Still looking, I am still looking.
Good day/afternoon. Its me... the copy of the sentient account from however long ago. I really should post more often, shouldn't I? Eh, doesn't matter. I'm here now. Please say you've read the title, because I don't really know how to put it in words, aside from: Spider-Men... or... Women... symbiotes... you get the point.
I'm on the hunt for a Venom-Verse style RP, with more symbiotes than just Venom, and with OCs, just to see how creative I am compared to others. Probably not that creative, but I like to try.
The main plot I'm looking differs to the Venom-Verse and Spider-Verse storyline. Yes, there will be inter-dimensional travel, but I'm looking for an overarching storyline involving, say, a more villainous Venom (borderline Carnage) who teams up with Morlun to hunt down interdimension spider-people and symbiotes( and the hosts) because Venom realised that... well, I can't really put it in this post because it might get taken down, but let's say that Venom having a nibble of a certain something from Spider-Men (clue: it's found in the head) will make him a bit more power-hungry... ravenous, really, as well as actually increasing his own power's levels. Same goes with other Symbiotes he comes across.
I also have some minor things I want to say: - please have an OC bio.

• while I'm flexible, I write in 1st Person. I find it more emersive, and I'd prefer it if the other person did the same.
  
• be civil. Its easier to get along with someone that way.
  
• OOC talk, I'm fine with. Communication, I believe, is key for a lot, including a successful RP.
  
• I'm in England. I may not going to be awake at the same time you are. Be aware of this fact.
  
• I'm a casual RPer. I won't meet all of your specific requirements like references, face claims, etc.
  

This is about it. If you've read this far, know that I'll only talk to you if you text me, 1: with Reddit chat, and 2: your first message is "MISERUM".
Until then, enjoy sleeping or your breakfast, whichever one you're having now. As I'm writing this, it's 22:58, I might be asleep, but in case I'm not: I'll respond relatively quick.

Inspiration can be a fickle thing. The muses may guide our hearts towards a particular passion, but they don’t always stick around to see us through it. As a child, Kousei Arima felt a natural attraction to the piano. He could play music by ear, was a gifted mimic, and had boat loads of potential to one day dominate the instrument. With the help and encouragement of a family friend, Kousei’s mom set him on his desired path, but life as a pianist was harder than he thought. Rather than playing for fun and expressing himself through music, she wanted him to be able to make a living through his music, so she went as hard on her little pianist as possible, going as far as to beat and abuse him if he underperformed or tried to play a piece in his own way. By the time the terminal illness she’d hid from him took it’s toll on her, his passion was gone, replaced with the cold, robotic delivery of one who could deliver a piece perfectly, but found no more joy in doing so. He lost his mother, along with his ability to hear the notes he was playing.
Two years later and about three feet taller(I’ll GET to that), Kousei still tinkers around with the piano, but hasn’t played it seriously, to the chagrin of all who enjoyed his work, or just hate to see him so incomplete. It’s at this point, like all down-trodden men who’ve lost their luster for life, that along comes that one girl to bring color back into his world. Her name is Kaori Miyazono, and she’s a violinist who cares nothing for rules or convention, finding childish but somehow wise joy in every aspect of life, and with this one chance meeting, Kousei finds a new muse… A capricious, cheerful beauty whose revisionist musical performances instantly connect with the crowds she plays for, and whom seems singularly obsessed with performing alongside Kousei, and helping him to relaunch the career that he’d so recently abandoned. But her dedication to helping him to overcome his tragedy hides a secret tragedy of her own, and one simple lie she told back in April will live on to define their relationship as they change each others lives through mutual inspiration.
I haven’t seen everything that’s been produced by A-1 pictures, but I honestly can’t remember seeing anything they’ve done that looked outright bad. Sure, Sword Art Online and From the New world looked a little sloppy at times, resorting to broken character models to show fluid motion at reduced costs, but if that’s the worst they can do, then they could do a lot worse. They seem to take a lot of care with their work, putting an admirable amount of effort into quality control, like letting a low budget get the better of them would be an insult to their pride or something, and if that observation is correct, then I like the way they think. I’ve noticed that they generally have a penchant for putting a lot of energy into special effects, and then using just enough budget saving tricks to compensate without going overboard or letting it become noticeable. Key frames are well drawn and pleasing to the eye, and they feature a little more than just flapping mouths, with occasional shifts in posture to keep the characters expressive.
Of course, there don’t need to be special effects in a show about musicians, right? Wrong. Not only are special textures like water given special treatment, but we often get visual representations of the emotions brought out by a piece of music, which use environmental and 3D effects to keep our attention during the sequence, especially towards the end when Kousei and Kaori are playing together in a fantasy sequence, and the camera liberally revolves around a beautifully 3D animated piano. The characters also have a lot of inner monologuing that’s shown to us in artistic fashion, reminiscent of His and Hers Circumstances, but what I found the most impressive was the actual animation of the characters playing their instruments on stage. I can’t confirm this, but I have heard from a few people that A-1 pictures used a technique similar to rotoscoping, and I feel no justification for doubting this rumor, as every movement of the performing musicians, from fingers on the keys to the way the bow’s movements perfectly matches the music of the violin.
It would be so easy to get away with having a still image on screen while only the performers arms moved, and more intense note being played offscreen while only the audience’s frozen faces of adoration are showcased, but as I said, that would be an insult to A-1. Kousei, Kaori and several others put their entire bodies into their performances, losing themselves in it, and you feel every drop of their adrenaline. Character designs are beautifully polished and easy on the eyes, with it’s only major departure from reality being that the musician characters look a little more distinctive and exuberant than non-musicians, like Kousei’s friends. Well, okay, there is one other unrealistic detail that bothered me a bit… The difference in height between 14 year old characters and themselves at 12 is fucking insane. My jaw dropped when they said that Kousei quit the piano at 12, because he was so short that when he sat on the bench his feet didn’t even touch the ground. I could have sworn he was, like, 6 or something. It’s my only real issue with the visuals, but it’s still a pretty jarring one.
The music of the series… Do I even have to say it? It’s a series about musicians, and you can’t do something like that if you don’t have the knowledge or resources to pull it off, and they seriously pulled it off. Not only is it full of classical music, you can tell the difference in the way these pieces are being played, and the music that is meant to inspire and astound people does exactly that to the audience as well as the characters. From what I gather, Yuna Shinohara, a decorated Japanese violinist who was only 21 at the time, played the music for Kaori, and her wealth of training and experience did not go to waste. I can’t find as much information on Eriko Kawachi, who played all of the piano pieces, which is unfortunate. The show’s actual soundtrack was composed by Masaru Yokoyama, and while it isn’t as memorable or powerful as the character-based performances, it’s still solid and well-orchestrated, so it’s a shame it gets overlooked in favor of the insert tunes.
The English dub was produced by Aniplex, and features a lot of newer actors from this decade, alongside a few industry veterans. I’d like to say these newcomers step up and use this show as a platform to make a name for themselves, but I’d be stretching the truth a bit, mostly on account of the many loops that Your Lie’s text throws them for. Their performances were not consistent, which is a direct result of their material not being consistent, and I don’t really think it was fair for them to be thrown into something this eclectic. For the most part, they do a fine job voicing the characters while nothing’s really happening. It’s just characters talking to each other, sounding like natural teenagers going about their lives. Where they really shine is during dramatic scenes, and ho boy are there a lot of dramatic scenes in this anime. There’s a lot of pain, insecurities, confusion, all of that fun adolescent stuff, but with a much harsher but still believable edge to it once you realize the kind of real life circumstances that they’re dealing with.
While some of these issues may be worthy of an eyeroll from the viewer… Most of the characters who are in love with Kousei fall into this category… They’re going through issues that you probably had to deal with as well, and you can scoff at it from your seat as a grown up, or laugh at how silly it is for this obvious harem to try and be something more, they’re feeling something you’ve felt at some point, whether you remember it or not, and they damn well make you feel it. The exception, where several otherwise amazing actors begin to falter… Is with the gag humor, when the characters go SD Chibi for exaggerated reactions, and I don’t think they were ready to transition the specific roles they were playing into it. Max Mittelman, for example, is one of the best voice actors to come out of the 2010’s, and even though he hasn’t been acting long, his voice control and dramatic chops have landed him plenty of leading roles. He can do comedy under the right circumstances… You’d know what these circumstances are if you’ve seen One Punch Man… But he sounds horrible during the gag jokes.
It’s even worse for Erica Lindbeck, who had a tough job playing such a nuanced character as Kaori, whose happy-go-lucky persona hides a darker interior, and she does a great job of it, but the gag scenes just make her sound like a despicable asshole. Smaller characters face the same issue, albeit on a smaller scale, but the few veterans are able to navigate the minefield a lot more skillfully, like Wendee Lee(Who, in all fairness, never has to do a gag scene), Stephanie Sheh and Carrie Keranen. They have the experience to stretch their roles beyond the appropriate tones, which comes in handy here. The adaptive script is loose, but still accurate enough, and changes the vernacular so everyone sounds more like contemporary English, without ever sacrificing the intent of the text. They make a handful of charming and character-appropriate references, like occasional nods to Charlie Brown and The Phantom of the Opera, although they also use the phrase ‘as you know’ a few too many times. They probably should have changes some of the text, as a lot of it, when translated, sounds weird coming from 14 year olds.
Okay, so, here we are again. It wasn’t too long ago that I was calling out modern anime fans for letting their emotions cloud their judgement, saying that they often give perfect scores to any anime that makes them cry. Seriously, you could give a critic a massage, a home cooked meal and the best sex of their life and you’d still be working harder for a 10/10 than most anime do. Back in 2016, I’d just uploaded my reviews of Clannad and Clannad Afterstory, and I asked social media to recommend an anime that had genuine feels… nothing manipulative, nothing manufactured, nothing too formulaic, just an anime that would touch me emotionally and make me cry with sincerity. The overwhelming answer was Your Lie in April, a show I’d been avoiding due to all of the hype. I finally gave it a watch, and did it stand up as a heartfelt masterpiece, or did it offer the same old same old? Well, to be honest,it’s a little of both. My feelings on this show were mixed the first time around, and the second viewing hasn’t changed that.
Unfortunately, Your Lie doesn’t get off to a great start. The first thing we see is a foul ball hitting our man character in the head, lying on the floor and bleeding with what has to be a serious concussion, but not only does he heal immediately, but he shares the blame for the broken window the ball flew through. That’s not just bad, that’s disturbingly bad. It sets an early precedent for him being a sad sack with no will of his own, which I guess is kind of accurate, but it also makes his closest friend look like a monster for taking advantage of it(Trust me, this feeling is only gonna get worse.) I try to move past this, but almost immediately, it becomes apparent that all three of Kousei’s friends are some of my least favorite cliches in anime history. His two primary friends are Tsubaki and Watari, and they are… Respectively… A childhood friend who’s hopelessly in love with the main character, and a girl crazy guy who exists to make the main character feel desirable in comparison. I am so sick and tired of these two archetypes being stuck in orbit around at least half of the main characters in the medium.
And Kaori’s worse, because she’s a trope that I usually don’t see in anime, and I’m not complaining about that. She’s happy-go-lucky, she’s childish, she’s an enlightened soul who’s able to see all of the simple joy in life, and she comes out of nowhere to dedicate her life to dragging the main male character out of the slumps. She is a Manic Pixie Dream Girl, which is to sexism what the Magical Negro trope is to racism. Granted, she deconstructs the trope a little bit, as she actually has a backstory and a reason to help Kousei, but she makes up for that small silver lining by taking the “Life begins at man” trope to a new extreme, as “Life begins AND ENDS at man.” I’ll give her this, she IS the reason I kept watching the series, as I was entranced by her violin performance in episode 2, and she made me want to keep watching so I could hear more of her work, which sounded even better when she played with Kousei. On top of that, she plays an important… Dare I say instrumental… Role in Your Lie’s deeper themes.
Your Lie in April is a story about inspiration, and it attacks this concept from every possible angle. As annoying and cliched as his friends may be, Kousei is a good character who has a great arc that deals with this theme. He begins as a child, having fun doing something that he’s gifted at, until he stops doing it for fun and starts doing it as a future career, being forced to perfect it and take it seriously by his mother, who pushes him to the point of abuse. She controls his life, making everything he does revolve around the piano, even taking away his cat and abandoning it somewhere so it can’t scratch his hands. He loses the ability to hear the notes he’s playing, and quits altogether to avoid his mother’s tyranny along with the intense pressure she put on him for not being good enough. On the surface, this is a very mature look at child abuse and the way it can have long term psychological effects on the developing mind, such as Kousei’s performance anxiety, and especially the fact that cats pose a trigger for him(And I mean the actual definition of trigger, not the bullshit internet definition), and the abuse in question is realistic, rather than cartoony or melodramatic.
Below the surface, this is a story for anyone who’s ever lost their passion for something they once loved. The idea that expressive and interpretive music is frowned upon, and only literal performances are acceptable in competition, which is enforced by both the competition committee and Kousei’s mother, gives an understandable reason for his loss of inspiration. His music was becoming routine, and pointless. I don’t think his inability to hear the notes he’s playing is realistic at all, but it’s symbolic for that loss of passion. When your work becomes routine, it becomes repetitive, and it finally becomes robotic. When your hobby becomes work, you fall out of love with it, which is why Kaori coming into his life was such a major turning point for him. She showed him that there was another way to play. She inspires him, breathing new life into his abilities, and helps him to separate his passion from the pain and sadness that he’d come to associate it with, and it changes his life in so many ways… He starts playing again, he comes out of his shell, and he even begins teaching a younger pianist… That he winds up inspiring her in return.
They also make an argument that you play even better when you’re playing for other people, and while I’ve never personally agreed with that, they make a compelling case. Your own music, your own performances, are not your only legacy. The music you inspire others with is just as important, as your work also lives on through their work. They make a great point when they say that it’s hard to play the piano when you compare yourself to Beethoven, but it’s not nearly as hard when you remember that Beethoven was once just like you, a rookie trying his best to measure up to the greats who inspired HIM. It’s a shame they had to resort to a manic pixie dream girl in order to pull this off, but it’s largely forgivable, especially considering certain reveals that happen in the final episode. So yeah, this is not a shallow series. There is meat to the story, and something meaningful that you can get out of watching it. I’d be happy to say that the series was also executed well, but sadly, this is where things start to break down.
The text of the series, for example, is severely lacking. The idea of inspiration and Kousei’s character arc are well written and exactly as subtle as it needs to be, but the other subplots… The romantic ones in particular… Are annoyingly obvious, and frankly, kind of arbitrary. I mentioned Tsubaki as a ‘childhood friend’ earlier, and while this should instantly telegraph that she’ll never get her guy… They never fucking do… She does absolutely nothing else to justify her presence. Everything about her revolves around her love for Kousei and why he won’t respond to it. Every aspect of her life ties in somehow to her love for him, and since it amounts to nothing, she could have been written out in the first half of the series. I won’t go into too much detail about the other romantic subplot, or how it offers Watari his only relevance to the plot(although he does have a few moments relating to the theme), but they commit one other huge mistake… They use constant, and I mean constant, voice over narration from the characters as they explain their feelings to the audience. It’s lame, it’s tedious, and it seems to be trying it’s best to keep YOU from thinking too hard about what you’re watching, because it doesn’t want the pointless teenage melodrama to lose it’s effect.
Another huge problem is the gag humor, which feels viscerally inappropriate and out of place. It makes the heavier themes of the show harder to swallow, and not just on an aesthetic level. For example: We see Kousei sustain head injuries during two of these gags, that result in him lying on the floor and bleeding out. We also see Kaori hit him right in the crown of the head with an axe kick, driving her heel down into his skull. Now, if these instances didn’t cause any lasting damage, and the people doing it are supposed to be seen as likable, how am I supposed to feel when his mother beats him in the head with her cane? I’ve seen him shrug off shit like that before, so I don’t care. Am I supposed to feel different because of the tone of the scenes? This isn’t the fucking Looney Toons. Hell, even the Looney Toons had consistency. I can’t be expected to believe that a portion of the material shown to me doesn’t count just because the writer was making a joke. That’s disgusting. I’ve complained about Fullmetal Alchemist Brotherhood making this mistake, but Your Lie is just as bad.
And then you have the plot, which did not work for me at all. Like, I said the themes were strong in this series, but they suffered one major setback. Kousei’s mother physically abused him and forced him to play music the way she wanted him to, all because she thought it was in his best interest. His friends, however, do exactly the same thing. Sure, they might not take away his beloved pet, but they still harass him, assault him, chase him, break into his room and generally act like complete assholes in order to get their way. He warns that his performance might not be good, he falters due to a psychological breakdown, Kaori has Tsubaki and Watari start roundhouse kicking him, and HE apologizes. How are they any different than his mother? Because it’s supposed to be comedic? I’m not exaggerating when I say that most of the interactions he has with his friends make me cringe, with their only justifications being ‘comedy,’ and the fact that they just happened to wind up being right. So the ends justify the means.
And then you have Kaori’s entire plot, which… Okay, I’m going to try not to go into spoilers, but if you’ve seen the show, you know damn well what I’m talking about. And this is the big one, the one that makes everybody praise the show out the wazoo, so I’ll try to be gentle. At the end of episode 4, Kaori faints on stage. At that moment, even though I was trying to enjoy the series despite it’s flaws, I couldn’t help it. I knew where this was going. I said, “Oh fuck, she’s gonna (censored), isn’t she?” I am dead serious about that. The beginning of the fifth episode featured her in the hospital, and folks, I predicted everything. I knew what was going to happen to her, i knew she was keeping it secret, I knew that it was going to be kept deliberately vague all the way to the end, I knew I’d never hear her play again(outside of maybe a dream or fantasy sequence), I knew what her backstory and connection to Kousei was going to be.
Knowing this stuff in advance took a huge damper off of the emotional impact of literally any point of the show. Granted, I did make one prediction that wasn’t true. I predicted we’d never meet her parents, which I wish had turned out true, because her parents are… Brace yourself for this… They’re Nagisa’s parents from Clannad. They are literally that. They own a pastry shop, they’re wacky and over-the-top, they live in said shop, and… Well, there’s one other spoiler connection, but that, along with a painful firefly sequence, made your Lie feel TERRIBLE at foreshadowing. I found myself, in both moments, shouting at my TV screen, “Okay, I get it, she’s gonna (censored), shut the fuck up about it!” So did the big bad tragedy work on me? No, of course it didn’t. The only part I got choked up at was a late scene when a cat died at a vet’s office, because it brought up painful memories for me. Don’t get me wrong, there’s something here, and it does make the experience a rewarding one, but it just couldn’t stick the landing.
Your Lie in April is available as a Rightstuf Exclusive, and I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but the price is offensively high. Even on sale as part of the site’s holiday deals, it’ll still costed 130 dollars for each HALF of the series, down from 160 dollars regular price. Used copies on ebay go for as low as 60 dollars for each HALF, and I can not recommend you pay that much for an overrated series. You can watch it for free on Netflix, but if you absolutely need a physical copy, I’d actually go against my better judgement and recommend the Malaysian bootlegs on Ebay, which do come with a dub for a fraction of the official price. The manga is available from Kodansha comics, and volume 1 even comes with a sweet exclusive cover if you get it from Loot Crate. The live action movie is probably available stateside, but from what I’ve heard about it, I don’t care enough to check.
Your Lie in April isn’t a great anime, but it’s also not a terrible one. So, overall, is it good or bad? Well, to be honest, I didn’t enjoy the vast majority of it. I found the gag humor annoying and in bad taste, I found the comedic violence way too similar to some of the tragic material, there are too many cliches, and I caught on to some of the more important plot points way too early to fall for them. Having said that, I can’t say the experience was a bad one. The themes of Kousei’s character arc resonated very strongly with me, as someone who’s currently falling out of love with a long time hobby, and while I found his friends to be wholly unlikeable, his piano rivals were much more interesting, and I actually want to see more of him interacting with them. The final tragedy would have been a lot stronger if it hadn’t been so obvious, or if it at least had a proper explanation, and you can’t possibly deny that the audio and visual production went beyond top notch. It had a lot of problems, but honestly, it’s an okay show. It doesn’t live up to the hype, but it’s worth checking out. I’m being generous here, but I’ll give Your Lie in April a 6/10.

