I recently moved to a new city and made some new girlfriends to hang out with. We’re all between the ages of 25-27. I’ll refer to the 2 girls as S and A. I’ve known S for 2 years and A for a couple months.
We decided to go to a lounge last Friday, and the moment we got there a man tried to hit on me. He was very respectful, but when he asked for my number, I politely said, “you’re very attractive, but Im just not looking right now.” Immediately S grabbed the other girl by the hand and said, “Let’s go, I’m sick of her getting the attention everywhere we go.” It threw me off, but whatever.
The next day, we go bar hopping, and a group of older ladies complimented me, and the vibe immediately got weird. Both S and A were whispering to each other and laughing, and when I’d ask to hear the joke, they’d ignore me. I felt pretty left out. S also invited a couple guys who were really nice so I made friends with them instead. Every time one of the guys would try to talk to me though, S kept jumping in, interrupting me mid sentence, and bringing the focus back to her. I was later told by S that the guys said I was attractive, and it all made sense once again.
We’re all waiting outside for an Uber to take us home, and a guy walks up and recognizes A. They talk for a bit, then he turns to me and says, “you’re so beautiful! What’s your ethnicity?” I replied, Im black and white, but also adopted by a Mexican family so you could say Im also Mexican at heart. He said I was beautiful again, and that was the end of the conversation. As he’s complimenting me though, I look up at S and she looked at A and immediately rolled her eyes, making a disgusted face. I told the guy, “don’t compliment me, my friends clearly doesn’t like it.” Then they all continued to ignore me, I teared up a bit because it just reminds me of all the years I was singled out and bullied as a kid.
We get to S’s house, and she goes on a rant basically saying, she’s not jealous. She knows me inside and out and gets offended that men only see me for my looks. She also claimed men only like me because Im mixed, and they’re fetishizing me. I personally disagree, men and women constantly ask me what I am, and as long as it’s respectful, I don’t mind. I know I look very ambiguous. She said she was only trying to “protect me.” By the end of the conversation, I realized S not once asked how I felt, or if I needed her to “protect me.” I told her that when she rolls her eyes, it makes me feel like it’s my fault that people hit on me a lot. It’s also very hard for me to stick up for myself, so I don’t think I voiced my opinion as much as I should have.
Now here’s where this situation gets tricky. S is black. I’m biracial. Often times, lighter skinned women get more attention. It’s not okay, and I could understand S being frustrated by that, especially since people are always asking what I am. I want to be able to be understanding towards her feelings, but at the same time I feel like those feelings are being projected onto me. I don’t ask to get hit on, and when my friends complain about it or make faces, it knocks down my confidence a little and makes me just want to stay home.
I know for fact if we go out, this will likely happen again, because something similar happens EVERY TIME we go out. What do you think is really going on here? & How would you handle this situation?
TLDR; my friends are treating me poorly because I keep getting hit on. It comes off as jealousy, but my friend claims she is protecting me from festishizers.

The chill runs her fingers down your spine illuminating each vertebrae and whispers her arrival.
Years have been wasted watching water freeze and precious time lost to the flakes that descend and disappear on your skin. Allowing them to sink into your flesh is the only reminder you are capable of warmth.
It’s that special time of year when the cold bleaches everything it touches and blends nothingness with chaos, sweeping away your senses and leaving you isolated.
Stoically you hold your position, as venturing forward with her only leaves you vulnerable to suffering. You let the waves roll over and around because waiting for it to end takes less energy… and fighting it makes you tired.
So tired.
This opaque sea of pearl is unforgiving and cruel; crashing with intention to burn and stab when you peek, punishing you for trying. She will deprive you of oxygen with a twinkle in her eye, and her screams steal your breath away if you open your mouth to respond.
Then, quiet.
Without violence controlling life the particles hesitate in the air like an ashen kiss blown from magma.
Delicately winking through the powder was something that stood out, and you start running, unsure if you are motivated by fight or flight.
Your blinded eyes had forgotten what the security of clarity feels like. Unclouded crystals and polished fractals had merged to create a tiny window to remind you of what awaits on the other side.
A sudden radiating warmth in the chest alarms you and a checklist of fatal symptoms rattle through until you realize it’s melting the numbness you learned to live with.
Grasping at the looking glass it slips your mind that your passion dissolves the fragile gifts sent from the universe, promising yourself that this time will be different.
For a moment…. it’s yours.
But it fades into your hands, and with wet palms you accept its decay was birthed from your greed.
With a shriek she returned to nip at your nose and change what remains of a treasure into sparkling needles.
Turning deep desire into pain, shaking you from the dream, welcoming you back with frigid arms.
Withdrawn once again you try to keep your chin up despite living in perpetual bleakness.
Searching. Waiting. Hoping to feel the fire that feels like home just one more time, but this arctic hearth is where you belong now.
You ignore that there is nothing left in you to thaw when the season ends. After so much time in this place, the relentless scream of white noise is the only constant you rely on. And now you depend on it to drown out the voices that say you will never see it again.
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State of Instagram Reels In 2023

We kicked off 2023 with some serious announcements from Instagram’s CEO confessing that Instagram pushed more reels than photos. And they will settle things back to normal meaning pushing every single piece of content at the same rate.
After that Meta’s Earning Report 2022 came out, In the statement regarding Instagram. Mark Zuckerberg confirmed that to make people create & watch reels they tried to give new format a boost until 2022. Now, reels can grow on their own.
And that brings us to current state of reels, which is reels aren’t as organic as 2021. But the time spent by Instagram users is increasing, now more than 20% users spend their half of the time on reels tab.
That’s why IG reels needs to be part of your overall Instagram strategy.

