Rules for the Sterling Void: The Valley of Gods and Monsters
You need a change. You need some excitement. Your life feels like it’s been mis-sold to you. Damaged goods that you’re desperate to return, but sadly, you were born out of warranty. You hate your job. You hate your home. You don’t have any family or friends that you feel you can connect to. Student loans, mortgages, bills overdue. You left your dreams to gather dust and crumble like some ancient artifacts in a museum’s stock room. When did it all go so wrong? Nothing has turned out the way you hoped it would when you were a kid. It’s all just been a series of compounding mistakes. Why did nobody tell you that, after a certain point life just seems to get worse and worse? It’s not that you want to die. No, that isn’t it at all. You want another throw of the dice. You want to start again, at a different place, in a different time. You want to go somewhere where you can begin anew, with a completely clean slate. That’s when you first hear about the Sterling Void: The Valley of Gods and Monsters.
A mysterious valley that was said to be home to powerful gods and terrifying monsters. Despite the warnings of the locals, you just cannot resist the allure of the unknown and decided to seek out the valley. After many days of arduous travel through rugged terrain, you finally find yourself at the entrance to the valley. There, you see a sign with a seemingly otherworldly language that makes you uneasy and a lectern with a blue scroll on top of it, a sense of dread washes over you and, just as you take a step forward, it hits you, literally, a note hits you in the face, it contains a set of petrifying rules, but your curiosity gets the better of you. You take a deep breath and step into the valley, fully unaware of the horrors that await you. As you walk further into the valley, the you begin to notice strange things. The colours of the plants and rocks seem to shift and change, and the sky above you is a deep shade of purple. You hear whispers in your ear, but when you turn around, no one’s there. Suddenly, you feel a tug at your feet and look down to see tendrils of mist wrapping around your ankles, pulling you down.
You tried to fight it, but it’s no use. You are dragged down into the mist, and when you finally emerge, you find yourself in a completely different world. The sky is a shade of silver, and the ground beneath you is made of shimmering white crystals. The air is thick with the scent of burning incense and the sense of unbelievable petrifying dread, and you can hear chanting in the distance. This is the Sterling Void, explorer and the you are now trapped there, but you wanted this and you are to blame. You knew that you had to follow the rules if they wanted to survive in this strange and dangerous place. And so, begins your journey through the Valley of Gods and Monsters, where you might face unimaginable horrors yet discover incredible secrets that may change your life forever.
Take a deep breath, adventurer, and savor the scents of burning incense and warm air. Listen closely to the wyverns chirping, inviting you to join them in eternal flight. But beware the staring imps, giants, ogres and griffins, ready to pounce at any moment. An insolent stare and you’ll be in their grasp, a glob of flesh. Remember the note you found, its warning ringing in your mind: 'Follow the rules or perish.' You shudder at the thought, but you're determined to make it through the Valley alive. You pull out the crumpled note as a reminder and steel yourself for the journey ahead. It reads the following -
Rule #1: Do not look at the gods or monsters, some of them are incomprehensible to humans in their "natural form" and, their mere presence can drive a person insane. Although it's not the case for all of them, it's better to be safe than sorry.
Rule #2: Make as little noise as possible. The gods and monsters can hear even the slightest sound and, if you're too obnoxious or noisy, you might be stripped of your soul.
Rule #3: Do not touch or disturb any objects that appear out of place, as they may be cursed or possessed by malevolent entities. These objects may include ancient artifacts, unusual stones, or unusual markings on the ground. If you encounter such objects, it is best to avoid them altogether and move on. Attempting to interact with them or take them may lead to disastrous consequences, such as being possessed by a vengeful spirit or cursed with a never-ending torment. Always exercise caution and respect for the supernatural forces that inhabit the Sterling Void. The objects in the valley can bring forth unspeakable horrors.
Rule #4: Only eat fruits and vegetables, as they are provided abundantly by the plants. Do not harm any animals unless they attack you first, as they are protected by divine grace. However, if the elementals or gods provide you with meat, you may eat it. It is important to follow the rules of supernatural hospitality and show gratitude for their generosity. Breaking this rule will result in severe consequences and you will forfeit the right to your soul and flesh, as it is a sign of disrespect towards the beings that have granted you protection and shelter. Remember, survival is possible without meat, but it is impossible without the protection of the elementals and gods.
Rule #5: Do not breathe in the mist. The mist in the valley can cause hallucinations and distort your perception of reality, making it dangerous to navigate. Cover your nose and mouth with a cloth if you must pass through it.
Rule #6: Do not touch the water unless it is orange in color. The water in the valley is cursed, and those who drink from it will suffer a fate worse than death. If you must drink, only drink from the "gilded water" that is orange in color and has regenerative properties.
Rule #7: Do not make eye contact with the statues. The statues in the valley are cursed, and those who look into their eyes will be trapped in a never-ending nightmare.
Rule #8: Do not trust your senses entirely. The valley can play tricks on your mind, and what you perceive may not always be real. Always verify your surroundings before making decisions.
Rule #9: Do not speak to anyone or anything that could possibly be a malevolent creature. The valley is home to creatures that can mimic human voices, and their intentions are often malevolent. Be cautious and discerning in your interactions .
Rule #10: Do not attempt to leave the valley without proper preparation. The gods and monsters that reside within the valley will make it difficult to leave.
Rule #11: Try to minimize use of light especially if you're out in the open. The creatures in the valley hate it and, and may hunt those who use it.
Rule #12: Do not disrupt the natural order of the valley. The curse that plagues the valley is delicate and easily disrupted. Avoid stepping on any cracks or disturbing the natural environment. Those who break the natural order will suffer dire consequences.
Rule #13: Do not open any doors unless you know where they lead. Some doors in the valley lead to places best left unexplored. If you do not know where a door leads, do not open it.
Rule #14: Do not climb any trees unless it is necessary. The trees in the valley are alive and may trap you if you climb them. Only climb if it is necessary for your survival.
Rule #15: Do not use any technology unless it is absolutely necessary. The valley is a place of ancient magic, and technology may anger the gods and monsters that reside within it. Use technology sparingly and only when it is necessary for your survival.
Rule #16: Do not pick any flowers unless they're orange, pink or red. Most flowers in the valley are cursed, and those who touch them will suffer a fate worse than death.
Rule #17: Do not enter any caves. The caves in the valley are home to creatures best left undiscovered.
Rule #18: Do not follow any "weird" sounds. The sounds in the valley are often a trap set by the creatures that inhabit it.
Rule #19: Should you spot an Inn with a sign or a placard reads "The Guardian's Grin" on the road-side, you’re in luck! You’ve found a traveller’s haven. Feel free to spend as much time as you want here and even stock up on supplies and, if you have need something, feel free to ask the staff for help. However, try not to be a nuisance and, don't overstay your welcome if you turn out to be a nuisance, the owner doesn't take kindly to those who abuse his hospitality. If you make a mess or, are a nuisance, don't stay for more than a day. And, in case you're wondering, none of the inhabitants of the inn are human no matter how human they look or, act.
Rule #20: Do not stay in one place for too long. This makes you an easier target for the creatures in the valley. Always be on the move, and do not linger in any one place for too long.
Rule #21: Do not attempt to communicate with the gods or monsters unless you have a concrete reason to or you really think you need to. They do not like pointless chatter, and attempting to communicate with them without any concrete reason so will only anger them.
Rule #22: Do not walk in predictable patterns. This can draw unwanted attention from the creatures in the valley. Vary your movements and be unpredictable.
Rule #23: Do not look at the sky, the sky looks like it’s made of silver alloys and, it is utterly incomprehensible to humans because of how “perfect” it is. And, can drive them insane, it is called the “sterling void” for a reason
Rule #24: If you see wooden signs or, milestones, do not read them or look at them for too long, they are memetic hazards.
Rule #25: If you hear screams of help, don't answer them. Don't move, you can't run or hide. Simply pray for salvation for heaven's divine grace. Only move when help comes, you'll know when help comes.
Rule #26: If you see an animal that has gone extinct in your universe, don't fret. It's neutral. It won't attack you unless you attack it.
Rule #27: If you see a loved one or, an object that you cherished but, lost, you are in a different plane of reality. The beings in this reality will try to convince you that you are home, and that everything is back to normal. They will try to keep you there, so be careful not to let your guard down. If you stay too long, you may forget who you really are and become trapped in this false reality forever. Keep in mind that even though the beings in this reality may look like your loved ones or your cherished objects, they are not the same entities and cannot be trusted. Stay alert and focused on finding a way back to your own reality. Look for blue-colored entrances and, exits for they are the only way out.
Rule #28: If you find scrolls, pick them up, they're going to be useful. Unless they're black in which case, they're best avoided as they're memetic hazards.
And just as you put the note back in your pocket, you remember the blue scroll, you take it out. It reads "The Nameless One is a fearsome creature that roams the deepest and darkest corners of the Valley of Gods and Monsters. Its origins are shrouded in mystery, and its true name is lost to the ages, but one thing is certain: it is a force to be reckoned with. Towering over its prey, the Nameless One is covered in an impenetrable layer of obsidian armor, and wields a massive hammer that can crush even the strongest of warriors. Its eyes glow with an otherworldly light, and its roar can shatter the very ground beneath your feet. Few have dared to face the Nameless One and lived to tell the tale, but those who have speak of a creature that is relentless, cunning, and utterly without mercy. If you ever find yourself face to face with the Nameless One, pray that you have the strength, the skill, and the luck to survive its wrath. If you see any of his minions, you will know. Stay away from them, if you harm them, you will anger the Nameless one. And don't fall asleep out in the open unless you want to become food for his minions
Remember, these rules are not to be taken lightly. They're more than just words on a piece of paper. They're like the Nameless One's eldritch serpentine minions, crawling underneath your skin, snaking through your blood and flesh, like a caterpillar playing host to thousands of wasp larvae. Although you may feel weakened, tired and disoriented, it's crucial to push through. Shake off the feeling and continue with unwavering determination. Your survival hinges on your ability to persevere. And, do keep in mind that sometimes you might have to violate these rules but, do not break any of these rules unless explicitly told to ignore a given rule. Only trust notes from me( You'll know if a note is from me) and, non-black scrolls. Do not trust any other source of information though you can try your luck with certain gods, fairies and elementals . But, not all rules necessarily have to be correct. And, do not forget the rules. Forgetting even one of the rules can lead to disastrous consequences.
As you’re about to roll the scroll, you notice a poem at the bottom that reads -
I am a set of rules, both true and false,
Some may lead you right, others may convulse.
Secrets I hold, mysteries I hide,
But beware, dear explorer, for I may misguide.
​
Beware of sneaky contradictions,
And secrets lost in the Void's evictions.
Can you spot the lies, can you see?
Or will they trip you up and deceive?
​
I am a list of rules, some true and some fake,
Read me closely, your life is at stake.
The truth is hidden, the lies intertwined,
Can you spot the deception and leave it behind?
​
But beware, dear reader, for beyond these words,
A darkness looms, like flocks of ominous birds.
The raven is watching, its eyes full of dread,
A symbol of death, of melancholy, and of what lies ahead.
​
You keep exploring.
A voice in the back of your brain keeps chanting "Don’t fall asleep" as you walk.
You keep exploring.

Hello, hope you guys are doing well.
So it's been maybe 8 years that I'm looking for a game that I used to play when I was a child. And I did a lot of research but still couldn't find him. This post is my last chance I guess.
I don't really have a lot of memory, but I think the story of this game was that : We played an egg character or at least something that looked like an egg with a propeller cap. If I remember well the point of this game was that the egg need to leave the house. So there will be many puzzles (in the different room of the house), mini games ....
I Hope that maybe one of you will have the answer, and will remember this game.
I used to play it in 2006-2007 i think, but I had no idea when this game was actually released. During this time I was playing the game : Oz : The magical Adventure at the same moment.
Thank you for your time
(Sorry for my english it's not my native language)

When I was 23 years old, I stepped on the scale at 5'9" and weighed 320 lbs. It was the largest I ever actually weighed on a scale, but I'm sure that wasn’t my heaviest. Three months later I left for Umpire school in Florida. I had always thought umpires were allowed to be fat, which couldn't have been farther from the truth. After five weeks I had lost 20lbs just due to umpiring 6 days a week with instruction. At the end of umpire school, you are hoping to get a position in minor league baseball. I was denied for one reason, my weight. It was an eye-opening experience that I wouldn't be able to pursue my dream job because I was fat. From there I dropped to 285 lbs. leading up to my summer league season and then maintained that weight because God help you losing weight on the road. I showed back up at umpire school down another 30 lbs. to 255. They almost didn't move me on due to my weight again, but knew I wanted it and that I was a talented umpire. This led to the next 8 years of my life in professional baseball. My lowest weight was 169 lbs. and that made me miserable. I had a now major league umpire turn to me and say are you even happy? My answer was a very quick no. I was hungry all the time and felt I was missing out just to keep being extremely skinny. This led to my next passion, power lifting, which allowed me to eat more, but still maintain my overall aesthetic.. Despite my newfound fitness passion, the seven-month baseball season is far too grueling and difficult to maintain your normal weight. I weighed in every year at 17X lb. weight. However, I also finished every season at 200+with one year being 215. This weight loss and gain every year a completely accidental 6-month cut followed by a six-month bulk for 5 years. By the time I was released from Double AA I had hit all my powerlifting aspirations at the 181-weight class. I overhead pressed 200lbs, benched 300, squatted 400, and deadlifted 500. The last three were all in competition. I then turned to Bodybuilding starting at 195 lbs. This was quickly derailed by covid, and I pivoted to a 4:30:39 marathon, but was now skinny fat due to the lack of lifting. It took me 9 months of being a complete hermit away from all family and friends to step onto the bodybuilding stage. The last 12 weeks were absolutely perfect eating and working out with zero binges or missed workouts. The last month of it is some of the most miserable I have ever been, but it was completely worth it. To go from a fatass 320 to a third place worthy 169 is a memory and trophy I will always cherish. My next goal was winning a strongman competition at my favorite gym (Devoted strength and fitness) one week before my competition my mother had a TBI. I still had to hit the 181 weigh in with my mother in the hospital every night wondering if she would survive the next day. I made weight and won the competition thanks to my freakishly strong shoulders. Over the next 6 months I moved home to help take care of my mother and for the first time in 10 years did not work out. I gained nearly 50lbs and was a shadow of my former self. I'm currently training for a half ironman now and have already 10 lbs. back to my goal weight of 195 for my competition.
I wrote all of this not as a self-flex or woe is me, but to show how your journey through weight loss and fitness is an eternal struggle. You will always fall off the horse. I have gained and lost the same 40 lbs. for the past ten years, and I will bet it won't be the last time as well. Even if you have fallen off your diet, suffered a family tragedy, or sustained an injury. Get your mind back to a healthier you and figure out what you need to do to get yourself healthy again. My answer is simply to find the goal I need to cross off my list. I have done it many times so it's easier for me, but I guarantee if you lost weight once the next ten times it is far easier.