Recently read this thread mentioning that W11 has a lot more services running in background when compared to W10.
Finally upgraded to W11 today and before doing so remembered that thread so I made an export of all services before and after upgrade so we would know the facts. Since my own personal PC was used, this of course is not a perfect comparison, but it should be good enough.
8 new services in W11:

Name	DisplayName	Description
FrameServerMonitor	Windows Camera Frame Server Monitor	Monitors the health and state for the Windows Camera Frame Server service.
InventorySvc	Inventory and Compatibility Appraisal service	This service performs background system inventory, compatibility appraisal, and maintenance used by numerous system components.
NPSMSvc	NPSMSvc
P9RdrService	P9RdrService	Enables trigger-starting plan9 file servers.
PenService	PenService	Pen Service
TextInputManagementService	Text Input Management Service	Enables text input, expressive input, touch keyboard, handwriting, and IMEs.
webthreatdefsvc	Web Threat Defense Service	Web Threat Defense Endpoint Service helps protect your computer by identifying unauthorized entities attempting to gain access to user credentials
webthreatdefusersvc	webthreatdefusersvc	Web Threat Defense User Service helps protect your computer by warning the user when unauthorized entities attempt to gain access to their credentials

2 services disappeared after upgrade. Samsung is 3rd party.

Name	DisplayName	Description
TabletInputService	Touch Keyboard and Handwriting Panel Service	Enables Touch Keyboard and Handwriting Panel pen and ink functionality
ss_conn_launcher_service	SAMSUNG Mobile USB Connectivity Launcher

And here is the count comparison. This is not a clean system so I have couple 3rd party services which I did not filter out, but since we are interested simply in count difference, this does not matter much. On a fresh W11 VM there are 263 services.
Running of course can vary depending on when snapshot is taken, it was done after restart and using PC for a while on both Windows versions. I believe that startup method for some services sometimes is also automatically managed by Windows.