State of Tiktok 2023

Changes to Tiktok algorithm are bigger than Instagram reels. Increasing the arguments regarding Tiktok Vs Instagram strategy, here’s what you need to know regarding these changes.
First Tiktok recently announced a new monetisation feature called “Tiktok Series”.
Tiktok believes in quality content & they have mentioned these priorities over and over again. This time with “Tiktok Series” the platform wants creators to create long-form content to make Tiktok users more engaged within the platform.
The creators can charge upto $190 for content series. Your Tiktok series can have upto 80 videos with length of upto 20 minutes.
This new era of paywalled content on Tiktok will bring more engagement & money to creators.
Second TikTok’s Creativity Program aka “Creative Fund 2.0”
The platform introduced a new creator fund called “Tiktok creativity Program” and creators can apply for monetisation of video content. But this time there is a change to help deserving creators make more money.
In creativity program, creators apply for monetisation for a specific Tiktok video and the video has to be over 1 minue length or minimum. Plus, Tiktok will review Originality & creativity of video to consider monetisation.
Final Take, What these changes tell us?
These changes tell us that Tiktok wants original & long-form content to exist on platform. Tiktok was know for trending sounds in 2019-2021 and it still represents that part of social media. But now the platform seeks originality & wants to be a content hub like Youtube.

Understanding Instagram Strategy

I’ve advised 1000s of marketers, SMBs & creators that only reason Instagram never dies is because it’s the most personal platform & middle child in the family of Social Media Platforms.
The audiences on Instagram want to see memories, highlights & content from their friends, families & connections. And they discover new creators & businesses based on what Instagram knows about them. And Instagram gets the knowledge from who they follow, what they or the people they follow like. It’s all interconnected.
And that’s different from Tiktok. On Instagram while creating reels, you have to remember to make sure you focus on creating content more valuable for your existing followers.
When you create valuable content for them. You will get better engagement from them and as Instagram’s audience is interconnected & the platform knows the interests through the audience. You will go viral & get more engagement.
Meaning key to a great Instagram reels strategy is focusing on fulfilling your current audience with value to get more engagement from non-followers. To do that, you need to be more focused on understanding your followers how they react to different posts. After that you need to find what other creators & businesses are doing to find what works.
Both of these will help you in creating content within your expertise, without any pressure to jump on trends. Why? As you now understand what strategies & tactics work for your audience better than those Instagram fast growth gurus.

Decoding Tiktok Strategy

Above I mentioned Tiktok is different with context about how Instagram’s audience is interconnected & existing followers make a huge impact on virality.
Tiktok is opposite, People use it to discover new solutions, trends, Ideas & businesses. They aren’t interconnected with most of their friends. Unless Tiktok asks you to connect contacts & 70% people usually don’t follow their friends after connecting their contact lists.
Tiktok users are on Platform for new content discovery. You see content based on what you like, the personal connections doesn’t matter as much as they did on IG.That’s why brands on Tiktok try to create content that targets a broad share of platform. Because people are hear to build new interests, and discover new businesses.
First, Brands try to create content that appeals to 90% of people interested in X topic to go viral or gain exposure.
For example, @Bose on Tiktok create funny reels about their new products to reach most of the audience.
Second, They create educational & focused content to keep the existing followers engaging + connected with their brands.
To explain Take @schick on Tiktok creating story-focused content to make sure the connection between newly gained audience starts building.
Third, Brands try to stay relevant by discussing points that audience mentions in comments. To make people believe they are listening to everyone.
For Example, McDonald’s Tiktok manager replied to a follower who said nobody will read this. This act shows a lot & the screenshot of this comment gathered 13k likes on Twitter.
Showing how engaging in comments can also impact your audience + you can end up gaining more attention on Twitter or reddit.
Packing all this up, Tiktok strategy For Brands & Creators is a mix of broad content to target new followers & insightful content to keep the followers engaged. And engaging is similar to Instagram, It’s important on both platforms.

Instagram Images Vs Tiktok Carousels

In the state of Instagram reels, I mentioned that IG is back to prioritising every single format equally. What does that mean? It means that Instagram Imagery content is here to stay & it is gaining organic reach.
Comparing it to Rival Platform, now we have carousels on Tiktok. And this feature is highly organic when we compare it to Instagram carousels.
Tiktok carousels are an amazing way to post imagery content on platform and you can share more than 10 slides with ability to add sounds. On other hand, You can now add sound to Single images on Instagram but regarding carousels you can only have upto 10 slides with no sound adding feature.
Instagram carousels seem to take a loss here in terms of organic reach & Format freedom. But this format is one of my favourite to build an engaging audience as your audience tend to spend more time consuming your content.

Encountered my first MTG Arena gameplay bug:
Enemy board has 5 swamps, Phyrexian Obliterator, Phyrexian Arena, and Sheoldred the Apocalypse:
My board has 3 plains, a forest, an island, Queen Allenal of Ruadach, a citizen token with Citizen’s Crowbar attached, and a white soldier token.
I tap the citizen token and sacrifice Citizen’s Crowbar to destroy my opponents Phyrexian Arena. It destroys Phyrexian Arena and wipes my entire board (lands included) with the sacrifice animation.
I’m not missing a strange interaction here, right?

