I am a firm believer that action films require a male lead in order to be effective in the action market. Nearly every one of these films is about revenge, taking on a spirit of vengeance, or taking on the role of justice. But the strange part of this is that both vengeance and justice are feminine deities in mythology, and at multiple levels. The male action hero is less about taking revenge or enacting justice and is more about understanding their role in taking revenge, which can result in not wanting revenge at all or realizing there is something more grand to the journey they enter. This is why mystery and whodunit stories appeal to women, because women enjoy aspects of revenge and justice, while being less interested in the more masculine aspects like enlightenment and the hero’s journey.
That statement alone is enough to set any wokescold’s blood a’boiling, because it’s a factual statement.
None of this means it’s impossible to make an action movie with a female lead, it just means it will be built differently with themes exclusive to the female role. I’ve talked about the movie Furie here and there when talking about female roles in stories because it’s a clear example of how to do it right when the female role is meant to be a tiger mother archetype. The story is simple: a mother has her child kidnapped by bad guys and she goes out to retrieve her child and save her from the dangerous world they live in. This kind of story is very primitive, with how it’s no different than if a tigress lost her cub and had to find it in the wilderness. The tiger mother finds her strength by being more feminine, closer to mother earth, and using her nurturing spirit to stay dedicated to her main goal: protect her cub.
Not only protect, but also allow her cub to flourish in the world by making sure her child studies hard, gets a good job, and gives the air of “not being good enough” because that is what the world tells us every day. We will never please the world and feel comfortable at any moment for any reason unless we willingly let our guard down, and that’s when the snake devours the cub. The tiger mother views the world as harsh, unforgiving, and a constant threat of corruption that will swallow their child whole. They are not paranoid, they are realistic. They are not carefree, they are careful. This mentality causes them to become very authoritarian, and so the tiger mother might as well be called the empress, because they are to be the empress of both their world and the world of their child’s.
A fury is one of the Furies from Greek mythology, who are the 3 goddesses of vengeance. Nemesis came before them as a goddess of revenge, but it is more like Nemesis handles anger between gods and the furies cast curses upon humans. In the movie Furie, there is a detective who is after the same villain, with the villain being this drug lady(as in female version of drug lord) and she is the dark sorceress of the streets. The Drug Lady represents the terrible chaotic side of the earth mother, with her minions being these evil demons who kill and rape anything in their path. The entire story of Furie was a mythological tale presented in modern day Vietnam in one of the most beautiful depictions of such a tale I’ve seen in a while.
This is not meant to be a hero’s journey other than the journey of the detective, who gains a gift from the tiger mother in the form of protection while he also saves her in the end, meaning there is a supportive synergy going on in their relationship. The authoritarian femme fatale assisting the masculine authority is a story about control between both family and society. An action movie like this is why I love action films when they have effort put into them, because there is deep subject matter being played out through simple interactions between individuals and between that we get epic fight scenes.
Let me tell you: these fight scenes are awesome.
It’s not just about a woman beating up a bunch of dudes. It’s about how she struggles to get through each fight but will still carry on because that’s what a mother does for her child. It’s no different than when a noir hero fights his way through hordes of goons in order to enact his revenge. All of these little fights represent thoughts in our head like “give up” and “go back”, which are meant to detract us from our main goal. Get hit too much or get surrounded and we are forced to play defense or hide behind something, which is no different than being like a turtle hiding in their shell. The turtle, the hermit, only works in isolation and it’s meant to be the moment of introspect.
All of that is a way of saying that the action hero should only play defense to plan a better attack, because the world around them will not give up on the onslaught. These are the moments in an action movie where someone is healing or planning a new attack, with the occasional doubt hitting them near the end. The movie Furie has these moments, specifically for the tiger mother to heal and make a plan to get her daughter back, which enhances the movie’s credibility. We need these high and low points of an action movie for rest, progression of story, getting to know the characters more, and also we don’t expect a budget to be constant expensive action all the time.
If anything, the furie in this movie is a representation of Alecto, goddess of unceasing anger, due to her dedication that goes beyond the death of those who wrong her. In the mythology, the furies are three sisters who live in the underworld, specifically Erebus(meaning darkness), which is why it’s appropriate to have this movie mostly at night and involve the criminal underworld. Whenever an action movie involves the criminal underworld as a setting, they are mirroring the underworld of mythology in a form of katabasis, a journey into the underworld. Think of something like Orpheus or Dante or Jesus making a trip into the underworld in order to achieve a goal. The underworld in this case is always related to something like a wilderness or a hedonistic primitive state of mind that’s full of everything unlawful because the primitive state is before society and order is established.