My brother is currently looking for an ADHD diagnosis but I am worried he isn’t honest about his care and just wants the diagnosis, concerns are

• abusing his sleep meds to the point of hallucinations (on them since 4 years old - has an option for the sleep clinic but seems more keen to stay on the host of meds)
  
• ordering medication online without informing GP whilst on other important medication (such as steroids and beta blockers)
  
• an overdose a few years ago, which he was offered support for but refused. We and his work believe he has some depression
  
• being offered support now, but refusing (resulting in myself and my almost 60 year old mother having to do everything for him)
  
• a history of lying to strangers, family, himself and medical professionals, he lies from small things to big things
  

Somethings seem like the could align with the ADHD but it also doesn’t quite make sense. As an example
He struggles to manage his room. We help him, he started to get better at it until he got ADHD into his head. Since then he leaves it for months (despite us offering to go round once a week) then gets my mum or I or both of us to go round, spend a day sorting it, and then there is evidence of 0 attempt to put a single item away and he lets it happen again. What’s curious is he was starting to manage it, and since the last few times we have done it he has refused any help from the support he gets for his autism. Basically, he doesn’t even try and expects my mum and I to do it all for him and when we suggest things he shuts it all down. (This is a common pattern of family quite literally holding his hand through everything throughout his life, despite working full time and sorting out his own mortgage - 28 and let’s his 82 year old grandmother clean up his own spillage and has her running him drinks back and forth)
All these things the GP or psych he’s been referred to for assessment doesn’t know about (apart from the minor OD as I got him check out in hospital) - it’s also weird because I know they ask if a family member will come to aid in the assessment, which hasn’t happened.
Are these things we should be passing on if we are concerned (which we are)? Thanks

Quick tldr, the girl in question is my childhood friend who I had a crush on for several years before I confessed when we were both 14, currently I am 21M now and she is 20F, but after I found out she was only using me for an ego boost I cut off contact with her and the mutual childhood friends we had growing up.
Recently, the talk of a reunion came up for next December when my mom mentioned it. The girl who I no longer talk to and the friends I used to have were going to be part of it because they were all the children of my mom’s closet friends, and that’s how I knew them since we were young.
I told my mother I was ok with joining but wasn’t really going to talk with anyone if the party occurred as I am currently a junior in college and that would be my senior year and I would be very busy with my thesis. She sounded quite disappointed when I mentioned that and told me to just patch things up with everyone.
I stayed quiet after that and headed to my room to ruminate things, but considering these were the people that caused my mental health to deteriorate, give me anxiety, trust issues and depression I hardened my heart from crying at the painful memories. I am fortunate enough to be somewhat better now as I actually found friends who have become my brothers and sisters in all but blood. So I told my mom I couldn’t just leave it in the past as of now because I was still in pain from the experience, she knows a bit of my depression but doesn’t really believe in negative mental health.
She looked and sounded disappointed still with me but told me it was ok. Now I’m nervous if I affected my relationship with her and AITA here? Should I at least forgive the people that hurt me? Because I don’t to damage my mother’s relationship with me or her closest friends. AITA?

I think China's economic development is not dependent on ASEAN, but has established a mutually beneficial economic and trade cooperation with ASEAN.
In terms of trade scale, China's bilateral trade with ASEAN reached a record high of $716.2 billion in 2020, up 7% year-on-year. China has been the largest trading partner of ASEAN for 12 consecutive years, and ASEAN has become China's top trading partner. However, China's trade with ASEAN accounts for only 14.7% of China's total trade, much lower than China's share with the EU (16.9%) and the US (15.4%). This indicates that China's foreign trade is not overly dependent on the ASEAN market, but maintains a diversified and balanced pattern.
In terms of trade structure, China's trade with ASEAN is highly complementary and synergistic. China mainly exports industrial manufactured goods such as electromechanical products, textiles and garments to ASEAN, meeting the needs of ASEAN countries in the process of industrialization and urbanization; China mainly imports resource commodities such as minerals, energy and agricultural products from ASEAN, meeting the needs of China in its economic development and improvement of people's life. In addition, China and ASEAN have formed a close cooperation in the regional value chain, which has improved the production efficiency and competitiveness of both sides through division of labor and industrial transfer.
In terms of investment scale, two-way investment between China and ASEAN has also maintained steady growth. in 2020, China's actual investment in ASEAN was US$14.8 billion, up 52.1% year-on-year, accounting for 12.4% of China's total foreign direct investment; ASEAN's actual investment in China was US$7.7 billion, up 0.7% year-on-year, accounting for 6.1% of total foreign direct investment in China. However, the investment volume between China and ASEAN is still relatively small compared to the total economic volume of both sides, especially there is still much room for improvement compared to the huge market potential and cooperation space of both sides.
In terms of cooperation mechanism, China and ASEAN have established a comprehensive, multi-level and wide-ranging economic and trade cooperation mechanism, which provides solid institutional guarantee and policy support for both sides to deepen cooperation. For example, the China-ASEAN Free Trade Area (CAFTA) was formally established in 2005, which is one of the most populous and developing countries in the world with the largest potential; the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership Agreement (RCEP) was formally signed in 2020, which is the world's most populous, largest intra-regional trade scale and most diversified membership structure In addition, there are also various forms of economic and trade cooperation platforms, such as the "Belt and Road" initiative, the "Lan-Me Cooperation" mechanism and the "10+3" cooperation mechanism.
I believe that ASEAN-China economic and trade cooperation has some advantages and challenges. For example:
Advantages:

1. Geographically advantageous, close to each other, convenient transportation, conducive to the flow of trade and investment and interconnection.
   
2. Historical and cultural similarities and long history of friendly exchanges, which are conducive to enhancing political trust and humanistic exchanges.
   
3. Relatively close economic development levels and complementary industrial structures are conducive to mutual benefits and common development.
   
4. Perfect cooperation mechanism and mature free trade zone construction are conducive to creating an open and inclusive cooperation environment and rules.
   
5. Wide range of cooperation areas, covering trade, investment, infrastructure, digital economy, green development and many other aspects, which is conducive to expanding the cooperation space and potential.
   

There are also challenges:

1. The international situation is complex and volatile, and geopolitical competition has intensified, which may cause interference and influence on the cooperation between China and ASEAN.
   
2. The situation of epidemic prevention and control is still severe, and the unbalanced and unstable economic recovery may bring uncertainty and risk to the cooperation between China and ASEAN.
   
3. Development gaps and imbalances are still prominent, and there are large differences in the level of economic and social development within ASEAN and between China, which may cause obstacles and difficulties to China's cooperation with ASEAN.
   
4. Cooperation opportunities and challenges coexist, and emerging areas such as digital economy and green development need to strengthen policy coordination and rule-making, which may bring new requirements and pressure on cooperation between China and ASEAN.
   

What do you all think?

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I and my (ex) boyfriend (we are 29 y/o) in a long distance relationship for 6 months. He flew to meet me once in my country.
We have plan to take a vacation in oversea together for 5 days. We made a plan in advance for 2-3 months. Finally, he decided to canceled flight 2 days before vacation start because he get sick (Dr. said because of overworking). I texted him a lot how I feel and upset, but I'm ok to travel alone.
After that, I asked him that he has someone else? So he said "I don't have. What's the point?" I'm done and say ok, then change the topic to finding a new accommodation for stay and still sad that we do not spend time together.
*I asked him for a kind of that question because he didn’t show how he regret about it, maybe his feelings to me has changed.
He read but don't reply. It was 1 hr. passed I texted him again to say sorry to asked him like that and I clam down. Btw, I will share pic and video call during my vacation. The results is he's still read and ignored.

• Throwing back before he get sick 4 days ago. He said he want to quit a job and sent emoji cry, he look sad for 2 days. Said He miss me. After that, he work overtime for 3 days until get sick and went to hospital.

Day 1 of my vacation I send him the clips of a beautiful hotel room and me on beautiful dress. = he left me with read.
Day 2 of my vacation, I texted him long passage with 1 bubble to clear my mind. On the context mentioned about explain my conversations and promise I’ll not spend emotional and change myself for him. However, I’ll wait him until he’s ready to talk with me. = he left me with read again.
I stopped to contact him 3 days, I get nothing from him until now.
I don’t understand why he didn’t asking me to break up? Does has a problem with mentally?

Hey! I just had my third time trying jazz tobacco and I experienced something really strange last night, completely different from my previous experiences. Usually, I'd just smoke half a J, chill out, and listen to some tunes. But last night, my friend and I decided to go all in and smoke an entire J each. Let's just say, things got intense.
We were hanging out in his backyard, and when it hit me, it hit HARD. I felt like I had to drag my legs up the stairs to his house with my hands just to make it back to his apartment. Once inside, I plopped down in a gaming chair and suddenly my hands and feet felt so heavy I couldn't move them, though I could still wiggle my fingers and toes with some effort.
My friend, concerned by my unresponsiveness, tried to talk to me and touched my shoulder. I understood everything he said, but I couldn't manage to speak. Every word he uttered made me feel increasingly nauseous.
Before I knew it, I couldn't open my eyes and I had to lay completely still. I felt like I had to manually control my heartbeat and breathing. My mind was flooded with altered memories from my past, with random details that never happened. It was a bizarre mix of lucidity and thought loops. I had bought some Burger King to munch on like the previous times, but I was powerless to even reach for it.
The music we were listening to suddenly seemed like it was coming from surround sound speakers, with instruments and drums coming from different parts of the room. I started sweating profusely, feeling like marbles were forming on my forehead in some insane pattern. All I could think was, "Just hold on for 2 more hours and it'll pass." I stayed still in one position until eventually, my legs and arms loosened up, and I could move again.
So, is this what people mean when they talk about "greening out"? Anyone else had a similar experience? I'd love to hear your thoughts and stories!

