to address, but if 30 guns are firing, I would limit that sound clip to only a few playing vs every single one going off.
--When you are placing anything, such as a wall and you accidentally click another object while in placement mode, it deselects that and selects the new thing. If in placement mode, disabling the ability to select something would be clutch. Otherwise, I frequently place a wall, click a turret, have to mouse back to the wall, select it and go back into trying to place it and hope I didnt lose the turret behind it (I did). Then you have to also re-place the turret and run into a similar problem. Later in the game, this is really painful with walls being blown away instantly and trying to replace your defenses. Typically it was just me letting a huge swath of defense getting destroyed, then trying to rebuild it all between waves or after the blob moved on.
--Boss HP bars are nice, at first, but at one point I had I think 6 or 7 and it consumed nearly 50% of my screen, making it difficult to see paths and build things.
--No mass repair option, or even a choice to auto-repair. Being able to toggle that for say, just walls, just turrets, etc, would be really nice. Otherwise, I stopped using the repair at all and just let stuff die and then replaced it. Only really used the repair on my HQ as needed.
-Turrets have the ability to shoot different things based on the priority you choose, but a 'deadliest' or 'boss' first would be neat! I set a pile of turrets to shoot highest HP thinking that would work, but it looked like they would switch to something else after some damage was done, moving to a higher HP unit because it was new in that targeting range. They don't stick to the boss or the bigger threats. Tried this with several settings to see if I could find one to do this, but didn't find one that worked.
-No mass select for turrets. Having to manually select each one to change priorities is a slow, tedious process.
-On the main home page and when loading, the camera shakes/tries to be dynamic in movement but its just really disorienting. It can follow the unit but it swinging around does not feel thematic or needed. Loading a map the cannon fires and the screen zooms in/out at a tilted angle. I think a little wiggle here is okay, but the zooming tilt effect is a bit much.
-No pause feature. Opening the research panel and it pausing would be nice, or an overall option to pause. Its not a huge con and I get why there might not be one. Still, it can be pretty useful. UI: --The UI isn't bad, especially again in EA and really gives that old C&C feel. However, a few things complicate the game:
--No shortcuts for buildings, if you misclick during placement, you have to go re-select it.
--Opening the research window in a game, its always stuck in a weird place with the camera in the upper right. Have to use WASD to reposition it every time. If its going to open in a static place, maybe a zoomed out full view is better, like it is on the main home page. Makes it easier to zoom into what I need to see.
--Text in the research descriptions is all different. Font size is huge for some titles, with tiny red & green text that's a little hard to see. You have to zoom in a good bit to read it clearly. Feels like the description box is a set size and the text is trying to squeeze into that space.
--The 'Expand' button on multiple playthroughs covers building space. Can you make it only pop up when you hover over the dome?
-Not every time, but most my games when I build the Radar, the spot for it still has the silver background, some games its all black.
Huge wall of text, thanks for reading it all if you did! I know the game is EA, but this is going to be something I keep an eye on and I really think its good so far and has tons of potential! Thanks for your hard work and I am looking forward to seeing the direction you take it :D

I don’t see many travel diaries for Europe or the UK so thought it would be nice to do an example of a long weekend!
For reference I live with my partner and share some housing / bills with him but keep all other money separately, however I went on holiday with one of my friends.

Section 1: Bio

Age - 34
Occupation - Tech Manager
Hometown - East Sussex
Number of PTO days and how you accrue them - in the UK most people get at least 25 days annual leave plus public holidays. In addition to this I get the option to buy holiday as part of my benefits - I do this every year, usually between 6 and 10 days, so this year I have 31 days.

Section 2: Assets and debt

Savings balance: We bought a house early last year with my partner, that wiped out most savings! I’ve probably got £10,000 now across stocks and shares ISAs and standard savings pots.
Checking balance: About £1500
Debt: Other than a giant mortgage, no other debt.

Section 3: Income

Salary after deductions: Around ~£5K per month - that’s after tax, NI, pension, life / critical illness insurance, health insurance, holiday purchase deductions
My pals overall situation: I don’t know her specifics but she works in PR and makes somewhere in the area of £60-70K per year.

Section 4: Travel expenses

I have kept all costs as combined through the diary and then have done the split at the end.
We wanted to do a long weekend Europe trip but wanted it to be pretty relaxed and I didn’t feel like taking a flight so we eventually decided on doing the Eurotunnel.
For reference, the Eurotunnel is where you drive your own car onto a train and then the train goes through the channel tunnel from the UK to France. We then thought we would do a bit of northern France and do a bit of exploring! I've done other areas of France previously but never further North than Paris.
Pre trip:
Eurotunnel and insurance - £213 - we booked this beforehand, this is return for one car with two people in it. It was a fixed time train each way, and includes car insurance for when we were in France for three days.
I also spent £40 on a “prepare your car for Europe” kit which included what you must have in your car to legally drive in France (high viz jacket, first aid kit, breathalysers, light deflectors etc) - I haven’t included this in the trip expense totals because we will reuse it many times for trips, and to be honest seems like a handy thing to have in the car anyway!
Air bnb - £155 - we booked the accommodation beforehand, we booked two nights in Lille in a studio apartment with one double bed and one sofa bed. I always like to get an AirBnb as it gives more flexibility to stay in, have your own kitchen and have a bit more space!
I didn’t book separate travel insurance - I get full year cover as part of one of my bank accounts.
Accommodation total: £155
Transport total: £213
Pre trip total: £368
Day 1
9.30 - I pick up my pal from a nearby train station then drive down to Folkestone where the Tunnel is. I am very excited to take my car on a train!! We stop off for fuel at the services nearby so that I won’t need to figure out France petrol stations - it only needs half a tank to fill, we also pick up snacks for the drive £40 for fuel and £5 for snacks.
11.30 - our train is at 12.20 but we arrive about an hour before. Check-in is super easy and we get a little sign to hang from the mirror to show what our train number is. We park up at the terminal and wait for the signs to show to proceed. We grab a drink from the terminal whilst we wait £4.
12.30 - whizz through both passport controls and then drive on the train! So weird to be sat in a car which isn’t moving on a train which is speeding along. The train takes 35 minutes and then you can just drive straight off onto the motorway. We lose an hour with the time difference so arrive at 2pm.
2 - we have no plans as we've both been so busy with work and decided to just see how we get on! But the signs on the motorway says Dunkirk and that’s a place I’ve never been so we head there which is about a 35 minute drive. Park the car £1.
3 - wander around Dunkirk looking at the war memorials and the pretty harbour. Buy some cheese baguettes to keep us going - £5.
5 - back in the car to drive to Lille where the AirBnb is which is about an hour away. We stop off at Lidl to buy some provisions (bread and cheese ofc), snacks, Prosecco, champagne, and tonic for the bottle of gin I brought with me from home - comes to £45 but £15 was the bargain champagne!
5.30 - check into the Airbnb. Promptly drop my bottle of champagne on the floor and it smashes everywhere. £15 well spent… spend ages cleaning it up. Have a glass of Prosecco to commiserate.
7 - decide we need to go out for a drink to make up for the champagne. Head out to a nearby French restaurant - food is delish, service isn’t excellent but overall a lovely evening catching up - £65.
9 - head back, more Prosecco, put the sofa bed up and then off to sleep eventually around 11.
Day 1 total: £165
Day 2
9 - time to explore Lille! We get our walking shoes on and start to explore the city - lots of walking down little streets. We do the classic of wandering from cafe to patisserie with a snack here, a drink there, comes to about £15 for the three breaks. The city of Lille is beautiful - it didn't get as destroyed in the war compared to Dunkirk so full of French architecture and big grand squares.
11 - walk a bit out of town to the Citadel and do a big walk around the park outside. You can't go in the citadel but its still a very nice spot to walk around.
1 - time for proper lunch!! We fancy crepes and thankfully we are in France! Find a great crepe restaurant and have a sweet and a savoury - ham and goats cheese which is so good. Plus a couple of glasses of wine - £27
2 - there are so many chocolate shops due to how close we are to Belgium. Pop into one and buy some chocolate as a gift for my partner - £7
3 - feet are getting tired by this point so make the 25 minute hike home - almost 20,000 steps today! We are exhausted. Collapse in the Airbnb for introvert time of tv, phones and ignoring each other.
4 - I for some reason start to feel a bit off and have a bad stomach (too much cheese and wine?! Surely not). Make the decision to stay in for the evening.
7 - have a little bit of gin which I brought with me and watch a movie on Amazon Prime. End up getting Uber eats of some pizza - £25. I used to feel guilty when we stayed in when I was on hols but now I know that I need to not be exhausted when I get back so a night in is okay! We did so much exploring that we did make the most of seeing Lille. Plus I know it's so close now, I can pop back!
10 - water, reading, bed!
Day 2 total: £74
Day 3
8 - feel much better this morning - so thankful! Nothing like being ill when you know you need to travel, I was worried it would not be a good driving day today. Glad I got lots of sleep!
10 - clean up the Airbnb and pop to the patisserie for croissants - £2, before hitting the road and driving back to Calais to do some exploring. It's raining a bit but clears up when we hit Calais - win!
11.30 - it’s about an hour and ten back to Calais. Driving hasn’t been too bad considering it’s the wrong side of the road for me and the wrong side of the car! I was a bit worried about it but as long as I just tell myself continually to drive on the right then it seems to be okay! I want to go to the lace and fashion museum as it sounds interesting. We park - £1 - and then walk over. It’s £8 for both of us to get in because it only has one exhibit on - bargain! Very much enjoyed it, never realised so much went into lace or that there were so many different types!
1 - time for our final lunch! Head to a probably too touristy restaurant and the food wasn’t great. Clearly means time to go home! £27
2 - head back to the Eurotunnel and stop in the terminal once we are checked in. Pop into duty free and buy 2 bottles of rum as they are a bargain, plus some macarons as a gift - £33. Stop for a drink in Starbucks - £8.
3.30 - another speedy trip through the tunnel! Save an hour on the way back too. Head back and drive home. Used about three quarters of a tank of fuel so quite pleased with that. So nice to have a lovely break, see somewhere new but also return back not feeling utterly exhausted!
Day 3 total: £79

Section 5: Overall

Total cost for both of us: £686
Total cost for what I paid: £370 (half most costs, plus full cost of rum, smashed champagne and gifts)
How I afforded the trip: I’ve only recently started earning more so I’m still a very naturally frugal traveller! Plus most of what I enjoy when travelling is just wandering about and eating the delicious food.
I split the cost so did all the pre trip costs earlier in the year so it doesn’t feel like all at once. I then usually put my “spending money” onto my Monzo which I don’t use for anything else - makes it really easy to track how much I’m spending and keep an eye on it. This was probably lower that I expected for the trip because we didn't go out for dinner on the second night which definitely saved some money!

Hi Everyone. I am an undergraduate taking Real Analysis 1 this semester. The course uses Abbott's 'Understanding Analysis', 2nd ed. Although the book's explanations are clear, it has one downside for me: no solution manual. I usually struggle with solving the problems following each section. This is mainly because when I solve a problem, I do not know if my proof is correct/complete, and if I did not solve it, I would not find any hints or solutions. Moreover, my professor is usually unavailable/hard-to-reach.
Therefore, it would be an invaluable learning tool for me to have if anyone could share a Problem List / Test Bank with solutions. Thank you! :).

Hello gafs,
Rules: Dibs rules applies. I can also do cash on my end if something doesn't add up to the trade value of optics I am interested in. Payment due within 15 minutes of dibs. If payment has not been received, I will move onto the next dibs in line. I accept with NO NOTES, pp ff, apple pay, venmo, carrier pigeon, and Zelle. Users who wish to use G&S will eat the cost. Comment and then PM, no chats.
Looking to trade or sell the following items (anything else not listed is not for sale):
the goods
DD MK18 upper from Brownells with the dark brown handguard and .07 diameter gas port. This includes the head spaced DD bcg, DD barrel, and BCM/Vltor CH. < 300 rounds fired through it. This is currently rattle canned but the underneath, supposedly there is no salt. (catch and release from here) I would prefer not to split, but willing to split if I have to. Upper must go first. SV:$950 TV: $1050
Trijicon Accupower 1x4 SFP on an ADM Recon H QD mount (1.93 height). Low salt, but it does have some lights scratches on the body and dings on the caps from being used. This does have the original box. It's extremely large, but I can send it if you want it. 223/55 gr BDC reticle. 30mm tube and green crosshair. I will split this no problem. This thing is super clear and a super nice optic.
SV:$600 TV:$620. Scope alone $400. $200 for the mount. Mount has approx 300 rounds through it.
27 brand new 30 round Tapco AK mags, one used pmag, two used CAI mag (steel reinforced lips), one used 40 rounder of unknown origin, It looks to be Bulgarian since it has the three little stars. I would prefer to get rid of this as a lot to avoid logistics issues. They are great range mags, but I have no use for them since I got out of the AK game. I have no idea what these are worth since they are no longer in business. $250 SV:TV? (No shipping to ban states)
​
Items I am interested in trading for:
Trijicon VCOG SCO 1-8. 100% has to be the SCO with the Larue mount and christmas tree reticle. If you have one of the SCOs, I will straight up buy it from you cash if you don't buy/trade any of my stuff.
Trijicon ACOG TA02 red crosshair reticle.

DRAFT

Here I am again LOL. Some of y'all might remember that I had done a game almost a year ago for first gen Kpop acts, but because I have expanded some of my horizons to a time that predates first gen, and which is super unique and cool in it's own right, I've decide to come back to do a similar game, but for the late 80s - mid 90s era! That era was marked by a young democratic Korea and a society basically re-inventing and rediscovering itself. I'll be basically looking from 1985 (and maybe a little before that, so maybe maximum 1981) to music in 1995.
I will actually not just be talking about music, but also a little bit of pop culture - actors, models, events, fashion trends,... but I promise, it's going to be majority music LOL.
Game goes as simple as follows :

• 1.Take the number of members your favourite group has (if you can't decide on a fave, choose the groups whose song you listened last). Will be referred to as "your group".
• 2. Go down and choose the number in the list. Then go to the letter the number takes you to. Choose one from a few choices. Might be a song, an artist, a show, a scenario, or just simply a fun fact.
• 3. Because I'm curious, comment down below what you got!

Here we Go! Have fun time-travelling!
---
(3). You're walking around Hongdae, and you hear a real killer rock riff played by one of the street bands. The rock scene is flourishing, y'know. Which song is it? Go to (H)
(4.) You have 5000 won, and picked up a "Best Of" Album at a music store , but the artist's name is not written on the cover. Whose "Best Of" Album is it? Go to (F)
(5). It's 1981. You notice a music store owner putting out trash bags full of albums on the street. You ask him why, and he answers that these albums are by artists who are on the "ban list" of the current military dictatorship. But since you asked, you can pick one from them. Which one are you picking? Go to (C)
(6). You come across a little shop selling tickets to various music events. You have some money left, so you decide to buy one. Which one are you buying? Go to D
(7). Go to (E)
(8). You find a gift coupon for the Seoul Department Store (서울백화점) on the road! What are you going to buy with it? Go to (G)
(9). You have 2000 won, and bought a random album at the music store with it. It's a "Gayo Compilation Album". What songs are on there? Go to (B)
(10). Go to (A)
(11). You are walking around Seoul, when you notice film cameras and lights on the streets, with some staff members clearing anything in front of them. You deduce you are about to be part of a TV drama! Where are you, and which one is it? Go to (J)
(12). Go to (B)
(13). You want to attend a music show, KBS's Gayo Top Ten. Too bad that it's not in KBS's Studio this week! Where is it? Go to (I)
________________________________________
Letters:

(A)

(B)

What is your favourite season of the year?