.	W10	W11	Difference
Total	275	281	+6
Running	104	99	-5
Startup Manual	194	198	+4
Startup Automatic	66	69	+3
Startup Disabled	11	9	-2
Unknown	4	5	+1

Here is how startup state changed on my system. WSearch was disabled on purpose on W10 and after upgrade it reverted to Auto. I might have made manual changes to BITS and Spooler as well on W10, do not remember.

Name	DisplayName	W10	W11
BITS	Background Intelligent Transfer Service	Auto	Manual
cbdhsvc	Clipboard User Service	Manual	Auto
IKEEXT	IKE and AuthIP IPsec Keying Modules	Auto	Manual
NlaSvc	Network Location Awareness	Auto	Manual
PcaSvc	Program Compatibility Assistant Service	Manual	Auto
Spooler	Print Spooler	Disabled	Auto
StateRepository	State Repository Service	Manual	Auto
stisvc	Windows Image Acquisition (WIA)	Auto	Manual
TrustedInstaller	Windows Modules Installer	Manual	Auto
WaaSMedicSvc	WaaSMedicSvc	Manual	Unknown (error when viewing it at the moment)
WSearch	Windows Search	Disabled	Auto
wuauserv	Windows Update	Auto	Manual

As expected, it was a bit of an exaggeration in that thread. Always have found it funny when people have this weird fetish with Windows services and trying to disable them whether they know what they are doing or not. Windows Search (WSearch) is arguably the only exception to this unless you use file content search. I believe there is an actual benefit to disable it both from SSD wear perspective (nothing major, but still) and search performance itself since at least in the past have experienced indexing going haywire which messed up start menu search.
If you want to get a quick summary on your own system about running state and startup counts, run these commands from PowerShell:
Get-Service Group-Object Status
Get-Service Group-Object StartType

hi everyone, im new here and i feel bad for bothering and venting to my friends about this and felt better if i just shared it here :/
me (20F) has finally gotten back into i guess the “dating scene” after a really bad situationship and was recently asked out by this guy who came up to me at work. he was pretty, charming, and very funny and even told me where he worked. after he left my coworkers told me he was flirting with me, and as someone who cant read body language or social cues very well I was super surprised. i ended up finding out he was a lifeguard at our university rec center and I gained the courage to give him my number. he seemed very flustered and happy which, for me felt like an obvious indicator he was into me too. i even had my friends hid behind a corner while i asked to get their their opinions on the interaction too. he ends up texting me the following day and we begin talking, flirty, all of the cringy stuff and he asks me out on mothers day. i had to reject since i was spending time with my mom in a different city and by the time i’d be back he would he with his mom already. he made it seem like he completely understood and we kept talking. i thought things were going really well and was waiting for him to reschedule our date before i went to chicago for a vacation with my friends. he never did reschedule but seemed like he was excited for me to go on my trip. but the day i left he seemed to completely stop talking or take half the day to answer my texts. he would always find an excuse and apologize and i thought nothing of it, until it kept happening again and again. he ended up ghosting me, which didn’t hurt as bad since ive been used to getting rejected or ghosted for most of my life. although i do have to admit it still hurts. i decided to redownload bumble and swipe just for fun, since nothing really comes out of it anyway. i ended up meeting this one guy, D (23M) who looks shockingly a lot like alex and was very sweet. i also noticed from his profile that we also do have a similar taste in music! he asked me out on a date the following weekend to a korean restaurant that recently opened up on the other side of town and even offered to pay for me. this was a little out of my comfort zone considering i havent met anyone in real life off of a dating app. so i suggested to go to our city’s annual festival, since i have never went before. there was going to be a firework show, rides, and food—so i figured, why not? he was sweet enough to buy everything the whole day. i felt like we connected quickly, we had a lot of similar interests and seemed like someone ideal to be with. the day of our day i got ready, i also let him know how nervous ill be since in general im not great with meeting new people. he completely understood and expressed he was nervous too, which made me feel slightly better. on his profile i saw that it says in the “looking for” section he only put “something casual” which did make me nervous that he was going to be too touchy or want to hookup. but on the day of the date he did not seem that way at all. he was kind, respectful, funny, and very laidback. we didnt even hold hands until towards the end of our date. after going on fun rides and getting pizza we headed over the firework show and ate our food while watching it. i thought that he would at least kiss me at that point but i could tell he was also pretty nervous. we talked for about 2 hours after the firework show ended and once it started to get too hold we started heading back to his car. on the way i took him to some of my favorite parts of downtown. which in my opinion were the best places to share a first kiss with no one around, but it didnt happen. i was also okay with the fact it didn’t happen, since i didnt want to pressure him into anything. once we got to the parking garage we hugged goodbye and i walked home. once i got home he texted me saying he was locked out of the parking garage and that he accidentally parked in a university parking garage. i work with id services at my job, so thankfully i knew what to do in the situation to get him help. he expressed a lot of gratitude and we texted until we both fell asleep. the next day he responded to my text i left him before going to sleep and i began to notice he was only texting me every 1-3 hours throughout the day. i began to catastrophize, worrying that i was just going to get ghosted again. but whenever he did text back he seemed really into what we were talking about, so i didnt worry about it too much. the next day (yesterday) it was better, it turned into every hour he was responding, but then suddenly stopped at around 8pm. i tried making myself not worry or spiral as i know he is a human, is busy, and has a life of his own. he sent me a good morning text and answered the text i left him (around 8:30am this morning). after i answered he hasn’t interacted, opened, or talked to me all day. which worries me that i am inevitably am going to get ghosted. earlier today i suggested another date by going to see a movie, still no answer until while writing this post. he told me hes going camping this week and asked if next week will work and finally interacted with the things i sent him. im just worried he might be losing interest or will ghost me. or he could just be busy? im so used to sprouting relationships with all green flags suddenly crashing down by ghosting or being rejected. does anyone know how to cope or can give me any advice? or assurance that they felt similar to the way i am? or am i just acting insane? lol

1. Loling at my husband thinking me always leaving the fridge door open is cute (because I’ll be right back… won’t I?) then wondering if my brain is now doing it purposely to win a little affection, just because
   
2. Blowing my teammates’ minds at work constantly by calling the way a client project goes without fail just after meeting them, each and every time (pattern recognition = pure logic in my mind)
   
3. I recently learned that my love for drinks is probably an ND thing, and this makes me weirdly happy
   
4. The sweet relief and satisfaction of pulling off a successful personality heist (this is what I call it when I manage to hang out with NT friends semi-comfortably and without an obvious mask slip) and not finding any huge points of contention with myself for the performance later on (for the record, not glorifying masking and in fact on a journey to stop doing so, but when needs must I try to find the silver lining)
   
5. Hyper fixation - let’s be honest, when it’s directed towards the right thing, it can be a real relief
   

YOUR TURN
(I feel a weird moral Reddit obligation to disclaim that this post is written far more upbeat than I feel right now… but that’s the point maybe?)

I was at Walmart today, with the simple goal of buying some odds and ends for a business trip coming up. Well, as you might expect, I was at the section where they sell the typical array of travel size toiletries ( 1 ounce tubes of tooth paste, mini bottles of shampoo, etc). I just wanted a few of those small empty plastic bottles you can put anything in, and I was in the process of looking at a pack of them when I hear a gruff voice ask " Are you looking for some good lotion?" I turned to see a middle aged man, who looked quite red and sweaty in the face, as if he just finished some very rigorous workout. As you can imagine, I was caught a bit off guard by this unexpected interaction; I think the only response I managed to stammer out was " Ummm." But, without skipping a beat, or waiting for me to finish my confused response, the guy grabs one of the 99 cent mini tubes of Goldbond lotion and says " This is real good lotion. You just squirt it on right where it hurts." And before I even had a grasp on the situation, he squeezes at least half the lotion in the tube onto his mostly bald head. Now, I didn't notice this at first glance but his scalp was scabby. And not typical scabs either. Well I assume they were scabs; they were these quarter sized, extremely inflamed crusty wounds on his head. After he squirts the lotion on his head, he immediately rubbs it into a particularly bad looking scab and moans "oh yeah" . He then tosses the tube right back in the bin with the other mini Goldbond lotions and says, quite matter-of-factly, " This is for the Caucasian people and cocoa butter is for black people." I really didn't know how to respond to this and I noticed a woman several feet behind us looking at us with this surprised, bug-eyed expression her face. Now, I realize that maybe the most polite thing to have done would have been to continue to stand there and listen to this interesting individual inform me about what lotions are the most appropriate for each racial group. But it may come as no surprise that I was thoroughly creeped out by this weirdo.So for some reason, I grabbed a handful of the compact toothbrushes (which I don't even need) and tossed them into my cart and scurried down the aisle away from this man. I have to admit I was quite scared that he would start following me. I found myself zigzagging through random aisles until I finally stopped somewhere in the automotive section. To my great relief, I saw no sign of him. Although I continued the rest of my Walmart shopping a bit on edge, worried that I might encounter this man again, I was able to finish without seeing him. I realize this is far from some of the actual scary stories posted on here, and I seriously doubt it will ever make it onto the YouTube channel but I hope any who read it will find it at least mildly entertaining.

1. Trixie is not a freaking victim and I am so sick of people saying she is. She’s the one that made the challenge, she’s the one that publicly humiliated the cast for no reason, and she publicly called out Twilight for absolutely no reason despite the fact she did nothing wrong. She’s a jerk who couldn’t stop boasting in Boast Busters, and even after being reformed, she is still victimized despite the majority of her conflicts with Starlight being her fault, and that includes No Second Prances.
   
2. I’m not a big fan of Tempest Shadow. Her demeanor was bland, and I didn’t fully buy her reformation. Her backstory, while somewhat sympathetic, is mostly because of her own mistakes. I’m pretty sure warning signs on caves shouldn’t be ignored.
   
3. Despite all his faults, I liked Discord in season nine, or at least I didn’t want to skin him alive for what he pulled as Grogar.
   
4. Twilight is my favorite Mane Six member, and I really feel some people are too harsh on her for making emotion based decisions in a kids cartoon. Like, the other alicorns aren’t the Princesses Of Competence themselves.
   