Hello all. I rarely ever post here but I need to get this off my chest and I can't even begin to talk about it to anyone I know. I'm very much so ashamed/disappointed that I let him get to me, after all these years, the way he did. And it wasn't even really him saying the things to me.
So I grew up with mom, dad and a brother. My brother was the typical golden child and I was..not. we'll refer to my mother as t father as m and brother as b, because I hate calling them my parents. Anyway, I wouldn't say I had the worst childhood. M and t always doted on b, their athletic, handsome, could do no wrong son and always gave me the shit end of the stick. I will say we wanted for nothing. It always felt kinda like M was making up for his meltdowns and hrs long lectures that included the chest pokes, kicking and hitting things, yelling until his voice cracked and gave out, forehead veins popping, the works.
Ms dad died when I was 15. That's when things really got bad. He no longer had the man he idolized as an outlet to turn to when he felt like exploding. He'd given up on taking wellbutrin which he was taking to quit smoking but it definitely did make a difference. You never knew what would set him off. A stack of papers, a soda can (this would really piss him off and on several occasions my brother and I were forced to drink the soda that had been open/out for days at a time even when it wasn't ours. One time I was forced to drink one that had cigarettes in it..it was traumatizing), t not fucking him. That was one of the worst things too. She had female issues and ended up having a total hysterectomy and no longer wanted sex and it hurt (yes I was informed of this at like 13) so if she didn't give it up he'd explode. Several times he'd lock himself in the garage for hrs not answering anyone and then he'd walk out leaving his Neuse behind as a kinda look at what T almost made me do kinda thing. Then came the silence. It was the best part bc he wouldn't talk to any of us for weeks at a time.
When his dad died and things got way worse, I turned to drugs and alcohol. I'd take anything you'd give me. By 17 I'd tried pills, weed, coke/crack, lsd, shrooms, alcohol, experimental pharmaceuticals, uppers, downers...you name it I tried/dabbled in it. I graduated high school addicted to several substances. He didn't care. As long as no one else found out and I stayed away from him, all was good.
I really never knew how much those weekly if not daily meltdowns really affected me until I started dating and anytime my late husband would so much as raise his voice, I'd shut down or start bawling. M Apologized exactly one time saying "I could've done better by you two" when he was drunk. Ofc I told him he was a great dad and he came back with "I gave yall anything you wanted and made sure you got to travel and never wanted for anything." That's true. We did travel. I have loads of memories of hus meltdowns in a ton of US cities and Canada! Anything he ever gave us would be held over our heads, including but definitely not limited to my education.
He's the kind of person to tell an awful story with a smile on his face and pride in his heart. "Yea when ETTA was 15 she kept talking back to her mom and I told her once and she did it again and I snatched her ass up and beat her ass real good. Ain't that right ETTA?" Sure is. But why are you telling my inlaws this at my rehearsal dinner? "B thought he could do whatever he wanted cause dads stupid isn't he? Until I caught up with his ass. I beat his ass so good the board snapped in two, didn't I B?" Also true but why say it at a dinner table full of Bs friends, gf and gfs family? I swear he'd say the shit with the biggest smile like it was a point of pride to treat another human like that.
For a while after I moved out, finished college and had my babies, all I wanted was to make him proud. Getting my RN didn't do it bc I wanted to enjoy my babies first few years and be a stay at home mom. My husband worked and kept us afloat so that's what I did. Then my husband got unjustly fired and started collecting unemployment. All I ever heard from M is how my husband needed to get to work and anything is better than unemployment, he's lazy, he's worthless. And I just wanted M to be happy so that carried over to my marriage and i pressed the issue so my husband got a job. That paid minimum wage. Because something is better than nothing. Except now we were struggling because we were getting less than half of what he was making on unemployment.
Then he threatened to sue me for the college he paid for. In reality he paid for less than half and the state paid for the rest bc I was a single mom in a high demand field..but let him tell it and he paid every last dime. And if I didn't get my lazy ass to work, he was gonna make sure he got every last dime back. So I went to work.
My husband and I both worked 2nds. I would get the kids up in the morning, get them fed and dressed and drop them at m and ts house because they wanted me to work so they offered to babysit. That didn't last long before I was hearing "I raised my kids. These kids need a mom not someone that's always working and has no time to be a mother to them. You get them up and fed and then theyre here all day this isnt working." By this time I was making way more than my husband and minimum wage wasn't gonna cover anything more than child care so my husband stayed home so my kids would have a parent at home.
At first I just really wanted to impress m. I worked 7 days a week, 8-16hr shifts varying. Now he was disappointed I didn't have any time for my kids and my husband was lazy and good for nothing. He just never stopped. Then his mom died. That hit me hard. Although I had quit doing all but weed when I got pregnant, I started dabbling in pills and alcohol when my grandma passed. She was the most kind amazing gentle woman.
Pills turned into more pills which turned into heroin and later fentanyl. I became a sex worker to support my habit and kids because it was too hard for either my husband or I to maintain a job when we'd be sick halfway through a shift. I ended up meeting this guy that beat the shit out of me and then decided that he was gonna tell any and everyone I was an addict. Honestly, it was the best thing that could've happened for my kids, eventually. They had necessities but we were homeless and living in motels at one point and they were old enough to know something wasn't right. When they were taken I had got us into a 3 bedroom house. They had their pets back, their own rooms, tablets and tvs and toys and our cabinets were always full. I was doing better for them but I was still deep in addiction.
When CPS came and asked about support systems I told them I didn't have family. I couldn't see how deeply i was affected by him then but (don't take this as me passing the buck, I picked up drugs on my own accord, he didnt force me but it was a coping mechanism I'd learned because of him) I knew I didn't want to subject my kids to his meltdowns and psychotic behavior. So my kids ended up going with their paternal family. Until their uncle decided he needed a break and called my brother who called my parents.
It really surprised me that B called them. He hadn't talked to them in years bc T had snapped when his mother in law tried to help her with a dinner and M had snapped on B and that was the final straw for B. I feel like it's important to mention that after a couple years struggling with alcohol B got his shit together. He now owns his own very nice home, married with 2 beautiful children that M and T have never even met.
So my kids went to live with M and T. It was horrible. I'm not going to put my kids business out there but I have recordings she sent to me after he pushed her so far mentally she had to be hospitalized. In one recording he's yelling that all my youngest does is eat (her weight is okay now but she had struggled with body issues thinking she was fat early on and he knew that) and that my oldest wasn't sick she was sick in the head. That they ruined his life. I have several recordings of him yelling that he's going to send them to foster care, which he weaponized frequently. My oldest rebelled and everything just spiraled. Luckily my distant cousins took her in a year ago. With proper Healthcare, diagnosies, medication and a calm understanding environment, she's done a complete 180. Just recently M and T decided to send my youngest to be with her sister thank God.
I haven't got my shit together. I'll be the first to admit I am fucked up. I chose my path and I know how people look at drug addicts like they're scum of the earth. I've done my best to affect those I love as little as possible. My children have hurt the most and I'll never forgive myself for what they've gone through as a result of my actions. My husband died in 2021 so its just me now. The whole reason I started prostitution is so I wouldn't have to be a scumbag and have other support my habit.
When they first got word of me being homeless they stored my things for me. In my things were my husband's tools and at the time he needed them to start working along side a handyman. I had called M and said I need to go to the house and get my tools can you tell me the code to the garage? He said no, you can wait 5 mo until we're home. I couldn't wait, the job wouldn't wait and it was before I started hooking. So my husband and I went to their house, popped the lock on the garage door, took our bag of tools and left. That is the only thing I did in addiction that has directly affected them. I didn't touch any of his shit despite there being thousands of dollars of tools and toys in the garage. I just needed the tools and I took t hem. Did I go about it wrong...yea I did. But did I steal from them? No.
Today I was talking to my daughter and she said when she first got to their place she asked to spend the day with me (visits had been 2hrs a week for months prior to them getting my kids and the judge made m and t tell him they would keep them up. They immediately cut visits completely out). She said they told her things like "how could she do this to us?" That I was horrible and I stole their crossbow (he gave it to me after a dog mauled my cat incase the dog returned and never asked for it back) and that he wishes he could've skipped having kids and went straight to having grandkids. That he wished he never had me or B.
How could I do this to them? That's the most narcissistic thing I've ever heard. Like everything in life revolves around him and is directed at him. And he wishes I was never born? I have to admit that's why I'm here. After 6 years NC, mourning the loss of my doormat mother, accepting that I don't have family, I read that and it broke me all over again. I cried. And then I cried because I let him get to me.
Ik this is long. TLDR my sperm donor asked how I could do this to him in regards to my addiction that hasn't ever affected him aside from him voluntarily taking in and traumatizing my kids before sending them to another state to live with family. He said he wished I was never born and I feel like I'm 15 again, choking down cigarette butt pepsi with a fat finger thumping and bruising my chest.
I don't want him to have this power. It's got me thinking about turning up at his house and blowing my brains all over his porch with a little note taped to my shirt, "your wish is my command"
Sorry for the wall of texts. I'm sure I won't get many if any replies but writing this out has been somewhat cathartic.

I have to take Xanax for a heart condition call graves ( heart beats too fast sometimes) It’s not a normal medication where you can stop taking it and just suffer withdraws you get seizures and it will kill you I recently had a coworker over whose friend or somebody I suspect who knows stole my medicine I don’t know what to do because it’s such a joke to medical providers, Because I’m sure a lot of people pull this, My question is I’m obviously going to have to end up going to the hospital before I go to the hospital is there any hope in going to an urgent care center can somebody tell me if they’ve been in my position? No I can’t call my doctor my doctor is on vacation for the next two weeks, And yes I have texted around to a few friends to see if they could ‘help me’ for the next few days they can’t. This is something I don’t want to do because I feel like I’m definitely going to get attitude from nurses or doctors or whatever but will they help me if I go to the walk in clinic or am I gonna have to go to the hospital. Yes everything I’m saying is true I’m even in a file police report online because I’m so angry I don’t know what to do and any urinalysis would show I’m also telling the truth. TLDR: My medicine was stolen and the withdraws cause lethal symptoms The pamphlet says seek immediate 911 help or care if out of medicine, Will the walk in clinic actually help me or am I going to be forced to go to the emergency room? Medicine was actually stolen have police report that I am filing.