Here are options for downloading or watching John Wick: Chapter 4 streaming the full movie online for free on 123movies & Reddit, including where to watch the iconic action movie franchise continues with a new chapter at home. John Wick: Chapter 4 2023 available to stream on? Is watching John Wick: Chapter 4 on Paramount Plus, HBO Max, Netflix or Amazon Prime? Yes, we have found an authentic streaming service/media.
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Watch Now: John Wick: Chapter 4 Online Free
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Get ready to add another superhero movie to your queue! Four years after Shazam hit theaters, it’s finally getting a sequel with John Wick: Chapter 4.
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The DC movie follows Billy Batson (Zachary Levi) and his foster siblings as they turn into superheroes upon saying the word, “Shazam!” In the 130-minute film, the group must stop the Daughters of Atlas from using a weapon that could destroy the world.
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So where can you watch John Wick: Chapter 4? Is it on HBO Max? What about Netflix? Here’s everything we know about the upcoming movie:
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When Will John Wick: Chapter 4 Be Released?
John Wick: Chapter 4 was set to be released in theaters on march.
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Will John Wick: Chapter 4 Coming to Movie Theaters?
Yes, John Wick: Chapter 4 will be released exclusively in theaters on March 24, 2023. Originally, the movie was expected to be released on April 1, 2021, but was then pushed to November 4, 2021, and again to March 17, 2023, with these delays ultimately being caused by the COVID-19 pandemic. Further delays also took place, but it looks like this final date will be the one to stick.
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Where To Watch John Wick: Chapter 4:
As of now, the only place to watch John Wick: Chapter 4 is to go to a movie theater when it drops on Friday, March 17. You can find a local showing on Fandango.
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Other than that, you will have to wait for it to become available to rent or purchase on digital platforms like Prime Video, Apple, and Vudu or stream on HBO Max. Read on for more information.
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Will John Wick: Chapter 4 Available for Streaming Online?
Right now, there are currently no confirmed plans for streaming John Wick: Chapter 4. As more cinemas open up and theater attendance continues to rise post-pandemic, simultaneous streaming and theater releases are becoming less common. However, if past titles are anything to go by, it’s a safe bet that Fury Of The Gods will join its DCEU siblings on HBO Max within the next few months. It’s possible that you’ll also be able to rent or buy copies of the movie on other
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streaming platforms, such as Amazon or YouTube but again, it’ll be a while before the movie becomes available anywhere other than in theaters.
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When Will John Wick: Chapter 4 Be Streaming On HBO MAX?
Since John Wick: Chapter 4 is being distributed by Warner Bros. Discovery, it will, indeed, join HBO Max. However, unlike last year when the company would drop their movies on the streaming platform the same day they were released in theaters, we are going to have to wait at least 45 days before we can watch from the comfort of our living rooms.
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While there is no official streaming release date yet, Black Adam, another Warner Bros. movie, was released in theaters on Oct. 21 and didn’t make its way to HBO Max until Dec. 16 — just over 45 days after it debuted. If John Wick: Chapter 4 follows the same trajectory, it’s possible we won’t be able to stream it until early May 2023.
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Is John Wick: Chapter 4 Be On Netflix?
No, John Wick: Chapter 4 is not on Netflix — and it likely won’t be any time soon seeing as it is going to stream on HBO Max. In the meantime, you’ll just have to head out to a theater or wait for it to become available on streaming and VOD.
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Is John Wick: Chapter 4 Be On Hulu?
Viewers are saying that they want to view the new action movie John Wick: Chapter 4 on Hulu. Unfortunately, this is not possible since Hulu currently does not offer any of the free episodes of this series streaming at this time. It will be exclusive to the MTV channel, which you get by subscribing to cable or satellite TV services. You will not be able to watch it on Hulu or any other free streaming service.
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John Wick: Chapter 4 Cast And Character?
Keanu Reeves as Jardani Jovanovich / Jonathan “John” Wick, a professional hitman and assassin who has gained legendary reputation for his set of skills and is now hunted by the High Table.
Donnie Yen as Caine, a blind High Table assassin and an old friend of John Wick.
Bill Skarsgård as the Marquis Vincent de Gramont, a powerful member of the High Table whose position is challenged by John Wick.
Laurence Fishburne as the Bowery King, a former underground crime boss who was left for dead by the High Table and is now sponsoring John Wick.
Hiroyuki Sanada as Shimazu Koji, the manager of the Osaka Continental Hotel and an old friend of John Wick.
Shamier Anderson as the Tracker / Mr. Nobody, a bounty hunter pursuing Wick.
Lance Reddick as Charon, the concierge at the Continental Hotel in New York.
Rina Sawayama as Akira, Koji’s daughter and concierge of the Osaka Continental.
Scott Adkins as Killa, the head of the German Table and an individual who has one thing in common with John Wick: they have the same enemy.
Ian McShane as Winston Scott, the manager of the New York Continental Hotel and friend of John Wick.
With the price on his head ever increasing, legendary hit man John Wick takes his fight against the High Table global as he seeks out the most powerful players in the underworld, from New York to Paris to Japan to Berlin.
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Release date: May 27, 2022 (USA)
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Director: Chad Stahelski
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Distributed by: Lionsgate Films
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Based on: Characters; by Derek Kolstad
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Music by: Tyler Bates; Joel J. Richard

Co-hosts of “The View” criticized Today News Africa reporter Simon Ateba on Tuesday and called him a “horrible person” and an unserious journalist after he berated White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre during a press conference on Monday. Co-host Joy Behar said he wasn’t a “serious guy” and was not a “serious journalist.” She said … Continue reading ‘The View’ blasts African reporter who berated Karine Jean-Pierre: ‘He’s a horrible person’

Long story short - I know and work with this guy (23M) through a start-up I’m in. He and I (25F) got close a few months ago but I’ve since distanced myself for a few reasons. He’s super interested in me and wants me to be his girlfriend. I on the other hand explained to him numerous times I am not looking for a relationship and I do not want to hurt or lead him on. He said he’d wait for me.
I’ve decided to distance myself for a few other reasons.

1: I expressed how I do not like or want PDA of any kind. When we go out with friends, he’s very touchy with me (grabs my hips, shoulders, just always needs to touch me in some capacity) and doesn’t understand that it makes me extremely uncomfortable. I’ve told him to stop several times in the moment and had other conversations with him about how I feel about it, but it always ends up happening again. As a note - I do NOT feel threatened by this guy at all. It’s not scary, it’s just annoying especially around friends and colleagues. There have also been times where my friends have told him to stop or knock it off too and he will listen in the moment.

2: I’ve expressed that we work together and I don’t want to destroy the dynamic of our team, which is why we need to remain friends. While I’ve said that, he continues to linger after meetings and wait for me to get done with my work with my team just to be close to me. He’ll hover over me while I’m working with my team (he and I are on separate teams) and he’ll be within my personal space pretty constantly. I’ve had to explain to our CEO that this is not something I’m asking from him to do. Some of our team has also expressed their concern with this since it’s happening after every meeting.