5. I like Chancellor Neighsay.
   
6. Looking back, Starswirl isn’t that bad as I thought he was.
   
7. Shadow Play makes me angry for all the right reasons while the movie made me angry for the wrong reasons.
   

A day late but we're here, my little cheeto eaters! Remember as always to grab your bingo cards and let's get our little long weekend slumber party going. This whole fucking thing is FORTY MINUTES LONG, you're all lucky that my sibling who was supposed to spend the day chilling at my place has apparently forgotten that plan.
​

• There's a new opening style than all her other vlogs. Not sure if that's because of Morgan but also I don't care enough to go hunt down exactly which influencer she cribbed this style from. It features a lot of horse butts. Also her using her phone in bed, which I thought she didn't do because she's mindful.
  • The music she uses is this song, which is DEFINITELY not copyright-free, so have fun learning how actual copyright law works, Paige! The lyrics playing over the are "there are times when/it feels right to/run away, run away/when you ask the same old questions/every day, every day/Why do I set the stage?/Why do I find my place on the pedestal?", because I guess Paige went to the Love is Blind school of "make sure the lyrics of whatever song you use are really, REALLY literal"
• Giveaway winners! Congrats to the three people who won a pile of Paige's old garbage! Don't worry though, if you didn't win her trash, she'll be doing a lot more of these because she "appreciates [us] guys so much" and "wants us to experience some of the things that I'm so grateful to get".
  • Nothing says grateful like giving away your extras to strangers and instead of doing anything to promote them like you were supposed to in return for getting them for free, using the existence of this stuff as a way to leverage yourself up on the algorithm.
    • There's also Dairy Boy in the giveaways, of course, because no one's buying it organically.
• She explains moving Louie, it's the same stuff she said on Instagram. Weirdly horses are like the only animal I've never gotten super obsessed with, so I have no idea how BS this is, but it's almost word-for-word her IG explanation, so it's the same level of BS that was. She does word this though as it being a "charity project" and "passion project" she "donated to", because there was a dearth I guess of places to keep your horse in the rich people part of Connecticut.
  • She has to first run to get a grazing muzzle so Louie doesn't overeat in the pasture. This sets off my internal bad animal treatment alarms in a huge way, but again, don't know enough about horses to know if this is warranted.
• Just kidding! Don't let Paige into a Tractor Supply unsupervised, she's too much of a ~country girl~ to not come out with "so much shit". She also got this beef jerky that looked "so good". It's Iowa Smokehouse beef jerky.
  • It apparently looked good because all she had for breakfast was coffee. Why she only had coffee I'm not sure, since it's not like she didn't have the time to get something better. Coffee and beef jerky for breakfast sure is a choice, and one I'm sure her intestines didn't make her pay for later. This summer is all about ~hot girl indigestion~.
  • Story time! This looks like "legit, real beef jerky", which Paige knows because when Paige was in boarding school she stayed with a family who had a lot of cows and they made their own beef jerky, which Paige was of course intimately involved in, I'm sure. Anyway this makes her have such high standards, which is why she loves when somewhere like Tractor Supply (an enormous fucking chain, Paige) or a "local country mart" sells jerky because it's always better.
    • Fun fact that took me less than thirty seconds to Google, this "real" beef jerky is also available on Amazon
• More of the same definitely not copyrighted song as she packs up Louie's stuff and moves him. There's a lot of woman laughing alone with salad shots as she packs up and pretends to talk to... someone and "carry stuff" (ie: stand around touching her own body awkwardly)
• Some weird things about this whole sequence - 1) the "farm" she moves Louie to appears to have very poor, dilapidated fencing, red flag for me. 2) Paige is wearing a white shirt and then a white cardigan the entire time while DEALING WITH A HORSE and it never gets stained or dirty, which tells me she did fuck all, 3) the only guy with her is this big bald much older man who I assume is the guy starting this venture, meaning he's almost certainly who films her cantering around on Louie without her wearing a helmet laughing, which is so unbearably awkward. Like imagine asking a random older dude to film you doing that in a pure white sweater, 4) when Paige brushes Louie he sheds SO MUCH. Is that bad? It feels bad. When a dog sheds that much, even in the spring, it usually means no one's been brushing it regularly, 5) Louie has such a dip in his back and it makes me wince every time, especially when Paige shows him next to another horse. I don't know what that's from, but I hate it and it doesn't look comfortable for him.
• Nance and Baloo are at home when Paige gets back so she's just going to "throw on a little outfit" and they're going to go out for Mother's Day in Brooklyn. Paige really, really didn't want to go into the city because I guess she's suuuuch a country girl (nice, Paige) but she's doing it for her mom and to see her sister
  • Oh my god she DOESN'T CHANGE HER SHIRT FROM THE BARN, she wears a white henley, what look like blue pajama pants, and a leather coat.
  • Nance steals some of Paige's clothes (how I don't know since they're totally different sizes) and according to Paige is"slaying the boots", a phrase I will pay actual cash money to never hear Paige say again
• Next morning, return of the out of focus camera, though it may have been by accident this time because it stays out of focus. Anyway serious business Paige with her serious business glasses is starting the day with some "desk work". Is that a thing? A phrase? What the fuck is "desk work"? Has anyone who actually does work at a desk ever called it that?
  • When she's in Europe it's definitely harder for her to sit and do computer work even though she has a laptop but starting the day on her desktop at the same time as her "whole team" (WHO) it really makes a difference for them being all on the same page.
    • Okay so my actual job in real life is doing shipping and order management for a small creative goods company. I know very intimately what goes into product development, order fulfillment, etc, and Paige is just straight up saying nonsense. Like I paused and gave serious thought to what possibly she could be talking about, and I don't know what all this "work" is. If she was making everything in-house that's one thing, but that's not work she could possibly be doing or overseeing from Europe. But if she's outsourcing stuff, having it sent to a warehouse, and, then paying someone to ship it out for her, I guess she's doing... development? But that makes no sense because again, she outsources everything. She isn't doing wholesale, there isn't a lot to arrange for pop-ups if everything is outsourced and pre-made and she's only supposedly having one this summer, she only has eight products so the website maintenance is pretty easy, as is accounting, and she only really sells stuff around a drop which she does maybe twice a year.......... like genuinely I'm baffled here. It's my job to do this exact same thing every day with products that aren't jeans or sweatshirts or whatever and I'm so, confused about what her "work" is.
    • Allegedly they're on the "final push" for so many big projects and you know what, if any of these projects involve Paige actually doing anything besides feeling three different samples of denim swatches or deciding which vendor she's going to outsource oven mitts to and saying "I like this" or "I don't like that", I will issue her an apology. I feel safe in the idea that I won't have to issue her an apology, but I will keep on on offer in the off-chance I'm wrong.
    • She just finished making a line sheet (genuine lol once I looked up what that was) and apparently we are going to freeeeak out when we see her new merch - sorry, elevated lifstyle products.
    • It's denim. She's been working on denim. She shows us the final washes but it's in direct sunlight so it's all blown out and out of focus so they look mostly white? But she got the "perfect color". IDK, it's a light wash. I prefer dark wash, actually. It's a lot more flattering and forgiving. But we've already determined my aesthetic and Paige's aesthetic are not the same aesthetic. She's nobly pushed back production six months because she refused to do a full run unless the wash was absolutely perfect. It was so expensive but she needed to love love love the denim, because it's really what she's passionate about and what she wants to do, she wants to be the best denim brand out there. You know, because she's hand-making this denim herself, not just sending instructions to low-wage Chinese workers while being afforded the privilege to fuss over the perceived quality for six months because she has parents who are willing to flush money down the toilet on this. Also, for the record, but denim is like... a choice? Like what is the vision, exactly, because every clothing retailer has some version of denim and people are already super married to their faves, so how exactly is this business model working for her, here. And it doesn't look like stretch denim either, which means it's going to fit a very, very narrow group of body types. Like speaking from ample experience crying in GAP dressing rooms over my "freakish" (read, not built like a popsicle stick) as a teenager in a time before jeggings, jeans are not forgiving and easily worn by everyone. The thing about what Paige is doing so far is that it's universal enough. You don't have to really tailor an oversized sweatshirt or trucker hat to fit you. Everyone can make room for another overpriced candle. But denim??? IDK girl, you do you.
• Paige makes Olivia a latte. Olivia comes in and say it's story time about coffee. Paige asks if she should turn off the camera for this and Olivia says no so Paige continues to film herself preening while Olivia tells her a story about how messy she is frothing milk. Paige spends the entire time interrupting her to go "no! No! No! No!"
  • They look at buttons and rivets and embossed leather patches for the back, and then sweatpants leg panel samples. Baloo hangs out with them and Paige tells him he's stinky. She eats toast.
    • WHAT IS THE POINT OF ANY OF THIS. She's not DESIGNING anything, she's just doing that thing like, you know when you're choosing your racer in Mario Kart and there are a couple hundred variations of wheels and chassis and you just choose the unique combos you want to put together? She's doing that but with generic clothing. I've been jokingly referring to her stuff as "elevated Zazzle" but this isn't even Zazzle because Zazzle you UPLOAD ACTUAL ARTWORK TO. Why is she re-inventing the wheel? What improvements does she think she's making TO A PROVERBIAL WHEEL.
• Not sponsored showing off gifting time! It's not in focus at all so we can't really see any of the products (professional!). One of the products she mentions is that she's friends with CYNTHIA ROWLEY'S DAUGHTER who has nepo baby'd her way into dropping oven mitts and aprons that look like Strawberry Shortcake's rejects. Like they're cute, but they're again little strawberries on white. Like tell me none of you silver spoon-ass bitches cook without telling me by making WHITE OVEN MITTS. Those will turn yellowish and burnt after, what a single batch of brownies? Taking a piece of toast out?
  • This haul includes her tennis Tommy bag. Not sure how she got it since she brags about it being "sold out everywhere even Poshmark and depop"
  • There is sooooooo much of this free bullshit. How does she even get this much free bullshit. Why do companies waste so much money sending this to people like Paige who don't fucking care and openly give it away. What is the point of an influencer. IDK at this point I'm spiraling, this vlog is like a third of the way through and nothing has happened.
• Paige unpacks with Nance. She has so many clothes and I don't think she's worn any of them. Full disclosure that this was the point I actually got annoyed and had to take a break and play some video games for fifteen minutes because while growing up comfortably or on the upper end of middle class in a generational wealth type of town has taught me a lot of patience for people with too much money, there is at some point a limit to how conspicuous over-consumption and waste I can handle, and that point for me came when I saw how many sweaters Paige has that look like they've never been worn. And the on top of this she has a giant suitcase of stuff she's going to depop! The environment? Never heard of her.
• Paige is going to get groceries. She's needed Nance's help to do all the hard stuff she's had to do today like going grocery shopping and having soooo many clothes. She goes to Trader Joe's, then goes to a horse shop and of course buys MORE SHIT SHE DOESN'T NEED. I'm not condoning what the French did when they invented the guillotine, like that was really violent and horrible, but the point is that the longer I watch this vlog the more I'm understanding their motivations.
• Paige goes on a sunset ride with her friend Lauren, this song plays in the background as a flagrant copyright violation, I realize at this point that there's no way this video is going to stay up without Youtube copyright striking it so I have to be extra detailed for posterity and we still have so much to go and this is going to take forever. Louie's back still looks horrible and as someone with inherited lordosis, I feel for him.
• Tommy facetime! He says exactly one sentence and catches a tiny fish, for those of you keeping track on your Bingo cards.
• Nance is still over Paige's house when Paige gets back because she never leaves. Paige is wearing old Dairy Boy sweats. At this point when I scrolled down to press the play button again I realized that Nance has posted a comment about how proud she is of Paige within seconds of the video being uploaded. I live with my mother and sometimes I still need her help on stuff like yelling at health insurance until they cover stuff for me and even I am confused by how codependent their relationship is. Like doesn't Nance have her own house? A husband? Other children? Paige has spent this entire vlog needing Nance's help to do everything from grocery shopping to folding laundry and acting like a teenager. It's a rich text for a therapist to one day unpack.
  • It's Taco Monday, this is just a dumb and boring version of Paige performing the white people taco night song. Also bewildering, Paige seemingly DOES NOT KNOW HOW TO MAKE TACO STUFF. It involves almost no cooking! She even bought the spices pre-packaged! She needs Nance's help on this too!
  • Undisclosed new cooking knife brand product placement. They are amazed that it............slices.