“The lover carves into his soul the model of the beloved. In that way, the soul of the lover becomes the mirror in which the image of the loved one is reflected.” - Marsilio Ficino, Commentary on Plato's Symposium
Nietzsche’s criticisms of Hegel are often conflated with Schopenhauer’s. Often by people who type things like, “I’m in the Schopenhauer camp when it comes to Hegel and his ilk.” In a series of Beeps-and-Boops they copy-and-paste Schopenhauer’s loathing without any of Schopenhauer’s substance (which would require actually engaging with Schopenhauer and Hegel) instead these Thinkers exists as little framed photos on a candle covered shrine in Geocities. Even if they’re correct they’re still wrong and worthy of immediate scorn and derision. We must express the most profound sense of Christian Pity and Charity at the sight of their nakedness.
It’s easy to spiral on this particular subject but unbecoming, revealing, even damning. What they don’t seem to process, is that the seethe and the scolding and the tantrums are in their manner the highest form of compliment either philosopher could muster. That the younger Schopenhauer’s response to Hegel’s semantic blunder should be a kind of ecstatic fury that propelled his career as a philosopher. That Schopenhauer is endearing when he puts pen to paper and writes:
“May Hegel's philosophy of absolute nonsense - three-fourths cash and one-fourth crazy fancies - continue to pass for unfathomable wisdom without anyone suggesting as an appropriate motto for his writings Shakespeare's words: "Such stuff as madmen tongue and brain not," or, as an emblematical vignette, the cuttle-fish with its ink-bag, creating a cloud of darkness around it to prevent people from seeing what it is, with the device: mea caligine tutus. - May each day bring us, as hitherto, new systems adapted for University purposes, entirely made up of words and phrases and in a learned jargon besides, which allows people to talk whole days without saying anything; and may these delights never be disturbed by the Arabian proverb: "I hear the clappering of the mill, but I see no flour." - For all this is in accordance with the age and must have its course.”
Tempestuous little man. Without Hegel’s error what would’ve become of Schopenhauer? Would he have attempted to actively compete against Hegel? Hegel as the Phantom of Eric Roberts in the Killers Miss Atomic Bomb music video? The Other-Ghost, Hegel’s Smirking Geist cucking Schopenhauer, Sophia in his arms, Schopenhauer casts the wedding ring to the ground and runs away. As was the case in respect to Kierkegaard. Cucked out of marriage by the Ghost & Machine. “And it’s all in my head, but she’s touching his chest now, he takes off her dress now, LET ME GO. And I just can’t look it’s killing me. And taking control.”
An error is a wound is a mercy.
Nietzsche is different. Unlike Schopenhauer he doesn’t pretend to create a superior metaphysical system (the Platonic Carnivalesque) to rival Hegel’s.
I think the spirit of a Nietzschean critique of Hegel is best exemplified by aphorism 317 in Daybreak,
“The judgment of the evening. - He who reflects on the work he has done during the day and during his life, but does so when he has finished it and is tired, usually arrives at a melancholy conclusion: this however is not the fault of his day or his life, but of his tiredness. - In the midst of our work we usually have no leisure to pass judgment on life and existence, nor in the midst of our pleasures: but if we should happen to do so, we should no longer agree with him who waited for the seventh day and its repose before he decided that everything was very beautiful - he had let the better moment go by.”
Hegel as a Christian Nihilist and the Dialectic as Slave Morality. All finite forms of life attain their truth in the process of self-overcoming. Hegel uses Negativity to pacify an excess of Negativity. Hegel’s System annuls the Abyss. The Truth of any given determination is realized in its exhaustion. This Truth is what Remains. As part of a Whole. Eternal. Defeat for Hegel is what brings us to our Truth. That the subject’s defeat should purify it of its particularities and its impositions. My thoughts are already part of reality. This Knowledge leads to renunciation. I’m no longer attempting to impose or enforce myself on reality, to shape it in the heat of my perverse gaze. I look up at the stars and recognize a series of sores oozing out a brilliant light. In the Beggar’s Eye I see Christ. Saint Lazarus draped in indigo rags surrounded by dogs. In the Eyes of the King of the World, Christ. In the Illness the Cure. In the Poison the Medicine.
Hegel stands next to his student, the student looks up at the starry sky in awe. “They are the abode of the blessed.” Hegel grumbles, “The stars, hum! Hum! The stars are only a gleaming leprosy in the sky.’” Like Lorde, he never watches the stars because there’s so much down here. As he puts it in one lecture,
“The human being is this Night, this empty nothing which contains everything in its simplicity - a wealth of infinitely many representations, images, none of which occur to it directly, and none of which are not present. This [is] the Night; the interior of [human] nature, existing here - pure Self - [and] in phantasmagoric representations it is night everywhere: here a bloody head suddenly shoots up and there another white shape, only to disappear as suddenly. We see this Night when we look a human being in the eye, looking into a Night which turns, terrifying. [For from his eyes] the night of the world hangs out towards us.”
Let us then briefly think with Hegel whose underling problem is, from the very beginning of his thought, that of love.
What is Blue?
According to Goethe in his Theory of Colors,
“As yellow is always accompanied with light, so it may be said that blue still brings a principle of darkness with it.
This color has a peculiar and almost indescribable effect on the eye. As a hue it is powerful — but it is on the negative side, and in its highest purity is, as it were, a stimulating negation. Its appearance, then, is a kind of contradiction between excitement and repose.
As the upper sky and distant mountains appear blue, so a blue surface seems to retire from us.
But as we readily follow an agreeable object that flies from us, so we love to contemplate blue — not because it advances to us, but because it draws us after it.
Blue gives us an impression of cold, and thus, again, reminds us of shade. We have before spoken of its affinity with black.
Rooms which are hung with pure blue, appear in some degree larger, but at the same time empty and cold.
The appearance of objects seen through a blue glass is gloomy and melancholy.”
Goethe and a defense of Goethe’s critique of Newton’s Opticks unites Hegel and Schopenhauer. That color is produced by light and by what stands against it. Goethe who said that were the eye not of the sun how could we behold the light. Brilliant in the poetic continuity this expresses. A golden chain from Empedocles to Plato and Aristotle to the Stoics and so on. Summarized here elegantly by the physicist Arthur Zajonc, “the interior light coalesces with daylight, like to like, forming thereby a single homogenous body of light. That body, a marriage of inner light and outer, forges a link between the objects of the world and the soul. It becomes the bridge along which the subtle motions of an exterior object may pass, causing the sensation of sight.” Aristotle proposed the existence of a Proton Organon or Primary Instrument, an organ of congealed pneuma, located in the heart, that reconciles the division between the sensible and the intelligible. The Stoics would go on the rename this Mercurial (both volatile-subtle and fixed) Instrument, the Hegemonikon, the synthesizer or icon-maker. Whose function is to produce phantasms. The instrument through which the soul transmits all vital activities to the body and also the body’s way of capturing the sensations from the five senses and translating them into phantasms or images that could be understood by the soul.
The Lover longing loving unrequited. Smiling like she means it. Being-thrown into this World. Never fully at home, refracted, out of joint. That this affliction is our common inheritance. I think this is our patrimony. We are the heirs of this Abyss. It is to some degree I think fundamentally "Western" fundamentally "Romantic". Regardless of political opinion or alignment. It speaks to us. Through us. Perhaps it's because the Republic of Letters is largely comprised of Melancholic Perverts. Nostalgia or homesickness, as a longing for a reality which can only be possessed through the imagination and through the dream, the genuine site of anamnesis or recollection in the unreal. Evoking for us the movement of the soul described by the Venetian Magician-Philosopher Guilio Camillo; descending through the Lunar Gate of Cancer (of man), drinking from the cup of Bacchus and, depending on how much one imbibes, forgetting about all the things ‘up there’ before making our way back through the Saturnine Gate of Capricorn (of the gods). Tightrope walking to Luna. I see her so very clearly. My Corporeal Dasha, Giordano Bruno would rebuke me harshly, that I should Simp as I do for "these eyes, these ears, this blush, this tongue, this tooth, this hair, this dress, this coat, this little shoe .. . , this sun in eclipse, this crazy person, this slut, this stench, this deathbed, this privy, this mensturation, this corpse... which, by means of a superficial appearance, a shadow, a phantasm, a dream, a Circe-like charm in the service of procreation, deceives us by taking the form of beauty." Fuck it. Yet there is an Image behind the Image, a Woman behind my woman. The Platonic Dasha. Daria the Luminous Homunculi. Madonna Intelligenza who has served as a guide throughout this journey. “Keep your eyes on me.” I wobble on the tightrope, your eyes are what kept me, you and your rose-wreathed heart lit. A Unity-of-Opposites. Georges Bataille writes in The Sorcerer's Apprentice, “The image through which, in an instant, destiny has become alive thus finds itself projected into a world foreign to everyday agitation. The woman toward whom a man is draw, as to his human destiny, no longer belongs to the space that money controls. Her sweetness escapes the real world, through which she moves without allowing herself to be any more imprisoned than a dream. Misfortune would ravage the spirit anyone who lets himself be possessed by the need to reduce her.”
On Love Hegel writes, “Since love is a sensing of something living, lovers can be distinct only in so far as they are mortal and do not look upon this possibility of separation as if there were really a separation or as if reality were a sort of conjunction between possibility and existence. In the lovers there is no matter; they are a living whole.” That the Unity of Love is informed precisely by the division or difference between the Lover and the Beloved. The Union of Love, “…can remain so only as long as the separate lovers are opposed solely in the sense that the one loves and the other is loved, i.e., that each separate lover is one organ in a living whole.”
Here we might ponder Hegel’s Philosophy as a Philosophy of Death. The vespers-born melancholy conclusion is perhaps being that all Love is Unrequited. As Marsilio Ficino notes in his Commentary on Plato’s Symposium, “Insofar as it is death, it is bitter, and insofar it is voluntary, it is sweet. He who loves dies; for his consciousness, oblivious of himself, is devoted exclusively to the loved one, and a man who is not conscious of himself is certainly not conscious in himself. Therefore, a soul that is so affected, does not function in itself, because the primary function of the soul is consciousness…. Therefore, the unrequited lover lives nowhere; he is completely dead.”
Blue the color of Sulfur ignited. Blue the color of the Ocean of the Dead, of Dasein. The blue knees of a prayerful lover and the blue lips of the lovelorn fool, “Here’s to my love - O true apothecary! Thy drugs are quick. - Thus with a kiss I die.” That the smell of bitter almonds should remind the good doctor of unrequited love.
Such a melancholy conclusion can only be produced by a proper melancholic. Melancholy was regarded by Ficino as one of seven exemptions in which the bond between body and soul was weakened, allowing the soul to take flight and acquire the gifts of premonition and clairvoyance. Saint Albertus Magnus writes of the two kinds of melancholy. Hot melancholy and its two primary effects on the subject’s phantasmic activity he describes thusly,
“The first consists in the mobility of the phantasms within the subtle organism: the second, in the great capacity of phantasms to stay impressed upon the pneuma. This brings with it, besides a prodigious memory, an extraordinary capacity for analysis. This is why, Ficino tells us, 'all the great man who have ever excelled in an art have been melancholic. Either because they were born so or become so through assiduous meditation.”
Philosophy begins with this Unhappy Consciousness. The Alienated Soul lithe and loveless, which is the consciousness of self as a divided nature, a doubled and merely contradictory being. Dissatisfied with its Self and the World it retreats inward, like a Nymph fleeing Pan, fleeing into Reflection, which might likewise take the form of a fleeing into Nature (think Thoreau’s Walden). Herein is the mirk. This Narcissistic dialectic between Subject and Phantasmata. The Ouroboric Narcissism of the Beautiful Soul.
Another affliction associated with Melancholy is Hysteria. The Psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan refers to Hegel as the most Sublime Hysteric. The Hysteric asks questions because they experience their own desire as if it were the desire of the Other.
The Spirit retreats into a pre-rational state of life, a Life of Feeling, that this feeling expresses a movement in which the soul is no longer simply natural, but able to realize a mastery over itself.
“Finally, in the “feeling of self,” the individual becomes “a sensitive totality.” But the gradual formation of the ‘I’ is paradoxically accompanied by a loss of fluidity, leading to “ruin and disaster within the conscious spirit.” This crisis results from the fact that the subject, being constituted in a free relation to the self, feels at the same time like ‘another’, and this tension pushes it into a state of ‘trembling’ (durchzittern).” The Future of Hegel, Plasticity, Temporality, Dialectics, Catherine Malabou.
How does Hegel escape? Or perhaps more accurately how can we escape this trap? This Pneumatic Mirror-World. Of Subject-Mirror-Phantasmata. The Romantic Prison? Of one who learns of Love in order to be Loveless? Hold that thought.
Returning to the color blue, the psychologist James Hillman writes in Alchemical Psychology,
“This is the realm of the alchemical (kyanos, blue; kynos, dog); blue takes on a dog-like quality: hangdog and dirty dog, both. Why does depression seek porn? For arousal? For Eros and Priapos and Venus to come to life? Rather, I think, to maintain the depression, to re-direct the verticality of desire downward and backward (doggy fashion), clipping the wings of eros. Pornography - an opus contra naturam, a counter-instinct of the psyche, perverting the conventionally natural, enslaving, torturing; an erotics of despair.
To translate these esoteric references into the blue dog’s perverse obsessions we discover this: Invisible Hades appears in the world as Dionysus. There is a divine (i.e., invisible, unfathomable) impulse that seeks to enter ordinary life. It wants to know the soul in the Biblical sense. Carnal knowledge, intimate knowledge, knowledge of intimates. (Hence the innumerable images of copulation throughout alchemy.) The soul longs for this copulation, and sings its longing in the blues, blueing its own flesh, drawing the divine down into the ordinary body. (Hence the blues’ libidinous mood.)”
My Cup Overfloweth.
Pure thinking-subjectivity is phantasmological or hauntological. The role of the Phantasmata in the context of medieval philosophy, is described exquisitely by Mauricio Loza in The Hounds of Actaeon. The Phantasm or Phantom is understood “as a mental image with effects reaching not only the level of perception but that of social construction, the phantasm exists in the twilight between the objective and the subjectivity, the material and the immaterial, a zone of indistinction between reality and unreality. This is why the phantasm pulls us towards the twilight from whence it comes: Its central action is to drag us into the shadow of the world.”
Minerva’s Owls unfurls its wings only with the falling of dusk.
For the great Persian scholar Avicenna, sensory phantasms were processed through five virtues or powers corresponding to five cavities in the cranium; phantasy or common sense, imagination, cogitative virtue, the estimative virtue, and finally the reminiscent virtue. According to Georgio Agamben in his work Stanzas: Word and Phantasm in Western Culture, Avicenna conceives of this gradation through the inner senses as a "progressive 'disrobing' (denudatio) of the phantasm from its material accidents."
Material accidents in this instance, evoking the etymological origins and proliferation into common speech of the word "accident" itself.
Ad - 'towards to' and cadere - 'to fall'. The Latin Accident - 'happening' used in late Middle English to refer to 'an Event'. Used to refer to the parts of the sacred bread and wine that remained after the transubstantiation through the sacrament of The Holy Eucharist,
“Thus, throughout the history of Scholasticism we have to do with a sort of triangle of intellectual forces: Realism and Nominalism fighting a five hundred years’ war, and the Church, in its official capacity, anxiously endeavouring to hold the balance between them. One wonders whether the three parties to this ancient dispute may not have found symbolic expression in Tweedledum, Tweedledee, and the ‘Monstrous Crow’ of nursery legend. But it is no disparagement of the intellects of that day to say that to us the chief interest of their polemics lies in the many new and accurate instruments of thought with which they provided us. The common word accident is an excellent example. We use it every day without realizing that it was only imported from Latin by the indefatigable efforts of the Schoolmen to reconcile the doctrine of Realism with the Catholic dogma of Transubstantiation. The accidents, when they first came into the English language, meant that part of the sacred bread and wine which remained after the substance had been transmuted into the body and blood of Christ.” History in English Words, Owen Barfield
Here we see a process of Pneuma returning to Pneuma through this process of Rising and Falling. That the Absolute Idea is a Radiant Star. That the Phantasm undergoes a kind of purification process, from the sensible to the spiritual to the mnemonic. That this purification entails a kind of excremental remainder. A material accident. An excess which goes?
This brings to mind the question that the Sophist Parmenides (in Plato's Parmenides) raises to Socrates, which forces Socrates to admit to his own limitations. It utterly stumps the Apostate Tragedian. That being whether or not there is an eidos or Pure Idea of the lowest material things. Things like excrement and dust and I might add these eyes, these ears, this blush, this tongue, this tooth, this hair, this dress, this coat, this little shoe .. . , this sun in eclipse, this crazy person, this slut, this stench, this deathbed, this privy, this mensturation, this corpse...
The Ghost and The Star
Recall the episode with Hegel comparing stars to leprosy sores. This got out around town and Hegel found himself having to address this controversy,
"It has been rumoured round the town that I have compared the stars to a rash on an organism where the skin erupts in an countless mass of red spots: or to an ant-heap in which too, there is Understanding and necessity. In fact, I do rate what is concrete higher than what is abstract, and an animality that develops into no more than a slime, higher than the starry host."
The rock is a rock.
Hegel defines the Domain of Art as the “sensible appearing of the idea”… or the Idea given expression in Sensuous Form. This is to be understood as The Star shining through The Ghost. This opposition between Form and Content. This Contradiction is what animates the Motion of Spirit. From Art towards Philosophy.
She is and is not. Ah wait. I'm not her. But in this regard I am the same and suddenly the Ghost is Concretized.
Alexandre Kojève in his Lectures on the Phenomenology of Spirit writes,
"It is known that Hegel asserted that his knowledge is circular, and that circularity is the necessary and sufficient condition of absolute truth - that is, of complete, universal, and definitive (or "eternal") truth."
The Hysterics quandary finds some resolution. The question of the Other is reflexively transformed into the answer to the question.
"In the Wise Man's absolute Knowledge, each question is its own answer, but is so only because he goes through the totality of questions-answers that forms the entirety of the System. Likewise, in his existence, the Wise Man remains in identity with himself, he is closed up in himself; but he remains in identity with himself because he passes through the totality of others, and is closed up in himself. Which (according to the Phenomenology) means, quite simply, that the only man who can be Wise is a Citizen of the universal and homogeneous State - that is to say, the State of the Tun Aller und Jeder, in which each man exists only through and for the whole, and the whole exists through and for each man."
We return to Self-Consciousness. We're not the same. We're different. Tonight.
Eros pins Pan. Chronos clips Eros’ wings. Compulsion is overcome by Love. Love is overcome by Time. Love can only be actualized and concretized through Time. When it must Dwell in a given Space. This is the Poetic-Plasticity. This is the Commitment.
“Desire has reserved to itself the pure negating of the object and thereby unalloyed feeling of self. This satisfaction, however, just for that reason is itself only a state of evanescence, for it lacks objectivity or subsistence. Labour, on the other hand, is desire restrained and checked, evanescence delayed and postponed; in other words, labour shapes and fashions the thing.” (Phenomenology of Spirit)
We begin with the Problem of Love and in the Problem find the Solution. Love is the Answer to the Question of Love. Loving is to give what one does not have.
Our Unrequited Love is Mutual,
“In fact, there is only one death in mutual love, but there are two resurrections, for a lover dies within himself the moment he forgets about himself, but he returns to life immediately in his loved one as soon as the loved ones embraces him in loving contemplation. He is resurrected once more when he finally recognizes himself in his beloved and no longer doubts that he is loved. O, happy death, which is followed by two loves. O, wondrous exchange in which each gives himself up for the other, and has the other, yet does not cease to have himself.” Commentary on Plato's Symposium, Marsilio Ficino.
To be Overcome is to Animate. This is the Labor of Love. Productive Labor as Art.
You understand why Hegel is so very frustrating? In his System. In the Movement from East to West back East. We find the Heiros Gamos, the Sacred Matrimony of Eros and Sophia, and in this Unity of Opposites the philosopher becomes the Sage. In the production of this Heiros Gamos, Hegel's System becomes the Perfect Pneumatic Circle.
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I make of Nietzsche a traveling companion through Hegel’s Aesthetics. Why? Because The Birth of Tragedy is crudely Hegelian. Here we find ourselves encountering what is so very frustrating about Hegel and his Pneumatic Circle, his method and his system. From the occultists perspective this is because Hegel’s System is an Artifice of Sacral or Mythic Time, of Cyclical Time. The genuinely infuriating thing is realizing that the Artifice, the “Copy” is in fact the original. This is why some speak of the feminizing effect of Hegel. Feminizing in the way Achilles’ is feminized by Scamander. That not only do we never step in the same river twice and that the river is the site of the Doom-driven Hero’s self-fulfilling prophesy.
As Nietzsche himself puts it, “one cannot refute an eye disease.” I thought it would be stimulating to read The Birth of Tragedy through the lens of Hegel’s Lectures on Aesthetics. Framing Nietzsche and his insights within a Hegelian Tableaux. Nietzsche who denounces Metaphysical Systematization. Demurely objecting he says, “unhand me woman,” with a little blush. Does he mean it? I don’t think it was Hegel’s Dialectical Method or Logic that Nietzsche objected too. Denouncing instead the refraction between the Philosopher and the Logic (an ironic detachment)… that the Philosopher and his Logic are not two separate beings. That for him the Philosopher is Alkahest or Universal Solvent. Body and Soul collapse into a singularity, Art and Artists. No, in a sense Nietzsche celebrates the animating antagonism at the Heart of Hegel’s work. That this refraction is what results in the System which Nietzsche saw as modeling contemporary German Bourgeois fearfulness and timidity simply solidifies into Consensus. “I’m old and I don’t want to be alone.” That the System should be a kind of Metaphysical Prison concretized around the Fiery Pneuma, the brilliance of Hegel’s Esprit.
The application of the Dialectical Method is evidenced throughout The Birth of Tragedy; The Apollonian thesis, the Dionysian antithesis, the Tragic synthesis. Or perhaps in a manner more accurate to Hegel; The Dionysian Abstract, the Apollonian Negation, the Tragic Negation-of-Negation, and the Socratic Concretization.
The section dedicated to a retrospective appraisal of The Birth of Tragedy in Ecce Homo, Nietzsche concludes that all the good things he had ever written about Richard Wagner were actually about him. He was talking about himself the whole time without even realizing it, “"Even psychologically all decisive traits of my own nature are projected into Wagner’s - the close proximity of the brightest and the most calamitous forces, the will to power as no man ever possessed it, the ruthless courage in matters of the spirit, the unlimited power to learn without damage to the will to act.” Poor Nietzsche he who was too high-strung for his own good. Comes to a conclusion paralleling Hegel as it concerns Art, specifically Music. Perhaps one day, there will be Dionysian future for music. But for now, the Pneuma roils through space-and-time, and it culminates in Nietzsche or Zarathustra, as the Last Philosopher or the first Tragic Philosopher. Who despite all the aristocratic pretensions cannot help but write in a popular and accessible manner. Writing into motion the conditions for the Dionysian resurgence he had once thought was being spearheaded by the compositions of Richard Wagner.
He goes so far as to be both Beethoven and Goethe’s response to Beethoven in the anticipation of his works and in the need for them to remain ‘exclusive’ despite their undeniably popular character. Goethe in his old age weeping softly to Beethoven’s sonatas, proclaims “If such music were performed by a large orchestra, it would destroy everything around it.”
The stylish and inspirited Vitalism of Nietzsche’s ruminations is Pneumatic. A red dot in the center of a dark blue sphere.
Dialectics reveals an Infinite Spiral. The Circle divided by a straight-line. Containing the spiral. The straight-line breaks through the circle. Above and Below. Revealing three other spheres. Above the configuration one spiral. Beneath it two spirals; one winding up and the other winding down. On a Hegelian theological note. God the Father and God the Holy Spirit proceed from God the Son. “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.” John 1:1.
Here we might locate the Traumatic Temporality of Christianity. The introduction of History. Time as Chronos. With God the Son. Without the historical personage of Jesus Christ, there wouldn’t be a Trinitarian Unity and Division. From God the Son proceeds God the Father and God the Holy Spirit. In this wound we are brought to an awareness of another Time. A Timeless-Time or a Time sans History. “In the Beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God,” a time in which God the Father, God the Son, God the Holy Spirit had always been. The Triune God. Whether or not, in this Aionic Time, God the Holy Spirit proceeds from God the Father or from God the Father and God the Son, is the division between East and West.
This Times overlap and nowhere is this more evident than in the anachronisms or perhaps more accurately, the Archeo-modernity, of the romantic painting. Or perhaps further still, in the Ethiopian depiction of Christ, in the Korean depiction of Christ, and in the Italian depiction of Christ. Black Jesus, Asian Jesus, and European Jesus.
As that obscure note by Nietzsche produced by Gilles Deleuze in his work Nietzsche and Philosophy goes, “Universal chaos which excluded all purposeful activity does not contradict the idea of the cycle; for this idea is only an irrational necessity.” Here we see Nietzsche approaching something akin to the Infinite Dialectic realized and developed in Mao Zedong’s contributions to Dialectical and Historical Materialism. As Mao writes in On Contradiction, “The universality or absoluteness of contradiction has a twofold meaning. One is that contradiction exists in the process of development of all things, and the other is that in the process of development of each thing a movement of opposites exists from beginning to end.”
The stylish and inspirited Vitalism of Nietzsche’s ruminations is Pneumatic. Being Pneumatic it is Phantasmic. Here we locate the Girardian critique of Nietzsche. As Nietzsche proclaims in Ecce Homo that everything his was praising Wagner for is in fact praise he was unconsciously directing at himself, at his values or innate dignities, the obverse is true. For Nietzsche every great philosophical work is a confessional, an involuntary and unconscious autobiography. He invents the Overman and by extension the Last Man. Will to Power and Ressentiment. One cannot exist without the other and in Nietzsche they collapse into a singularity (a point worth keeping in mind when we eventually venture into Deleuze and his Anti-Hegelianism). The Last Philosopher. In sum Girard’s contention is that in the production of these Phantasmata, Nietzsche ends up offering to his audience another Scapegoat. The Man of Ressentiment and the Slave Morality. Obviously within Nietzsche the potential for this is treated triumphantly. Nietzsche refuses to have his Poetic Revelry stifled by timorous considerations. That stupid people might read his works and take it as an excuse to persecute Christians or to locate the Man of Ressentiment in their political adversaries. That they might completely forget the contradictions inherent to the very office of “Tragic Philosopher” and how the Vagabond and the Prophet are a singular figure, hybrid and lovelorn and glorious. “If I had power I’d know how to immediately and brutally exercise it.” None of this concerns Nietzsche. People will misinterpret you regardless. Still the points are well worth reflecting on and prove stimulating as we move from the Symbolic-Classical to the Classical-Romantic.