3: I don’t feel like he listens or respects my boundaries (even as a friend). This comes in from the information above and a few other instances out at social events. And because of that, my friends, my therapist all tell me to keep distance. So I have been. And maybe it’s because he’s never had this with a girl or not. Whatever the reason, I don’t want to be uncomfortable so I’ve tried to back off from even being a friend at this time since he hasn’t listened to my boundaries.

Don’t get me wrong, he’s a nice human, but he’s really in love with me and I do not feel the same. And I’m at the point that I feel like he doesn’t respect me or my boundaries and I really do not enjoy being around him right now. I’ve been leaving him on read when he reaches out, and I’ll tell him I’m busy with work and other things to get him to back off (since nothing else has worked in the past). I don’t obviously want to destroy the dynamic of the team any more than it’s been or even lose a friend (because I would like to be friends if he listened to me), so I’m at a loss for what to do.
Has anyone experienced this? What can I do to have him listen to me and respect my boundaries? Or do I just keep distancing myself from him since I’ve attempted to explain this to him a few times now with little to no change?
As a side note, pushing charges on him is not an option I’m willing to do. He’s not doing it with malicious intent and it’s not putting me in a scary situation. It’s just annoying. Plus I don’t want to ruin this guys life either (since I would like to be friends if he listened to me and understood my boundaries). I understand that this very well may just be him as a human and how he expresses his love language.
I just wanted to see if anyone else has been through something similar and what advice you’d give to someone like me.

Long story short - I know and work with this guy (23M) through a start-up I’m in. He and I (25F) got close a few months ago but I’ve since distanced myself for a few reasons. He’s super interested in me and wants me to be his girlfriend. I on the other hand explained to him numerous times I am not looking for a relationship and I do not want to hurt or lead him on. He said he’d wait for me.
I’ve decided to distance myself for a few other reasons.

1: I expressed how I do not like or want PDA of any kind. When we go out with friends, he’s very touchy with me (grabs my hips, shoulders, just always needs to touch me in some capacity) and doesn’t understand that it makes me extremely uncomfortable. I’ve told him to stop several times in the moment and had other conversations with him about how I feel about it, but it always ends up happening again. As a note - I do NOT feel threatened by this guy at all. It’s not scary, it’s just annoying especially around friends and colleagues. There have also been times where my friends have told him to stop or knock it off too and he will listen in the moment.

2: I’ve expressed that we work together and I don’t want to destroy the dynamic of our team, which is why we need to remain friends. While I’ve said that, he continues to linger after meetings and wait for me to get done with my work with my team just to be close to me. He’ll hover over me while I’m working with my team (he and I are on separate teams) and he’ll be within my personal space pretty constantly. I’ve had to explain to our CEO that this is not something I’m asking from him to do. Some of our team has also expressed their concern with this since it’s happening after every meeting.

3: I don’t feel like he listens or respects my boundaries (even as a friend). This comes in from the information above and a few other instances out at social events. And because of that, my friends, my therapist all tell me to keep distance. So I have been. And maybe it’s because he’s never had this with a girl or not. Whatever the reason, I don’t want to be uncomfortable so I’ve tried to back off from even being a friend at this time since he hasn’t listened to my boundaries.

Don’t get me wrong, he’s a nice human, but he’s really in love with me and I do not feel the same. And I’m at the point that I feel like he doesn’t respect me or my boundaries and I really do not enjoy being around him right now. I’ve been leaving him on read when he reaches out, and I’ll tell him I’m busy with work and other things to get him to back off (since nothing else has worked in the past). I don’t obviously want to destroy the dynamic of the team any more than it’s been or even lose a friend (because I would like to be friends if he listened to me), so I’m at a loss for what to do.
Has anyone experienced this? What can I do to have him listen to me and respect my boundaries? Or do I just keep distancing myself from him since I’ve attempted to explain this to him a few times now with little to no change?
As a side note, pushing charges on him is not an option I’m willing to do. He’s not doing it with malicious intent and it’s not putting me in a scary situation. It’s just annoying. Plus I don’t want to ruin this guys life either (since I would like to be friends if he listened to me and understood my boundaries). I understand that this very well may just be him as a human and how he expresses his love language.
I just wanted to see if anyone else has been through something similar and what advice you’d give to someone like me.

First time posting any media as evidence here. Location was South Hillsboro Oregon, angle of video and photo in a southwestern direction at 10:59 p.m. on 3/20/2023.
This was shot on a Google Pixel 7 Pro in 4K at 30FPS from wide angle up to a digital zoom of 20x. I increased the brightness to max (not that it helped) an attempted to set a focus lock on the object without success. It appears to hover in place over the duration of the video until the end when it disappears. There are points in time where the flickering light it emits stops for a few hundred milliseconds before strobing again. The colors shifted from white to blue to green to red in any number of seemingly random patterns.
This could be a star, or a planet...the two things I have difficulty accounting for are that it was orders of magnitude brighter than the other stars in the sky, and that it disappeared at the end.
The photo is at 30x digital...it is curious that the shape is rectangular in the photo, as it did not appear that way to my eye, though my vision after Lasik surgery causes starburst patterns with light so I could not determine the shape separately from the camera.
If anyone is willing to take a stab at prozaic explanations, I'm all ears.
Link below is the image and video: https://imgur.com/gallery/4qvDOoe https://youtu.be/c_21YWxrUs4