The male enters the underworld to become enlightened and the female lives there because it’s their domain.
Rape, murder, theft, drug use, kidnapping, everything that we are able to do as humans but only do once our shadow has taken over. The shadow, the darkness within us, is what is so present in the underworld that the entire world is enveloped in darkness, under this shadow. When taken symbolically, this movie works beautifully and it makes sense to have the evil villain kidnap the child of our tiger mother heroine and also try to harvest her organs. This villain, named Thanh Soi, appears to be something like a big bad wolf who goes around and devours children. Being a female antagonist, she represents the ruthless underworld and chaos that causes the world to be so treacherous and causes the tiger mother to be so dedicated.
I have nothing but praise for this first movie because it sticks so close to mythology and fits itself into an alchemical form of storytelling. It’s no surprise this movie was nominated for awards and it probably would have won a lot of them if people respected the beautiful choreography and neon noir aesthetics. I would even go far enough to say that it’s one of my favorite action movies of the decade, if not in the top 10 of all time. It provides a female action heroine in a way that works because she is entirely feminine in her approach to everything, down to her not really having a hero’s journey because that’s reserved for the male assistant she has, who is in the form of a detective.
Sadly, thanks to the colors pink and purple always being present in these neon noir movies, we have encountered a massive issue in how these kinds of movies will be made in the future.
For a quick reminder, noir is the film genre where a cynical hero enters an existentialist journey that changes them for the worst because they were touched by the darkest elements of the world. In noir, the femme fatale always aids in bringing this male hero to his downfall, because the femme fatale is a representation of Lilith and this existential crisis our hero enters represents the fallen state of Adam. These stories are aided by German expressionism and poetic realism, to both ground and extend the story into an almost surreal world that we can relate to. The inner mind of the hero gets reflected out onto the world to cause this expressionism, which allows aspects like elongated shadows and warped environments to symbolically fit into the story and make it look fascinating.
Neo-noir is a postmodernist form of this genre that takes some of the aspects of noir and tries to experiment with more current trends, keeping some of the aesthetics and aspects that resulted from decades of pulp stories being told and merged together in what I would like to call “mental slop” that is created in media by merging elements together after years of experimentation and deconstruction. No longer does it have to do with a cynical hero or an existential crisis, because now the barriers of the genre are removed and people simply recognize it as noir for some vague aspects that might relate to noir, such as dealing with a criminal underworld or the snappy way hardboiled dialogue would be written.
A good way to put it is that neo-noir holds noir “themes” and “sensibilities”.
This is further continued into neon noir, which is not a fully established genre quite yet, but is noticed recently with the increased popularity of retrowave and cyberpunk. The neon lights of the 80s are brought into this neo-noir story to create a contrast between two colors, similar to how noir was filmed in black and white. This is an aesthetic choice and is usually in the form of contrasting purple against a blue because these are complimentary colors. Lights are very present in this new genre, but the light is less of a source of clarity and more like a new form of obscurity. The expressionism in these movies are used for mood enhancing, due to the tranquility of blue and the excitement of red.
All of this is important to note because postmodernists will take everything that works about these factors and then try to avoid anything that makes sense about it. They go by whatever they feel and hope their experimentation doesn’t blow up in their face. Sometimes it works, like in the case of the movie Drive, and other times it doesn’t like in the sequel to Furie called Furies.
Everything was set up for this sequel. There was no way for it to be worse. It had more money, it had Hollywood investing in it, and the concept of the tiger mother can be used as much as any typical action hero setup could be used. Just have a villain who runs a crime syndicate, have a person who was wronged by this crime lord, they seek out revenge, and it ends with the villain being defeated.
Simple, right?
Well… this movie didn’t do that. I mean, it did, but it didn’t in the way that works. There’s a villain, a male drug lord who runs a casino and kidnaps women to sell their bodies for sex. There is a person who is wronged, who is a woman that lost her husband and child at the hands of this drug lord. This woman is seeking revenge and she defeats the villain at the end.