• Spring
• Summer
• Autumn
• Winter
• Monsoon/Rainy Season : Soft Rock
• ​

(C)

(D)

Where would you rather go to spend some free time?

• The library : KBS Rookie Stage
• The park/greenery: Riverside Music Fest
• The downtown/shopping district : College Music Fest
• The movies : KBS "March Of Youth"

(E)

(F)

​

(G)

You go to the store and show the reception desk your coupon. The lady at the desk asks you if you want a "twin cake". Well, what is a "twin cake"? Is it...

• A sweet condiment : Wrong! With your coupon,
• A makeup product : Correct! The twin cake is a pressed powder that acts as foundation. It got it's unique name in Korea, from the build of the case. The upper flap/lid contains the puff that helps with the application, and the lower lid contained the actual powder, with an inbuilt mirror on the top of the second lid.
• A household item for cleaning :
• A case or purse to keep things inside :

(H)

​

(I)

​

(J)

The run in question, for those interested. Features: The Fighting Lion, Sub-50 minutes, Sleep Deprivation, commentary in Fireteam Chat, Strange Music, no Wishender Cheese
 

• Brakion has way, way, way too much health in the third phase. I think changing the health splits from 30/30/30 to 45/45/10 would go a LONG way towards making that encounter feel better. A high-damage, high-durability enemy that endlessly rushes you with no reprieve or mechanic outside of a stagger that can happen exactly once isn't fun or interesting, it's just frustrating - especially when it comes at the end of a long and intense activity. It'd be a lot more tolerable if his health reflected that you've been beating the milk out of him for two phases, making his stagger more accessible and giving you a greater chance to capitalize on it to end the fight.
• Alternately, just turn off his gun for the third phase. The Void Fire attack hurts, but it CAN be dodged, and it causes him to stop for a second instead of engaging in more relentless pursuit. Plus, he's been using a single-fire weapon in burst-fire since the second phase started - it's gotta be overheated or something by now, right?
• gosh the fighting lion is SO buggy. not a single aspect of that gun works properly or consistently right now
• It's funny how much more tolerable spawns are when you're running solo instead of in a group, and I actually appreciate how in duo+ "add clear" goes from a job to a career because the adds are actually dangerous and there's just so very many of them.
• Controlled Demolition adds Volatile to Sentinel attacks but not Volatile Rounds to Weapons of Light??? Throw me a bone here
• Wyverns are made of bastard.
• No Champions is SO nice. Please do the rest of the game.
• When Asher Mir physically returns to us, I want the option to hug him. I want to see him turn into a furious spluttering mess over being welcomed home as a dear friend.
• Speaking of Asher, I wonder if he's up to trying his Synthetic Light experiments again. Maybe Splicer tech will make them work this time?
• Despite the Fighting Lion dealing more damage than usual to Red Bars, it doesn't make much of a difference in the big scheme of things - most noteworthy thing about it is being able to down Wyverns in one shot instead of two shots, which really isn't that significant when they can be downed quickly with other weapons. Keep it IMO.
• I don't know why I got the second catalyst when it's supposed to be on a weekly lockout but I'm not complaining since that's the only catalyst I actually care about.
• One of these days I need to clean out my music library.

 
Good luck to everyone else who attempts runs of their own!

So, Rank Match is coming to EN (in less than 12 hours as I’m writing this!). Maybe you’ve seen a few posts crop up on your twitter TL or randomly on this subreddit bringing up fear of cheaters. Maybe you haven’t and have only seen the ones saying “I’m no good, I’ll probably only languish in bronze” or something like that. But all the same, I think we need to treat with the topic.
Let’s talk about cheating. It’s rampant, and it needs to be recognized. It’s worth addressing. It’s worth keeping EN’s integrity as a server.
A little context, before I do: I'm a user from the community Sekai server (henceforth referred to as Sekaicord) linked on the sidebar. By habit, I am not a reddit user, and I apologize if this comes off too strong as a consequence. I understand this is a contentious topic, and I recognize that I might have perception bias if the only posts I see from here showcase the "worst" posts and not the actual "average" opinion on this — but, my impression is that, in general, this subreddit has a terrible track record when it comes to identifying cheaters, and an equally awful slate of defenses for their behavior. I'm writing this post not just to address some of these defenses, but also to open the conversation. The less we know about it, the less we can push the devs to take action on it. And likewise, the more we’re aware…
Some context for my viewpoints / experiences on the matter:
- I'm a Day 1 JP player, with 240+ Master FCs. I played EN from day 1 up until around Scramble, when the amount of external tiering drama got too much for me (and, if my handle on what happened during White Day is right, it hasn't gotten better). Level-wise, I’d be about Lv31-32 for FC skill and 26-28 AP-wise. Ask me for a handcam if you want. On Sekaicord I frequently talk to much better players — yes, even ones who can FC/AP 33+ songs (which are probably the most likely to get doubted). I asked a player with Lv34+ FCs (AMARA, 16bit, Intense Voice, Disappearance/END) to review this huge treatise before I wrote it out. I'm pretty confident as to their legitimacy and generally see some patterns that emerge as to why they are. I'll explain some of these here.
- I tend to give the benefit of the doubt to APs up to around Lv32 in the wild, but a lot of Lv33+ FCs tend to be more suspect for any number of reasons you can see from the co-op results screen.
- The atmosphere in Sekaicord around cheating is, as you can probably infer from my tone, highly distrusting. Cheaters are banned on sight once proof is established beyond doubt – so in fact, it surprises me that technically speaking, the rules on the subreddit’s sidebar don’t concretely penalize cheating!
But like many communities, it didn't start out like that. The dedicated gameplay channel was VERY happy to celebrate players' accomplishments (we used to have every 33+ FC pinned) and generally didn't ask for much proof — until Rank Match came on JP, and a player who we all thought was just insanely good got exposed (because JP caught and banned him). Here's the thing — he was a good player in his own right (i.e., Lv. 32+, but not good enough for the results he cheated), and the way he hid his results was much less blatant than some of the people later banned from the server for cheating, who… well, put in about as much effort as some of the cheaters that have been linked to me from here. This is how it goes for pretty much any community: break the established trust, and obviously nothing's the same afterward.
I will try to write this in such a way that it gives cheaters as few hints as possible on how to make their plays look more "legit"; I simply want to point out some of the common patterns that emerge when a cheater really is afoot (and which are never an issue for a legitimate player), and refute some of the more common defenses.
Another thing: yes, not everyone condescends to the level of some of these defenses I’ve written out. However, I’ve seen them appear enough in more or less these exact forms, unchallenged, that it’s worth quoting them in exactly the same way to give you an idea of what’s wrong with these viewpoints. This is not meant as a personal attack (moreso if you may have said something to these effects in the past); it’s simply an attack on the logic behind them.

DEFENSES:

(1) "Has it ever occurred to you that someone might just be that good? / Or maybe they're just that good?"
Statements like these are, to put it bluntly, passive-aggressive and condescending towards people who might have genuine grounds for suspicion. People weren't born yesterday; we're fully aware that people on the level of HPS, MaengZombie, nanoflower, REN, STK, SkisK… exist. (I've specifically excluded jack just because he's the low-hanging fruit and also to point out that if one’s only knowledge of a "good player" is jack, well… there’s a whole world out there).
But the reason people don't cast doubt on those players is because they have put in the effort to be deserving of that trust. Every one of the players I've mentioned has videographic evidence — YouTube, Twitter clips, the list goes on. They frequently compete to get world-first on APs, and they're well aware that if you do not have a video that shows your hands, your play means nothing. For example, tweets purporting to show world-firsts on Six Trillion Years and Overnight Story were, pretty much without exception, disregarded by JP players when the user was silent on the question of handcams.
(The first recognized AP of Six Trillion Years is from SkisK , at 1d 1h 19m after release.)
(A little aside: JP players can be pretty ruthless about cheaters. From the official JP Discord, I passed by this message of someone posting a Yaminabe AP tweet with no proof on release day and was (not) surprised to see a slew of X-to-doubt reactions -- and, as with the tweet above which I had to resort to Wayback Machine to show you, it was later deleted presumably after getting called out.)
I also want to be clear on this: this also means that a player you don't expect CAN come out of nowhere and stake their claim on an achievement, as long as they have the proof to back their claim up. Here's a good example: the maxed score on Arcaea's hardest chart, Testify BYD, was achieved by a player (005saikou) who otherwise wasn't known for any other world-firsts! And — you guessed it — he had an annotated video to back up his claim, commenting on which parts he thought was hardest, and other peculiarities of the chart.
There's a common counterargument to (1) that goes something like
(2) "Well, maybe some people just don't want to show their hands / dox themselves / don't know how to record / etc."
Let's do this point-by-point.
2a) "...don't know how to record / not everyone has a second phone or camera to record handcams with..."
The trial-and-error process required to reach the level of play we're talking about 99% demands the ability to record, review, and rewatch your play. Even if you're not going to post it, you almost certainly will have tried it at some point on the road to 33+ just for your own "where did I go wrong?" purposes.
This argument is also an insult to the intelligence of a player; recording ISN'T EVEN HARD. Recording is built-in on iOS. Recording on Android is as simple as typing "screen recorder app" into Google Play Store (or its equivalent, for Xiaomi and other no-Google builds) and downloading the first free option that doesn't have ads every 0.1 seconds. While screen recordings are less trustworthy than handcams because, well, you can’t see what the player is doing in order to get that result, they’re trustworthy enough in conjunction with players who, besides a recording, can talk about what, why, and how they do what they’re doing (more on this below).
As for handcams, please don't be intimidated by the fact that most well-known YouTubers have professional-looking, crisp 1080p setups: even a grainy 480p view is enough as long as it's clear you're not pretending to mash away while a bot automatically PERFECTs the 200BPM portions of Intense Voice. Google "handcam setups", or DIY one by cutting a slit at the top of a cardboard box and pointing a camera lens down while you play from the bottom (my preferred solution). I have seen players who record themselves using cheap $20 webcams not even clipped to anywhere stable, players who ask to borrow a family member’s phone or camera for a paltry five minutes… anything to be honest! For as many cheaters I’ve seen accused, I’ve also seen nearly as many people who put in the effort to be honest, which deserves a good mention.
Just about every case I know of someone who wasn't a cheater was willing to provide a handcam of some sort. It doesn't matter if they took 30 minutes, five hours, or three days — they came back and defended themselves. I've even seen it on the EN discord! The first instinct of a cheater, by contrast, is to either stay completely silent and let other people do the defending for them, or to get extremely defensive and use some of the many arguments here.
Incidentally, there are legitimate examples I know of of completely unknown players who pop up one day in Sekaicord with some godlike play, and the reason they were believed on the spot? Handcam.
2b) "...don't want to show their hands / dox themselves..."
I suppose nothing can be done about that, but on this point I'd like to point out that Sekai is hardly the first (and will not be the last) rhythm game community to have doubters. This is frankly small-time compared to osu! players doing this like it's a JOB. And that comes down to a fundamental truth about rhythm games: difficult skill-based achievements have always had value because people SHOW they can be done. Consequently, if there is no proof, there is no value; if you're willing to make an outrageous claim; you best be prepared to show some outrageous play, or risk it not being worth anything at all.
There are other ways to show you clearly did what you're claiming to that don't involve a handcam, mind you — but they involve knowing what you're talking about, describing the chart / your strategies in detail, and, well, generally a certain level of passion about the intricacies of the game that most cheaters don't really seem to have, because they're only really here for the one fleeting shot at attention (mentioned this above already; skip to “spotting cheaters” below if you’re curious enough to know how).
Moving on…
(3) "But they posted a recording of…"
Let me be clear on this point: I personally (and many others) are not wondering if they photoshopped a rainbow clear diamond on a song; anyone can do that in three minutes. I am also not wondering (and do not care) if someone has a recording of themselves scrolling through a list of songs with a shiny line of rainbow diamonds, because that doesn't really mean anything if they cannot demonstrate the ability to repeat it (and that a bot didn't do it for them). On this point, most players aren't so letter-of-the-law obsessed as to demand a recording of a re-AP (understandable: players like Mita Kousuke take months even to get a singular AP on What's up? Pop! and there's no guarantee the perfect moment will be caught on camera for most players) — I (and many others) just want to see a level of play that reasonably LOOKS like they can do what they’re claiming to have done. Put simply, I really just want to see someone’s fingers dancing where the notes are landing, not their hands flailing miserably against the glass screen while a bot does the actual playing.
What would "reasonable" look like? Take a look at the Mita video as an example. While he lists some of his current personal bests at the top, you'll find that the majority of these streams are him failing, sometimes incredibly early, sometimes amazingly -- but the overall level of play is high. Players who've just finished with a feat from the night before / day before / two hours / 30 minutes before don't "rust over". A few hours' rest (if necessary) for exhausted hands is almost always enough to show something approaching legitimate if the player in question is legitimate -- again, no one's asking for a second AP.
(4) "You're just jealous!"
And? So what if I am? Since when was emotion a valid reason to stop reading and avoid the possibility that even people driven by emotion can make valid points? But part of why this argument is unusually effective is because most aren't aware of the common patterns that drive cheaters, and so valid arguments are often dismissed as being down to jealousy if you're not aware of why some of these defenses for cheaters just don't stick.
Part of why I shared the context of where I come from with this was partly to dispel this argument. I've long since accepted that there are people much better than me, and I want to explain why people (who don't necessarily have that chance) react the way they do towards cheaters without resorting to ad hominems like this.
But never mind me. If me potentially being jealous is enough to discount it at my sub-33 skill level, then would you believe the distaste for EN cheating if it came from the world-first AP on Kusaregedou to Chocolate? Incidentally, I assure you he's got nothing to be jealous of: after all, he's going to Tokyo for Spring CS and rubbing shoulders with HPS and the rest of the Sekai gods.
(5) "It's just a game, why would anyone cheat on Sekai?"
If you've ever heard a variation of the common schoolyard boast (or jokes about it) "my dad works at Nintendo / Game Freak / Activision / [insert AAA video game company here]", the answer is: it’s for exactly the same reason immature people have lied since the dawn of society — attention and self-esteem. Of course they gain nothing from this, it is just a game, after all — but kids literally lie just to win arguments as petty and easily-forgotten as those in a schoolyard. Why would Sekai be the first skill-based game (of many, many rhythm games out there) immune to this?
(6) "It's just a game, calm down lol"
I genuinely struggled to write an answer to this without getting a bit irritated; I’ve seen this so many times in so many places for so many wrong reasons. But what’s wrong with being passionate about a game? What’s wrong with wanting the pastime you settle into after a stressful day of work or school to be a fair playing ground? Why shouldn’t a game be taken seriously when competitive PvP games fuel multi-billion industries, have university scholarships, and round-the-clock teams and sport scientists analyzing them, and ignite the passions of people just as intensely as any “traditional” sport?
“Because that’s esports, and this is just Sekai”? Here, tell me you can’t feel the room shake when Mita APs Brand New Day live on stream.
What’s wrong with being passionate about something in the same way others, you included, are passionate about things besides Sekai – enough to be offended if someone said this exact same thing to you? What’s wrong with wanting fairness for one thing and not another?
(7) "Trust the cheat detection!"
I hate to have to say this, I really do, but automated cheat detection for EN is TERRIBLE. It might not even exist. As evidence I'd like to point towards some of the more infamous cheaters: the T2 for Mesmerized by Mermaids in EN. There are some pretty damning threads from long-time tierers that have explained the point in much more detail than I could eloquently say. Now, this exact cheater was defended by someone using the exact same argument I'm about to reply to, and it's just as fallacious now as it was then.
Allow me to explain exactly why "trust the cheat detection" doesn't fly.
- T2, as the threads I've linked demonstrate, was clearly botting, and did so for the entire week the event ran. So why didn't the supposed "cheat detection" pick this up? Why was T2 allowed to play all the way until the EVENT ENDED? Why was the event title AWARDED to T2, denying the T4 (nara) the T3 as a result?
- The appeal to authority argument particularly disgusts me because of one thing: JP has had its own issues with cheaters of a different nature: those who share accounts so that they can tier 24/7 with no downtime. The example I know of is from Unnamed Harmony: not only did they outright admit to account sharing (and insinuated that the t2 who lost was probably also cheating), they weren't banned. I use JP as an example for this reason: JP, which actually, proactively bans botters in Rank Match, still has cheaters that are left completely alone. How then, can you expect EN to have better scrutiny when even botters need a public outcry and a LOT of angry support desk mails just to get one T2 banned? (oh, and come back, and get that account banned too, and admit to committing about 7k euros worth of chargeback fraud…) No offense, but EN can't even herd its official discord channels together; how am I supposed to believe they have time for botters?
T2 Mermaids is hardly the only example there is — only the most notorious one. But if even the cases of people high enough to be in the ranking spotlight take so much effort to call out (no thanks to people spouting uneducated defenses and convincing enough people), how much more botters who just roam the wilds with all perfects that show with 0 notes hit?
Put another way: why use a tiering cheater as an example for skill-based cheating when tiering skill boils down to whoever has the stamina to slap Envy for the longest time? Answer: they use the same tools. The person running around with an EmpErroR AP in public rooms may be doing it to show off, while a tiering cheater may be doing it so they doesn’t lose sleep or struggle the same way their competitors do, but the means are (almost) always the same: a machine does the work for them. And if the game isn’t banning one of them… how can you be confident they’re banning the other?
“Well, that was months ago! They’re better now, I hope!”
The proof is in the pudding. If you’re right, then I’d be happier than anyone else.