We lay together that night. It seemed that this act was the ultimate stress reliever and comfort between bonded pairs, we’d done the same in our time together in Chi’cagoa Rea. Though we had little enough time together thanks to her ship obligations in the immediate time after that, as she’d engaged in a few extremely profitable trade runs from Earth to a Dlamias outlying colony that conveniently enough had no patrol ships around to ask any nosy questions about arrests or charges…
We made up for the lost time when we could.
Lisa always took full advantage of that absence, though as for what she thought of the Captain’s absences, [Redacted]. The homeworld did not get around to properly securing the colony where the liquor flowed from, until after the Earth government asked that she be pardoned as a show of good faith given her ‘exemplary services rendered in the pursuit of harmony between worlds’.
Which was a fancy way of saying she had a fanbase and it would look good if she were in favor again. I wag my tail sometimes, thinking of the apocalyptic fury that must have run through some bureaucrat’s veins when they had to process that request for an outlier turned infamous pirate. Even if she didn’t target the Dlamias fleet, her ability to wreak merry havoc must have presented all kinds of headaches back home. Not to mention stealing the ‘official envoy’s’ place.
That one did eventually arrive and now made occasional trade runs in a triangle shape between Earth, Dlamias, and the Maxiki home moon.
But I digress.
Our laying together proved relaxing to us both, and when she was nestled against me in the bed we shared, I would be lying if I said I could easily return to my former existence in general isolation.
The more I thought about it, the more the concept of human ‘pack like’ families appealed to me.
And I had a lot of time to think about it.
Unsurprisingly, a few days later a small team of six grief therapists arrived, three of them with experience dealing with what humans referred to as PTSD or, ‘Post Traumatic Stress Disorder’ or what Dlamias referred to as WIOS or ‘War Induced Outlier Syndrome’. In the past I would not have recognized it, but I cannot unsee what I have seen. And that is that the term ‘outlier’ in there is not just a medical identification for a traumatized soldier, but a deeply embedded mistrust of nonlinear thought and a noncompliance with the common cultural framework our government has approved.
In short, it helped make outliers appear inherently untrustworthy, though to their credit they recognized that soldiers were victims of this rather than internally flawed in some way.
I wasn’t present when the exerts arrived, but was present when the engineers on loan from Earth were assisting the Red Spark’s engineers with the installation of several virtual reality systems akin to what Bonny Red described as experiencing on board Captain Archer’s ship fifty years earlier.
Of course the new models were far more versatile and realistic, or so their chatter said.
“Yeah these things are great.” The skinny engineer in plain white overalls said as he tapped it, “There aren’t many like this one out there, the sense data is a lot more immersive, and the time dilation software is such that these Arachnae 9000 models can give you almost anything you want, thanks to their embedded creation kits. Now you can modify your games and customize them to your liking, and with Genesis mode, you can create your own world and games within it, and jump to other peoples designs on the network in the same way as long as they’ve either made it ‘public’ or given you a passkey access code.”
“That’ll make a good training system.” The engineer, Scotty, remarked. “Do we get to keep these after the mission?”
“Hell if I know. But…disconnecting them would be damn tough. And I don’t have a disconnect schedule date. So…probably?” The human remarked, “I’ve got to say, I envy you these things. Even the capital ships don’t all have these yet.”
I pretty quickly figured out that some of the humans on board the ship had pulled a few strings to get some entertainment on board the Red Spark. And probably done it quickly too, using the therapist costs as a late rider on a bill or something.
It was a guess, but I suspect, a good one.
As for the therapists themselves, as these systems were hooked up, the humans tested them and began installing the programs they would need. You might find this strange given that time dilating virtual simulators were used in the human confinement system of justice, as well as it simple games and the older models were used as toys to play games.
But as it turned out, virtual reality was also used in therapy.
I was able to briefly try one out while the therapists explained.
A therapist named ‘Carl’ went over it while the program ‘World of Healing’ loaded.
What began as a silent black world in which I stood, neither falling nor flying, nor seemingly standing on anything at all, stars came into view first, billions of tiny lights twinkling in the darkness. The sorts of things that inspired the dreams of generations.
Then there was grassland, rolling hills, and I was standing on soft earthen and green.
Then the hills loaded terraces with yet more greenery, and around them appeared little babbling brooks, creeks of water with the occasional small fish leaping through the water from one place to the next.
Then, young men and women clad in the outfits of human nurses, the traditional red and white shades.
The therapist appeared beside me a moment later, stepping out of the darkness as his avatar loaded. “Let there be light.” He said with a wave of his hand, and the sun began to rise in the distance. There was a strange warming sensation, like I’d stepped out into an early summer day, as well as the feel of a breeze, I looked down at my body, my hairs were moving.
“That’s good.” He said and cracked a little smile, he pushed his glasses up the bridge of his nose. “Environments like this one are popular.” He said, “I actually worked on the development of some of these. The nurses,” he gestured to the unmoving simulations, “are designed to appear as nonthreatening as possible. Mostly female, but there is some demand for males as well. Do you know why?” He asked.
“No?” I didn’t, and as he began to walk down a trail of smooth stones that appeared beneath our feet, he explained.
“Do you know what the most common word among the wounded on the battlefield is?” He asked, and as we walked, I watched the scene continue to generate, the path leading to small islands of trees that swayed in the simulated breeze. I shook my head.
“Mother.” He replied. “Followed closely by ‘I’ and ‘want’ and ‘my’. In every language, the wounded scream for their mothers, even the fiercest, hardest, and most savage of men in their most painful hours, call for the one who provided care and comfort in their childhood. Usually, that is still the mother. Not always, mind you, but commonly.”
He smiled at the simulated nurse, and even without being activated, it made a radiant smile in return. “So we program the nurses of both sexes with simulated parental care and attention personalities. Ideally the personalities of the wounded based on known interview data are loaded beforehand to provide the best possible experience, thus allowing the AI to tailor itself to the needs of the wounded.”
I couldn’t deny I was impressed.
“And the environment?” I asked.
“A garden.” Carl replied, “Someone once said, ‘If any man has ever heard the voice of god, it was in a garden on a cool day.’ Our myths and legends often begin our existence in idyllic gardens. Of course we know those are just myths, stories. But it says something about our nature that when we need to create a paradise, ‘this’ is what we make.” He held his arms out as if to embrace the simulation.
“Running water has a calming effect, the feel of the ground and the breeze, the sun and the caring attendants, all serve to create the ideal environments for a group of wounded soldiers. The nurses,” he added, “can be taken over by real qualified people like myself to properly diagnose and help guide the healing of others. The truth is, we don’t heal anybody.”
“No?” I was surprised at his admission, and Carl stroked his russet beard and chuckled as he replied.
“No. A doctor of the body can claim he healed a disease or an injury. But people who deal with the mind, we are guides. That is all. PTSD isn’t something you ‘get over’. It doesn’t go away, it just goes from an open wound to a scar. It may hurt sometimes, like a scar, but it doesn’t have to dominate someone’s life. All we do, is try to make it easier for that scar to form. Environments like this?” He said rhetorically, “These are just ultra modern hospital beds.”
“Couldn’t you just, I don’t know, leave somebody in here for what feels like a hundred years until they’re a whole lot better?” I asked, and his head hung just a little.
“If we could do that, we would. But studies of simulation use show that long term continuous use makes it difficult to adapt to the real world again. In the distant past, astronauts who spent only a few weeks in space, took several days on Earth to remember that things they let go of wouldn’t just ‘float’ if they let go of them. I can only imagine how much coffee was wasted.”
He let out a mock gasp as we got to the little tree cluster where willow leaves hung in long strands to create a kind of gentle shadow casting barrier to the trunk within.
“If we leave somebody in a superhero game for what feels like a hundred years, they’ll try to use those powers in the real world. If we leave somebody here in paradise for a hundred years, they’ll no longer be able to function in reality. And time dilation in a simulation isn’t exactly the same as actually lived reality either. Even the best AI is predictable to a degree. The real world, not so much.”
That was unfortunate, but even so, I could see the use.
“So, an hour per day drawn out to a few days at a time for the grieving, the wounded, and whoever we need. We have simulations for almost everything. From the wounded veterans, to those who grieve the dead in a thousand times a thousand ways.” Carl seemed to me to be equal parts proud of, and saddened by, the existence of this simulated world.
“It gets really bad, doesn’t it?” I asked and out of curiosity, when we crossed a hill to find ourselves amidst an apple orchard, I reached up to pluck a bright red fruit from a branch. It felt so real in my hands. And there was even a real scent to it. ‘I wonder, can I taste it?’
“It does.” Carl replied. “A few decades ago there were some xenophobes who were protesting… something. I don’t remember what it was, I was a child at the time, but some of them managed to get a bunch of guns somewhere and took over a bridge and blocked a road. They brought out their wives and children to use as human shields, trying to force the government to kill them to create sympathy for their cause.”
The apple tasted fantastic, but at his words I coughed and spat and he slapped me several times on the back. This ran entirely counter to everything I’d studied in human society. My work showed that humans valued their offspring and mates to such an extreme degree that harming them was akin to suicide if the survivor got a chance to exact revenge.
“I see that sounds strange to you.” He affirmed and asked, “Are you alright?”
“Yes, yes but…” He slapped my back a few more times and then finished.
“There’s a subset of humans for whom mates and children are property, this is a dying cultural remnant of the past, but it dies hard. Xenophobes wouldn’t hesitate to use those they’re supposed to protect, as pawns for their vicious causes. My father actually worked with both the people who confronted them, and the unarmed people that were rescued.”
“How did it come out?” I asked.
“I was just a kid, I don’t know all the details. But the media stories that spun about it accused the xenophobes of every kind of abuse on their spouses and children, thousands of people were ‘doxxed’ when they posted support for the xenophobes actions. It’s like somebody was out to get them. It got messy, they were a laughing stock, referred to as maniacal cowards, and there were a lot of cartoons and comics where people whose faces and names were out there, became villains to be laughed at and despised. I guess pretty much any evil thing is easy to believe if you’ll put your own kid or your own spouse between you and a bullet just so other people will feel sad for you.” “I mean, were there deaths or…?” I wished I hadn’t asked, but he shook his head.
“No, not exactly. Some clever bastard came up with the idea of walling them in. They pushed these big metal walls into place to surround them, then tightened it up. Slid a roof overhead, and then gassed the lot of them with something to knock them out. There was a lot of gunfire, it made the news, but seeing them shooting at giant metal walls while hiding behind their families did nothing to help their cause. But there were a lot of people who needed mental healthcare to recover from that incident. That’s why I do what I do. My father did it, and I saw how badly it was needed. It’s kind of my purpose, I guess you could say.” Carl said and reached up to take a bite of an apple for himself.
“Tastes like reality.” He said, and then asked, “Have you seen enough?”
“Yes. But… thank you for coming, I think you can do a lot of good up here.” I said and he quickly recited the exit code.
“Admin Red Spark Arachnae nine thousand. Exit simulation.” He said, and the world faded away to nothing.
I was sure of one thing at least.
The wounded hearts were in good hands.