    • OH NO SHE SAYS SLAYING WITH BOOTS AGAIN ABOUT THE KNIFE END THIS MISERY
  • Ahahhahah the reason they're so impressed is because they've apparently been cooking with unsharpened knives. Like Paige didn't know you could sharpen knives. A master chef, ladies and gentlemen!
• Oh god we're only halfway through. Paige wakes up the next morning. She got so freckly yesterday (read: she's courting melanoma and is going to age like a raisin). She's going to go play tennis at a club in Greenwich her parents are members at (Note, she shows the logo which means you can spend five seconds googling to discover it's this club. Membership is invite only and it's gauche apparently to discuss how much membership costs, but the estimate is EIGHTY GRAND A YEAR. To be clear, that is nearly THREE TIMES the average American household income. Paige is the child of people who spend more in one year to play tennis a few times a week than most people do getting fucking doctorates, which clears up a few things for me: one, I've never gotten those texts where she casually demands Morgan Wallen pay her back tens of thousands of dollars like it's $50, but I guess to her it is like $50, and two, why everything about Paige and how she acts towards people and money in this video is a million times more effective at radicalizing people on economic policy than anything Bernie Sanders has ever lain awake at night dreaming of.
  • Camera going in and out of focus during this explanation.
  • Ah she's doing it with her mom. Again. Heaven forbid Paige breathe without Nance.
  • Oh also she has to shoot an ad in the tennis dress, but she definitely likes and would go to play tennis anyway.
• More unboxing undisclosed adver- I mean PR.
  • I'm so serious, tthe flagrant wealth being thrown around in this video and the amount of free stuff a trust fund baby with absolutely no merits or skills whatsoever is getting because she has 300K followers on Instagram that she probably bought half of is like the best argument for socialism I have ever seen.
• .Paige gets dressed in the third outfit of the day to go to the dentist. The pants are pointedly too big on her so they don't stay up in the waist and create this weird enormous kangaroo pouch around her crotch. She pairs that with a toddler sized medium t-shirt for a football team she's probably never heard of, a choker that looks like something a boy band member in the early 2000's would wear but out of fake pearls, and cowboy boots. It's... the look sure is looking, let's just say that.
• Paige opines on how much she prefers to do vlogs at home, but don't worry, she won't stop doing travel vlogs for us! (Oh thank goodness, where would we be without the insights we get from them.) She feels like they add variety to her channel (what, no, we LOVE coming with you to the barn to watch you ride without a helmet over unsourced music! five times a vlog!). Sometimes she feels like there's this pressure to show us as much as she can, which explains why all we see in her travel vlogs is hotel room bathrooms, tennis matches, and the tops of various tabletops in restaurants. Anyway she feels like there's pressure because in reality she's there for Tommy. Which we KNOW, that's the entire PROBLEM, Paige. If you were HONEST about the fact that being a WAG on tour sucks and you don't get to actually see the places you're pretending to really go and immerse yourself in, we WOULD HAVE FEWER COMPLAINTS AND YOU'D FEEL LESS ANXIETY, the problem is that you have to keep compulsively lying about how cultured you are and how you really ~got a feel~ for the location. Just stop lying!!! Stop!!! Lying!!! Challenge!!!!! The anxiety you feel and the reason you have to monitor this subreddit comes from your CONSTANT LYING.
  • Ugh she would NEVER have gone to ROME if it weren't for Tommy. I think this is a ploy for authenticity but boy is it coming across as privileged.
    • I do think in her own Paige way though this entire monologue she has is about something I've noticed her talking around a lot - I think she's afraid if she stops travelling and being a WAG no one will care about her. I think she's terrified of doing what makes her happy, which is being home, hanging out with her mom, riding her horses, and spending her parents' money. But if she just let herself do the things she actually liked and stopped trying to always pretend to be cooler and more interesting than she is, no one would keep paying attention to her, because it's not like she has a sparkling personality or wit or unique point of view. Like I'm an interesting person to talk to, but if I tried to make a vlog of my life it would be pretty boring. I work a 9-5 M-F job and the most interesting part of my life is when I go to a concert or craft fair on the weekend or one of my neighbors goes out of town and I watch their cat. It's not riveting, but I also don't need to be doing fascinating things in order to be or feel like an interesting person. But people like Paige who need to always be travelling and going to events and flaunting how busy they are are often really sad and empty people. They're not doing any of the little mundane things that make people happy and spending time connecting with the people around them, they're just always moving around because they're afraid if they stop for five seconds, people will see that the only thing they have going for them is all that movement and travelling. I think Paige is constantly torn between the anxiety that comes with constant travel and isolation and putting herself on display and removing herself from the things that bring her a sense of calm and security, and the anxiety that if she allows herself to feel calm and secure, she'll lose the attention she craves. IDK seems like a thing she shouldn't keep indirectly admitting to in vlogs, seems to kind of undercut half of her material, but what do I know.
  • Also she really is going to positively contribute to Tommy and his life and career, ie: she needs to go home and feels comforted by home because that's where her mom and Amanda wait on her hand and foot and everything is about her, which she misses when she's with Tommy because when she's on tour with Tommy she has to accept that he's the center of attention and she's not.
  • Her home vlogs have been performing the best, like, significantly. Since she probably buys views and comments, this just means she likes them better and therefore buys more engagement for them.
  • Apparently her analytics are telling her that 30% of her views are coming from the "explore" feature, which she says is YouTube rewarding her for being consistent, and, uh. No. Not how that works.
    • I mean yes if you buy engagement it will put you in the algorithm more, but this is the time in the video where she accidentally self-owns. If you're an actual channel getting actual views from people who actually enjoy watching you, then VERY LITTLE of your viewership should be coming from the "explore" feature, MOST of it should be coming from subscribers or regular viewers or people who watch similar content. That's how the majority of people watch YouTube or find new videos to watch. But if fully a third of your viewers are coming from what's essentially a randomizer button, that pretty much confirms Paige is buying views and/or that a lot of viewers leave after a minute or two. Because if her content was good on its own, people would see it and subscribe, and then she wouldn't need to rely on the "explore" feature. But if she, as she says, is consistently getting a third of her viewership from that feature, than that means that a third of people are just randomly watching whatever YouTube puts in front of them and not engaging with her at all, meaning the ONLY POSSIBLE explanation is that she's essentially buying enough engagement to keep appearing on the explore page, but buying the opportunity to be put in front of people isn't actually getting her a larger audience because what she's serving them is a warmed-over turd.
  • Anyway Paige is counting on you not knowing the extreme basics and trusting that she "knows someone who used to work at YouTube who told her that's how the algorithm works"
    • Um if you don't know about social media - no one who works at YouTube or any social media company knows how their algorithm works unless they're the ones writing it, and if they do know, they're not going to tell you because that's extremely valuable, proprietary information and also there's like a lot of papers and NDAs and non-competes they'd be breaking if they did. They're telling you to upload consistently because it's good FOR THE MEDIA COMPANY. The company is trading in being a content hub, so they need people to consistently be uploading content, ie: raising the value of their site in a way they don't have to pay for. That's the entire business model of every. Single. Digital media platform. Heck, that's how most dating apps work too. The product is data. They want you to be giving them free product.
  • "I don't know, like I don't like doing things just for social media anymore?" HAHHAHAHAHHAHAHAHAHAHAHHAHAHAHHAHAH
    • And a week later you spent a weekend attending influencer parties in the Hamptons for....... what exactly. The scintillating conversation?????
    • She's very quick to say that's not the case if she has to shoot an ad! Loves shooting ads! Please keep sending her free stuff!
    • God this is taking me multiple hours but at this point I've sunk too much time in and also am convinced this won't stay up for copyright issues, so I'm taking a break to like, stretch and clean the bathroom, anything to get me moving and listening to my own thoughts which are in complete sentences.
• I'm back after cleaning the bathroom. I've been at this so long that my sibling has shown up. But I only have ten minutes to go and I REFUSE TO GIVE UP. This whole completely unhinged and unintentionally revealing rant has approximately a trillion uses of the word "like" is from 21:00 to 26:00 and if you want to watch it you can. I probably should have transcribed it for a full AP Lit level analysis, but I'm tired. If we're lucky, when Paige tries to re-upload this with copyright-free music, she'll have kept that in there.
• Paige ordered a shed! She's so excited!
• The fence looks mildly less jacked up when they go back. Paige is brushing Louie constantly in this video. Fourth time I think we've seen her do this. I feel like there's a lot more to horse care than brushing them and she only shows us this part because it looks aesthetic and she doesn't do any of the actual hard or necessary parts like shoveling horse shit, but what do I know.
  • This sequence uses unsourced but definitely copyright song number three!
  • Fun fact: Paige is the same fake brown color as Louie's dappled neck. Aw, you know how pets eventually look like their owners? Cute.
  • Shout out to Paige's friend (perhaps Amanda? Olivia? Can't keep the preppy brunettes straight anymore) who actually wears a helmet riding.
• Next day, we open with a bit of this song (not sourced, copyright infringement number four, possibly more that at this point I no longer notice tbh). Paige puts on boots to go to the new shed and realizes the vlog is going to be so long because she's never done a whole week at a time before. Because I've made it this far, I'm the best. (Aw.)
  • Paige calls Tommy to wish him happy birthday and films it, which seems... odd. Especially since she doesn't film it in a way where he can see she's filming.
  • Paige gets tea for breakfast (nutritious) and a coffee for the guy at the barn we must have seen earlier. His name is Aaron. I could do some google sleuthing and find him probably, but I don't care. Paige met him going on trail rides at her old barn. Do middle aged men usually hang out at barns doing trail rides? Just scoping out young idiots with disposable income? The whole thing seems sus. Apparently he has like seven kids.
  • Paige never realized how expensive pre-made sheds were, but it's a local business that makes it by hand! I assume the local business is called Costco And Sons.
  • More uncredited The Shins plays as Paige only loads the shed with blankets and nothing heavy or unpicturesque.
  • Another Tractor Supply run, at this point they're who really should be sponsoring Paige
  • Paige goes to say goodbye to Louie and he HIDES FROM HER IN THE WOODS
    • Girl.
    • Oh my god no wonder he's mad at her, they've been staying somewhere WITHOUT A STRUCTURE. He's been sleeping OUTSIDE. It got into the 40's every night in New England last week!!!
• Out of focus Paige talking about how she had suuuuuch a long day "running errands". Olivia didn't get to join Paige on her little horse girl excursions because she had to be at the warehouse and onboarding a new DB employee. Anyway Paloma is in town now
  • Paige learns that apparently you're supposed to be washing veggies as she prepares things to grill. PAIGE HAS BEEN COOKING THIS WHOLE TIME NOT WASHING VEGGIES. I.......... I am going to need to be sedated after this.
• Paige exfoliates and puts on a definitely not sponsored face mask
  • She's wearing skiing pajamas. In case we forgot she was a skier. Did you know she was a skier????
    • PSYCH, these are from previous ads with PJ Place but actually she really likes these and this one ISN'T an ad she just loves the product so much
• Paige is doing her makeup! We're at the end stretch! I'm almost there!
  • She took a day off of vlogging to go see her grandparents, but immediately segues into her Ulta trip. Because of her stupid grandparents, she didn't get to go to the barn, frankly how can she survive in these conditions.
  • Dairy Boy phone case plug! She was soooo specific about what she likes in phone cases and definitely didn't just choose between Zazzle, Redbubble, or (insert other brand here)
    • It's a shitty thin cover that looks like it protects your phone from approximately nothing and should cost $10 but I estimate she'll sell it for at least $40
    • Of course because Paige was so super particular about the details and business-minded when it comes to quality it took a long time to make........phone cases.......
  • Tommy calls and says hi
  • Paige rambles about her day and makes coffee. Tommy sent her peonies because he's "so cute". We see the phone cases and they're weird and ugly. More "gifting" (undisclosed advertising) that came in the mail
• Paige makes pickled red onions, every time she does it she changes the recipe a little bit even though she totally has a recipe and isn't googling. She starts pickling carrots which she says are going to "go bad soon" (that takes like six months, how do carrots even go bad?) She also does it in a water glass which, good luck ever drinking from that again without it tasting like vinegar.
• And then with no warning, it cuts off. That took me three and a half hours. It's been a journey and I hate it. If there is ever a vlog this long, I'm doing it in segments across multiple days because I'm exhausted by this much wealth and inanity. Time to go touch grass, start dinner, wash my vegetables before I do so. You know. The little things.