SPOTTING CHEATERS:

Besides the whole "they get really defensive" / [insert argument above] things listed above, there are a few more tells that really go a long way towards sniffing out a cheater, and I'd like to go over some of them here (since they didn't really fit naturally into the counterarguments presented above). I'll skip over directly critiquing their results in the case that a prospective cheater reads this and takes notes on how to avoid getting caught.
Now, a little disclaimer, for fairness: most of the posts I’m aware of don’t actually involve the cheaters themselves risking getting caught on here, and so the uses for such red flags may not be easily applicable. But all the same, they go hand-in-hand with the (fallacious) defenses for cheaters, and it’s important to know what you’re looking for when someone inevitably comes here asking why they got banned (for “no reason”) assuming EN is any trustworthy when Rank Match hits.
Keep in mind: each of these ALONE does not mean someone is a cheater — it's when red flags like these, ALONG with refusing to provide videographic proof, come together, that someone becomes more and more suspicious.
(1) Unrealistic timeframes for improvement
Let's not mince words here: the highest levels of Sekai are HARD. As in, it competes with "pure" rhythm games like Arcaea, Lanota, Phigros, Cytus, Dynamix, CHUNITHM, maimai, ONGEKI… levels of hard. Sekai itself is unusually hard for a popular rhythm game (sorry Tokyo 7th Sisters, no one knows you) with funny PNGs you roll and pay for, in a market where the closest competition (and therefore most people's previous frames of reference for existing difficulty) is Bandori or Enstars. And, well, no offense… but Bandori doesn't have six Hell or Hell SPs (and it took THIS long to release the 33+ specials…) and a release schedule that promises more every three months, like we're getting with Yaminabe and Jinsei. As for Enstars? Two years to release Awakening Myth and Seishun Emergency SP (and they’re only roughly as hard as ~32lv. Sekai charts).
What this results in are cheaters who grossly underestimate the time needed to get to Sekai's highest level. You might hear things like "i was up all night / week / month getting this omg my fingers are so tired". To use an example from sekaicord / experience: most players who commit to the improvement grind tend to find that they'll improve really quickly from 26 to 30 — and then hit a major wall at Lv31, where the difficulty then spikes exponentially. The average time it takes legitimate players to go from Lv31 to 32? Six months or more. 32 to 33? You'll be lucky or just insanely good if it takes you six months.
Anyone claiming to be the exception to this pattern, put simply, needs the proof. People are willing to believe someone’s good if they can see someone play good.
(2) Not recognizing patterns when questioned
An actual story about a banned cheater from sekaicord: they claimed to have AP'd Don't Fight the Music on Master, and immediately fell through when people started asking them about patterns from other charts, including Hibana and KING. The issue? They were told that those patterns were from Don't Fight the Music. This is pretty much self-explanatory: you'd at least be expected to know the charts you're claiming to have beaten!
But besides that, people who have pulled off such feats (hell, pretty much anyone) always has a devil of their own. Everyone has That One Pattern they find, and which they hate. And if you're a devilish enough little Pattern (hello Greenlights / Bitter Choco Decoration), you'll be so absolutely evil that everyone will know you, not the other way around. Someone who picks out a pattern that is pretty obviously free to someone actually at that skill level OR doesn't have a least favorite pattern at all tends to stink from a mile away.
(3) Low-quality / vague explanations and/or misuse/lack of terminology/jargon
A common trope in TV shows, video games, and so on is a smart character (usually a scientist) who launches into a convoluted explanation with a LOT of jargon you're not supposed to understand, before a character stops them and says you're making my brain hurt. While silly, this trope has some basis in the fact that people who are good at something tend to be really passionate about it, and often won't hesitate to explain in a lot of detail exactly how they pull off what they do. The same almost always goes for rhythm game players — it's common for people who have just conquered a chart in sekaicord to follow up their FC / AP screenshot with a long-ass postmortem of the parts they hated the most, the strategy that finally got them through it, and pretty much everything in between.
As a cheater, it would be pretty difficult to emulate this. There's no adrenaline rush as you get through the part that you've been struggling on for weeks, possibly months, no sitting down staring at a chart viewer cursing the disgustingly hard part, no detailed "L-R-L-R(index)-R(middle)" big brain strategy just to pass something extremely cursed. There is nothing to explain. Most often, you will get "i was just shaking throughout it's all so hard", "uhhh i just mashed as hard as i possibly could" “go watch a video instead of bothering me” without reference to a specific pattern, and almost no way to describe their solution in terms any reasonably practiced regular would be familiar with. Did you jack this part here? Two fingers or multiple? Is there a BPM divisor that helps you get the rhythm down on this?
Let's go back to the 005saikou Arcaea example I mentioned earlier. Pretty much anyone at that level will have thoughts about their own achievements, and which parts they found hardest to conquer; look at the pinned comment (translation of the CCs) on his Testify video and see just how detailed they can get. I'm not saying everyone has to get to that level of detail, but someone with practically nothing to say about their achievements AND no video either is a serious red flag.

A brief conclusion

Why I took the time to write all of this is pretty simple: I would very much like if people were more aware of the players they're defending who don't deserve to be defended. Not only are there legitimate players out there much more deserving of your attention, but there's also a glut of illegitimate ones out there cruising along with the potential to make Ranked Match completely unplayable if we're just going to sit here and pretend it's not a problem. Perhaps you’re thinking it’s not going to be a problem for you if you only stay in Bronze / Silver / Gold / Plat. Good for you, but then that leaves Diamond and Mastery completely unplayable wastelands fit only for people who jump onto sites-that-shall-not-be-named for modded apps. Pretty much every time I talk to a JP player about EN and the prospect of ranked match, I universally hear back the words “cheating” and smell the implication that there’s no point to even touching it. There’s already so few legitimately skilled players on EN (let alone those who aren’t simply imported / previously JP players) and the last thing EN needs is to drive those players away.
Genuine question: If the playerbase is capable of raising enough of a stink to get an entire event memory-holed out of existence (I have not forgotten RMD), please tell me why it's not possible to push the devs to take action on people who will undermine the legitimacy of an entire game mode? It's easy enough to ignore if you're just running around co-op getting event points and can forget about someone who's not playing the game, but in a game mode whose basis is a fair and even competition between two players, surely there's some reason to get them to do something.
Call me jealous, salty, misguided, whatever you want, but if at the end of the day this post has you thinking a bit more critically about why people can be so suspicious of others (and why it's more legitimate than just jealousy), then writing it will have been worth something. Please, don’t throw these words by the wayside, and keep a more critical eye out for the people you meet, be it in ordinary rooms, on social media, or, well… on Ranked Match. If you could do something about RMD, you can do something about cheaters.
If you’ve gotten this far, thanks for your attention and time.

so for the last few years I rarely meditated maybe once a month for like 20 minutes, I didnt really enjoy it and it bored me and I found myself wanting to get up and go do something else. but for the past month and a half I've made myself meditate almost everyday for atleast 30 mins, atfirst I felt the same until I learned how to really let go, of my thoughts, my fears from the past, hopes for the future, which I wasn't doing before. since I've gotten down letting go, I can't even explain the difference it feels amazing to just be present laying in the grass feeling life and hearing it around me, I never realized how clogged my mind was from my thoughts and stimulation from my phone and tv and those things, and what it feels like for it to be clear. I find myself meditating for atleast an hour now and I dont even wanna get up but I have things to do. and this is all from just doing it for a little over a month. also from spending so much time outside I've noticed things about nature that I never had before which is kinda sad, how unique and nice the grass smells, I've heard the trees creaking which I'd never noticed they do so much before, how when u dont move for so long the wildlife starts getting so close to you, I heard an owl which I didn't even know we had in our yard. I definitely would suggest meditating in nature rather than inside. also I notice the longer I go without meditating I start losing interest and forgetting how it feels until I do it again. one night I want to just lay and watch the stars, can't believe I haven't done that yet lol

I'm a complete noob, please forgive terminology errors (though I welcome corrections/education if you're so inclined)
I just started using a DeLonghi ECP3630 that I got 3 years ago and never touched (don't ask lol). After a week of use, and an incident, it started leaking badly from the boiler outlet. Long explanation here, but if someone can bear with me, please see if you know what I should do next. I don't have the time right now to research any more and I'm stuck.
So, I made 1-4 shots a day for a week or so (using 1-2 times a day for 1-2ppl), and then one day something happened. A few times I have forgotten to remove the filtecoffee grounds right away. So that happened again that evening, but this time when I did remove it, I turned the handle and it exploded! It burst from trapped pressure, and dry coffee grounds exploded everywhere! I assume the continuous slow leak of pressurized aisteam had dried the grounds. It had not been THAT long. Like 20 minutes or something. (Previously has been left as long as overnight though...so I recognize that I probably broke my machine)
Air continued to hiss for a few minutes after this, even after unplugging it out of fear lol. I don't know where it was trapped but... yeah. We also realized the lattes we made actually tasted pretty weak so it clearly didn't brew properly before the explosion.
And now ever since then, while it doesn't explode, I do hear a hiss for a couple minutes after use. I don't actually remember if it did this before or if that's normal. Might be normal. But what is definitely not normal is the amount of water that leaks during warming and after brewing :( Like sometimes I'll get a few drops coming out through the filter by the time the ready light comes on. Or if I warm the machine without the filter in, it drips pretty steady as soon as it starts to get hot. And I'll finish brewing, froth some milk, turn the steam wand off, and then water just keeps dripping steady from the boiler outlet again. Like a lot. Making 2 drinks can fill the drip tray.
Now, I have flushed this machine 4 times over 2 days (two cycles in a row, as instructed in the manual) and it doesn't make a difference. I took the boiler outlet apart to check for build up in there from my mistreatment/not cleaning it promptly. It was pretty clean, but of course I thoroughly cleaned what I could anyway. No difference. I can't figure out if there's anywhere else I can look and/or clean. Yesterday I did try to remove some panels but nothing came off easily enough, I was certainly not willing to pry too much. I haven't descaled, but I can't imagine that's the issue after a week...
Huge thanks to anyone who read all that haha...and hopefully someone can help!