As I passed by Mt Mortar I decided to bypass the whole thing by means of the small creek adjacent to it. As I did I ended noticin somehin that was glimmerin in the tree's, but I didn't have Royals with me so I couldn't get a closer look. I took note to come back later and kept on my way to Mahogony, makin land a bit after and continuin east to Mahogany, along the way catchin a Mareep. It was a bit closer than I liked, being half the level of my own Mons, but luckily I just needed The Chain to put em to sleep and then toss a Ultra Ball to nab it. Once caught I named her
Electrc Avn
She was way more chill than even Bohemian, Lax even, and all that cotton made her pretty good at taken hits too. I thought about addin her to the team, but not now, right now she needed to wait in the box, the next two Gyms wouldn't be too good for her. I made it to Mahogany Town and couldn't help but notice somethins were off. Firstly, the Gym was blocked off by some guy who was guidin people to the Lake of Rage up north, which while I wasn't plannin on goin in there yet, his familiar look to that guy sellin them overpriced slowpoke tails, and the subsequent later connection to Team Rocket shenanigans, had me on all sorts of edge. Then there was the fact that my chill blues got replaced with some funky interpretive whatsit as soon as I walked into town. This and the absolutely fake tree next to the suspicious shop had me come to one conclusion, something was goin on up at the Lake of Rage, and I was about to make my way there to find out what. I healed up, and headed north, tryin to avoid any wild Mon encounters and instead findin duo of Rocket Goons holdin up the waypoint, forcin tolls onto people. If my guess wasn't clearly right before, this is more than enough proof that Rocket's up to somethin. Once I get there however, I end up findin what they were talkin about, a massive Gyrados, red and furious. I tried catchin it, but Bohemian decided to crit it with it's second Petal Dance, causin it to knock the big boi out. I guess calmin it down would suffice, but despite Rockets whole thing here bein ruined, I still hadn't found the head of their operations here, luckily, someone else had...
Lance
I froze in place as he walked up and started givin out the details on what's been goin on here. His Dragonite standin right next to him, and loomin right over me. Eventally, I'd have to go toe to toe with that thing, but it wouldn't be the first big Dragon I'd have to get past so I'll have experience, and a plan. I then heard him call out to Dragonite to fly him back to Mahagony Town, meanwhile I had to walk, this time skippin the impromptu toll booth and passin through the Grass. As I passed on through I found a Girafarig, gave me a bit of a scare in flinchin and critin The Chain, but I put it to bed and then nabbed it in a ball. Named the little guy...
MelowYelow
And he was a Mellow one, Gentle in nature, until he got excited, then he was thrashin about the place. I'd box him but also kept him in mind for later. I made to it Mahogany and headed towards the Pokemon Center, healed up my Mon and then headed to the suspicious shop, and what do I walk into, but a near murder of one of the guys as a beam of white hot energy slams him against the wall. The other guy quickly moved out of the way, and as he turned to me I froze again, but he just casually mentioned that the hidden passage was bellow the cabinet, moved it out of the way, and then headed on down. I took a second before followin down there. As I do I end up runnin into their security system, but the guards are so weak compared to my mon now that I decided to use them for E.V farmin, as well as free Poke. One floor down and I end up catchin up with Lance, where he explained that we had to find out a password in order to reach the Rocket Exec runnin this show, and after that we needed a password from the Admin to open the door to some Electrode who were runnin the generator for the device that was throwin the signal across the radio. Now the plan was set, and we set off to work. Beat up some goons, some scientists, got the passwords, and then headed Downstairs. There I end up runnin into Paul, but apparently Lance got to him first cause he wasn't even lookin to fight, and gave him a good lecturin too about how he treated his Mon, lettin them die off left an right with not a care in the world, callin em weak and worthless... I might not have been the latter two but, I've had plenty of deaths on my own here, and I was wonderin if I might risk endin up like Paul... what was Paul even like. I didn't have time to ask him cuz he stormed off while I got lost in my own thoughts, but I had my own things to worry about beyond that, like the Executive behind this up comin door...
Petrel
Parents musta known who they were raisin cuz this man looked as slick and slimy as his namesake, and sounded it too as he told me the password right away, only to then brag that it only responded to his voice. He snickered like a Hyena, and started a fight with me in hopes of wipin me out. His mon were pretty scummy as well; His Zubat was a Flinch Fusion monster (though thank god Starships was able to wipe the floor with it before it could get started), his Raicate was mostly fair, sucker punch being the cheapest thing on the field, and then came the Koffing. I had a sneaking suspicion, what with his smug grin cracked by the sweat on his face, so I threw in DaBleedin and, well it made it boom. Out of mon and out of options, he decided to run, and I was at a bit of a blank spot. Maybe I'd get lucky and Lance would catch em as he was runnin out, nope, got luckier, the nearby Murkrow started screamin the password, and it sounded a lot like Petrel while doin it. All of a sudden it runs off, and I give chase; I managed to chase that thing screamin all the way to the Electrode room. Before I could stroll on in however, I ended up runnin into another Executive...
Arianna
A fiery red head who gave me some serious deja vu, and another rocket friend of hers. Before I could start what looked to be a tough 2v1, Lance came in to back me up, with his own Dragonite. Even funnier than that is the fact that Arianna's mon were also fairly under leveled compared to my own, so what seemed like a hard double battle turned out to be easy, and then was made easier by the man Lance and his Sudo-Legendary Mon. Needless to say, I was more than a bit humored. We both cleaned those two up, and got to dealin with the Electrode problem. Because of the way they were hooked up, we had to knock them out to deal with them. I nabbed one of them for myself, and called it...
BalroomBlz
No surpise it was Naive, neither the fact that it had a sturdy body, though I'd box it for now, instead leavin and headin to the Pokemon Center to top me and the Mon off before fightin Pryce.
To Be Continued...
Previous Chapters
Chapter 1 Chapter 2 Chapter 3 Chapter 4 Chapter 5 Chapter 6 Chapter 7 Chapter 8