But she’s not the protagonist. She’s not even A protagonist. In fact, they made her the actual villain of the story. The villain… kills the villain. They probably thought they were doing a “Darth Vader killing off the Emperor” kind of thing, but they weren’t.
We are told in the beginning that this woman is to be like a mentor, the fairy godmother who protects our protagonist and guides her through this treacherous world. She’s meant to be a sort of adopted tiger mother, the way lesbians do it, and instead turns into the wicked stepmother by the end. But it seems I’m getting ahead of myself, so I’ll explain this story in a more coherent manner.
This sequel is a prequel. It happens before the first movie. We are introduced to a character named Bi(pronounced like BEE) who claims in a monologue that she was “destined for darkness”. Hey, makes sense. The Furies were born from Nyx in one of the mythologies, so being born from night to be destined for darkness is a sort of match made in heaven for this kind of character.
She becomes a homeless wreck after a drunk man tries to rape her and killed her mother. She killed him and is forever reminded of that moment every time she gets blood on her hands(a running theme we will see later). This is where a lady named Jacqueline finds her and brings her under her wing, hiding her with two other girls. Symbolically, we can determine these three girls are meant to be the furies: Alecto (“Unceasing in Anger”), Tisiphone (“Avenger of Murder”), and Megaera (“Jealous”).
Already, this entire thing fell apart and deviated from the mythology.
I say this because the other two girls are nothing like the furies of mythology and I can only assume Bi is meant to be Tisiphone because her mother was murdered. But she already got her revenge, so there’s not much for her to do in that regard. The girl named Hong is meant to be a cute Harley Quinn style psycho and the girl Thanh Soi is meant to be a butch biker. The two girls want their own forms of revenge against the drug lord that runs the streets they live in, mostly because both used to be slave girls and want to free their fellow women who have been enslaved. Jacqueline convinced them that she wants to free the slave girls as well, and all of this training that she puts them through is for this mission, but there’s a catch.
Jacqueline kept her relationship with this drug lord secret, because she was working with him and ended up having her husband and child killed by this drug lord. For years, she planned out revenge and set up several spies within his ranks, including the boyfriend of Hong. All of this is revealed in the end, so we go through the whole movie believing they are out for vigilante justice against crimes, specifically against women, when it was all because a bitter mother was betrayed after trusting a man too much. Already, this sounds like a mess, and it is. This prequel makes such a simple story incredibly convoluted and tries to use twists as a plaster for weak narrative and symbol subversion. But there’s a reason for this.
The woman who acted as the main heroine in the first movie also plays the role of Jacqueline. These are two different women in the movie’s setting, being played by the same woman. On top of that, the first movie was directed by a man and now this prequel is written and directed by… this same actress in question, Veronica Ngo. That’s right, she decided to play the villain after she wrote the script and directed the entire thing.
It was designed for this woman to crank herself silly.
And boy does it show in the movie. Quite literally in every scene. I say this because the first movie held shots for a while and had the simple story unfold slowly, with long moments to settle down and let the beautiful environment sink in. In the prequel, we are supposed to enjoy flashing colors as every scene is cut and edited like a movie trailer. I’m not kidding when I say that.
Every. Single. Scene.
Even the scene where Bi is being raped by a drunkard is treated like a movie trailer, with the camera changing all over the place and music playing as she monologues about how everything sucks. This camera is a massive pain to sit through, because it’s either constantly moving, getting splashed with CGI blood, zooming over people’s shoulders, or switching between 5 different conversations before a single thought could be finalized. It does that thing where someone is talking in a different scene and then a few seconds later the camera goes to where the person is talking, as if the transition was meant to be meaningful, but it would be for any little thing.
This is the sign of someone trying to experiment with things but are completely incompetent in what they’re doing. It gets worse when we enter fight scenes that look like they were edited frame by frame to hide the fact that they didn’t know what they wanted the fights to look like. The only time a camera holds for longer than a second is when someone dies off screen or Bi starts to suffer from her PTSD. And boy does she suffer.
They have a moment where she kills a random goon, gets blood on her hands, and when they return to their hideout, she vomits in the sink. She gets flashbacks to her first assault and the day her mother dies, which results in her trying to fight Thanh when she tries to calm Bi down. They fight in the bathroom and one of them knocks a valve loose, which causes the shower to turn on and shower both of them as they try to grapple and fall to their knees. This moment is meant to be a loving embrace between sisters during a time of need and support, with Thanh being a protective sister who is dedicated in making sure the new sister is able to get through harsh mental anguish whenever she is triggered.