Long story ahead.
It started when I was just a kid. I'm in my mid 30s now, but that's when it started. I'd like to preface most of this with an obligatory, to the best of my knowledge, I'm not making any of it up. Whatever definitive knowledge I think I've got is based on speculation and heresay. Nothing has identified itself at all, let alone directly. For my own sake, and the sake of related parties I'm going to edit all names from the story(ies). Especially since I'm not using a throwaway or anything. This is going right up on my personal account. I fabricate or hold back nothing this time. Ill be doing my best to cultivate as much accurate information as I can remember, but I'm getting old and don't remember as well as I used to. I can't even tell you how genuinely I consider religion, supernatural whatever, all of it to just be some stuff made up by white men to continue on with the patriarchy. I don't buy into ghosts or any of it.
It started as shadows. The feeling of being watched. My childhood wasn't that great, it was full of physical and emotional abuse from my mother. We lived in my step father's own childhood home, so it wasn't haunted by any ancient ghosts. It was a dark place though, with their history already blotting the air with it's thickness.
I guess before I really go on, I should explain that, too.
My step father was twenty something years older than my mom. So he was in his fifties during my teen years. He wasn't bad, he wasn't great. I guess technically speaking he was a bad step father. We didn't have much of a relationship, let alone a even bad "fatheson" one.
The home itself was an old New England starter home. It was small, as far as modern houses go. Three bedrooms total. One bath, a large basement spanned the entire length and width. By the time we had met him and moved in, he had already mostly paid the house off, buying it from his own parents. Outside of four years in the coast guard, He, his brother, and older sister had all lived there(while they moved away, he stayed)
Their family dynamic was dated, and weird. His mom and dad were the type to call each other "mom and dad" respectively. His sister, even after joining the navy and marrying an officer was required to maintain a joint bank account with her dad so he could have uptime decision making. She had her own creepy qualities when we'd visit. She collected Barbies, never opening them. That in itself isn't weird. Hell, I collect action figures myself. But she had a voice for some of her favorites, and they'd talk amongst themselves if she was in the room. My Step father's brother, was actually an inventor and invented something I can't remember anymore. He wasn't Bezos rich, but had a nice house in Florida when we'd visit. Mom and Step dad both always warned me though to be careful. He was on a lot of drugs.
My Step father himself was a weird man. He was never taught hygiene. And he was never really nurtured or loved, and unfortunately it showed. He didn't know how to do those things, either. He was a nice guy, but had no idea what to do from there. He grew up in the fifties, and as a kid, I just imagined that's why he was the way he was. From a different time.
The legacy of their combined tragic legacy lived on in a ghost that I do believe was in the realitively new house. We lived there total for twelve years with him, however the time is broken up into two different six year stints. Half way through, my mom for whatever reason, moved us out. We lived in a one room efficiency apartment together for exactly one year, before they reconciled and moved back in together. While we were moved out - we adopted a stray cat. Well, he adopted us. We actually found him the very first day we left him on our own. He was a white cat, nearly completely blind. He was just outside our motel door. We took him in with us. He was actually great. We named him Doofus, because he was kinda fun and goofy. He stayed with us the entire year departure, and was reluctantly allowed back with us.
My Step father was a dog person. Awkwardly so. He loved his dog(s). To the point where I'd still say he more made out with them, as a form of affection. It wasn't okay. I'm sure of that. Let me clear something up, while I say all of these negative things about him. It's not like that. While we don't have any sort of relationship now, I believe that's more us both healing from my mother more so than each other. But anyway, let's keep going!
Within a year after introducing the new cat into the house, he had himself quite the affinity for the basement. It was cool in the summer, and kept itself warm enough to be down there without freezing in the winter. It was my home base as a teenage boy in the late 90s, early 00s with AOL internet access. Doofus would often lounge around, and we'd leave him to his own devices while down there. He never disappeared and always came running when we'd shake his bowl of food. That first summer back though, we were, even my step father was, convinced he had worked his magic on a neighborhood feline friend, and had a litter of kittens down there. It wasn't the mousy cries of fresh babies. Certainly a meow that wasn't his though. We thought maybe he had found his way into the walls, or was simply stuck. Inevitably one day it happened with him fast asleep on his window perch in the kitchen. Finally my step dad fessed up what comes to be an important story.
When he was a kid, himself and his younger sister, found a cat. They, with some kind of sitcom understanding of how the world works, brought it home and tried to hide it in the basement to keep. Their father found it and brutalized the animal to punish them and simply disposed of it like it was nothing.
I can't stress it enough how… from that point on, things changed. The meowing from the basement stopped. Forever. It never happened again. However I never felt alone down there again, honestly.
I want to take another brief intermission to point out that at the current point in my life, I've been in therapy and anger management both. I haven't spoken to my mother in over seven years, and I'm barely any contact with my family at all. I had a very good therapist that helped me through my trauma with my mom as a child that continued into adulthood. Most of the information I'm going to share here, and continue to share here are things that modern medicine and science have since explained away. Sort of. I didn't just feel not alone while in the basement of my childhood home anymore, I felt actively pursued. Someone wasn't just always watching, they wanted to be known. I also started to experience night terrors that felt lucid.
I eventually moved out as soon as I could, and moved to Florida. Unfortunately my abusive mother followed. However, years passed from there. Through circumstance, I maintained a relationship with her. I was young and dumb, and didn't know how to set or enforce boundaries. Anyway.
Fast forward to my mid 20s. I had just ended a long term relationship with what was essentially my first "real-life" girlfriend. Things went sour the way things do when you're young, and I ended up moving back in with my mom and her now new husband. It was a very short stay, but while there I fell on hard times with my health. That's where the story here really takes an interesting turn.
Their house wasn't just bad, it was absolutely the worst. It was literally just a shack. The way some of those poor places in Florida are really like. I was home alone. I did have my own private bedroom. It was small, couldn't even hold my bed and the dresser. There was no door. It was an old curtain pinned to the outside wall. The illusion of privacy. It all went from easy enough to explain, to outright bonkers that day.
I was in bed. Doorway clearly visible. The sheet had been pinned to the space above it so it stood open for me to come and go easily. In the doorway was a teenage girl. Shoulder length brown hair. Conservatively dressed, yet modern. She didn't speak. It was over. She was gone.
The same girl came to me two or three days later, same setting. Just standing in the doorway. She seemed far less relaxed. Even agitated. She was holding something but I couldn't make out what. Whatever it was just wouldn't manifest, but it was important to her. Whatever that item was I can't help but feel like it'd all make sense now, but who knows. She stayed for nearly a full five minutes, fidgeting eithcthecitem before leaving. It was only a couple of more days before she came back again, but wasn't alone. An older man. Older then I was at the time, at least. He seemed like her father. They were bickering and fighting about something and she, in her tantrum disappeared. But he stayed and said nothing to me. He made no motion or charades. He did however glare at me this empty, menacing eyes and then vanished.
I didn't see the girl again until the night before I moved out. By this point, I had been drained of the small savings I did have. I was literally starving. Stealing food from Walmart just to keep myself going. I had aloowedcmy mother to drain me of everything. The apparition came to me that night, and the sensation was different. She glowed a warm orange tint. it felt like we were together forever. She still never spoke to me, but shared knowledge. She told me things about myself I didn't know yet. Actual, real life things that wouldn't come to fruition for over a decade, but they have indeed come true. Not even as a warning. It was a parlor trick to prove her abilities to me. I didn't see her again, for nearly 12 years.
It was last year she came back. I wasn't startled, she communicated like we were old friends. By just, giving me the information. I had probably six or eight months prior to that, reconnected with an old friend. The girl told me matter of fact my, "reach out. They aren't okay." Which was weird because we were talking mostly daily at that point again. I knew things weren't perfect but not being okay raised alarm bells. I reached out to find out their dog had passed just that morning. Again not a huge flex of their ability, just enough to keep me hooked.
I was bewildered at this point. I knew nothing of psychics or spirits or demons. Outside of what I seen on TV of course. I didn't even believe in that shit, but I love reading and learning.
Because of the history with my newly rekindled friendship, it was actually my childhood crush - the love of my life. That was actually the context of us becoming friends again. I wanted to work on fixing the things between us so we could be there again. The situation felt ripe by description for either Dr. Phil, or Lilith. Though I didn't know what that was even supposed to mean.
My own research and learning has brought me here, to you. This sub. This long story of ghost cats, and dark places, the meddling of what I thought was Lilith, but I believe to be something else entirely.
You see I've reached out to the girl who manifests. She hasn't been back, but I can still feel her around. So I've worked up the courage to confront her. I ask for identification, and my ears fill with this droning white noise and it'll eventually tell me that shes Lilith, but I'm not convinced. But from the difficulty in expression, neither are they. I believe it's something that latched onto my belief at first of it being Lilith and won't let up on that. I do believe it's "male" in nature. Has a knack for tricks, and knows that pretending to be something it isn't is bad for him, so he's trying to keep it under cover. I also don't think it's here to help me in any capacity. It clearly wants something either from me, personally, or is trying to use me as a vessel.
I think something masquerading now as Lilith has been involved in my life from the house I grew up. It didn't leave me alone, it learned to be less obvious and scary outright. But it's here. It's always here.

I took my p365 .380 auto to the range today to finally and I kept having an issue. The spent casings kept getting stuck instead of fully ejecting. I was able to manually clear it when it happened, but one time a new round was pushed into the barrel and was being pushed into the chamber at the same time. Not sure if anyone has had this happen before?

I'm learning German and my uni puts huge emphasis on the phonetics. With how intense articulation is, especially on the long vowels, I wonder how mumbling germans get away with this? When I'm watching movies, the articulation is indeed intense, yet I haven't met a character that intentionally made to not speak clear (e.g. main protagonist of Mr. Robot tv-show). Can you give me an example?

Summary:
After an accident, a young man finds himself in an unfamiliar world.
A world where your status is equal to your strength.
Can he gain access to power? And how far is he willing to go to achieve his goals?
Excerpt:
A cart moved through the countryside. From time to time, you could see some small villages in a distance.
“It's not easy for a youth at your age to find a job in the town. Especially now, since its autumn.” “All I can do is try my luck.” “Indeed, but what are you going to do after that? A youth should have an ambition” “Ambition? I want to become a martial artist. A powerful warrior who can roam freely through the world.” “Oh… Not shallow. But not realistic either, considering how much it costs to learn martial arts. As for cultivation manual… Even some noble families are struggling to obtain them. For poor commoners like us… Forget it. Sometimes, it's all about destiny, we should just do what we can.”
“Destiny huh?” I clenched my fist and looked into the sky. If I want something, I will take it with my own hands. I won't rely on destiny, not in this life.
“Senior, thank you very much for giving me a ride.” I looked at him with gratitude.
“Don't mention it. I hope you'll find what you are looking for.”
I waved at him and walked towards the town gate. Looking at the city walls I couldn't help but recall medieval castles back on earth. I only saw them on TV shows, I guess sometimes real life is wilder than fiction huh? The town was surrounded by thick walls made of stone. They were twelve meters tall, with a bunch of bowmen standing on top. Two armoured guards with a spear stood on both sides of the iron gates.
“Name, age, origin, goal.” asked the guard on the left. “Shido, 14, an orphaned peasant from the Oak Village, looking for a servant job.” “Why are you wearing a wooden mask? Are you hiding something?” he continued to ask.
I put it down so everyone could see my face. Covered with burns, it was a hideous sight.
“Anything else?” I asked in a calm tone. “No, put it back. We don't want you to scare everyone around here. You are allowed to pass.” he coldly said.
“Poor child, with a face like that I don't think anyone will hire him. Will he starve to death?” The guard on right asked. “This has nothing to do with us, every spring we find dozens of dead bodies that were frozen to death.” “Indeed, such is the fate of the poor.”
Walking through the streets I looked around with curiosity as everything was new to me. Wooden houses made of round logs, roads filled with mud and manure, and people. Wearing sacks, with eyes filled with either uncontrollable happiness or desolation. Those who looked happy were always in hurry. As for despaired ones, they roamed aimlessly all over the town, as if looking for something. Seems like I'll need to get used to this fast, so I can blend in. After all, this is my new life. I'm not sure if they burn people at the stake here, but standing out is always bad. After asking around for a bit I finally found my goal – the town lord's mansion.
_______________
Feedback desired: General impression from the plot, pacing, fight scenes. (i'm new so any feedback is appreciated.) Content warnings: One F word.
Swap availability: I'd be happy to critique a story of similar length.
Link: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1BJxQv8UMyyjPpyoiCGgf-qFBuIBwqPzK/view?usp=share_link