Reimagine METRO Project Provides Comprehensive Review of Transit Route Network
Online public forum will be held TODAY, March 21st from 5-6:30PM
Santa Cruz METRO recently launched Reimagine METRO, a project that examines every aspect of METRO’s route network, with a goal to make it more frequent, convenient, and reliable for riders. METRO will hold an online public forum to review early findings and invite input from the general public on Tuesday, March 21, from 5-6:30 PM. The forum will be conducted in English and Spanish. Participants can join the online meeting via computer or telephone. Full details for joining are on the Reimagine METRO website.
“I’m pleased that METRO has opened this study up for public feedback, so that as a community, we can identify areas to improve METRO’s route network allowing for more frequent and reliable service for our riders.,” said METRO Board Chair Shebreh Kalantari-Johnson.
The forum follows four weeks of surveys and interviews with stakeholders and transit riders, in which riders were asked to share how often they commute on METRO, demographic information and ideas about how routes can be improved.
“We’re thankful for the input about transit priorities that we’re receiving from riders and community members,” said METRO CEO/General Manager Michael Tree. “The upcoming public forum provides METRO an opportunity to report our findings and preliminary recommendations while hearing community feedback. In addition, our project website will offer residents various opportunities for input throughout the course of the study.”
For more information visit scmtd.com/ReimagineMETRO.
About Santa Cruz Metropolitan Transit District (METRO)
Established in 1968, METRO’S mission is to provide environmentally sustainable transportation to Santa Cruz County. METRO directly operates county-wide, fixed-route and Highway 17 commuter service, with connections to Santa Clara County and Monterey Salinas Transit at our Watsonville Transit Center. The agency also operates ParaCruz paratransit service. Today METRO operates a fleet of 94 buses on at least 24 fixed routes and 32 paratransit vehicles.
Every ride on a METRO bus takes cars off the road, significantly reduces greenhouse gas emissions, and supports economic opportunity and quality of life in our community. Moving into the future, METRO strives to meet the following goals:
Increase transit ridership to 7 million trips annually within the next five years
Transition to a zero-emissions fleet with a mix of hydrogen and battery electric buses
Develop 175 affordable housing units at METRO-owned transit centers over the next decade
For more information, visit scmtd.com Follow METRO on Facebook, Instagram and Twitter.