This, my friend, is the entire problem with this movie.
I understand it’s meant to be emotional and heartfelt. I don’t deny there is thought put behind a moment like this. The music swells, the colors are somber, the water slowly falls on them as if to say the water purifies their thoughts and cools their head. I get it. But what the hell does any of that have to do with being a fury?
This isn’t about taking vengeance, this all feminist woes being presented for the sake of representation. Hong later on has a birthday party and they all celebrate by singing 90s songs(because this movie is meant to take place in the 90s) and when Bi came into the picture they had a makeover montage. This is an action movie written like a teen romcom without the romance and nothing in it is meant to be comedic. There are light hearted moments, sure, but I would never call it a comedy except for this one moment where a drug addict begs for drugs and the drug lord throws it on the ground for him to snort it, and then the drug lord pisses all over him.
To me, that is funny, but it’s treated as a horrible moment to make us hate the villain who doesn’t even really do anything. One of the most disappointing moments is when the furies sneak into a bedroom with him by disguising themselves as club whores and they have the perfect moment to kill him. Bi messes up by being too obvious with her stab attack and he runs away with a slight wound. This is where we have a fight that is meant to be a key moment: a hallway decorated with silhouettes of dancing women as the place fills up with black suited goons.
This moment is meant to show how brave and powerful the girls are, and all it does is accidentally present a massive stereotype where women can't get the job done and they are granted luxuries by having beautiful bodies while wearing a lot of makeup. When I saw this, I figured at least the action scenes will make up for the lack of theme, and… boy was I wrong.
These action scenes, as I said before, are a mess. Everything is a close up so we can’t see what’s going on and every attack is a wide swing that gets blocked by an arm that comes up 5 seconds too early. There is this back and forth that happens with each fight that makes it look functional and the music keeps it pumping, but it always looks like the fight coordinador told them to do everything wrong as a joke and the director was none the wiser. There are even moments where they use the wrong sound effect, like when someone gets punched and it does the stabbing sound effect.
Sure these are tiny technical things, but it gets worse when I am forced to mention the infamous bike scene.
So, Hong dies at the hands of this guy called Son, who is meant to be the dragon below the drug lord. Her boyfriend sees it, with her boyfriend acting as a spy who has infiltrated the drug lord’s ranks, so he’s standing there shocked and everyone ignores him. The remaining two sisters decided to run away on a bike and ensue in a chase sequence that is some of the worst CGI fighting I’ve seen in a while. There was no reason for any of this, they just put it in because the director thought it would look cool. I have no idea what it is with women and motorcycle chases, but there’s something where a woman on a motorcycle is seen as a “sexy” thing, specifically for women.
Not sexy to be sexual, but it’s something that women find aesthetically pleasing, and I can only imagine that it has something to do with the feeling of a bike vibrating between their legs. It also has to do with the idea of danger, because it’s easier to fall off a motorcycle than it is to fall out of a car with the doors closed. That, and I think it’s a fantasy for women to actually ride them without crashing. It’s the director’s way of saying “See! Women can ride motorcycles too!”, as if refraining from instantly crashing is an achievement.
But considering these are women and they are Asian, the fact they are not crashing instantly is a miracle.
What makes it funny is that in order to say “women can ride motorcycles too”, they put these women on a motorcycle and then transition it into a CGI race through the city with the motorcycle sitting in place in front of a greenscreen. We can easily tell this is happening because the wheels aren’t moving and there is the world’s fakest looking background flying by with whacky angles and movements being made with the camera. Bad guys fly into the screen from behind like TIE fighters in the old Star Wars movies, clearly breaking through the scenery, and I could not stop laughing at how terrible it all looked. And they somehow managed to make it worse by having a moment where one of the girls gets knocked off the bike and the other keeps riding to go up a ramp and onto a roof, only to get knocked off the bike herself and the bike flies off the roof and explodes in a corner.
I think I forgot to mention this but EVERYTHING EXPLODES in this movie. It’s as if the direct thought “hey, this part doesn’t have much substance to it, let’s fill it up with explosions.” There’s even a part earlier where they light a building on fire because it was a place where girls were being held captive. They throw lighters in random areas that have lamp oil or alcohol conveniently placed for them and random areas of the building start blowing up. What are you guys lacing in your cocaine over there, nitroglycerin?