Twenty years ago this week, the United States began its blatantly criminal invasion of an unthreatening sovereign state that inevitably turned into a hideous quagmire.
I had joined the United States Marine Corps in the summer of 2001. I was still in boot camp on 9/11, which made for an interesting couple of days. In early 2002 I obtained a two-year leave of absence to ‘serve’ a Mormon mission, and by March of 2003 I was more than a year into being a full-time religious propagandist in Mexico.
The war was big news in Mexico, with public opinion generally running pretty strong against it. Given my history of relentless indoctrination, and my current assignment of telling everyone I saw that they were immorally wrong about everything that mattered, and the fact that I wasn’t allowed to consume any kind of non-religious media material of any kind, I of course took the opposite position.
But I improved with time. I came home in early 2004, and quickly discovered that the war was, at best, very badly managed. But I was back into military service (as a reservist), so I fully expected to end up being deployed to Iraq at some point.
The miserable shitshow that played out across Iraq throughout 2005 and especially 2006 convinced me that the war wasn’t just badly executed but a hopelessly terrible idea from its very beginning, supported by blatant lies and unconscionable manipulation.
When my turn to deploy finally came, in 2009, I was rather conflicted. On the one hand, I clearly understood that the war was immoral and dangerous and I should avoid it at all cost. On the other hand, I was four years into attending college and making no discernible progress towards any of the goals I had set for myself: graduating, choosing a career, getting married, existing as a functional adult. So the choice (and it was a choice: contrary to the contract I thought I’d signed, I was set to be released from service in mid-2008, and so this deployment was entirely optional for me) was fraught. I didn’t want to kill or die for a mistake; but I also didn’t want to dodge what I was sure would be the challenge of a lifetime for a second time; and I also could not say with a straight face that I had anything better to do.
So I went. It didn’t go well , but it went at least as well as I had any right to expect. I never saw anything like combat (shooting flares at a few civilian vehicles was as close as I ever got), was never in danger, and so on. But it was no picnic, either: severe and extended boredom can be just as damaging as actual trauma, and the psychological abuse inherent in military life was constant. And things weren’t entirely safe: my unit had two suicides during the work-up, and given the state of my mental health, I was never all that unlikely to have joined them.
The whole experience did me no immediate good, but as an experience with disillusionment with and escaping from an all-consuming self-admiring institution, it was a pretty decent dry run for my exit from Mormonism a few years later. And, as I had expected, it got me a year’s salary (which was probably the majority of the money I’d made in my life up to that point), and a lifetime of monthly disability payments and free health insurance. So I really can’t say I completely regret it.
​
The movie I’ve chosen to commemorate this anniversary is Green Zone, because it came out shortly after I came back, and I’d always wanted to see it, and I’d heard that it took an interesting angle on the whole mess, and I’d heard that it was pretty good (which is a rare quality among Iraq War movies, which have, shall we say, a mixed record ). And it’s pretty good, though of course it has some issues.
​
The best thing about it is how it nails the look and feel of the military occupation. The movie abounds with details large and small that just look exactly right, from US troops driving green Humvees with no doors and unprotected gun turrets* to piles of Pizza-Hut-labeled shipping containers at the airport to one of them carrying around a bottle of chewing-tobacco spit to the use of the then-new Blue Force Tracker technology. Greg Kinnear as the villain of the piece looks exactly like he should, a completely nondescript bureaucrat that would never get a second look at any white-collar office in America, incongruously transplanted into a blood-soaked conflict in an environment where only fools and the extraordinarily pampered (he is both, of course) dress like that. And I didn’t know I needed to see exactly what the Google homepage looked like in 2003, but I did, and the movie delivered.
It’s also a very good look at the culture of the US military; the briefing with Colonel Bethel is pretty spot-on (except for the one guy interrupting to speak the truth; that pretty much never happens). It’s a bit optimistic to assume that a random US military unit would have even one Arabic speaker in it, but the movie makes up for it by having him only know a dialect that’s completely useless in Iraq. The soldier who argues with Damon and tells him that the reasons for going to war don’t matter to him struck me as a perfect distillation of the me-first attitude that the US military explicitly teaches its members: the “My only job is to get home safe” dogma was basically a part of the official training materials, very much to the detriment of accomplishing any particular mission beyond that (and of course no one ever wants to talk about how obviously cowardly and selfish such an attitude is).
The movie also does well with points of view from outside of the US military, namely the absolute terror of being an Iraqi unfortunate enough to fall into US hands during the occupation, and the possibly greater terror of being on the ground when the Americans started bombing or disbanded the Iraqi army and purged the civil service, which this movie treats as an irrefutable sign of the apocalypse. Not that any of that took any great insight to determine in 2010, years after it became clear what US detention was like and how foolish it was to send thousands of unhappy armed men out into the streets with nothing to do, but it’s still good to see it stated so plainly.
One aspect that does not look so good is the trademark Paul Greengrass shaky-cam technique; it’s tolerable in the actual action scenes, which are supposed to be stressful and chaotic, but in the opening scene, in which the ‘action’ mostly involves men walking quickly down crowded hallways,** it really doesn’t work. I do wonder how Greengrass does it; does he plan and rehearse the camera movements, or just have the actors do their thing while someone waves the camera around randomly? One analysis of one of Greengrass’s Bourne movies pointed out that it seems that the camera can’t predict the characters’ movements, which adds to the sense of uncertainty and danger; I wonder how closely Greengrass controls the camera’s ‘random’ movements, and what he thinks he’s saying with them.
There are other moments that fall short of the movie’s best moments of authenticity: Damon’s first scene, in which he explains (over the radio, no less!) where his team is going and what they’ll be doing there is pure Hollywood bullshit; any such explanation would be given (likely multiple times) well before the mission actually started, and the team will try to minimize radio use while out in the field. And that’s not the only moment of clumsy exposition; once that mission fails to find anything of use, Damon laments “That’s the third one in a row,” to a roomful of guys who’ve been on all the same missions and all presumably know exactly how many of them there have been. On that same mission, someone, for some reason, uses a Geiger counter to analyze a suspected chemical weapons site, which…what?
The movie’s second-strongest sympathetic character is a CIA ‘Middle-East expert’ that knows everything he needs to know and that no one listens to. While I don’t doubt that no one important listened to anyone who knew what was going on, the thing-knower being a CIA agent that the CIA chose to send to Baghdad seems unlikely; were there any such thing-knowers left in the CIA in 2003? If so, why would leadership (which was fully behind the WMD hoax) send such an ‘unreliable’ person to such a sensitive post? Surely they knew there was a risk of him doing exactly what he ended up doing, and would have kept him as far from the action as possible.***
And how and why does he have such detailed information at his fingertips about the movements of people that don’t officially concern him? That information would be a closely guarded secret that he has no plausible official need to know. And why the hell does he dare take a very important phone call, which concerns a blatantly illegal operation he’s running off the books, on speaker in a room that’s crowded with god knows who that he very obviously can’t necessarily trust?
Once he makes contact with Damon, he sets up a meeting in the most secure part of the infamous Green Zone, which Damon is somehow able to access with minimal trouble. That strikes me as outrageously implausible; the highest security I ever experienced in Iraq was about 37 levels lower than the Green Zone (where American civilians could expect to live and work in pretty much complete safety), and even there I had to show my dog tags and scan my ID to enter the gym or the chow hall. Green Zone security would emphatically not just wave through any random US military vehicle or personnel that showed up at the gate. Damon would have to show some kind of proof that he belongs there, and since he’s going to an unauthorized meeting with a civilian far outside his chain of command, he just wouldn’t have that, and the gate guards would turn him away.
At that meeting, the CIA guy instructs Damon to get out of uniform, which is wise, but we never find out where Damon gets the civilian clothes and the civilian body armor we see him wearing right after. (I doubt he would have brought civvies with him for his invasion deployment, and even military body armor was pretty hard to come by in Iraq in 2003.) But also I understand why the movie felt it didn’t have time for a deep dive into this question. What it leads to is egregious, though; in the movie’s climactic scene, Damon, dressed in civilian clothes and carrying a clearly non-American weapon he stole from a local, runs through a combat situation involving US troops who spot him from a helicopter…and they somehow assume that he’s an American who’s on their side. What makes them think that? Did all US troops in Iraq in 2003 have implanted RFID chips that all US night-vision scopes could pick out from a distance? (No. No they did not.) Nothing at all that they can see indicates that Damon is American, but even if they knew he was American, he’s actually working against those particular US troops (who are very explicitly there to kill the man that Damon is trying to contact and rescue), and so there’s still no reason to identify him as a ‘friendly.’ This is a most unfortunate misstep, because doing it more realistically (having the US troops not know who Damon is, assume he’s their enemy, and act accordingly) would actually better serve the movie’s general theme of disunity and confusion.
Those same US troops are first seen arriving in a helicopter that suddenly arrives from below the not-very-high high ground that Damon is standing on, which means they must have been flying very low indeed (like, below rooftop level) over a very urban area, which is ridiculous; and without anyone hearing them approach from miles away, which is even more ridiculous.**** But those same US troops also drive around in Humvees at night with their headlights blazing, which is just dumb enough to be real. But what’s way too smart to be real is the timing of that helicopter arrival; Damon apprehends an important individual, and those troops (who are also looking for that person for unrelated reasons) somehow know about that and are able to arrive instantly, which…rather stretches the bounds of plausibility.
There are also some timeline issues, which are bad to have in a movie that is so closely tied to historical events on very specific dates. The invasion began on March 19, as seen in the first scene. Then we skip forward to ‘four weeks later,’ around April 16. The rest of the movie seems to take place over only a few days, and yet prominent plot points include George W. Bush’s (spit) Mission Accomplished speech (which happened on May 1), and the CPA’s dissolution of the Iraqi state apparatus (which happened on May 23). In the movie, those 22 days seem to pass in a matter of hours.
Also, and this is unbelievably petty of me, somewhere in the Green Zone, sometime at least as late as April 16, we catch a glimpse of someone watching a college basketball game (UCLA vs. Oregon, if I’m not mistaken) on TV. The final game of the 2003 NCAA tournament was played on April 7, and didn’t involve either team: Oregon lost to Utah in the first round, and UCLA didn’t even make the tournament, so that game is misplaced in time by at least a month.
​
Around the time it came out, I heard that this movie was a kind of Inglourious Basterds treatment of the Iraq War. While it’s certainly not NOT that (in that it’s an optimistic fantasy that revises well-known historical events about which there is little cause for optimism), it’s also different in that it doesn’t depart from the historical events nearly as much. There really was a ‘Magellan’ figure in real life, but he was called ‘Curveball,’ and, despite being pretty different from the version in the movie, he had precisely the same effect of being cited in favor of the invasion. In the movie, Magellan is an Iraqi Army officer who secretly meets with Americans to tell them that Iraq has no WMD programs. The Americans then falsely report that he’s told them Iraq has WMDs, and the war machine’s gears start to turn and the Americans plot to kill Magellan so he won’t reveal what he actually told them. In reality, Curveball was an Iraqi exile who actually told the Germans (not the Americans) what the Americans wanted to hear, because he figured it would make his asylum application (he’d fled Iraq after embezzling money from his government employer) easier. I’m not sure why the movie felt the need to change these details; an Iraqi who lies for his own gain is at least as interesting a character as an Iraqi who tells a truth that certain people are determined to disbelieve, and what US intelligence did with Curveball’s obviously flawed reports was hardly any more honest than blatantly telling the world he’d said something he never said.
The movie isn’t really clear what it thinks Damon’s heroism amounts to. He leaks his final report to every news outlet he can think of. Perhaps one of them will publish, but perhaps not. News outlets strive to scoop each other, but sometimes, as the real-life Iraq War amply shows, they collude to cover things up, especially when it’s something as explosive and ‘unpatriotic’ as “The whole reason for this very popular war was a complete lie.” Furthermore, how credible is Damon’s information? It’s based entirely on conversations he says he had with an enemy general who is now dead. No one has any reason to believe these conversations took place, or if they did that the general said what Damon says he said, or if he did that he wasn’t mistaken or lying.
But even if someone does publish, it will make no difference. US troops are already in Baghdad, and the CPA has already taken the plunge that made civil war inevitable. A report (even one whose credibility is bulletproof, which this one very much is not) that the whole war was based on a lie will not change anything, any more than it did in real life when the lack of WMDs and the falsity of the pre-war intelligence became similarly clear on a similar timeline.
In any case, Damon’s Army career is over. He leaked a very sensitive internal document, using an email account under his own name. He might not be guaranteed to go to prison, but he has to be in a shitload of trouble. The Army quietly booting him out and never speaking of this again is the absolute best-case scenario for him.
The movie’s two main sympathetic characters take turns reminding each other to not be naïve, but the movie itself is pretty naïve if it thinks that what we see is a happy ending. Or maybe it’s not meant to be a happy ending, and I’m the one being naïve.
In any case, I was expecting the SF team led by Jason Isaacs to kill Damon and then, upon realizing who he was, hype him up as a hero who gave his life for his country, thus completely obscuring the very unpatriotic truth about what he died doing and why. You know, a slightly worse version of exactly what the real-life Army actually did with the actual case of Pat Tillman.
​
The movie also runs into trouble upon consideration of its moral perspective; movies love the idea of someone going rogue, breaking whatever rules get in the way of ‘doing the right thing,’ as Damon does throughout the movie. But that’s the whole problem with the Iraq War, isn’t it? Government officials decided that brutalizing Iraq was ‘the right thing,’ and they broke any number of rules of humanity and decency (not to mention actual laws) to make it happen. They went rogue exactly as Damon does, so who can really say that he’s right and they’re wrong?
His confrontation with Amy Ryan’s reporter character also struck me as backwards; the movie wants us to see it as Damon, the heroic teller of inconvenient truths, heroically confronting the corrupt and decadent and much more powerful peddler of lies. But it’s really not that at all; she got lied to just as hard as he did, and he’s a heavily armed agent of the state security apparatus upon which her life and safety directly depend. It’s pretty ridiculous to see him as any kind of underdog in that situation.
​
Some stray observations:
It’s pretty funny that the early scene at the airport shows the blown-up remains of a large cargo plane, given the famous fate of the An-225 in that other, more recent, blatantly criminal invasion of an unthreatening sovereign state that inevitably turns into a hideous quagmire.
I was surprised by how much of the spoken Arabic I understood; I ‘studied’ Arabic for two years in college, and didn’t really get anywhere with it, but there were multiple instances where seeing the English word in the subtitles brought to mind a particular Arabic word that the characters promptly said. (These include ‘ichwan’ for ‘brothers,’ ‘kul il balad’ for ‘the entire country,’ ‘bernamaj’ for ‘program,’ and some others.)
Ben Sliney is in the cast as a random bureaucrat in the background of one of the Green Zone scenes. This is the air-traffic-control official who gave the ground-all-flights order on 9/11, and then legendarily played himself in the movie United 93. This is his only other non-documentary film credit, so I hope he kept his day job.
​
​
*By the time I got to Iraq, the Humvees had all been painted desert-tan and heavily armored, but my understanding is that this change did not take hold until like 2007.
**In a manner unfortunately reminiscent of George Bluth Senior ‘running with great intensity.’ Yes, this is foreshadowing. It is inevitable, because despite its ambitions, this movie proves that the definitive Hollywood treatment of the Iraq War is still selected episodes of Arrested Development. (And Generation Kill, which I considered revisiting for this anniversary post.)
***I do enjoy how Kinnear frames the idea of people who know things: they’re ‘dinosaurs’ with heads full of ‘old ideas,’ which sounds like he’s being boldly innovative and courageously resisting hidebound bureaucracies that have outlived their usefulness. But of course the ‘old ideas’ are things like ‘Know what the hell is going on’ and ‘Don’t assume you can simply kill anyone you don’t like,’ and Kinnear’s ‘bold innovations’ are just clueless wishful thinking.
****Movies very often miss this detail, but helicopters are really loud. Almost as loud as gunfire, though of course movies also very often fail to convey how loud gunfire is. It is impossible for a low-flying helicopter to sneak up like that on anyone with functional ears. They’d be drowning out any attempt at conversation before they got within hundreds of yards.