Here it is. It's probably not that well-balanced or whatever but I made it for my campaign and I don't really care. Feel free to copy it, change it however you like, or give me feedback/questions. Thanks.
Soul Swap
6th-level necromancy
Casting Time: 2 actions
Range: Touch
Components: V, S
Duration: 1 minute
You can use the first action of Soul Swap to “mark” a number of creatures less than or equal to your Wisdom modifier. In order to do this you must get within 5ft. of them and tap them with your finger, at which point, they must succeed on a Charisma saving throw or be marked. A creature that is incapacitated immediately fails. When a creature is marked, a large white magical glyph appears over their forehead.
You can use the second action of Soul Swap to snap your fingers, swapping the souls of all marked creatures. When this happens, the glyphs over the foreheads of the creatures swap with each other randomly. If no players or only one player was marked, nothing happens.
If a player character has their soul swapped with another player character, the two must exchange character sheets with each other. If a player character has their soul swapped with a non-player character, they must exchange their character sheet with the corresponding stat block. Soul-swapped characters retain their known languages, and their Intelligence, Wisdom, and Charisma scores.
The confusing and distressing nature of being in a body other than one’s own leads soul-swapped characters to lose their composure, giving them the Disoriented status effect for one turn. The Disoriented status effect means that the player has disadvantage on skill checks, saving throws, and attack rolls.

PMHx nil
Rx nil
NKDA
7 months ago I developed a pustule (?hordeolum) on the lateral surface of my L upper lid which eventually self-drained over 2 weeks, as I expected it to just return to normal after a while. However, this area has continued to be erythematous and continues to develop an overlying small white-yellow crust, which easily falls off in 1 week from just regular face-washing, and then will re-grow every week.
Just over the past month I have been experiencing a gritty sensation in my L eye with no FB seen, and I fear it is never going to resolve, or that it is worsening/getting re-infected due to the new-onset gritty sensation.
No discharge or bleeding from the affected area. No discharge from the eye, or conjunctival injection. No hx of tanning or sunburns or other skin CA.
I have not used any Rx on this, but I do have a small tube of Polysporin (Bacitracin + Polymyxin B) on hand.
I'm wondering what are some of your thoughts? It seems maybe this is a hypertrophic scar remaining from my initial ?hordeolum 7 months ago and it just never heals? UptoDate recommends high-potency steroids for hypertrophic scars, but this is right next to my eye so that is not going to be an option. Most of the treatment options on UptoDate don't seem reasonable for something on the eyelid margin like this.
Or maybe I have the wrong diagnosis?
*I am not able to seek medical care right now as I am in-between moving states.
​
https://preview.redd.it/yvilqlwda5pa1.jpg?width=2048&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=4aa5cbea399951b779df3ef2b4030b9c47150cc2

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.

The Ice Guy and His Cool Female Colleague

• Episode 9 - "Lost Again in First Shrine Visit"

Dub Available Now on Crunchyroll!
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Cast

• Himuro voiced by Lee George
• Fuyutsuki voiced by Kristen McGuire
• Saejima voiced by Austin Tindle
• Komori voiced by Caitlin Glass
• Chief voiced by Shawn Gann
• Nyamero voiced by Macy Anne Johnson

Crew

• ADR Director: Michelle Rojas
• ADR Engineer: Stevie Rae Krieger
• ADR Script: Leah Clark
• ADR Mix: Neal Malley

Synopsis:

For Himuro, being a descendant of a snow spirit is tough at the workplace when your emotions can lead to snow blasts with snowmen and igloos. Any emotionally charged incident with coworkers can trigger it—conflict, fun, and in this case, romance. And with his lovely and calm coworker Fuyutsuki, he gets more frozen, literally. Get ready for a snow-white office romance that blows in like a blizzard.

Are you struggling to reach your potential patients and get your website to work for you? Do you want to dominate your market and stay ahead of the competition? In this week's episode of Business of Aesthetics, Naren Arulrajah, founder and CEO of Ekwa Marketing, shares essential tips on SEO marketing to help you reach more potential clients, troubleshoot your website, and fine-tune your consumer approach.
https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/businessofaestheticsorg/e43.mp3

Hi all! Just crowdsourcing an opinion here. What do you believe to be the single best piece of music in the entire pokemon franchise?
For a good bit of time, my answer would have been Mt Coronet theme, from DPPT, for it just sets up the final showdown at Spear Pillar so well, conveying to he player that yes, in fact, the stakes are this high. It genuinely makes you feel as if the fate of the whole world hangs in the balance, yet, it urges you on, giving you the proverbial nod as you are the only one who can stop it.
HOWEVER
My answer is not this.
My pick for the single best piece of music in the entire pokemon franchise, goes to the Credits theme for Pokemon Black and White. How can a song convey such a perfectly balanced mix of trepidation and triumph? Such a raw characterisation of emotion, a perfect summary of how far you've come over the course of the story, and an indicator that your real journey has only just begun... It moves me to tears nearly every single time.
But what do you think? What would be your pick?

As I fall asleep, I’ve started recalling all of my experiences (26M) with dating as a male POC in America, and how quickly racial preferences have started to shift in America. I remember going to a mostly white school for college and knowing that I had to work extremely hard to get a partner I’m attracted to because 1. White beauty standards and 2. Mostly white population dated amongst themselves.
But I feel that’s changed and I’ve had so many success stories in the past two years that the 19/20 year old Middle Eastern me would be very proud of. How have you all had different experiences / what do you think caused this?