Finally, we come back to the ending, the part of the story that ruined it for the movie. Bi and Thanh go to the drug lord’s hideout, they seek revenge for their lost sister, and meanwhile we have Hong’s boyfriend kill Son because… he was her boyfriend and had sex with her. Way to go movie, that sure shows what men care for. We only fight for those we bang and the sex was really that important for him. Forget meaningful things like a firmly built relationship or a child being made between a man and a woman, those aren’t important to a man. It’s all about the dedication someone has to a girl who sold her body for money.
But you know what? His motives and story aren’t important because we don’t even really see him. In fact, they bring in several characters that we’ve never seen before and act as if we’re supposed to know them. This is when they enter the drug lord’s underground casino, with the casino representing a massive gamble that this entire mission has been taking. However, the concept of gambling doesn’t mean much since the story repeatedly hits us with talk about fate, which is meant to relate to the sisters of fate in Greek mythology. I thought we were going to get some kind of motif going on every time they mentioned fate, but they just said “this is our fate” and that was it.
So they enter the casino and start shooting up the place. I don’t know what guns they are using, but they have enough ammo in their magazines to practically be infinite. There’s even an editing flub where they were supposed to show one of the girls reload, but they just show her pulling the slide back to load a bullet in the chamber, as if that’s enough. At least this part of the movie tries to implement gun-fu, but the way they do it is surreal because it’s entirely for show and there’s nothing practical in any of their attacks. They come with limited ammo and see themselves outnumbered, but they end up shooting people in the hands and feet while fighting as a way to ease off some attacks, to then shoot the enemy in the head.
Fast forward a bit and we have one of the stupidest twists enacted on screen. Jacqueline came with the girls to finish this once and for all, and while fighting she is seen getting stabbed in the back by a henchman. The drug lord watches it happen on a CCTV and celebrates. This looks like a perfect time for Bi to get her revenge on the main villain. But no, that would be the smart thing to do.
Instead, they have Bi and Thanh held at gunpoint in a room after a surprisingly difficult fight against a crackhead armed with a syringe who walked up to them like a zombie, and no I am not making that up. It sounds stupid, because it is, but they put that into the movie because someone decided it would be a good time to include something zombie related in a movie that has nothing to do with zombies. So, they’re held at gunpoint and then Jacqueline barges in and shoots the drug lord’s limbs to make sure he suffers. The boyfriend of Hong also comes in and is like “yeah, let’s get our revenge on this sick bastard”.
Then Jacqueline shoots the boyfriend of Hong. Everyone in the room is like “what the hell is going on?!” and Jacqueline kills off the drug lord and goes “Ok, now Thanh has to kill Bi” and both of them are just as confused as the audience. Even if Jacqueline was this new villain who becomes the new drug lord, it’s not like either of the girls would join her if she continued the sex trade. So, Thanh does the expected and tries to shoot Jacqueline instead, but was too slow and gets shot herself. The final fight is between Jacqueline and Bi, with Bi shooting Jacqueline several times.
But this is the part that made me really pissed: they fire the same gun over 30 times without reloading and then the second the gun is trained on Bi’s head… it’s empty.
The only way for this to be more convenient for Bi is if a bird flew in and airdropped a white turd into the eye of Jacqueline and had it explode for good measure. But because that didn’t happen, we have Bi tired as all hell and she collapses in a room full of dead bodies. Police come in and find her alive, arrest her, and then imprison her for 15 years. The big twist of this, the reason this is a prequel is revealed in this single moment where we see her leave her jail cell.
Who was Bi this whole time?
She was the villain of the first movie: Thanh Soi.
Apparently, the name is meant to be something like “she-wolf” and she took the name in honor of her dedicated sister in battle, Thanh Soi. This means that this entire time, the one we’re to be rooting for ends up being this horrible monster from the first movie that was kidnapping children and harvesting their organs. All because she… didn’t like to get blood on her hands.
If you think that none of this makes sense: welcome to the club.
The first movie was brilliant and coherent all the way down to a mythological level. It hit us deep in our unconscious and is something to be remembered years after watching it for how heartfelt each scene was made. It even brought some sympathy to some of the villains with how one of them was spared by the tiger mother because the guy’s own mother was present. It followed a theme of motherhood, while the second movie tried to follow a theme of sisterhood.