[Chapter 1] ;[Previous Chapter] ; [Discord + Wiki] ; [Patreon]
​
Chapter 107 – A Patron Saint
​
“[…] with the leadership of many territories claiming that the muted response to the thread is once again a blatant showing of the Community-Leadership’s clear bias against Deathworld affairs. Loratexach Echtsesimm, the current leader of the united Lachaxet territories, even went so far as to call it, quote: “A kick to the face for all those of us seeking to live in a peaceful unity.” Meanwhile other deathworld groups, like the occupants of the only known Class V deathworld, the Ligormordillar, are trying to quell the conflict and urge their fellow deathworlders to make a measured response, pointing to the lack of any concrete evidence when it comes to the recent events, and asking to give authorities a bit more time to investigate things. However, the accusations of corruptions that emerged in the last quarter have many people questioning how much the current Acting Galactic Council can truly be trusted with the investigations, and calls for the addition of independent investigations are becoming louder,” an Urounaek news caster professionally read off the seemingly endless lines of texts on her teleprompter, while b-footage of recordings of the sitting governments of a diverse number of species played in the background. “Surprisingly, humanity, the largest accuser of corruption in the Galactic Council as well as a front runner in the proclaimed fight for the extended rights of people and especially deathworlders that feel ousted by the Community, and also one of the Myiat’s currently closest military allies, have so far made no official statements or press-releases about the incidents, apart from damming the attack as a violation of intragalactic law as well as the laws of war.”
James passively allowed himself to be doused by the white noise of the TV that Shida had basically been glued to for the last days while he checked through his messages and mails on his phone and laptop. Of course, any of his addresses and contacts that had at some point been public in some way had been absolutely bombarded with a torrent of spam, threats, offerings, accusations, and even more spam. It was a daunting task to sift through all of the messages in an attempt to pick out the few of them that could possibly be useful every day, especially since those were extremely few and far in between, however, he still did it. On the one hand, he did it because he felt that it was his duty to leave nothing untried, no stone unturned, and no resource unused in these dire times they found themselves in. On the other hand, it was a quite time- and labor-intensive yet still comparatively easy task that he could easily waste away hours with without feeling like he was being unproductive.
Of course, all the really important messages he received would be forwarded to him through his more secure contacts that just select people had access to, and therefore the things he did find in his private messages were usually rather menial in comparison, however it was still something.
His hopes of not feeling so left out and abandoned anymore now that shit had thoroughly hit the fan had sadly been short-lived, as it quickly became clear that any broadcasts and statements to the outside world when it come to the topic at hand would be made by actual diplomatic professionals and not by-circumstance Ambassadors that had basically stumbled into their role.
…Which was honestly fair enough, James had to admit. Certainly, people who did this for a living had a much lower chance of screwing everything up and making things even worse than they already were than he did.
However, that did little to quell the nervous and anxious energy within him that just begged to be released in some productive way.
“While official governmental replies are being released by the hundreds by individual species, many collaborative political groups have also proclaimed their intentions to react to the current tensions caused by the attack on Dunnima. For example, many order-collaborations have been sending out invitations for emergency-conferences to possibly discuss a united reaction and collaborative measures to help ease the Galactic Tensions between their members; among others, the collaborative councils of the Tetsudines, Psittacines, Corvids, Hymenoptera, Canines, Skitellifera, Estotsucuvae, and Primates will be gathering within the week to discuss possible measures. Additionally, for the first time in about 12 uniform years, a recently founded, provisional ‘council of deathworlders’ is also inviting possible participants to a first conference, after having reportedly struggled to find an adequate venue for such an event for a few uniform months. This council is the thought-child of representatives of the Lachaxet, Ligormordillar, Roosh’gaack, and Teracheponn territories, who are now trying to get representatives of as many deathworlds as possible to take part in it, claiming it as an important step towards future collaborations between the so-designated worlds and people.”
“I wonder who they’re going to invite,” Shida commented as she tensely leaned forwards and absorbed the news with great concentration, her ears opening widely to not miss a single detail. Inside, she was just as rearing to go as James was. But just like him, she was also bound to the orders they were being given.
So far, they had both not been called in to reinforce the fleets that were either stationed to more intensely control the borders of their own unified borders or sent out into the cosmos to reinforce the myiat’s defenses after the first attack. However, the military base in Lorraine that they had been staying at for a while now had certainly become a lot emptier ever since the attack, leaving basically only instructors, very fresh recruits and essential personnel behind. And themselves, of course.
The constant tramping of boots outside of their doors had been replaced by an eerie emptiness, and their regular trainings-sessions that they had along with other occupants had also run dry, as most of the people on a similar level to them had received orders to move. And working with actual trainees didn’t exactly have a lot of appeal to it either.
“They have plenty of options,” James mumbled while his eyes flew across rows and rows of recently received mails, going back hour by hour that he had slept while sifting through piles and piles of junk.
Finishing off with the mail-service he had used during his Uni-days without having found anything of note, he then switched over to the next tab, where he had opened his miraculously still not out of service work-mail that had been assigned to him during his in hindsight very brief time of working on the G.E.S.-32.
He had no idea why exactly it was still in service, but as long as he received messages to it, he was going to check them, even if so far, this had by far been the least useful of his addresses when it came to receiving any messages of actual note.
And indeed, it was once again basically all junk.
Spam, a death threat, a very angry email from a former coworker, spam, more threats, a clearly fake solicitation from some firm he had never heard of, some news-channel trying to get an interview with him, spam, another news channel, spam, even more threats, spa-
He paused for a moment as his cursor hovered over a mail he had apparently received about five hours ago, that had the very brief and uninformative title of
“You are invited.”
Usually, he would’ve almost instantly disregarded it as clearly some form of spam, however after what he had just heard on the news, it made him raise an eyebrow and quickly check the address it was sent from.
Lifting the eyebrow even further as he saw an actual, official government address, he clicked on the mail to open it up. Slowly, his eyes read over the neat lines of text that had been revealed to him, his eyes getting wider and expression becoming more confused and disgruntled by the moment.
Was this a joke?
“What’s up?” Shida asked, apparently having noticed his expression changing, and just as anxious to do something as he was, she immediately stood up and walked over to him to glance at his screen while her tail swiftly flailed through the air. “One of the threats getting too personal?”
James shifted his lips as he gathered his thoughts to reply.
“No, I was invited to one of those conferences,” he said, and his eyes quickly double-checked if this invitation was actually addressed towards him and hadn’t just accidentally landed with the wrong person by some sort of blunder.
Shida glanced at him in mild confusion, her yellow eyes scanning over his face while trying to read his thoughts from it.
“The Deathworld one? That’s not surprising, is it?” she commented with a flick of her ears, before pressing up to his side a bit closer so she could lower herself in a position that would allow her to more easily peek at his mails. “Not only are you a deathworlder, you’ve also been a pretty public figure when it comes to the public fight for more rights. Hell, you probably inspired them to found that whole thing in a way, so of course they want you along for the ride.”
James scoffed slightly and turned his screen so she could look at it.
“Well, if it was that, I wouldn’t be surprised,” he said and waited a second for Shida to read, seeing her face also slowly turn into a more confused one as she realized what the invitation he had received was for, before he added, “But this is from the council of primates.”
Shida looked at the message for a little longer before turning only her eyes towards him.
“What the hell do they want?” she asked with clear distrust in her voice. James just shrugged.
“A trap? Appeasement? Publicity? Options are numerous,” he said with an exhausted exhale before switching the tab yet again to log into his ‘professional’ mail services, copy-pasting the text of the invitation before forwarding it to a pre-prepared list of people that should probably be informed about this.
Shida hissed through her teeth and stood up straight again.
“Are you going?” she asked, crossing her arms and glancing down at him.
“If I have a say in this? Absolutely,” James replied after hammering the ‘send’ button. Anything to get out of here and do something at this point. Besides, it would probably give him the opportunity to give some people some serious stern talkings to. “Buuuuut you know how this goes.”
“We should keep an eye open who else might get invited to something,” Shida commented after acknowledging his reply with a huff but not responding to it. James nodded. In his periphery, he noticed how Shida’s fingers were starting to dig into her arms as her grip likely inadvertently tightened, and he reached out to rub his hand against her side, wordlessly aiding her with relaxing.
“They have plenty of options,” he repeated his earlier statement as he opened the invitation one more time.
“You are invited.
James Aldwin, Ambassador of Earth by community tradition, you have been officially invited to the emergency conference of the council of primates. Given recent events, the council has decided it is imperative to coordinate a response among the members of our esteemed order.
As humanity has so far not had a representative in the council of primates, it has been decided to extend an invitation to you for this conference. This invitation officially grants you access to the venue on Nedstaniot-Station and makes you eligible for a support-fund covering the traveling costs for you and an accompanying group of up to ten (10) companions of your choosing.
Should you accept this invitation, please contact us under one of the council of primate’s official addresses to receive access data to the necessary accounts as well as a detailed plan of the venue and scheduled events.
Should you not accept this invitation, a message of your declining is not strictly necessary, but always welcome to aid in planning.
I hope this message finds you well and am looking forward to possibly meeting you at the venue.
Sincerely
Klanneifer FF of the Tiasonko.
Success to you!”
Well, if they weren’t going to regret that…
​
--
​
Alexander clutched the necklace around his neck tightly as he looked into the mirror, taking deep breaths to quell his nerves.
Yes, he was nervous. Extremely so in fact. He thought that he would be excited previously, but now that the time had come, he could feel only the nerves.
Well, maybe that was understandable. Something like this really didn’t happen every day, after all.
“God, give me strength,” he prayed silently with his hands clutching the symbol of his faith even tighter.
Then, he took a minute to, one last time, check if his hair was in place and his robes were immaculate. He couldn’t make a fool out of himself on an occasion like this, after all. His own blue eyes stared back at him from the mirror sternly. Scrutinizing. As if he was judging himself. And he should. After all it was a big day. Taking a moment to judge oneself was important in moments such as this, lest you get complacent and started to make the wrong choices.
Soon after, there was a knock at the door.
“Father Mokoena is beginning his sermon, Alexander,” a muffled voice said from the other side. “You should be ready for when you are called upon.”
Alexander exhaled deeply and took one last look at the mirror, his gaze wandering from his own eyes down to the pendant around his neck.
“I’m on my way,” he then assured the Brother waiting outside, before stepping away from the dresser with a flourishing movement of his robes.
As he stepped out of the cloakroom, brother Anders slightly bowed to him, before stretching out a robed arm to guide him in the right direction. The brother was of the older sort, yet he had held his body in a shape worthy of a temple. Thinning and greying rose-blond hair did little to distract from that, as his wide frame could easily be spotted even through the loosely fitting robes.
A man of devotion in more than one way.
Alexander moved in a slow and measured way, his head held high, as Brother Anders guided him through the branched and tight back hallways of the old theater that they were holding today’s sermon in. As they got closer to the stage, Alexander could already hear the booming voice of father Mokoena as he addressed the masses from his place on the stage. It was no microphone he heard there, no amplifiers or other speakers. Only the impeccable voice of a devoted preacher.
Despite his age, the man had pipes like the largest organ, and still he was speaking at a volume that Alexander wasn’t used to from him. Inhaling deeply, he swallowed for a moment. Hopefully the people would even be able to hear him when he spoke. He certainly couldn’t bellow like the father could. Then again, this was a theater. Maybe his voice would be carried further by the acoustics than he anticipated.
It was rare for him to speak in a place like this, after all.
For a moment, Alexander thought about houses of faith. All the temples, churches, mosques, synagogues and whatever else he had visited throughout his life. Their large, marbled halls. Their magnificent decorations. The instruments and loudspeakers and all the other tools they were equipped with for impressive…performances.
That is what he had always called them. Performances. All those people just playing at faith while all they truly worship was their own selfishness.
And yet here he stood in the backrooms of a theater, watching as a father Mokoena gave a sermon on a literal stage and waiting for his cue to join him in the spotlight. What ironic twists fate could take.
The theater had been the most sensible option of a place that was for rent for one night and also held enough seats for this many people to come together. Still, he wondered if maybe they should have swallowed the tougher pill and looked for something else. For his liking, this was a bit too close to making a mockery of the event. The ‘houses of God’ may have been a sinful sham, but was this really much better?
Still, what was done was done. And while reflecting on past mistakes was certainly a virtue, getting stuck on them was most decidedly not. They were here now, so they would use what they had.
He and Anders finally came to a halt right at the side of the stage, hidden behind the large, red curtain that could be used to cut the stage off from view. Of course, today, it would stay wide open for the entire time, allowing everyone to witness.
“Are you nervous?” Brother Anders quietly asked him, leaning in close to whisper so there was no chance of his voice leaking out and disturbing the Father’s sermon.
Alexander smirked in slight anxiousness.
“Of course, I am,” he confessed honestly. “It’s not every day you get to make proclamations this weighty…or enemies this powerful.”