Hi folks,
as a new user, my Reddit posts get deleted by robots or by admins. I hope this is not going to be the case yet again. Sorry if it's too long- I've tried to shorten it:
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This is a revenge story told from the other side- I was the target of the revenge. So here we go:
I’m an Israeli programmer working in Germany and also a semi-pro musician.
In one of my bands, I’ve met a divorced German woman.
At the time she had an affair with a married man, who was planning to get divorced, once he hides most of his property from his wife.
They've rented an apartment together and she waited there for half a year, for him to give his wife notice. She was frustrated and impatient.
At that exact time, I succeeded to seduce her, and we were having sex at the apartment of her and her lover, where he could enter at any moment (i.e. he told her he was at home with his wife).
I also got to know her kids and treated them lovingly as if they were mine.
Eventually we drifted apart, mostly because I was separated for several years, with wife and kids in another country altogether, so she had doubts that she would eventually have me for herself on a permanent basis.
Then a couple of years later, her boyfriend, who was already divorced and living with her, found out about our affair.
He started to be menacing toward me, like for example he would attend all rehearsals, even though he's a non-musician, choosing to sit just behind my back.
On concerts, he would stand on the stage, eavesdrop to each band huddle before a concert.
In the band where I've met her, they were complimenting him for always being around, because he's a guy who likes to help.
He was also the only person taking band photos, and would you believe it- I didn't appear in ANY band photos during those years. I wonder why.
Eventually I told my former lover: "either he stops the dirty tricks, or I'm telling the band why is he behaving like that"
No improvement occurred.
So one day, I've told the band mates- I had an affair with her years ago- her boyfriend isn't always here to be help with carrying and photos- he's here to make sure me and her stand far away from each other.
The following gig, she and rest of the band made a point of posing for photos together, with me out of the frame.
One gig later, the band shot a professional video. They’ve published the edited video and I was edited out of it. They also didn’t pay me for the gig.
The next day she called me to shout at me. She told me that she and the band members are going to start a fake rumor that I am insane, and this is why I invented this affair.
I told her she must be crazy to deny the affair when I've still got the chat logs, our photo together as a couple and her nude photos.
Shortly after that I've left both bands, as I've felt this has anyhow ended, so better have the upper hand and leave first.
So, was this the end?
Not really.
Two years later, the epidemic hit, and I've tried to build some kind of a music project.
A female singer from that band agreed to rehearse with me. We rehearsed for around one year.
Then she dropped the bomb:
She invited me for a songwriting session with some half-celebrity from a TV talent show. A notorious man who rarely sang with our band, but almost everyone hated him, as he had this vibe of an insane/violent/drug addict dude.
I presumed this is some kind of a trap, but to be honest I was very curious, what kind of a conspiracy is concocted here against me.
After many of hours with the female singer, her mother, the male singer-
-they've staged a well-rehearsed kerfuffle.
They've pretended I was mentally insane. The man said he is mentally ill, he was hospitalized in an institution for a long time! So OBVIOUSLY he's an expert, and as an expert he determined I'm mentally ill.
Didn't you know? If a person is crazy and hospitalized in an institution for a long time, obviously the benefit is- he earns a psychiater's diploma! Hilarious.
The two women started to scream in panic that I was going to attack them physically (nothing happened in the room to justify the screaming).
I had to leave the place.
They've stole the song we've written together, whose melody, chords and drum beat came from me.
The female singer tried to force me to leave, abandoning my expensive music gear behind. I retrieved it anyway.
Later on, I saw in social media, all the signs that these people were celebrating that the revenge operation was carried out successfully.
Apparently, it was a big shame for a German woman to be outed for having sex with Jew, so this revenge was in order.
The crazy singer guy who planned it all, also synchronized this with the radio release of his song about revenge, wink wink.
On social media, I saw how my former lover thanks the dude for the perfectly executed revenge.
Not that it was explicitly admitted- they were just celebrating something that wasn't explained anywhere but everybody seemed to know exactly what the occasion was.
Several years later, I am still unable to play with any band in the whole area, as people are afraid cause I'm "crazy". No way to prove this, but nevertheless true.
Naturally there are professionals working with me to bring these people to justice.