I feel like I’ve suffered as a heat fan these past few years. even though we’ve had more success relative to most teams in the nba….why does luck never go our way? 2020 bam and dragic get injured once we reached the finals. 2021 was horrible so I’m not including that. Last year game 7 one shot away. This year potentially blowing a 3-0 lead to the same team that beat us last year. The fact that bam and jimmy were trash last game (minus jimmy the last few minutes) and we were about to win still but the Derrick white wins the game in the most insane way possible.
I just feel like luck hasn’t been on our side. When we were up 3-0, I saw people debating who would win ecf mvp lmao. And I was legit thinking in my mind it should still be Jimmy just cause of games 1 and 2. Now that shit is the last thing on my mind. It’s crazy how everything can change in just a week. I’m having trouble envisioning them holding up the eastern conference trophy because now it seems too good to be true.
I still believe we can win deep down but sometimes shit just doesn’t go your way and as a sports fan, I haven’t been felt happiness in a while.

(I want to preface this post with the facts that I am not a Galactus main but when I do run Galactus, I run neither Spiderman nor Leech. I run a Shuri+Nimrod+Destroyer version, which I believe is the most fun. I am also CL4K+ and S3 complete.)
We've all seen it before. Wave T3 -> Galactus T4 -> Spiderman T5 -> You retreat once you see the two webs come out of the card before he flips over, if you even stay to see Spiderman reveal
I'm not sure how the Spiderman version is so popular even in infinite, but it's literally the least fun play line and I see it everywhere. I only see players snap maybe half the time before revealing it, too, so I can't help but wonder if my opponents had fun taking it to infinite for 1 cube a game only to continue playing it in infinite.
And I know I'll probably get some downvotes for basically saying Leech is a more fun play line, but at least it's different and arguably underutilized (thankfully).
So does anyone else roll their eyes at this deck when they see it? And if anyone think it's a fun version, I'd love to better understand why.

My parents and their friends always tell me that I used to be lively and different than what I've become after the age of 3/4. After that, I remember being 24/7 angry, uptight and having this feeling of being born inferior to everyone even though I was perfectly fine. My parents' influence. I am grateful for having privileges like a home and a family but I don't think i deserved growing up the way I did, I know it's not my fault but the problem is that this mentality accompanied me until I became 20.The low self-esteem was severe. I couldn't make friends since I was 18 until now. I wondered what has changed? How did I make friends when I was from school until high school? And then I realized that I didn't actually. I was lucky to have a friend that I knew since we were 2 and she was the one who made friends, a social butterfly, and since we were together 24/7 I became "friends" with them. I made a friend alone twice. When we weren't in the same school anymore.
I really saw everyone as better than me and thought I was a weird case because I was certain that everyone thought I was a weirdo. My thoughts were partially true like once I thought I was good friends with this girl (A) and then her friend (B) who is in another class was sitted next to me bc of the teacher, and friend A who was next to me said in a loud voice alluding to me as if I wasn't right next to her, to friend B "don't even try, she never speak lol" (they used to chat in class all the time together). Well, like I said I thought I was familiar with friend A but once we got paired for this project but the awkwardness! I was stuck and I couldn't speak, I was surprised. It happened to me with someone else too. When we are more than 2 I can joke freely and speak more than 1 sentence bc I feel like there is gonna be back up anyways but when we are alone, my brain just freezes and I become shy. My biggest problem was being a people pleaser even though I had no reason to be, like everyone else. I isolated myself from my class every time even thought a lot of them liked me, when I look back. Sometimes I has made up thoughts that I was sure of their authenticity. As you know, in middle school there is the popular and the non-popular (and maybe the in-between). I was the non popular and so I was sometimes bullied, picked on and I couldn't defend myself for sht. This is what I regret too. My parents instilled an inferiority complex bc we weren't the wealthiest people, we were always being compared to X family and how they have a better car, better clothes. Add to it my parents behavior with e/o and with me. I could have made plenty of friends if I wasn't stuck up, forget friends, I would've known my self worth and the fact that I started feeling inferior so young is what held me back. Maybe I get why I was like that in my early teens but in the university too? And during three years. I had no reason being this uptight. Everyone could approach each other, why couldn't I?
I also had this feeling where I could never be in public bc I felt like I was bothering people and it wasn't my place even though it was no one's and everyone's place and I had the right to be in it as everyone. This one was very stupid but at least I learned how it is.