“Are you afraid of them?” Anders then asked with an almost pitiful look at Alexander, who sighed deeply.
“Of course, I am,” he confessed yet again. “I’d be a fool not to be.”
The task before him was grand, and his foes, in a way, even grander. There was a reason that the realized that had plagued Earth once upon a time had taken the name of heaven’s general for itself. They were powerful. And they knew it.
And that was not even mentioning the force of Earth’s armies, that could turn against them on a whim of fate. Masters over the forces of nature. The undisputed leaders of destructive power. Those who had managed to best such a powerful being before.
Yes, he was afraid. But overcoming fear was a virtue as well.
Meanwhile, the sermon was starting to whip up into a louder cadence, as Father Mokoena seemingly began to introduce the important part of the evening.
“[…] Many years has he studied and prayed and silence, following the will of our Lord by standing by and reflecting. Keeping humble. Keeping modest. And he has developed into a fine man of faith. Eighteen years of serving and studying under our faith, hidden away in the dark and obscure, waiting for the event that would catalyze his becoming! Now it has finally come. And with it came the time for him to step out into the light! Please welcome with me, oh children of the Lord, our newest ‘Guide’! Guide Alexander Paige!” the Father loudly announced and lifted his arm in the direction of where Alexander still stood out of sight. The bald head of the dark-skinned man reflected the spotlights above while his modest robes swung around from the energetic movement.
Meanwhile, Alexander took a deep, calming breath.
“Best of luck, Guide Alexander,” he could hear Brother Anders next to him say, and he respectfully bowed to the man before advancing out of the shadows and into the light.
His eyes narrowed strongly, and he had to resist the urge to lift his hand in order to protect them from the blinding light that now blared down on him. Of course, he did his best to keep his respectful and reverent expression before the Father, however he wasn’t quite able to entirely resist the pain of the rays stinging into his sight. Still, he advanced with quick yet collected steps all the way up to the side of the Father.
“Don’t scream,” he told himself as he prepared his throat for how loud he would have to talk to be heard in a place such as this. The lights were so bright and the rest of the room so dark that he couldn’t see those listening to him, but he still knew they were there. Hundreds of them. Another failure of this chosen venue. He couldn’t even see the faces of those that would listen to his words. How could he claim to speak to them if he couldn’t even look them in the eyes?
Well, it was too late now.
“Thank you, Father,” Alexander loudly announced as he had finally reached the man, and he did his best to talk as loudly as possible without it escalating into shouts. It was hard to gauge how far his voice carried in this room, and he silently prayed that he would be understood.
The Father then reached out his arm, offering his old, worn hand to Alexander. Alexander reciprocated the gesture, taking the Father’s hand with his right, while positioning his left underneath, pressing its palm up against the father’s wrist. Meanwhile, the father lowered his left onto Alexander’s wrist from above, holding his hand as if he was blessing it.
“Alexander!” Father Mokoena loudly greeted him, and Alexander almost flinched at the intensity of his voice up close. If that was what it took to be heard around here, then his own words would merely come across as a whimper. He truly hoped that the old preacher was just overdoing it with his enthusiasm. “You have finally found your treacherous sea, it seems!”
“Indeed,” Alexander replied and really just couldn’t measure up to the Father’s incredible voice no matter how he tried. What an impressive organ. “And I am prepared to guide my fellow men through it, towards safer ventures.”
“And the Lord shall bless your path!” the Father proclaimed, before taking his hands off of Alexander’s again.
“May the Lord bless your path,” a gentle echo came from the unseen crowd.
“And yours as well,” Alexander replied quickly, having almost forgotten to do so given the stressful situation.
The Father nodded deeply, before stepping away from Alexander and in front of the crowd again for a second, as he raised his arms high and declared,
“Tell us about your treacherous path, Guide Alexander, so we veer from it with you!”
Then, with another flourishing movement of his robes, he stepped back and aside, leaving Alexander basically alone in front of the many unseen eyes watching him.
Even after years of waiting, he wasn’t truly prepared for this. For the briefest of moments, he imagined just walking off. But no. He had to do this. This is what he had lived for. His entire life up until now had led up to this moment.
“I am telling you all no secret when I say that the recent times have been turmoil filled ones,” he began to speak, getting right to the matter at hand without any greetings or big introductions. The air around him felt heavy, and the room was so quiet whenever he didn’t speak that he could hear the lights above softly buzzing with electricity. The old wood under his feet gently cracked whenever he shifted his weight, and he was sure that it could be heard all the way up in the top rows whenever it happened. “As all of you who have come together here know, we stand in front of a huge danger. You do not need a guide to tell you that treading in the domain of a realized leads to peril. Such an affront needs no explanation on my side.”
He swallowed heavily, truly hoping that they had not all come together to hear him proclaim that he would guide them against the A.I.
That was simply no task for a Guide. Yet hopefully the others understood this as well and did not think that he was avoiding the threat in order to pick an easier mission for himself. After all, he would still gain its ire with his words, he was sure, even if it was not his declared danger.
Swallowing again, he continued,
“No, I am here today to talk with you about something else. About someone else. Someone whose words have touched many; and influenced even more. A man who was thrust into conflict against his will. Hurtled into the chaos, he fought, and the galaxy shook before him. A man known to the entire Galaxy obviously needs no introduction, but I would still like to take a moment to list James Aldwin’s achievements to give you a better picture of what I am talking about. Before his life was thrust into conflict, he used to dedicate his time to the improvement of life. He took some of nature’s gifts, and he used them to make new things that would aide people in need. Medicine was his claimed goal, and although he never got to reach that state, he had the clear intention to make life easier for many with his inventions, caring little for where they came from. Then, after his life changed for the worse, his focus shifted. Instead of trying to safe the ill somewhere in the future, he instead dedicated himself to saving people right here and now.”
Talking himself up into a bit of a frenzy, Alexander began to walk back and forth on the stage without even fully realizing that he was doing it. The blinding spotlights were still turning everything that wasn’t the stage into a dark, blocked out void. Night had been separated from day, and he was standing in the sun.
“He turned his focus onto those he thought to be like him,” he explained, starting to make wide gestures with his arms that caused his robe to move in flowing downward waves, embellishing his movements even further. “Those whose lives had been thrown into chaos through no doing of their own. Those born into it. Those ousted. Those who felt ‘othered’ by the world. The pariahs. He promised them acceptance, with little care for who they were.”
He then stopped his pacing for a moment to fully face the crowd, his gaze turning upwards so they would all be able to see it.
“Even when faced with one of our world’s greatest calamities asking him to take it in, he did not cave,” Alexander proclaimed, and he could feel himself tapping into potential of his lungs that he didn’t know he had within him, as his voice boomed throughout the theater. “Despite knowing of the danger in his path, he walked it all the way. Truly, what kind of man is it that will turn no one away? What kind of man who puts himself on the wayside to help others? What kind of man that cares not for who or how?”
“A Saint!” a booming echo came back from the crowd, and Alexander could feel the vibrations of their roar beneath his feet as it rolled over him.
“Indeed,” he replied to the people. “After seeing the path he walked, I say that his actions are worthy of nothing less than sanctity!”
A sound came back from the crowd that was hard to describe. It was neither jeering nor cheering, but something entirely in between. A deep rumble that filled the air with almost nonsensical noise as it escaped the mouths of hundreds of people who reacted to his declaration.
Alexander now lifted his arms in a wide arch, as if he wanted to beckon the crowd into an embrace.
“By the Ministry of the Church of the Failed Savior, bestowed upon me as your new Guide, I hereby proclaim James Aldwin as the Patron of Realized Sapience!” he loudly declared, and the noise of the crowd picked up in intensity.
He took a deep breath while letting the sound slowly fade out, although he didn’t wait for the people to be completely quiet before he let his arms sink again and continued in a milder tone.
“Sanctity is a dangerous path,” he said as he began to slowly pace along the stage again, this time with collected, measured movements. “The Saints walk it, and they invite all who will to follow. They do not warn them of the danger. In fact, they encourage all to face it. Proclaiming their path as the right one, they tell all who follow to not stray from it, no matter the danger. It is a dangerous thing indeed, such a Saint.”
He stopped again, but this time, he didn’t face the crowd. Turned to the side, he stared straight ahead, his eyes fixating on a part of the folded, red curtains while his mind went to a different place.
“Saint Aldwin believes himself to walk the right path, and nothing is holy to him, neither on Earth nor in Heaven, man made or God given, but that which allows him to follow it,” he said, still loud, but a lot more restrained in emotion. “He believes himself to be a protector. A shepherd. A…savior.”
This time, the jeering of the crowd was palpable, as the ground once again shook with it. Any sense of good will had disappeared from the noise.
Now, Alexander waited for it to completely die down. Calm and quietly, he stood there without moving a muscle for minutes on end while the sound gradually faded out.
Only when he could have heard a pin drop in the enormous room did he speak up again.
“As your new Guide, I promise to show you the way to the safe road. I promise to disarm traps and sweep away obstacles in your way. I promise to keep my sight on the destination, and to always point you in the right direction should you stay. And…” he paused for a moment to take a deep breath, before he continued louder than before, lifting his head high as he did so. “And I promise to veer you off the paths of all the Saints and Doomed to Fail Saviors who would have you walk with them into hell!”
A cheering broke out in the crowd, going so far that some of the people began to drum their feet on the ground in a wild, rhythmless thunder.
Meanwhile Alexander turned around to face the man behind him.
Father Mokoena had a wide smile on his wrinkled face as he walked back up to him, his hand extended. As they repeated the same gesture they had given each other earlier, the Father loudly announced,
“God bless your path, Guide.”
“Thank you, Father,” Alexander replied with a deep nod. “I am going to need it.”
After a moment, they let go off each other’s hands again, and Alexander wordlessly walked back off the stage, while Father Mokoena already loudly addressed the crowd again.
Behind the curtain just off the stage, Brother Anders was still waiting for him.
“A captivating speech,” the muscular man complimented him with a brief faux applause he hinted at with his hands, not actually clapping so he wouldn’t disturb the sermon. “But was that a reference I spotted in the middle of it there?”
Alexander scoffed at the man.
“All speeches have references,” he said while he passed the Brother, folding his hands behind his back as he went.
Anders looked after him in mild confusion.
“Aren’t you going to stay and hear the sermon?” he asked as Alexander was already disappearing away from the stage again.
“My faith is between me and our Lord,” Alexander explained as he shook his head. “My prayer does not need an advocate.”
No, instead of wasting time listening to a sermon of prayers that he could speak himself, he decided to instead use it to look after those who were in need of his guidance.
Walking back to from whence he came, he passed his earlier cloakroom and traversed the hallways all the way to a larger, much more open changing room, that would usually most likely house droves of actors or other performers in marvelous costumes before they would go out on stage to dazzle the masses.
Today, however, it was home to a much sadder sight.
Laid out on two benches, surrounded by their peers, were two truly pitiful casualties of conflict. As he walked in, their ears twitched and they began to look up in erratic movements, their muscles twitching and shivering as if under immense stress from just the simple movements, and even after their head was lifted, it was stuck in a constant quiver.
Meanwhile, their far healthier compatriots also turned towards him, their gazes dark and eyes sharp, while their agitated tails whipped through the air like angry flails.
“How are you feeling?” Alexander asked the first of the two clearly ill myiat who met his gaze.
“According to the…circumstances,” the man replied, his voice about as jittery as his posture as he spoke. His name was Mirrakshra. A good man, suffering a bad fate.
Meanwhile, one of their healthy compatriots, a dark-skinned fellow with a scar from a cut right over his cheekbone that had accompanied Alexander since back on Dunnima, glared at Alexander with fiery eyes as he saw the kind of robe he wore.
“If you’re going to try some sort of faith-healing bullshit, then I swear to-“ he began, however Alexander cut him off harshly.
“You shouldn’t swear, Eskfotarra. Not on heaven or on Earth,” he reprimanded him with firm words. Then he smirked, “You may promise to harm me all you like, however. But no, that’s not why I’m here. I’m not a fool. I know I can’t work miracles. I simply worry about his wellbeing.”
“It’s al..alright,” Mirrakshra quelled the worries of his friend. “Y-y-you got news?”
Alexander exhaled disappointedly.
“Sadly, yes,” he said and looked away. “It seems that some of our allies have…how do you say…jumped the gun? They attempted to exterminate the affront prematurely, and in the process, have only made it all the more enduring, it seems.”
Eskfotarra scoffed and his ears twitched slightly as his tail slowed to a gradual sway.
“So, she’s out now?” he correctly assumed, and the smirk on his face told of him not finding those circumstances all too disagreeable. An unfortunate choice, but his to make.
“Indeed,” Alexander replied. “And at the scale we’re currently working at, I’m afraid it’s going to be hard to stamp it out.”
By now, the AI might have infected the entire Galaxy. There was no telling of the kind of hardships they would soon face because of it.
However, Eskfotarra just glanced down at his ill friends again as his grimace soured.
“And Aldwin?” he asked darkly.
Alexander lifted his arms with open palms and shrugged.
“Hidden away where we cannot reach him, at least for the moment,” he explained.
The myiat aggressively clicked his tongue and hissed through his teeth.
“Then when will we be able to reach him?” he asked, his claws unfurling on his arm, cutting into the sleeve of his shirt. “It’s high time that he answers for a lot of things.”
In a picture that should be grotesque but could only be described as empathetic, the quivering, injured feline laying before him looked up at his healthy friend with pity, while wrath seemingly consumed Eskfotarra.
Alexander nodded.
“I’m sure he would agree with you there,” he pointed out, seeing as Aldwin had never been shy to point out his own misdeeds. “That is why sooner or later, he is going to make it possible. The danger is the nature of a Saint.”