"About time!" Lu t'Cca thundered at her. "Split find hiding spot!
Najia backpedaled, giving the irate Split prisoner plenty of room to get past without coming into arms' length of her. At least he seemed to get that this was a prison break, and he made no move for her or her firearm, darting well clear of her, and out from the cell block.
Axiom's voice cut the sudden quiet that was otherwise punctuated only by her racing heart. "While you two were chatting, I've found a way to temporarily disable security in the hangar. That's where we'll hitch our ride. Head for the second level; the Ministry seems to have installed more switches. They'll require some adjustment, but I know you love a good puzzle." Najia snorted. She did, in fact, love a good puzzle, but breaking out of a prison was not the time to indulge in that. Usually. Unless one looked at the prison as the puzzle. She shook her head, huffing, and drew her pistol again. There was no marked pathway this time, but she made better time; it was reckless, but she jogged, since the place was seemingly totally unguarded. And, if it wasn't, chances were that Lucca would run into the guards first, and she'd hear the struggle ahead. She passed the lift, glancing towards it, and hurrying past in the other direction she hadn't been yet, coming to a door. Slowing, she closed enough with it that it opened automatically.
Najia let out a huff; Lu t'Cca was on the other side, but so was Axiom. She stepped forward, and looked from Axiom, who nodded to her, to Lucca, who snarled. "Creature reveal Split hiding spot! Creature nothing better to do?" This is a hiding spot? Najia shook her head; the two of them were literally standing in the middle of an intersection, in front of an airlock with two branches off on either side. She huffed, looking at Lu t'Cca. "Hey, Mellerd said -"
"Split not talk about friend-foes!" Lucca ranted. "Kriss went against family! Betrayal followed petty betrayal! Way of Windfall, yes. Way of some Split, maybe, but not how real warriors do revenge!" He made a guttural sound of anguish, shaking his head vehemently. Kris? He was on a first-name basis with her? The fact that Ace had spoken so frankly of xenosexual encounters popped into her head, the constant talk of betrayal, pettiness, personal matters, and suddenly it was obvious; somehow, this was personal. Personal; and none of her damn business. She held her hand up placatingly, holstering her other pistol, trusting to Axiom's physical presence to keep peace between her and Lucca. "Fine. I'll leave you to it," she said. "Split thought so," Lu t'Cca spat, looking back to Axiom. She looked to Axiom as well. "Switches, Wildcard. Get to it."
Najia nodded, and darted down the left-hand branch of the intersection, fuming all the while. It ran into a dead-end, and she uttered "ah fuck," turning and sprinting in the other direction, slaloming between Maestro and Lucca. At the end, she dead-ended there, and exasperated raised her voice, "the hell?!" Back in the middle, she examined the airlock carefully; she could see that it connected to nothing, which is why she discounted it previously. Carefully she moved into the airlock, her hand on her pistol just in case Lucca tried to kill her by cycling it, but he and Axiom seemed to be in the process of discussing old times.
Exasperated, Najia stepped back out of the airlock. "Axiom, where are these buttons you're talking about? How are we supposed to get out of here?" "Er..." Axiom blinked, tri-ocularly, at her, and looked around. He looked at his datapad. "They should be... Through..." He let out a discontent rumble. "Oh my. That is not obvious on a computer systems diagram schematic." "They're on the other side of the frigging airlock," Najia said. "You're probably already aware that humans can't survive in vacuum, let alone maneuver in it, right?" She snorted, her sarcasm at least getting a sheepish shuffle on his long legs out of Axiom. "Can we get out the way we came back in? Even if it means abandoning the Raven?"
"No," Axiom said gravely. "The tampering I did to activate the cell block doors will be caught by someone sooner or later - probably later than sooner, but sooner if we try to leave the cell block." "Split has been implanted with a tracking device," Lucca growled. "It will raise quite the ruckus when Split leave the cell block!" "If we're leaving by... Unconventional mechanisms, that will be no trouble," Axiom noted. "But if we enter the lift, it will lock down and security will be summoned immediately."
"Outstanding," Najia huffed. "Let me double-check something, see if I can think of something." She turned and left the way she had come from. She bypassed the lift; she had no intention of simply bailing on them. But now, she had two options. Neither was good, but one was significantly less good, so she hoped the other option worked. She opened a channel to Boso Ta. "Boso Ta, I hope to hell you've been listening in." "I have, Assistant!" Boso Ta's voice came through loud and clear. "You are in quite the conundrum. I hope you see a manner in which I may be able to extricate you, for I do not." "You and the Professor have been upgrading teleporters with the ability to upgrade themselves. To do so, you've been transporting equipment, right?" "Hai!" Professor Nakagawa's voice cut in. Clearly he was on the line. "This capability is within our grasp. What is your proposal, Takio-San?" "Can you teleport my EV suit to me?"
There was silence for a long few moments which felt like an eternity. "Potentially," Boso Ta broke the silence. "Have it placed in one of our lifts." "I'll get right on that," Marta cut in on the line. Najia smiled to hear her voice. "Any other requirements?" "If this will work, we will need very precise measurements," Professor Nakagawa said. "The teleporter is more your project than mine, Boso Ta. My thought is that it will require at least three triangulating vessels, and a beacon, and a substantial amount of open space." "Will an empty cell block do for that," Najia asked, hustling down the corridor. "It should yes... Yes! That will work." Rei Stringer cut in on the call, and Najia blinked as she saw Rei's comm-code. "I can arrange the fly-by," she said. It had been awhile since Najia had heard from the friend she had left in charge of the Eighteen Billion Terran-tech construction supplies factory, and generally, in charge of Eighteen Billion affairs. "There's a patrol of Katana in the area already, it won't look suspicious if they do a swing-by of Wormwood Scrubs."
Najia set her datapad down on the floor in the middle of the cell block. "I put my datapad down on the floor. Is that beacon enough," she asked. "Hai, Takio-San," the aged professor's voice informed her. "But I would endeavor to be in another room when the teleport takes place. This is... Highly experimental." "Vacating the room," Najia said, sprinting out into the hallway and down it. "Tell me when it's gonna happen."
"In... About twenty seconds," Boso Ta informed her. "You might want to cover your ears, assistant." Najia didn't even bother to complain about being called 'Assistant' again, she simply crouched and closed her eyes, covering her ears and tried to become one with the railing. She counted to thirty, then opened her eyes. "Did anything happen?" "Your EV suit and EMU aren't in the lift anymore," Marta said to her. "Better go check."
Najia did, and she laughed heartily. Her hardshell carapace EV suit and EMU were sitting on the floor of the cell block. "A perfect teleport! I didn't even hear anything." "Fantastic," Boso Ta said. "You had best hurry, Assistant."
One fast donning later, Najia opened the door to where Axiom and Lucca were still standing around, chatting like old gossips. They both started when they saw her, and she held her hand up. "Easy, guys, it's me." She was hauling her EMU with her. "Split wonders where creature was hiding that," Lu t'Cca said, pointing at her. "Ancient secrets," Najia flippantly answered, as she hefted her EMU into the airlock, and sat in it, strapping in. "Right, let's do this." Reaching up, Najia slapped the airlock cycle button. The door behind her hissed shut; air was evacuated. Her suit indicated a total drop of external pressure, and the airlock's A-grav let go, letting her float free, and so she pushed off the floor.
"Excellent!" Axiom crowed at her, over the comm. "Level 2 is right through there. That exhaust fan may impede your movements, but it won't make our mission impossible. See those alcoves? There's where I'd hide if I were you, whenever the fan is blowing at full speed."
Exhaust fan? I'm in vacuum! Najia carefully maneuvered out. She was in vacuum and microgravity; but she was also inside a large, cylindrical space. Below her was something like a massive fuse-box with a big holographic turret outline, and she jetted down to examine it, but could see no obvious way to tamper with it without most likely setting off major alarms, so she looked back up - just as a synthesized alert klaxxon sounded.
I hate this place, Naija thought, as she saw a fan at the top of the cylinder spin up. At a guess she thought, perhaps it was something like an exhaust, which struck as horrifically wasteful in space, but she could only grit her teeth, watching it spin. At the bottom of the cylindrical space, she only felt the slightest of buffeting; it might have been substantially stronger closer to the top. I am very confused, very frustrated, and I just want to get the hell out of here, she thought. She was seriously considering revisiting her first plan, which had been to simply teleport herself, Axiom and Lucca to Ace's ship.
But now, though, she was pissed, and she wanted to poke something spiteful in Mellerd's eye herself. So she jetted to the top of the cylinder, looking around. As she did, Axiom popped up in her comms. "These airlocks are shut, so you'll need to find a way to bypass their locks." She responded with only a quick "roger," looking around. One airlock, contrary to Axiom's words, was hanging open, but the lights next to it were red. She tried it anyway; but for once, Axiom was spot-on. The airlock door might have been open, but its functions were locked out, the panel totally nonresponsive. She returned below, and looked around; there was an open airlock opposite Axiom and Lucca, so she tried it, and it worked for her automatically.
"Well, let's see what's down this way," Najia muttered to herself, slipping out of her EMU and leaving it in the lock. She unholstered the pistol that was now clamped to her hardshell-clad thigh, and started to look around again.
To her surprise, she found only another cell block - it was a dead end! She was about to hiss in frustration, when she heard someone call to her. "You there! You! Hey! You are not supposed to be here!" Najia turned to face the Teladi voice, her pistol half-raised, when she saw that the figure in question was imprisoned. She lowered her aim to the floor, and appraoched the bars. Standing within was a Teladi, who looked rather forelorn. Najia's shoulders slumped. Well, this is awkward, she thought. When the Teladi seemed to realize she wasn't a guard, she started to ask, "Oh please, please, please! You cannot leave me here! I am friends with Urgu... Ugusa... I can help you make profitsss! I promise."
Najia sighed at the pathetic display, but she understood the Teladi's desire for freedom; though, on the balance, she also had no idea what this Teladi had done to become imprisoned. Knowing Kriss Mellerd, it was a total crap-shoot; she might be a real scum-bag, or she might be being shaken down. Axiom cut in on her. "I sympathize with the little lizard, really I do, but we cannot compromise this mission in the name of charity."
Najia huffed out a sigh, and looked around. Frustratedly, she slapped the door panel on the imprisoned Teladi's cell, and to her surprise - and the prisoner's surprise - it opened. The prisoner looked around, confusedly, and Najia was glad that her mirrored helmet hid her gaze. "That's the best I can do," she said, resignedly. "You'll have to effect your own escape from here, if you can. Good luck." Turning, she huffed back into the airlock, slapping the button to cycle it as the Teladi prisoner looked around in tentative confusion, taking a few steps out of her cell.
Najia pulled her EMU's straps back on. "Well, that was a fucking bust," she snarled. "I'm about to start lasering shit," she muttered, floating back into the massive vacuum cylinder, and back up towards the locked airlocks. She found a third floor of airlocks, but they only offered some shelter from the fans starting up. After waiting that, frustratedly she flew back out again, and started looking around. "Axiom, there aren't any switches here!" "My diagrams say there are switches, Wildcard. Look more carefully - and swiftly."
Najia let out a guttural growl of frustration, and switched to her cutting laser. Giving in to a pique of frustration, she hit her Mk.2 thrusters, blowing past level 1 to the sub-level, coming up level with the big fuse-box. "Right, let's see what this does," she said with a snarl, and targeted her suit's cutting laser on the big set of what looked like fuses.
She blazed a neat line down the middle of them, and, gratifyingly, the 'Turrets' hologram switched to a big red repair icon... She looked around for a moment. Nothing happened. Najia smirked. "On the one hand, this place is frustrating, confusing, and I kind of want to blow it up out of spite by now. But on the other hand, the gross criminal negligence on display is really working in my favor. Fuck it. Lasers for everything," she said, snarling and going back up the shaft. There were a bunch of unmarked panels, and, giving in to the frustration she felt earlier - which she had barely restrained herself from allowing herself to hold Lu t'Cca at gunpoint - she started lasering the panels like a schoolgirl hooligan on a vandalism spree.
"Your new laser is low-powered, but if you keep it aimed at the lock, it will break eventually," Axiom said. Najia blinked. New laser? This is my laser and I've had it for a while, and... Oh, piss on this! She laughed, however, as she saw that one of the panels had indeed fractured.
One deeply-cathatic vandalism spree later, every panel had been opened, and had revealed that inside the two panels nearest the top-level airlocks were two further, smaller panels, with similar mechanisms. With the fan starting up again, Najia took shelter in one of the alcoves at the top, just under an airlock, and, deciding to use her time productively, she lasered the opposite airlock's control panel. After holding her laser on the box for awhile, it was a glowing ruin, and Axiom commed her. "Partial access to level two established," he informed her.
Najia nodded. She didn't even bother to sarcastically snark at him, though the phrase no shit, Sherlock ran through her mind. Rather, she charitably assumed he was reporting to her something he was learning electronically, and turned around. This is gonna be bright, she thought, as she trained her laser at close range on the near access box, and closed her eyes. She held in the firing stud, and held it - counting in her head to seven, when Axiom's comm made her let up off the laser. "And just like that, we have free reign over level two! They can't stop you now!"
Najia grinned, and opened her eyes to behold a molten, glowing hole drilled into the electronics she had blasted. "Right. Let's get this show on the highway."
On the level above her, in the half just above, she slipped in, and found herself facing a door to another cell block, just through the airlock. She went in and looked; no prisoners. Walking out, she huffed, and decided to walk the half-circuit around the big cylinder again. To her surprise, she found a console, just attached haphazardly to a railing. Really? Najia examined it, and snorted; it looked shoddy, ad-hoc. She tapped the console's screen, and it simply changed color. Axiom piped up. "Magnificent! That'll give you access to half of the switches! There must be another console nearby that will let you remove the second cover."
"Got it. Moving on," Najia said. Back to the airlock she went, after checking the other half of the crescent hallway she was in; without any luck, she just floated across to the other airlock on her EMU. Predictably, she found that, on the opposite railing in the other half of the level, was another console haphazardly attached to a railing, and she rapped it quite firmly with her knuckles. It flashed. "How's that, Axiom?" "Both covers confirmed open," Axiom informed her. "Let's flip some switches. Get back into your spacesuit."
"Never got out of it. Who has time to undress four times? Anyway, switches, yaaay switches," she snarked, as she cycled the airlock again, strapping her EMU back on. "Whoever designed this place is both a madman and criminally negligent."
Once the airlock cycled through again, Najia saw that the two panels she had manipulated had caused five boxes that she had previously taken as unimportant junction boxes to slide their panels open. She groaned to herself when she saw that there were five more lock-like switches within. "Great, time for more vandalism, yay." She lasered the first of the boxes' interiors, the one that was lit, and held it for a long few moments.
"Something's not right," Axiom said, comming her. She had a sinking feeling. "The switches are also setting the state of their neighbors," he declared. Sure enough, she had blasted the leftmost switch, and the second had lit up. Worryingly, the leftmost switch did not look damaged in the slightest. "You'll have to find a combination which turns them all off," Axiom said, as Najia groaned. "I don't think a game of whack-a-mole will get you there," Axiom continued. "Though... Actually, it might!"
Najia groaned, and briefly considered calling for a five-hundred-some member boarding party attack from two capital ships instead. "What tail-hole thought this was a good idea," she bitched. "Who dreamed this up? Why install it like this? Don't anybody answer that, those questions were rhetorical," she snarked, as she set about the process of shooting the junction boxes like they were a juvenile 'turn them all off' game.
About eighty seconds and the false start of thinking she could shoot an inactive switch to switch it on and switch its neighbors states (it transpired that she could only make an active switch toggle neighbors' states), all five boxes were dark, and Najia snarled, bristling with outrage that this was evidently considered part of a high security system and not a child's game.
"You got it, Wildcard!" Axiom commed her. "Access to Level 3 established. And it turned off the darned fan! Off to the hangar, then." Up one level, Najia cycled herself into the airlock, and groaned. She was getting mightily tired of this, and she rolled her shoulders. "I am going to need a massage and to soak for an hour in the shower," she griped to no-one in particular. She hefted her EMU half-over her left shoulder, unholstering her pistol, just in case. The EMU was very heavy, but her EV suit had a fairly substantial low-profile power assist mechanism. Not enough to turn her into a super-soldier by any means, but enough to let her heft a 150kg load like a bulky and cumbersome backpack. She was tempted to leave it behind... But it was a good thing she didn't. The corridor she found was only a straight shot to - and she groaned - another airlock. As she approached it, Axiom unhelpfully congratulated her. "Excellent," he said. "Yo're approaching the internal hangar now. Our getaway ship is right over there." Cycling through, she passed into the deep well of an internal ship hangar - and groaned.