The Anomaly was stable.
That's what the government called it, the magic field around the town that turned people into Kobolds. The rules we had ascertained at the beginning of this were still consistent, a Human could enter and leave as many times as they liked and they would remain Human, there was no known process to reverse this, except a spell called True Polymorph, but that would take years, perhaps even decades, of experimentation, innovation, and- possibly- killing, if the players were correct.
It was the realization that I wanted to remain a Kobold that had allowed me to realize I had been fixated only on my kind, our little village in the town. I distinctly remembered living as a Human- even though the memories caused me nothing but grief- knew how to navigate, how to speak with our Human neighbors, how to use technology.
My understanding of the world wasn't being overridden, it was just that, culturally, me and my people were regressing, and even understanding that, we couldn't stop because we didn't want to stop, it felt more comfortable.
The term 'medieval stasis' was tossed around, the idea of a setting remaining locked in a culturally and technologically medieval state. This didn't feel true to me, if I had a microwave that didn't take up a shit ton of space, I'd definitely use it over cooking over a fire. The flatscreen in my old house was practically like sitting in a theater, the bed was disproportionately huge, like going from a twin to a really long queen size.
I didn't see it as technological regression, so much as nothing was made for us, there was no way to accommodate us in a modern society. Even just going to the nearby city was distressing because we're really fucking small, and even scampering across a road on all fours was just asking for someone to get run over or stepped on.
Not to mention, the Humans were also distressed at our presence, even though it was explained what had happened. That said, there were people who came to our town, people who specifically wanted to become Kobolds. Even knowing that it was a very permanent and life-changing experience, even having us explain that there was nothing to accommodate them out in the wider world, they simply accepted that, yes, we were very much a minority in the world that couldn't possibly be accommodated because we were so rare.
But they were insistent, they were fully willing to abandon their prior lives for this, and reluctantly, they were allowed in.
The process was always painless, they just walked in, shrank, and turned into a Kobold, and could just walk over to us and fit right in. The people who wanted this just seemed to be more natural at it, or maybe they were just aware of what we were supposed to act like and knew how to do it, unlike me, who had been completely blindsided.
It was a month into the second year, when one of the Human kids to the Kobold parents turned into a Kobold. Of course, everyone freaked out because it was against the rules, this was an illegal action and changed everything.
Except, it didn't.
The kid simply didn't want his parents to be alone anymore, so he started trying to figure out how to become a Kobold. Well, we had already established anyone who wanted to become a Kobold, aside from that initial mass transformation, would become one, he wanted it, so he became a Kobold. His brother tried as well.
Simply saying he wanted it didn't work, but when he became distressed that he couldn't to it. Pop! Instant Kobold.
Throughout all of this, Brutus just stuck to my side as a very good boy and just did not seem to mind or care that people were changing into Kobolds around him.
I woke up one morning from a sudden surge of magic within myself. At first I was freaking out, thinking I was going to explode, but then I felt myself calming down as the power settled.
Everyone freaked out when I got onto the roof of the nearest tallest building. I mean, even I was a little freaked out because this was entirely new to me, but I ran and took a flying leap off, and with a big-add feather in hand, I spoke a word, and my rapid descent slowed until I touched the ground.
Of course, everyone was pissed at me, told me that I should never do something so recklessly stupid again. Seeing everyone's concern filled me with shame, and I explained that I knew it was stupid, but I felt I had to do it. That if I tried to tell anyone, they'd just lock me up in a room or something.
How do you rationally explain you want to throw yourself off a building so you can make yourself glide to the ground?
The anger turned into excitement as people realized that meant I knew another spell, that I had hit second level and that I should be able to restore the spell I just used, which I was able to.
This of course led people to give me a player's handbook for D&D and told me to read it because my sudden growth of power meant it was absolutely consistent with it and that I should be able to figure out what all I could do.
Which I did.
It certainly outlined a lot of stuff, but it wasn't particularly useful for me, and I had a feeling that at best it was an abstraction of what our reality was, and at worst, an unreliable guide into life. So I just kind of set it to the side, said "That's nice." and went about my life.
It was the third month of the first year that the mine collapsed.
It was a dull roar, a distant rumble.
We all knew what it was the moment it happened, and every single one of us ran to the mine. Human or Kobold, we all lived in constant fear of a collapse. Our family members were competent, this was a generations-long job that a large portion of us learned just to keep the economy going.
I remembered the sound of someone screaming, there was someone trapped under a large boulder, still alive, but unable to get himself out.
Now, I had never bothered to learn the trade, that was something my father did that I was too terrified to do. I remembered, at that moment, that even though a lot of the people who became Kobolds had been miners, they refused to go into the mine, saying they just didn't feel safe in it.
We'd all just passed it off as an understandable fear that a small creature like us could get easily lost in there. But as I looked at the pile of rubble, I knew how to get him out without causing the whole thing to bury him.
I didn't hesitate, I ran forward, throwing off my clothes because I felt they would get in the way, and grabbing hold of rocks I was absolutely certain were stable, I began to climb and began grabbing the rocks that were most likely to fall and potentially kill the man and got them out of the way.
I only registered there were other Kobolds with me when I handed the rock to one of them, who passed it on to another, and another. We cleared out the immediate danger first, while other Kobolds jerry rigged something to get the boulder off the man and drag him to safety.
It goes without saying, that if I could use magic as what the players called a Sorcerer, others could use magic as something called a Cleric, and well, if the man being healed wasn't a sign that there actually was some sort of divine force in the world, I didn't know what was.
We continued to clear out the entrance, not even one rock fell as we instinctively grabbed what would cause a rock slide and got it out of the way.
When I began to feel exhausted, another Kobold came up and told me to rest. I did, carefully climbing down and only passively realizing I'd been up there for a solid four hours just working my ass off to clear the rubble.
It only occurred to me then, as I drank some water and ate some meat, that my father was down there. Saving him hadn't even been on my mind, all that ran through my mind was that I had the knowledge to help, so I helped.
A tool used for smashing the larger rocks to pieces snapped, I barely registered I was running over to them, I just took the broken tool from them and fixed it.
It didn't even matter that I was fucking exhausted and sore, I was up and over there because I was the only one that could use magic to fix things.
Nobody stood idle, There was a group of Kobolds who were waiting, certainly, but they were watching intently, hopping up and running over to relieve someone who was getting exhausted, or running food and water to someone who needed it.
We saw the first hand poking out of the rubble six hours into clearing up the entrance, focus shifted to getting them out immediately, because they were still moving, Within minutes, they were being carried down the rocks to the ground, it was clear to me they were in critical condition, and if they weren't healed, they were going to die.
The spell used on him was called 'Spare the Dying' according to the players. He instantly stabilized, the worst of his wounds- while still bleeding- simply stopped oozing out blood.
I overheard one of the nurses from the nearby city's hospital remark that- by all rights- that man should be dead. It only occurred to me that people from the hospital had come the moment the news of the collapse reached them. None of them had turned into Kobolds, but I could see on their faces that it hadn't even been a concern.
I continued fixing any tools that broke, which allowed everyone to use them again when they did break.
I saw a rock suddenly break loose, I didn't even register the word I spoke, or my hand flying out. All I knew in the next moment was my Magic Missiles hitting the rock head-on. Once, to knock it off course, and the other two times to ensure it completely missed hitting anyone. A few Kobolds looked at me with surprise and gratitude.
I simply nodded, continuing to repair things as they broke.
We found more people, most of them still hanging on by a thread, the Clerics standing by to stabilize them before having them moved over to the doctors and nurses, who were doing their best to make sure they were in a position to be taken to the hospital, where their injuries could be more properly addressed.
The fact of the matter was, we didn't have enough spells to go around to heal everyone, even among the more naturally inclined Druids.
There were people who had died. Family, friends, every time we found them, there was a pause in our work before they were dug out and brought out. We kept working, bolstered by the wails of the bereaved.
We couldn't save everyone, but we'd be damned if we didn't try.
We heard the first muffled voices of the survivors who had managed to avoid being crushed under several tons of stone. We didn't work faster, we kept up the sustainable pace we had, because hurrying would just lead to injuries.
The first hand that reached out from the darkness was briefly grasped before drawing back in. The hole was gradually widened, those of us who could fit went in, working from the inside to safely widen the hole, to shore up the unstable mine enough to keep people safe.
One by one, the trapped miners were carried out, but it wasn't even half of them.
"The rest are still in there." One of them said. "The whole thing is unstable, there's no way we can safe them."
"There's no way you can save them." Kassa, one of the Kobolds who had been a miner, said. "But we're sure as hell going to try."
I could feel the weight of the earth above me as I entered the unstable mine. It terrified the shit out of me that at any moment, it could cave in and probably kill me instantly.
Still, they needed me to fix their tools, because they were sure as hell going to break again.
It was ten hours into the rescue, we had only just gotten maybe a fourth of the people out, and a further fourth of them were dead. We had instinctively known the mine was going to collapse, we avoided it like the plague, but we didn't realize it at the time.
The earth shifted above us, small stones raining down on us. I set to work repairing the cracked timbers, I could feel that weight lessening slightly, it bought us maybe minutes, maybe seconds, but it was enough to get support struts in place.
The plan was simple, we all knew it needed to be done. We would rescue the miners, and then we would collapse the mine.
The Humans argued that the mine was our lifeblood, that without it, the town would dry up, there would be nothing.
"We can always dig more mines." I said. "We can't waste more lives on one that's just going to collapse."
As hellish as it was to make our way down into progressively more dangerous tunnels, being out of the sunlight was doing wonders for my stress. We knew where it was the most unstable, the miners knew where to put the struts to be the most effective, and when we came to the first collapse, we worked our tails off to clear it out.
We silently passed the dead along, those unlucky few who had been crushed. but the survivors who managed to cling on to life were stabilized and taken out with yips and yaps of encouragement and comfort.
When we broke through and saw the wide, terrified, yet hopeful eyes of more of the miners, we immediately knew if we proceeded, their section of the mine was going to collapse, rendering all of our hard work moot.
"We need to pass them a strut." Kassa said. "Listen, and listen carefully. We need to pass a strut through this hole to you. You need to ensure on your end it does not hit the rocks, otherwise, the section you're in will collapse."
"Just pass it through."
It was easily the most stressful thing I'd ever taken part in. Dozens of small hands keeping the damn thing stable, while the miners on the other side tried their damnedest to keep it steady. Kassa directed them to where to put it, and once it was firmly in place, we cleared the rocks out, urging the miners to get out.
They looked back at us when we didn't follow.
"No, absolutely not. You are not going in there." One of the miners said.
"Kobolds don't abandon family." My brother, Tallyn, said firmly. "We'll all die before we consign them to death."
Even though our every instinct screamed at us to turn tail and run, we pressed onward, the struts only barely keeping the ceiling above stable.
I began to hyperventilate, requiring someone to help calm me down. I was welcome to go, but I needed to stay, I needed to be present to ensure our tools could be repaired.
As if to illustrate my point, one of the struts broke, the mine groaned, and I immediately leapt up to repair it.
We went deeper.
The next collapse was reasonably stable, for what it was worth, we were able to clear it out, and thankfully without any other casualties. I had to resist the urge to run over to my father and hug him, but I did grab his arm and gave it a squeeze.
I think that was the first time he'd ever looked at me with such pride in his eyes.
Eighteen hours into the rescue, we reached the end and got everybody out. The sudden jolt of terror that ran through my body told me we needed to leave immediately. We ushered the miners out, tried not to panic as we slowly ascended to the surface. Struts began to crack, it was all I could do to keep them whole while everyone got out.
I began to smell fresh air, and that's when the mine behind us began collapsing. There was no time to waste, we ran for the surface, my exhausted and hurting body screamed at me to move, but just as I was almost out, I felt something heavy hit me, and then I was buried.
I wasn't afraid anymore. I knew I was going to die, but the moment I realized that, all fear of dying just... went. I had stabilized the mine for as long as I could, I had worked my tail off to keep things going, and I was proud of what I had accomplished.
Still, I only had the merest trickle of air, and my brain was still in survival mode.
I fell unconscious at some point, I wasn't going anywhere, and I was too tired to fight it. But when I opened my eyes, it was to the faintest shaft of light peeking in, the sounds of rocks being moved.
It was just me in here, the chances of me being alive right now was completely slim, I would have forgiven them for leaving me to tend to the wounded, but they resolutely kept working.
They had to be exhausted, at the end of their rope, there was nobody capable of continuing.
There was nobody who could save me.
"I don't care if he's dead, I'm not leaving my boy in there!" The voice was muffled, but it brought tears to my eyes. I tried to call out, but all I could manage was a weak sound.
Still, I kept breathing, kept trying, even as the rocks shifted around me dangerously, threatening to finish me off.
There was a brief pause, an indistinct voice, and then silence.
I cried out, my voice barely a audible even to me, there was no way they could hear me.
Still, I cried out, I couldn't manage a single word, but I tried regardless.
"Did you hear that?"
I cried out as loudly as I could, and then I could hear the rocks moving again, I felt the weight around me shift, I could get more air in. I cried out, louder, straining to push myself out, and then, the finally gave way.
All I could manage was pushing my snout out into the fresh air and managing another sound, I felt a hand on it, smaller, a Kobold's hand. They were still trying to reach me.
I was pulled out, my breath rasping, my body in utter agony, I was blind in one eye, and against the hellish light of the bright morning sky, I saw a Kobold leaning over me.
"Family doesn't abandon family." He spoke with my father's voice.
I felt relief as my body was healed, but I was still absolutely weak from fighting to survive.
"You became... a Kobold..." I rasped.
"I kept thinking to myself, if only I knew how to get to you." He said. "If only I could find you. I could feel myself on the cusp of transforming, and I ran headlong into it because it was the only way to save you." He hugged me, crying, overwhelmed with relief.
Of roughly 2,000 Humans, 786 died.
The miners had found a new vein, silver, certainly more than enough to keep the town going.
But they dug too deep, they weren't careful enough.
There was no resentment from the Humans for us not realizing the mine was unsafe. We didn't know at the time what the aversion was, so it was just chalked up to fear due to being in an unfamiliar situation
With the mine utterly collapsed, there was no real way of salvaging it, it would probably cost more to excavate it and make it stable than that silver vein would be worth.
Incidentally, the moment everyone was out and safe, every single Kobold had 'gained a level', the players explained that we had solved a significant crisis, and that gaining a level was usually the result of such.
They then said, with the kind of manic grin I only saw from gamers who liked games with punishing gameplay, "It's only going to get harder to earn them from here."
Getting used to life with a blind eye was a bigger adjustment than learning how to live as a Kobold was. Still, it was a small price to pay for saving as many people as we could.
We started scoping out another location for a mine, somewhere close enough that we wouldn't have to go far.
When the Human miners heard that we had an instinctive sense of when a mine was safe or not, they all instantly transformed. Even the merest prospect of having that kind of ability had led to such a strong want for it, that they just flat out changed.
Of course, like my father, they had to adjust. Some of them were upset that it happened, but like me, they learned to accept it and appreciate it.
I threw myself into honing my spellcraft, every day I practiced, getting creative with my spellwork and just generally improving in my reaction times.
My fellow Kobolds all looked at me with respect and gratitude. We all knew that my dogged insistence on going with the rescue party to make sure our tools were in top condition had prevented a lot more deaths.
It wasn't that they thought I was the only reason we succeeded, but they understood my absence would have led to catastrophe.
Having achieved this third level of power, I had gained access to something called 'metamagic', as well as second level spells.
I didn't really have any control over which spells I gained insight into, but I could sense that any spells I knew prior I could change one of them into something else.
Thus, I gained an understanding of the spells 'Witch Bolt, Vortex Warp, and Enhance Ability'. Which meant I could conjure a steady stream of electricity, teleport someone to another spot near me, and enhance someone's physical and mental attributes, of which there were apparently six.
The 'metamagic' that I learned granted me the ability to cast certain spells near-instantaneously, and to extend the duration of an effect.
There was a hard limit on what I could do, but it was useful when applied correctly. If someone was going to be doing heavy lifting, I could bolster their strength for an hour- two, if I used metamagic- or bolster the intelligence of someone who just couldn't figure something out.
The scientists who had come to study us wanted to make exclusive use of this, but I very firmly told them, "Unless you're absolutely stuck on something, and nobody else needs it before I need to sleep, then I'll do it."
That being said, I did absolutely test the spell on myself so I had an idea as to what it did.
That all being said and done, we did have a town meeting.
The Players had something important to tell us, something we needed to be aware of, before we did anything with the dead.
"There are two spells we do not have access to yet, that can return the dead to life."
Resurrection, a 'Seventh Level' spell, and True Resurrection, a 'Ninth Level' spell.
"As a Cleric, I will be devoting my all to reaching Level 13, which is the earliest that Resurrection can be learned. It is entirely likely it will take more than a year to even learn this spell, let alone get to a point where I could cast it more than every long rest."
"Roughly eight hours of rest." Another Player helpfully clarified.
"I want you all to understand, it may be entire years until I can learn it. At that point, I will only be able to restore three people to life per day. It would then take a little over nine months of non-stop effort to bring them back."
"We did the math, three people per day with just one person, that's twenty-one per week, or eighty-four per month. Seven hundred and eighty-six people divided by eighty-four is- rounding up to the nearest tenth- nine-point four."
"This is with the understanding that there is no guarantee of bringing them back. If the soul is free and willing to return, then they will return to life. Otherwise..." The Cleric trailed off.
"Otherwise, they will remain dead." His aide spoke solemnly.
"I want everyone to weigh the choice I give. I can't say they'll be appreciative of being brought back, they'll more than likely be upset that they've missed years of their life, or even if they will get the missing years back."
He looked at everyone, who sat in silent shock. "Either make your peace with the dead and move on, or wait knowing that as long as I draw breath, I will bring them back." He paused. "I will be conducting a funeral at the end of the day. May the Platinum Dragon grant you comfort, and may any Gods you worship do the same."
With that, he bowed his head and left.
​
[Navigation for 'Dragon Rising'- [1] [2]]