Where motherhood was filled with morals and justice, the sisterhood was filled with contradictions and partying.
I do not believe this was done out of a lack of budget or a rushed job. This was the result of how wokeness infiltrates even some of the least western influenced countries to create senseless garbage that nobody likes. We are not only to sympathize with one villain, but we are told that we have to sympathize with two, while the male villains are completely reprehensible. This movie was designed with woke Charlie’s Angels in mind and it shows with how they took three women to fight for a mentor and the only male on the team is treated like a bag of meat. What makes it more hilarious for me is that I’m constantly told by the woke that it’s bad to give women tragic backstories for why they become villains and there’s no excuse for having rape as part of this tragic backstory.
This is the feminism that is designed to trigger western feminists while hoping that Hollywood accepts it as “feminist enough”. This movie was not designed with men in mind, because female action movies are always plagued with over edited fight scenes, girl power moments, and romcom montages. I wish I was kidding, but I have yet to see a female focused action movie that refrained from doing these pointless representation calls, because the goal is to represent in this way.
She Hulk, Charlie's Angels, feminist Ghost Busters, Men in Black International, Atomic Blonde, Captain Marvel, Gunpowder Milkshake, Lucy, Jupiter Ascending, Disney Star Wars, basically every Disney and Pixar movie now. All of these movies are designed specifically to say women can do stuff guys can and then fail to show them doing stuff guys can. Then they wonder why these movies flop and get memed into oblivion. The only people who care about seeing a woman beating up men are angry women, because that is a low resolution view of what the movie is even supposed to say. The only people begging to see that on screen are women who hate men enough to want to beat them up.
This is not a lot of people. This is surprisingly a small fraction of the population and this is who these movies are trying to appeal to. Everything else around this low resolution declaration is meant to be spectacle for the sake of spectacle.
Why did the motorcycle explode? Because explosions are cool.
Why did the girls light a building on fire? Because fire is cool and it leads to explosions.
Why are they shooting the limbs of people? Because shooting limbs is cool.
Why does the camera get covered in CGI blood every 5 seconds? Because blood splatters are cool.
I’m not going to sit here and say something like that lacks style. It has style and it is spectacular. But when placed in a movie with zero meaning and zero purpose, this baseless spectacle gets lost in a sea of nonsense and there’s nothing to hold onto other than the possible impressive choreography or the impressive practical effects. This movie had a little bit of something, but it could never hold a candle to the dedication and effort put into the first movie. I also want to mention the camera work because this is also tied into woke ideology.
Every time the plot is trying to be expressed or shown, the camera and scenes are given the smallest amount of lingering. For example, a turf war begins after they blow up the slave holding… place and it’s shown as a turf war in two events. A person gets shot and people start getting attacked by random. These events lasted for about 5 seconds each. We’re told that Bi is homeless and fighting the local gang by having her steal a wallet and then have someone shout “hey, this is our turf!” all in the span of 5 seconds. We go from the girls going through an outfit montage during a plan to the girls working at the club of the drug lord in about 5 seconds.
If you didn’t get it by now: everything in this movie goes by the 5 second rule, but only when it is about the plot.
Do you want to know what lasts longer than 5 seconds? Moments where the girls are talking about stuff they like and parts where they pose together to present girl power. So to the woke, it takes the tiniest amount of time to show how someone enters the worst stage of their life, but it takes minutes to let us know that these girls plan to stick together and fight side by side. Everything important is done with quick flashes and everything unimportant is lingered on. This is a tactic of the woke to bring the mundane into the essential.
The goal is to feature tiny bits of important things to let the viewer understand why they are in that position, and then hammer in the idea of wokeness that the director or writer wanted to virtue signal for. The woke do not dedicate their focus on the themes of the story that matter to the audience and instead force the viewer to put up with things the woke writer is focused on so that the propaganda is viewed in the first place. We are promised a story about a mother seeking revenge and instead we are treated with the rise of a villain who became that way because she was abused as a child.