Najia was looking at a Magpie. That was the big, innovative, unique ship?
"If we want to make it out of here, you'll have to destroy the clamps on the hangar doors," Axiom informed her. Najia groaned, sighed, and rolled her shoulders. "Right. I can do that. All this for a..." She seethed, and looked back at the ship.
No, it wasn't a Magpie, but it sure as hell looked like one. It was clearly a derivative design, but it had not the Magpie's massive cargo pods; rather, it had smaller pods, and a lot more gubbins - antennae, dishes, and the like. Fan-dabbie-dozie she thought balefully to herself as she set about finding and destroying the lockdown clamps. As she did so, she also saw a couple more panels that had a turret hologram over them, and, thinking, why the hell not, fried them, too. Moments later, the lockdown clamps fell, too, and she saw a red light glare through one of the hangar windows.
Axiom piped up, "Holy triangle, that's the station alarm! Lucca and I are going to make a run for the ship!" She blinked, looking up - two EVA-suited figures, with full EMUs, cycled through the airlock she had come through.
What, she thought. Where... I... What... Where...? In a moment of dumbfounded confusion, she stared openly, unmoving, before both of them dipped between the ship's large thrusters, and headed for its belly, while Axiom said, "approaching the dock. Be with you in a moment!" Fearing being left behind, Najia abandoned the question of where they had gotten EV suits, let alone EMUs, in favor of making haste to join them.
As Najia negotiated into the airlock, Axiom and Lucca reported that they had boarded, and Axiom was working on powering up the ship's systems, and Axiom was transferring the ship's ownership - and hence, control - to her. They were trying to talk over one another, making it confusing, but, as she got into the ship and shed her MMU, running for the seat, Axiom noted, "This prototype ship does not appear to have an emergency eject system. I assume it was supposed to be added later." "Great," she snarled. "This is going tits-up and I'm in a little ship with no ejection system." "Split been moving into position," Maestro informed her, in a bit of good news. "Alarm must have mobilized more Ministry forces than Split anticipated."
"Thrice blasted!" Axiom roared from the back. "Mellerd deployed a capital ship to head off the Arcadian Endeavour!" Najia groaned, checking her map. A Pheonix-class vessel named Rolling Rock was engaging the Arcadian Endeavor.
As Najia got the Raven's struts up and pushed it forward, she got a comm from the Rolling Rock itself. She snarled as she saw Kriss Mellerd in her comm pane. "Thank you for leading the old man, and his crew of clowns, right to my doorstep. Crossing them off the Ministry's list will do wonders for my career advancement."
Najia gawped at her, in shock at the sheer gall on display, as Mellerd laughed. "You just stumbled into this whole affair, so I will offer you a one-time chance to get out of this. All you have to do is dock at my ship and hand over the pirates youy are currently harboring. You won't be able to keep the ship, but -"
Najia cut her off, snarling in anger. "You just love the sound of your own voice, bitch. Even if I was inclined to take an 'out,' though, nobody can trust you. For anything." Najia switched the comms to her ships, as she powered the Raven up to full. It seemed to be armed with two cannons; she test-fired them by holding in the trigger. They didn't fire immediately, but when she let go, they let fly. "Woah. These must be those Teladi charger things," she muttered. "Whatever. Ladies? This bitch cannot be trusted to keep her word. End her rightly!"
The Rolling Rock was already exchanging fire with Arcadian Endeavor, while Ace nipped at her heels, firing off shots from that launcher and the frontal cannon. Shiv and Kunai - the name chosen for the Paramerion - lifted from the Jackdaw and Arcadian Endeavour respectively, while Jackdaw and the Snapping Tortoise broke from formation with it to engage.
"L beam turrets... Problematic," Najia muttered to herself. "Let me see what I can do about that," she added, as she set the Raven prototype in motion. She could only hope, at least, that Kriss was at least rethinking her decision, now that the odds had tilted decidedly against her.
She dove into action against Rolling Rock, testing out the Muon Chargers, as the ships with her split and attacked. The destroyer was big, and problematic, but it seemed rather... Awkward to control, in fact. Ponderous, its turrets, even the lasers, seemed slow to respond. She nipped around it, firing a few times, as her four ships slipped past it. A plasma bolt struck her shields, and she yelped, diving to evade. "That's it," she heard Rei - not over the open comms, but in her earbud. "I am not letting you get your ass killed like this. I'm dispatching help," she said, and Najia winced.
Great. So this is how the war with the Ministry starts? And yet, oddly... There was no sign of Ministry reinforcements. Najia fled from the immediate vicinity to recharge her shields, coming in close to the Arcadian Endeavour, and watched as the Eighteen Billion Katana squads roared in. She winced as she saw that Okayama and her defense fleet had also been dispatched - a Destroyer squadron was going to bear down on Rolling Rock... Eventually. And yet, the Ministry was doing nothing.
It hit her suddenly; Kriss was rogue. Was doing this on her own. She snarled and grinned. The Ministry might be mad, when this shook out, but they'd have a hard time proving her involvement. Especially if she could play it as her ships responding to a distress call because a rogue vessel with an unaffiliated transponder had attacked a ship. It was flimsy... But it was enough. "Bear down on her, ladies. Tear that thing apart." Najia crowed, as she pulled the Raven in to touch down on the Arcadian Endeavour's landing pad. She looked back. "Axiom, they're gonna need you in the engine room. Lucca, you're not gonna wanna be on this ship!" The back ramp was dropping as she settled down; neither waited for her to have landed fully, they dropped from the ship and sprinted past, to the lift.
"So, you've decided to go down with the sinking ship? One less loose end for me to tie up later!" Mellerd crowed at her, and Najia smirked; of course she knew she couldn't trust Mellerd. "You're worse than a pirate, Kriss. Nobody can trust you," Najia said. "Prepare to kiss your ass goodbye."
Maestro was rattling on in her ear, but Najia could barely hear him over the combat calls. She hoped he was smart enough not to fire upon the T.E. vessels responding - it would be awkward later, and they were joining the fight on his side, after all. He was saying something about escape, and turrets. Najia snorted. "Actually, we're just going to blow this thing up," Najia declared. "We can't leave someone like Kriss Mellerd at our backs."
Things seemed to be doing well at first; the Rolling Rock was handling clumsily, awkwardly, as if she was critically undermanned. That gave Najia an odd hope that she might actually succeed at boarding her; the responding vessels were quickly tearing down her turrets and shields.
Then, everything went dramatically pear-shaped. Najia yelped as lasers tickled the the Raven's shields down and she got them back up again; again and again this happened, each time the hull started to fracture more and more. She made attack runs, damaged a surface element, and then things got worse. Where were those lasers coming from?
"Missile. Incoming missile." She slapped the countermeasures button, only to see the screen flash ammo empty. "Fuck!" A missile slammed into her, followed by a fly-by from a starfighter. She didn't catch it, but she took a pot-shot at it as it went past. Things were going from bad, to worse, when she heard someone howl, "Jackdaw's taking heavy fire! Jackdaw's... Oh fuck!"
Najia felt a moment of total disassociation. Numbly, her hand drifted over the stick, trying to maneuver the clunky ship like a starfighter, whilst fighting through mental fog.
Marta.
"We've got them!" Rei stringer called out, over her line. "I've got the crew of Jackdaw at the depot, but now we're under attack by a Ministry warship!" Najia gasped, shoving her stick forward, hard. Her ship was flying apart around her, and she snarled. "Someone get these motherfuckers!" "We're coming in," she heard - both the first, and last, person she wanted to hear. "Fenrir, engaging!" "Okayama, engaging." "Kagawa, engaging!" "Ark Royal, moving to engage!"
Najia laughed, incredulously. That was four fleets. Four fleets that most definitely were not supposed to be engaging to support the Arcadian Endeavour. One of them the Teladi wasn't even supposed to know about - Alarms blared. The Raven had taken a nasty hit, and a Ministry Kea was lining up on her six. She tried to pull away - she wasn't going to be fast enough - the ship jerked - the world went white.
Najia crashed forward to the deck, yelping, arms up to guard her head. She looked up; a Marine was standing next to her, offering her hand to Najia. "Better get to the skipper, ma'am," the Marina said. "We're Koshirae." Najia laughed, taking the proffered hand and climbing to her feet, hustling down to the bridge's main deck. Selaia Kevlin was standing in the middle like the Maestro, calmingly barking out orders with command presence. She looked up at Najia, briefly, smirking at her. "Does the owner have the conn?"
Najia shook her head, laughing. "Fight the ship, captain. I've got to coordinate this clusterfuck." Selaia laughed at her and nodded, barking out, "bring us up ninety, show her our broadside. Turret gunners, you are cleared to engage."
She hustled down to the fleet coordination console; the crewwoman at it hopping away for her. "This is Takio," she said, hopping on the controls. "Ladies, clear my skies of red. I don't know what the hell has gotten into the Ministry, attacking our stations like this, but if it's hostile out there, we kill it."
Rolling Rock was not having a good day, and it was getting exponentially worse. Her engines had been disabled, and Najia heard Maestro call out over the pirate channel, "Her engines are disabled. Now is the time to get away! But, where is Wildcard?" Najia winced. How was she going to explain that? Did she even want to? "This is Snapping Tortoise," Raleen, the captain of her pirate Baku called out. "We are picking up the crew of Jackdaw and Raven. Let these big bruisers fight, we'll get back to you."
"No!" Kriss Mellerd called out, yelping. "I don't wanna die!" Rolling Rock was coming apart under the growing tide of fire it was enduring, and more ships were still arriving. Najia snarled. Part of her wanted to bid Kriss a bon voyage to the afterlife, but she looked up to Selaia. "If anyone gets out of that ship, I want them. And we don't tell the Ministry."
"Roger that," Selaia said, and barked out orders to the helm to move closer to Rolling Rock. Najia looked back - a Ministry Razorbill was thoroughly engaged, and another had just blown up, attacking the construction depot.
She gritted her teeth, snorting hard. There was going to be hell to pay for this later. Righteous indigation - no, fury - was going to be the order of the day. Her ships had responded to a distress call from a Windfall trader, by an unidentified vessel. It was attacking relentlessly, wasn't on-record as being anything official. Then Ministry vessels, apparently heeding the aggressor's pleas, had jumped in, attacking Takio Enterprises assets, and the inevitable happen.
That was the tack she was going to have to take, and she clenched her fist. Outside, Rolling Rock came apart in a dazzling blossom of red that polarized the bridge windows for a long several moments. When they cleared, the ship was a debris field. Part of her hoped that Mellerd was dead; part of her hoped she wasn't. There was going to be a butcher's bill for today, and she tried - probably vainly - to make peace with that.
"Get us close enough to the Ministry Wharf to make contact," Najia said, looking to Selaia. "I've some barking to do." Selaia smirked at her. "After this? They should know damn well your bark isn't nearly as bad as your bite. They should be happy to get barked at. You should put on a respectable jacket at least." Najia let out a huff of exasperation, hurrying to do just that.
Najia needed to work to summon the righteous indignation she required for the bluff, but she reminded herself of the fate of Ace's mother to do so; the Ministry were assholes, even if they were also the lawful authority; and they had attacked her. She had clear and convincing evidence that Mellerd was up to no damn good. Not that she waas going to reveal it to anyone.
Hence, she found herself with eyes coldly blazing over the comms to the Ministry Police Kea craft which had departed from the wharf to intercept Koshirae. "Enough is enough," she snarled over the holo, standing in the conference room. "My ships responded to an attack upon a free trader from a destroyer that was not transmitting appropriate Ministry codes - not that the Ministry should be allowed to attack random traders, either."
"Your ships fired upon Ministry vessels," the captain of the Kea shot back, clearly outraged - but also, like the pilot who had followed her through the rift - terrified at being massively outnumbered and outgunned.
"Let me be clear, on the record, so there is no ambiguity," Najia said, leaning forward, placing her fist on the table. The effect was to lean closer to the hologram - and on the little attack ship's screen, her face would loom larger. "My ships responded to a distress call from a ship being attacked by an unknown vessel not transmitting appropriate ID. The Ministry, for whatever reasons, chose to respond to the event by siding with the aggressor and attacking my ships. Takio Enterprises warships responded by destroying the Ministry vessels." Her heart was thumping in her chest, but she narrowed her eyes. "If this is the gratitude of the Ministry of Finance, for all that Takio Enterprises has done here in Eighteen Billion, in Grand Exchange and at large, for the Ministry and the company, up to and including constructing facilities and securing neutral diplomats to mediate the dispute between the Company and the Ministry... Well, you might want to check with your superiors before you write a check they have to make good on. To be absolutely clear, this is a threat; you are the highest-ranking Ministry combat officer in Eighteen Billion. It is your decision whether this conflict continues or ceases, here and now. Ah - ah! Shut your fucking muzzle and listen to me carefully," she snapped, as the pilot opened her muzzle to retort.
"If you say anything but words to the effect of 'this was a horrible misunderstanding and we should deescalate the situation' - if you, personally, choose to escalate the situation, the first step I will take will be ordering all of my shipyards to stop producing vessels for the Ministry. The second step will be that I shall cripple the Ministry's ability to replace vessels by destroying the Ministry Shipyard and Wharf here in Eighteen Billion. I shall then proceed onward to prosecute this destructive and pointless war - a war chosen by you, pilot, here and now - by destroying each and every Ministry of Trade station I can find, until someone with some competent authority asks me to please stop doing that. You can see the weight of tonnage I have here, you know the Ministry does not have the tonnage to stop me. The choice is in your claws, pilot; war, or peace. War, or peace. Escalate, or deescalate. Your call."
The Kea pilot visibly shrank backwards in her command chair, obviously struggling to attempt to retain composure and command respect in the face of an overt and direct threat to bring fire and flame directly to the Ministry of Finance. Finally she steeled herself, straightening up in her chair. "This has obviously been a dreadful misunderstanding, miss Takio. The Ministry is undoubtedly going to demand reparations for our lost warships, but such matters are the purview of the financiers, not myself. If you will cease giving offense, we too shall cease attacks upon your vessels."
"Thank you," Najia said, leaning back. She fought not to visibly slump and sigh in relief, or to show how badly her heart was racing. "As for the reparations, they can take that up with the diplomat I have on payroll. Out." She cut the channel, and collapsed back into the chair behind her.
A moment later, the comm lit up again, and she flicked it on. It was a huge conference call, with the commanders of her fleets, the captain of Koshirae, Marta on the Snapping Tortoise with a small bandage on her forehead; Rei Stringer on the 18B construction depot, Tsukiko Peterson back at the headquarters, Professors Nakagawa and Okoye - whom Najia realized with a pang of guilt she hadn't yet formally re-introduced herself to -, Boso Ta,, and Ace. Najia let out a heavy sigh of relief. "Please for the love of god tell me we didn't lose anybody," she said, first off.
"Nobody from Jackdaw, Marta confirmed. "I took a headcount. We got lucky. "That seems to be a recurring theme," added Captain - probably should be Commodore - Xiaowen Kapoor - one of Najia's older friends, and currently the commander of T.E.S. Fenrir. "It helps that we responded with overwhelming firepower. My fleet is reporting no fatalties; thirteen casualties, mostly caused by haste in the heat of battle."
That proved to be the recurring theme; all of her responders reported sustaining injuries, mostly 'workplace accidents' incurred whilst in the heat of battle, but though some were serious, none were life-threatening.
"Najia Takio," Professor Yoriko Okoye - an aged-but-not-venerable, steel-haired professor-turned diplomat said, with the same tone of voice that she had used when reproaching Najia in class. "You are now, as ever you were, charmed, lucky, and reckless. You choose to act with passion first and foremost. This is a fine mess that I'm going to have to clean up, you understand. Can I expect this sort of thing to deal with in the future?"
Najia took in a breath, glancing around at her fellows. Barring a few, they were all young - Tsukiko was the third-oldest and Najia knew she was closer to thirty-five than forty - barely. Most of them looked grave, but not mutinious. She sighed, and smiled, wryly. "While I don't plan to go to war with the Ministry, there may be future... Rough spots to smooth over, yes. If you'd like to resign and go home -" "Not yet," the aged professor said, sharply. "But for dealing with this, I am going to require a pay rise!"
A chorus of chuckles surrounded her, and Najia sighed, face-palming and smiling. "That's fair, professor. We're going to have a fine time untangling this. Ace, how are the Curs?"
Ace looked into her eyes, then looked away for a moment, then back to her. "Secure in Windfall, awaiting your hopefully-safe return." She trilled, and Najia nodded. "Next stop, then."