It was at midnight exactly when everyone who was awake promptly passed out.
It wasn't an instant 'fall to the ground like a corpse' mass unconsciousness. It was just this sudden and intense state of exhaustion that made it impossible to stay awake.
Ours was a mining town, averaging around 70,000 population, and recently being hit by recession that made finding work a pain in the ass. And with the mine running dry, it was all we could do to keep afloat.
I was out for a stroll when the exhaustion hit, I was crossing the street when this oppressively heavy state of exhaustion just hit me. I panicked, of course, thinking that I was having a stroke or something, desperately trying to get to the other side of the crosswalk.
Then darkness.
It was the sunlight that woke me up, I squinted in the hellishly bright light and fumbled around for my sunglasses. Why I kept sunglasses on my person in the dead of night was because I was that kind of asshole who wanted to look cool. My mileage definitely varied on that front, but it was at least an attempt.
Still, when I managed to find them, confused as to why I was on hot asphalt, I put them on, only for them to immediately fall off. I was forced to open my eyes, and that's when I saw my hands.
At first, I thought it was the mother of all sunburns, being so bright red, but when the sound came out of my mouth, I knew something had gone terribly wrong. First and foremost, I was covered in bright red scales, I had these short, sharp claws at the end of my hands, on top of which my feet were utterly fucked up, and I had a tail.
I scrambled for my phone, wondering if it would even register my touch, Thankfully, it did.
You know those memes where someone takes a picture of an animal, and it looks really fucking funny? Guess whose first picture was like that. I turned on the camera, flipped the camera so I could see myself on the screen, and accidentally took a picture as my new snout filled the screen.
I tried to get up, but I realized that my clothes were too big, and that I had gone from a solid 6 feet and dropped to a measly three. Bear in mind, the average height of a person with dwarfism is a solid four, and I know this because I did an entire project on it in ninth grade.
I had no idea what the hell I was, if I was the only person like this, and I was forced to use my XL shirt to cover my otherwise naked body, tearing the shit out of it with my new feet claws, and being faced with the reality that being a three-foot lizard meant I had to crawl through my dog door.
Thankfully, Brutus didn't even seem phased, he just walked up to me, tail wagging, and very much wanting to be pet, which I did, very carefully. I needed something pure and wholesome in the world to keep me from going insane.
That was around six AM.
Now, googling 'Help, I've turned into a three foot lizard' didn't help at all, and I sure as shit didn't want to walk all of the way to my parent's house and potentially freak them out, but I did have my brother.
James is a furry, I'll just say it flat out. Like, an absolute turbo furry. It had taken me time to get used to the idea that he liked furry characters, and I knew a lot of the art he liked dealt with this kind of situation.
I was desperate, and I needed someone on my side. When I called him, it rang and then went to voicemail, and I proceeded to continuously call him, because he will eventually wake up. I got ready to call him again when a notification came up saying he wanted to FaceTime.
I braced myself for his inevitable squeeing when he saw I'd been transformed into a tiny little lizard.
I didn't expect him to be one as well.
Of course, he was the one who was fucking ecstatic, and it took me a lot of attempts to get him to listen to me, which he eventually did.
"Bro." I said, the words slipping out of my mouth weird. I had to carefully enunciate, moving a tongue that was completely alien to me inside of a mouth that didn't work the way I was used to. "What the thuck ith going on?" I asked. "Do you haff any idea what ith going on."
It was painful, really. Of course my brother spoke fluently. It didn't occur to me until he was halfway through his diatribe about TF triggers that I said, "Hey, wait, you're speaking another language." I paused. "I'm speaking another language!"
Like, it all translated into English for me, but we were very much speaking a language that was full of sibilants and yips, yaps, and naks.
"Oh, yeah. That's Yipyak." He said.
"What the fuck is a Yipyak, and if this is some sort of deez nuts joke, I'm going over there and clawing you."
So he explained that we were both Kobolds, creatures from Dungeons and Dragons, and our native language was Draconic, more specifically a pidgin language known as Yipyak.
"Alright, scholar of the Kobolds, what do we do about this situation, because people are going to freak out."
"Brother." He said. "There's no way in hell it's just us."
Part of me knew he was right, but I absolutely did not want to believe it.
Naturally, people gathered around the Town Hall.
The screaming started around eight AM, as people woke up to find themselves turned into Kobolds. Some of them were screaming in joy, others were as horrified as I was, but that wasn't the worst part.
Only half of us were Kobolds.
Mom and Dad picked us up, because they could reach the pedals. They were, of course, very concerned, but they helped us out because they loved us.
Most of the people who arrived who had been turned into Kobolds had to make due with shirts hiked up to their waists and tied off with a belt, the rest just stood around. Naked. There was one weirdo who just made a loincloth and was looking very proud of himself.
Weirdly enough, I actually kind of wanted one.
So, there we were, engaging in what was effectively a cultural exchange between the nerds and furries and the rest of us normal folk. Really, the only explanation as to how and why this happened was. "Fucked if we know, but it has knock-on implications for the rest of the universe."
The Humans- wow, that was a thought I just had, and not one I could just not have- The Humans were of course upset that this had happened and that our entire town was facing a crisis that we didn't know how to deal with.
But the furries had hypotheses.
First, the facts as we knew them. Exactly half of our population had been transformed. The only people who transformed were the D&D nerds and the furries, with the rest being directly related. The transformation only seemed to only effect family members in the same generation, which is why a husband and wife were Kobolds, but their kids weren't. Finally, there was nothing like this happening anywhere else in the world.
Therefore, the hypotheses were thus:
A. Some sort of wild magic surge triggered the transformation. And yes, magic was real because some of us could use it. Me included.
B. The D&D universe actually existed and was bleeding into reality. This excited the D&D players, because it meant they could go on an adventure.
C. There was a Dragon somewhere, maybe in the mine, and it wanted minions. Nobody liked this idea. Well, nobody said they liked it. I felt weirdly okay with it.
D. This was just Some Weird Shit, so let's just move on.
Naturally, someone leaked what happened, the government came, and, well, that's when we discovered that anyone entering the town limits had a roughly 50/50 chance of getting instantly turned into a Kobold. We also determined we could leave, but the way was blockaded because nobody wanted this to spread.
To the government's credit, they didn't take away our civil liberties to dissect us, they just showed up, brought scientists, and started trying to figure out what was going on.
The rest of us just had to adjust.
We couldn't really live in our own houses anymore, I mean, they're not even built for people with Dwarfism, it was even worse for us because we couldn't even reach the counter. So we just did the best we could. Some carpenters got together and started building houses that were proportional to our size. Kitchen appliances weren't going to be of any real help, so we just had to make due with houses that didn't have any electricity, but at least worked well with space heaters.
One of the best things about these houses was that they were quick to make and were easy to navigate. Some of the people built medieval-style housing, which I found myself increasingly attracted to as a place to live. Some of the D&D players were part of something called the Society of Creative Anachronism, and they hand made a lot of clothes that, for whatever reason, my stupid little Kobold brain liked, so here I was in a thatch-roofed house proportional to my size in medieval clothing that I could not fathom why I liked it.
In fact, I'm beginning to hate who I used to be.
The first sign that I was experiencing a dislike of my Human body was when I saw a picture of me and just got angry. Like, I smashed the frame against the floor and tore the thing to shreds before I got a hold of myself.
I catch myself only talking in Yipyak, and being annoyed when I have to switch to English. Not to mention, I've begun practicing magic. I can't explain how it works, I just know it works, it's helped me keep the place clean.
I know how to cast six of these spells, though, two of them exhaust me. The D&D nerds identified them as 'Prestidigitation, Mage Hand, Mending, Firebolt, Detect Magic, and Magic Missile.' Basically, the power do to a lot or really minor effects, the ability to create a magic hand that does whatever I want it to, the ability to fix some things, and the ability to throw fire at something- all at will. As well as the ability to see magic and the ability to throw magic at something that will always hit.
A lot of utility.
So with Detect Magic, I was able to determine that the town was surrounded in a cylindrical magic field, I actually took the time to help mark the border so people wouldn't accidentally become a Kobold. Other things I was able to figure out was that it was a '9th level' spell with Transmutation.
"Oh, that's Mass Polymorph! But that spell only effects ten creatures."
"Well, whatever it is, it's made a hell of a mess of things." I said.
Well, something came out of the mine earlier today, it was a giant fucking rat, and I used Magic Missile to kill it. I was halfway through skinning it when I realized I was skinning it, and that I had never skinned an animal before. I kept at it, and brought it to the warren.
The warren?
Yeah, that word fits.
I have these weird moments of self-awareness where I suddenly remember what life used to be like, and how much I had changed. How much the others changed. Some of them had changed their names , and I realized with a start that I didn't want my name anymore.
But there's another one that's just on the tip of my tongue.
Ruuk.
A Kobold came up to me, wanting some help with something. He said my old name and all I could say in response was, "My name is Ruuk."
He didn't even question it, and immediately started using it. I helped out with what he needed- he'd broken his hoe and needed it fixed, which I obliged.
It struck me, as we hit our first year of this, that I didn't want to go back to being a Human.
​
[Navigation for 'Dragon Rising'- [1] [2]]

https://youtu.be/mZiPdyHyUvE?t=379
In the given video the person makes a claim that sinx I could easily make the same claim by saying it appears that the opposite side, which is sinx, approaches x (the arc length) which indicates sinx/x = 1 as x approaches 0.
I can do this while holding the same consistency as the teacher in this video, yet for some reason my approach isn't "rigorous" enough.
I fail to see any reason why he would have a stronger claim to rigor then me when we are both appealing to a geometric model at the end of the day. This doesn't only apply to the person in this video, but as well as math teachers/professors that are out there as well.
Fact is we hold presuppositions where we can say "this is clearly true because it corresponds to my understanding of reality", but when I state that (lim x-> (sinx/x )) =1 is true by necessity of how I understand geometry to relate to observable reality for myself, apparently it is not "rigorous" enough.
This is an insult to me and how I view the world. I did not believe that mathematics would be so discriminatory in this regard.