TL;DR:
I’m almost certain after my behaviour over the past two years that I have BPD but have only a diagnosis of ADHD despite telling mental health team.
I had a very upsetting and painful relationship with someone that made me feel really bad about myself. I hit out and had a mental breakdown, no I don’t feel like I can live my life because of who the person is and what they have made up about me on top of my already (true) crazy… I don’t really know what to do because I have really good friends in the city I live in but know that anything I do can and will be cancelled by this person.
oh goddddd, so I have a diagnosis of ADHD and not BPD but I did some crazy shit to someone I dated - so I reckon I do have BPD/ I was suffering from psychosis/ super low self esteem + trauma.
Context:Me - 26F Her 32F (I’ll use R to refer to hr)
I was living in my van at the time, really down and out - low sel esteem felt like i had nothing to offer.
She has a fancy salon on the main st in the area where kinda everyone i know in the city is/ DJs at the radio station across the st from r’s salon. To get anywhere you need to walk past her salon or try to avoid it. She knows all the big names etc and is like semi -famous.
Basically I was going through a bit of a rough time - had been struggling with homelessness for a while and that had gotten me into tricky situations which I didn't realise were probably leaving a mark on me. I hadn't been back in the UK for that long, having lived in Greece working in the camps for a while until covid happened and i experienced burnout and got back into drugs when trying to make new friends since i'd been abroad for so long. I sobered up and sorted myself out a bit and went and lived in my van tree-planting and having a nice time.
Anyways, I wasn't really into dating at that point but had dating apps and got talking to someone. Straight away she was really telling me loads about herself and so I opened up to over messages etc, she'd voice note and send pictures asking me to identify mushrooms she'd picked and asked me my opinions/ knowledge about intellectual topics etc, and basically seemed to have a lot in common with me/ wanted similar things.
We don't meet for a while because I'm flaky and always on the move. We finally meet, she comes to a friends house where i sometimes went when I was in the city (i lived in my van remember) and we take some mushrooms, laugh loads and then go to the club together, as soon as i get there she ignores me completely- but i bump into a friend so spend the night dancing with him.. i tell r I'm going to leave and we chat for a bit and then go outside, I ask if she's attracted to me because I'm confused by our interaction, i like r from our chats and how much we laughed together but then i think that she thinks I'm weird hence why she ignored me in the club- we end up circling each other and then kissing for a while, I go to leave and she grabs me an throws me to the wall and kisses me more (HOT). In the morning she messages me 'you're on my mind this morning'- I find it kinda wild, but like flattering and hot.
Anyways I'm away again and she tries to get me to drive back to the city to fuck a few times when she's drunk/ messages me in the night and gets annoyed when i don't reply 'I want you to talk to me' is what she'd say. I've never experienced anyone being so forward so i find it a bit unnerving but nice.
When we finally have sex it's wild, she strangles me without asking but it just works, she's so intense the most intense lover I've ever had, staring at me like she's going to swallow me whole. she says it's the best sex she's ever had - i don't know how to reply, but it is good. We continue seeing each other and she tells me all about her exes who are badddd, like crazy - 3 turn up at r’s flat over the time we are seeing each other... (and she tells me how she has gotten people cancelled).. We hang out a LOT she keeps telling me she's going to fall in love with me but she can't- can't have a relationship, we chat about what we want and she seems to want everything i want? Land, community.. She comes for a drink with me and my friend and storms out half way through i follow her and she's like I'm sorry and goes to dinner, i wake up to 9minutes worth of voice notes telling me all of these nice things about me but that I'm like damaged goods so maybe we should be friends because she knows she'll fall in love with me and she can't do that.. I'm so confused i message back telling her that everything is telling me to run away but for some reason i can't..
everytime i stay r tells me she's going to fall in love with me over and over again, but that she can't do that and it hurts me so i often stay in the spare room, always awaking to her coming in and clinging to me in the night, the way she holds me feels so good.. it really confuses me, so i become unsure if i should see her, everything feels wierdly dramatic all the time and the sex is crazy, she sends me constant nudes and desires me all the time, asks me to come to her work just to kiss her. Does not stop going on about my appearance and body (I'm like SUPER underweight at that point - sick looking- but i guess muscly from all the manual labour? idk weird she was so into it). But we do have the best times when we're together and i feel so special she covets me in public and invites me to cool fancy events and i feel accepted by like the beautiful people? But then she's also seeing other people, (none like me though, she loves me and it's different...) and makes fun of me for not (ENM) so i try and date other people but she stops me each time. She gets a bit calmer and things feel okay between us, i stay most nights she still pushes and pull but i put it down to her trauma and she tell me she's in love with me. I tell r i need time but she demands that i fuck her hard and lover her during sex. R corners me all the time over the next few weeks and tells me i must feel the same way as it's between two people. I'm obsessed, I love her back, I tell R this but that it feels painful and that shouldn't be what love is. We continue hanging out and it seems okay but it's like I'm waiting for her to do something again, it's incredible in so many ways the way we talk constantly about everything and all the amazing things she says to me.. But I'll catch r out on lies/ she'll do things/ say things that are really mean both to me and to strangers etc.
But then things get hard she has some family stuff and says she can't date me, i of course say that's fine but she messages me every day - i get really sick from living in the van during winter with no heating and end up at my mums (alcoholic) after not seeing her for years, she ghosts me over random stuff then rings me crying saying she loves me and would be with me if stuff was not happening in her life.
I get a bit better and come back to the city in my van sleeping near parks etc, the night i get back i meet my friend (an ex, I'm a lesbian what can i say) who sees my phone flashing and her texts to me, she can't believe that that's how she speaks to me. I ask r if I'll see her tonight, she messages me as I'm parked up a while out the city demanding i come fuck her and leave my dog alone in the van. I feel like shit but then do what she wants the following night after not having slept, our relationship becomes me coming over and cooking for her and fucking her on demand.. At this point I'm barely sleeping each night, waiting for her to message me or up from the cold. one night i say no and that she has no respect for me, the next day I say we need to chat- she's mean over text and is all about what just tell me over text, so i tell her i think she has zero respect for me and it hurts. she brushes it off but later sees me walk past her salon and then ends up coming into the shop where i go with my friend and grabs my hand. Later she sees me again whilst djing (across the road from her salon) and messages me and asks if i like her croptop i tell her ofc she looks amazing, she says she'll come chat to me later. She doesn't so i sleep until she turns up at my van at midnight wrecked. I come out and ask her wtf she is doing but she just grabs me and kisses me and throws me against the park railings and tells me to come to hers so i follow her, we start having sex and i freak out and she tells me she loves me to which i only reply 'sure'. she jumps out of the bed and starts screaming at me to get out if i don't think she loves me, i move to get up but then she presses me down and doesn't let me leave nor does she let me sleep and shakes me trying to get me to talk but I've shut down.
The next day I wake having had one hour sleep feeling terrible. i go down on r and bring her to orgasm she bucks into my nose and i bleed everywhere, a sad trail of red leading to the bathroom.. she sits me on the edge of the bath and cleans me up, we shower together and i watch my blood mix with the water. Later in r’s kitchen she picks me up and sits me on her counter (I'm p tall 5'8 but tinnyyy 47kg and she's 6ft curvy af and strong) and strokes my hair tries to speak to me but i can't hear anything i feel so done and hurt and terrified to lose her, it's like my self worth has become reliant on her because idk she's so powerful in the area i live and is so mean about everyone and if she's not mean about me then maybe I'm not so bad right? I know - bpd right?
Anyways i go to my van and change and r comes in and gives me my stuff that i had at hers i tell her i don't want it and throw it out… I was feeling rejected I guess?.. she's laughing at me an I'm so embarrassed i throw my clothes into the street I'm crazy, feel ridiculous and small and sick and ashamed i want her not to see me like that. She storms off and tells me I'll never see her again if I do that again so I follow her (she wants to go a walk) and she screams at me in public all around the park and i try to calm her. By the time we get back to hers I'm apologising telling her it woulave completely lost my d be a shame to waste our connection and i love her. I have completely lost myself, I'm a different person from when she met me. I have no where to go but go to my friends who tells me she's worried about me and that someone shouldn't be treating me that way. The woman just sends me romantic songs and i tell her i think the other night was inappropriate, she admits that it was and says we can never talk about it again.
I start going crazy- messaging weirdly when she doesn't reply, clingy like, r tells me she doesn't think about me doesn't care about me. I'm not sleeping still and in the morning i tell her that i think she needs therapy etc if she thinks that this is love because it should feel good and it should be an action not just some intense feeling she has and that i am so confused because she treats her friends so nicely and yet the person she is in love with like a dog or an enemy and i think she's amazing but maybe we should be friends if her behaviour doesn't change cause i don't want to lose her.. She is obviously mad with me and tells me she completely fell for me but can't have a relationship (not my point). We were meant to have a date that night as r was going to Mexico the next day but she cancels because of my behaviour.. i ask to go and get my records then so i go to the salon- with her favourite chocz (ikr I'm full psycho at this point) and she's angry but we make out loads in the back street.. she says she'll meet me later, I'm a mess getting ready and think I'll be late so don't get fuel for my van (so no heating), i turn up and she's still working but invites me in i try and wait but my mum keeps ringing saying she's suicidal.. she finally finishes cutting the persons hair 2 hours after i turn up... and we make out loads in the salon, but shes mean, shes hungry so i take her for food she holds my hand down the street and leans her head on my shoulder as she eats i walk her to her car and she tells me that's it i kiss her loads and ask her to drive me back and she agrees I'm trying not to cry as she drops me off and she asks me why do i care so much about it. i kiss her and she drives off. i try and sleep on my friends couch but it's so cold. I message her and joke how she's going to go through all my texts laughing with her business partner - she's like wtf.. (she told me she'd done that with ex partners texts and I'm so paranoid all the time at this point), she tells me something has happened and she has to stop texting i apologise and say i;ll message in the morning...
She's so mad with me still in the morning and the communication is fucked, she's mad i just want to be friends and everything else, but of course, i want to be with her and not just be friends, i'd really do anything. I ask if i can leave her a letter because everything i text is misconstrued. She says yes so i write her a letter telling her how i feel and apologising, i feel like i really love her, she's such a strong character and so interesting and so fierce with so many idiosyncrasies and mad music knowledge and that i want to be in her life in any capacity that i can, i mean it but I'm so so fucked up at this point and i'd had a long term relationship but like it wasn't like this.. the intensity, it was really nice and so loving, but it was very different from this, despite the pain of it no one had ever said such amazing things to me and i'd never had sex like that / so much in common musically etc.... I'm so hurt and just think i should try move on, i go and sleep with someone straight away. the next day she messages me whilst on her way to to the airport, telling me the letter made her cry - because it's sad and that all she wants to do is be in my arms, i tell r i love her and r says she feels the same, but I'm stupid i try and date other people whilst she's in mexico. The stupidest idea, I’m so so mentally ill at this point, not sleeping and pushing my body to the absolute limits at work and to nail the coffin.. start taking street valium to try and sleep.. i tell r about going on dates, i always told her before because i want to be open about that and she encouraged my dating other people (but i have like sexual trauma so it's difficult for me, but i don't mind her dating) she gets jealous of one person i date (a)… A instantly clings on to me and by then myself esteem is so done i think everyone can just take what they want from me and I give it despite a year ago knowing full well I would have ran a million miles from someone like a.. and this is really horrible.. but i wasn't even really attracted to a and i missed and loved the r so badly, but a kept demanding me to come fuck her very similar to the way r did, but obvs I loved r, so I did go an fuck a even when I didn’t want to. Whilst a is in Mexico she sends me highly sexual messages again and of course I'm so hooked, i wake up to voice notes from r telling me she loves me that she wants to do everything with me, to read to her to go travelling, to do all these mad adventurous things etc and that when she gets back she needs to see me straight away and it'll be different this time we'll do sober things etc etc. at this point I'm flat sitting a friends flat so i finally have somewhere to stay - although only for a bit..
R arrives back and I'm so excited to see her, i don't want to fuck up this time and i want to be good for her, she also has regular lovers so maybe it's good that i now have someone else as well.. when r finally gets to the place I'm staying she's two hours late and she's full of mezcal telling me about a half a million property she's going to buy (what about wanting to get land like me). I'm cooking for her and we're making small talk but she just jumps on me and tells me to get into the bedroom so i do. she pushes me on the bed and tries to fuck me (again something i can have problems with cause past trauma) she hurts me so i tell her and she laughs and stops rather than asking what i want. I've never seen her so turned on, like, her clit is SWOLLEN anyways we have a LOT of sex for hours and hours can't stop touching each other telling each other how much we love each other, and i talk about the woman I'm dating and the sex... because i found it interesting because i struggle with casual sex / not having feelings for people who i sleep with but managing to have good sex with that person sometimes without having feelings (fucking for pleasure, as noted smth I struggle wi cause of trauma), i don't really remember chatting about it (she tells me the next day how inappropriate that is).. anyways it feels p fucking magical to be back with r and the next day she sees me running my errands whilst she's in her salon and asks me to get her for her lunch so i do and she comes up to the flat i'm staying in and we make out but then she becomes nasty to me - making fun of my clothes and then asking if i only like her for sex (very confusing as she always jumps on me when i'd much rather go and fucking do smth fun...). She tells me off for talking about a (very fair what a twat I am) and i'm mortified, i apologise so much and tell r maybe i was trying to show off or smth but i don't remember too well because i would never want to hurt her, i'm so desperate to make it work this time.. I move in with my close friend and I stop fawning over her so much, confused by the hot and cold.. I go and stay with people and I text her the same as always but I just seem to annoy her…
R sleeps with someone I know she doesn’t even like and I’m upset - what are we doing to each other!? I try to communicate this but everything I do annoys her, when I’m invited to a cottage with an and her friends I go, just for a night. Whilst there r starts phoning me manically asking to come over and that she needs to sleep next to me, but I tell her I’m out, not where, I should’ve said where I know.. been honest.. r sends loads of messages, I should just go and ring her but for some reason I don’t because I’m so anxious, I just text her I’m so sorry I’m away id love to be with her but we need to start arranging things rather than her expecting me to just drop everything there and then all the time - I honestly thought about driving my big van 2 hours back just to be there for her and I wish I had.. I say I’ll see her as soon as I’m back but it goes on at this place, I hate it I want to be with her.
When I get back the next day I cook r a massive meal and we try and watch a film.. I have no tv and no laptop just a shite iPad. I obviously can’t concentrate on it and it annoys r.. we have sex and she tells me she loves me but I don’t reply, I just stare confused… she says she needs to go and stay in her own bed, I ask if she wants company but she says no, so she goes. But she tells me to come in to the salon on valentines day to get my hair done..
I’m pretty ill at this point again and food isn’t going well with me and just super mentally unstable with everything going on and staking street valium each night.. it’s my pals birthday and I’m so anxious around everyone I get completely black out, take loads of drugs. My dog runs away and she is texting me maniacally I’m on the st tripping balls looking for my dog , I run to the park (past her salon) she sees me and runs out and grabs me I immediately have a panic attack and collapse, her staff bring me water and she comes out and calls my friends who come and get me, she messages me asking if I’m okay. I apologise not realising the gravity of the situation. Later she (rightfully) doesn’t want to talk to me when I try.. I lose my shit, she isn’t going to cut my hair, I accuse her of manipulating me, lying (she was always lying tbh and I knew it but just turned a blind eye) and not loving me, just using me for sex, complete psychotic drool. I don’t remember any of it, I was FULL of Xanax and everything else. I fall asleep and when I wake up I’m sick realising what I did, I ring her trying to apologise, of course she won’t speak to me, so I apologise profusely. She won’t see me again. I get it I’m awful, so awful, but I’m so full of panic.
I accept that she doesn’t want to see me but I get covid and keep filling with panic and sending her apologies ( I think on two occasions) and getting really cruel responses. I then pour my heart out, all romantic, the way she used to talk to me (I know I’m mortified) and she calls me disgusting and to focus on someone else (which hurt because my problem is I struggle with focus on someone because I’m so damn scatty/ avoidant a lot of the time, probs why I fell so hard for her because I couldn’t NOT focus on he be drawn and obsessed with her). I’m terrified of walking my dog certain ways and passing her salon worried she’ll accuse me of stalking because I messaged so many times to apologise.. if I do pass with friends she stares out at me..
But then she comes and talks to me on the street and says she will see me soon (she’d always say this when she sort of ended smth, to tell me it wasn’t really over in her code) so I thought it would be like all the other times she’s be annoyed and mess with other people then call me in crying again. So I message r and suggest a walk - she blocks me. I’m so mentally ill now, can’t go down the street and have panic attacks daily that my life is ruined, hurting someone like that and being so mean and also what she will be saying to people, people look at me differently like I’m mad (she got her ex barred from an art studios, another is seen as an abuser and has called other stalkers/ crazy). It was also (pure vanity) horrifying knowing everyone would think I was this evil crazy person.. so I’d try and stay out of her way but sadly struggle as her salon is on the main Street and I couldn’t keep making my friends walk a different way (they thought I was mad too). I continue seeing a for a 2 weeks but its too much so I ask for space but she then tells me she loves me and it feels too much like what I’d just been through (why am I now creating a new pattern)… I’m so lonely and fucked up and mad and weird that A continually gets back in because my boundaries are so poor and I’m so mentally ill and probably confusing her a lot :(. I go in and out of utter panic and trying to quit the st valium and relapsing. R sees me at gigs and sometimes tries to come up but I always freak out and have a panic attack, she comes out the salon when I walk by and goes smiles and tries to talk to my friends whilst ignoring me..
I go through homelessness again and a puts me up in her big flat she lives in alone (as a friend), but it’s such an odd situation because she keeps trying to initiate sex.. I see the salon shut for ages and get a weird feeling this is months later… July?… Just before R’s birthday.. I decide to message if she’s okay, the message goes through on iMessage so maybe I’m just blocked on WhatsApp idk? No answer.. I’m so manic not sleeping I take loads and loads of valium to try and shut my brain off and down gin, I’m on my own as A has gone away in the massive flat a st away from r’s and a st away from the salon everything is so fucking close.. anyways I go crazy from all the Valiums and somehow convince myself that if I just talk to r and tell her I mean no harm she will stop saying stuff about me and just be normal to me when we bump into each other. I go crazy ring loads. When she answers she goes hysterical screaming at me and laughing hysterically and calling me all these things. She hangs up and I ring and ring and leave nonsense drugged up voice notes like ‘does it make u feel powerful being so mean..’ Etc. I’m such an idiot I feel so bad for acting so odd and traumatised I decide to write to her and give her my favourite book I think about putting it in the post but she lives down the st so I think it’s an acceptable thing to leave it outside. When I get there she’s sat outside with her pals… she sees me and is like ‘hi.. what do you want’ I say I have something for her she just replies ‘sound’ so I give her the book and letters and she bursts out laughing..
I meet someone later (o) and then it turns out r was also trying to fuck them whilst with me and told a bunch of lies.. I go to a gay club with O and as soon as I walk in R is there, she just waves at me and I jump out of my skin. Fuck. I go over and I apologise profusely saying I’m having a manic episode and it’s no excuse (it really is no excuse - I’m aware my behaviour is fucked) but I say can I have a hug and she holds me, when I pull away she grabs me and puts her hand under my top whilst telling me she needs ‘space’ from me tonight and to leave, but that the letter was ‘sweet’. The letter was also like.. asking what the protocol was because I didn’t want to be accused of doing other disrespectful things - I’d been a prick and really shat on her boundaries apologising when she didn’t want to hear from me then going fuckin’ nuts and ringing her months later, but it was also cause I didn’t know if it was bad walking past the salon and how to avoid it or whether I was allowed/ should say hello - we WERE in love? I’ve never had to like idk police myself after being so entwined with someone, them knowing everything about me… and I just felt so ashamed of my actions and selfishly wanted to make up for it even though I knew that the only way to make up for it is to not apologise.. but ye I guess its also my life. R is involved in everything music, fashion, writing.. so I really wanted to be on like semi okay terms, but it was just completely fucked up of me trying to force that on a person and I truly am ashamed and have just been doing so much therapy since.
I did just about get myself on my feet, I got a council flat, got in to do my post grad, was playing music and had a gig lined up (smth I was nervous about again because r is friends with the gig organisers and other musicians involved) and then I had a serious rock climbing accident - smashed my left arm up pretty bad, had a lush two week stay in the hospital, two operations and a bunch of metal plates put in - it was a hard recovery as I’m so active usually and my council flat is like a st away from r’s salon and everyone who knows her in the queer scene and ye I walk out my flat and just get funny looks now because of it.. R did come and talk to me on the st one day after my accident I went to turn away but there was nowhere to go, so, idk it probably looked mental as but I put on my big grin and tried to just feel love and no animosity for her and just tried to chat normally and made a bunch of jokes and also apologised again, said I feel guilty and I think about what I did all the time, she told me to ‘let it go’ and made fun of my cast and chaos, kind of infantilising and kinda treated me like I was gross and bring up stuff that she knew would make me feel awful…
I pulled through my accident and even got a modelling contract with a pretty big agency, got funded to work on a film and started my postgrad.. but then things still happen all the time, a photographer blocks me, guess what, they’re friends with r. Two people working on the film, friends with R and I just feel weird around them, my friends ask me to go to events… r is djing. my best friend starts djing at the radio station r dis at and wants me to get involved but I know I can’t even though I’m friends with the person that runs the radio station. If I were to, r would get me banned and say it was to get to them or smth, which is not true, at this point I wish I could be as far away from them as possible. I’m scared to go and see my favourite musicians play as I always suspect r will be there as we have the same taste… scared to go to certain pubs I always went to.. before I met r I would spend days off at a cafe right by her salon and just read/ catch up on admin.. I’m too nervous now as she’ll again say it’s stalking/ her friends will think that too. My favourite food place was also next to her salon. I literally love the days it’s shut and I can just go down the main st like a normal person, funny thing is that’s the only time I ever see her other ex who is also too scared to go down the main st… it’s been so long now but I’m still crippled with anxiety, I know that she now has a partner so I thought maybe she might idk be full of love and evened out a bit, but she’s still trying to like talk to my friends.. and I know for a fact going around telling people I’m crazy, I tell myself it’s in my head that she’s doing this but then something happens.
I’m so young I just want to be happy, i make new friends and then if they make a move on me I freak out, can’t have sex at all, can’t be intimate. I don’t know when I’ll stop feeling like this. I guess I’m scared I’ll be awful to someone else like I was to R. And I know that my low self-esteem isn’t all due to R at all, if anything she built me up more than anyone else ever had… but I keep putting it on her in my mind and it’s obsessive and fucked up. I own a bit of land with a group of anarchist, working class queers now and we’re building huts to make a community - I’m on disability for my arm and the severity of my ‘ADHD’ and have so much opportunity to just write and try and make something of myself but I’m still so full of panic by the proximity. One of my other best friends good friend is close friends with R and so we can’t hang out together. They are creating a pop up poety/ wine night (I write poetry) so my pal wants me to be there desperately but I know r will be there and her friends who all think I’m an evil crazy bitch from hell. Which, I guess I am, but I’m trying not to be and treating me like shit forever and spreading things on top of the crazy shit I did which are fundamentally not true is just so difficult and makes me feel like I have to move away… I’m pretty sure after all this and my mind letting it continue that I definitely have BPD, all the symptoms are there but my mental health team just think it’s severe ADHD and possibly CPTSD and I just need to stick to my medication regimen (yay stimulants) and stay off of valium - I am!! But idk, everytime I think I’m doing something good I get scared that r will find out and tear it down.. it sucks, I have a lot of love and respect for her and wish I hadn’t done what I did but I did and I can’t change it.. so I guess I deserve it completely. But still, it’s difficult to make something of myself even though I deserve this..
Has anyone had a similar situation? any advice?