A group of coworkers and I became friends and started hanging out. They invited me to a Dodger’s game and I accepted. I was super excited all week. Also, (I know this is not recommended), I’m dating one of my coworkers, and was happy to be able to spend more time together after work.
Our group met up and drank before we got to the game. We drank a bit more in the car. I probably had about 5-6 standard drinks.
I remember walking into the stadium and through security… vaguely walking to our seats … then all of a sudden, I’m in a bed in the emergency room in the hospital , IV in my arm and covered in puke.
I had literally no idea what happened; I texted all my coworkers but no one replied to me. I texted the girl I’m dating and she said … “This is our breakup”. I asked why and she said she’s “never seen anyone as fucked up as me.”
Funny thing is she drinks alone after work every single day of her life. But whatever.
TLDR; I fucked up by not only hanging out with coworkers but also dating one.. and being so repulsive I made her break up with me.
Awesome :)

iPhone 12 Pro fully updated.
Sitting here at 2AM with my iPhone on the wireless charger like I've done 1000 times before.
Suddenly it flashed the LED four times and made a strange but loud and pleasant DING-DING-DING-DING sound in the key of C. Woke up the whole house because it's a chime at 2AM.
The fact that this sound was so "pleasant" but yet completely alien to me was weird. It's not like any ringtone I've ever used. And even if it was, it shouldn't flash my LED like it was some crazy emergency.
Silence mode is on. Nothing has changed on my phone in the past 180 days. I have nothing enabled in Accessibility that should trigger this.
No alerts, no notifications, no emergency, no alarms set, no Amber Alert, no nothing. It is 100% the same as it's been for months if not years. I'm scrolling through any leftover notifications to see what could have triggered whatever this is but I see absolutely nothing.
I've had an iPhone for 10+ years and have never seen or heard this. I have no idea what it is. It's 2AM and my wife and kid also have iPhones on the same network and in the same room as me, charging, and neither of them did it so it's not some massive emergency or they'd get this alert too.
The biggest mystery is that it gave me such a weird audible alert with a tone I've never heard of, AND it flashed the LED brightly several times.
What's going on?

While rewatching RvB for the 5th time, I’ve realized that Alpha and Epilson have never been in the same room.The closest we got was in Room Zero when Epilson interacts with a Alpha like version of Epilson in the memory unit.

When I was about 13, there was this girl I (18M) really liked who went to my youth group. At the time I was pretty chubby, and decided to loose a little weight to try and get her to think I was as cute as I thought she was. But I also grew up with strict parents, so I didn’t really have much access to any resources to know how to do it in a healthy way. I couldn’t talk to my parents about it because they were both overweight and anytime I tried to talk to them about how I was feeling about my body they told me I looked fine and to just ignore those feelings. So I decided at the time to just start eating healthier without telling anyone.
Starts off in a pretty healthy way, but the girl started to not come to church as much so I figured I needed to lose weight faster in order to be more attractive. That quickly developed into me skipping meals and obsessively counting calories. This went on for a month or two until I had finally reached the weight I thought I wanted. But by the time I reached it, I was so afraid of eating and didn’t really know how to stop on my diet. It wasn’t about her anymore, it was about me wanting to be as skinny as I possibly could so nobody would make a joke about my weight anymore. I just kept eating as little as possible, weighing myself 10+ times a day, and running on the treadmill everyday to the point where I physically couldn’t run anymore. It got to the point to where I was 14, 5’6ish, and only 109 pounds.
My eyes had dark sunken circles around them, my cheeks were hollow, and all I could think about was how I should count every calorie that goes into my mouth. At one point my mom was forcing me to eat a banana and drink a glass of milk so i stuffed the banana in my pocket when she wasn’t looking. I couldn’t figure out how to ditch the milk tho so I drank it and cried for two hours.
Later that week my lip swelled up out to the size of a grape and I was taken to the emergency room. There they discovered all my essential nutrients levels were severely low. Not only that, but my lack of eating mixed with a hereditary disease I didn’t know I had caused my bilirubin levels to skyrocket causing my eyes and teeth to be a yellowish color instead of white. This was the moment my parents decided to start taking me to a therapist that diagnosed me with anarexia, clinical anxiety, and quote “signs of depression”. In addition, I was also taken to a nutritionist who put me on a meal plan. Luckily I was able to sort of recover a few months later and start eating normally again, with my parents making me send them pictures of every meal I eat.
Everything was fine but I flipped back to the other extreme and overeating a lot again. Always justifying it in my head thinking I just need to gain the weight back. This habit continued on and off for the next 4 years or so. Then it’s my senior year (class of 23) and in november I was 220 pounds. I didn’t really get bullied in school for my weight, but people did make jokes about it. I know they didn’t mean them in a way to intentionally hurt my feelings, but it still did. Decided to go on a diet and do it right this time. Used a fitness app that kept me in line, stopped indulging in food whenever I felt sad. But it happened again. The obsessively counting calories, the always worrying about how I looked.
Now i’m at 170, loosing 50 pounds in about 4 months. I dropped the app, but I still can’t get my eating habits in check. A lot of people have commented about my weight lose, not really positively tho more objectively like they did when I was 14. Some days I over eat because I’m sad or stressed or whatever. Others, Im skipping meals because im so afraid of gaining all the weight back again like I did before. I’ve been trying to shake the obsession but it’s been a part of me for so long i’m not sure how to live without it, I just don’t know what to do. I’m not like a social outcast or anything. I’ve got a few friend with that i’ve known for years now, and we hang out about once or twice a week. I’m fairly popular at my job and got promoted after only working there for 6 months. And i’ve got an amazing partner of a year and some chang. All that to say is I don’t think im noticeably mentally ill or some, but it’s been a big part of my life for a very long time now. I don’t know what’s wrong with me, and I don’t know how to fix it. I just want to relax, and trust myself enough to indulge but not overindulge yk. What can I do?
P.S. I don’t go to church anymore, and the girl turned out to be kind of bratty rich kid. It’s so weird to think back about how I started all of this to get the attention of a girl I stopped liking in less then a year.