Using the woke lens of intersectionality and critical feminist theory, we can determine that the themes of this movie dwindled into arbitrary concepts like PTSD and girls trying to stay friends till the end. All of these are the result of mental weakness and toxic behavior that is now being given an excuse because the context of why they do these toxic actions are presented, even if it’s for 5 seconds. Now a woman like Bi is able to be excused for harvesting the organs of children and even blame men because it all started when her mother was a prostitute and a random drunk guy raped her. This is the polar opposite from how a tiger mother acts, because we are not trying to give excuses for a dedicated mother doing what a dedicated mother does. The tiger mother is a big part of what causes us to survive and is something to strive for because that’s what allows us to reproduce.
Being raped and then suffering PTSD over it doesn’t.
Thanks to intersectionality, the woke demand to present vices as virtuous and weakness as strength because this is how they take the outliers and bring them to the center. This goes beyond postmodernist subjectivity. It becomes subjective advocacy to obfuscate reality itself and pretend it’s incoherent just because their own agenda is incoherent. This is why every time there is a rule, they will pretend there is an exception to it, just because they don’t understand what that rule is or it’s not detailed in a way that prevents horribly bad faith takes. Every established rule for writing established doesn’t have an exception, just an attempt to reject what’s actually effective. These rules were established because they work and because people respond to them positively.
The woke hate positive results because those are the results that signify the rules work.
I don’t mind a female lead in a movie. I also don’t mind when a female lead is in an action movie. I don’t even mind a sisterhood or girls having magic powers or anything like that. Those things make sense to me when they are done properly, which the movie Furie did when they had the tiger mother as the protagonist and a harvester of child organs as the antagonist. That makes 100% sense to me, both symbolically and entertainment wise.
What I don’t like is when wokeness barges into established IPs and tries to change everything to say absolutely nothing of value. I’ve noticed that these feminist and LGBT stories always try to deal with the same nonsense that is done in a sad attempt to connect with some sort of audience they have in mind. Sexual abuse, PTSD, feeling oppressed, mental disorders, spousal abuse, prostitution, sexual deviancy, leaving their family to be with a sexual partner, drug abuse, being found by a guardian lesbian to feel protected, entering a sisterhood or a group of fellow LGBT agents of destruction.
These types of stories don’t mean anything to normal people. We can see some of these things as a terrible thing to have happen and we can attach a negative symbol to these things, but there’s no way in hell a person who’s never experienced any of this feels represented. The representation of a minority, that just wants to claim oppression because of their own choices or because of something that rarely happens, is a losing game. Normal people will either hate it or not care. I have every reason to blame the director for these horrible decisions and I have every reason to claim her poor decisions are because she fell for woke nonsense as a woman.
But no matter what, I refuse to let such an issue deter me from liking the first movie, even though she’s the main actress. The people featured in a story mean nothing to the story outside of how well they can act the part and be the character. Now we even have to say that the actor must retain the source material and culturally make sense, all because the woke want to bring the outliers to the center and turn every Disney character black. Especially the red heads. I only covered the feminist aspect of wokeness here, so we can leave woke race swapping for another time.
Furie is an amazing movie that will be remembered positively for years to come.
Furies is woke trash that will only be remembered for how terrible it was.

Here are my thoughts on potential issues I found after playing both weekends. I'm a poe andy, but played d2 and 3 as well, but this stuff isn't about endgame, or complexity, its purely early game balance, and the experience of leveling a character TO endgame! Not just ONCE, but multiple times. this is an arpg after all.
I made a commentary video going more in depth: https://youtu.be/POthomHs6GI
But, here are the takeaways I hope get fixed.

• Skill tree is tad limited. Branched nodes don't change too much for skills, which limits your variety of what you can do early on.
• Because normal rare gear is so basic, the above is made worse, since you have little customization you can do with rares. its mostly just dmg boost or defense boost, but nothing like chance to freeze, or MANA REGEN, life regen. Gear doesn't even have stat requirements so you completely ignore traditional stats like stdex/int etc.
• Gems are garbage with no good effects. they give more of the same as you do on rares, so again, it doesn't expand variety.
• Skill balance is pretty bad. Ultimates are mostly garbage with way too long of a cooldown for their damage, and many classes have skills that straight up ae better than others in the same class. ie blight vs corpse explosion. aoe skills, but 1 cost high resource to cast, is a dot, and dmg isn't that great compared to CE which is instant dmg and no mana cost.
• mana cost for many skills are too high considering we have no good mana regen. basic skills as regen, i'm not a fan of, but they could have given mana regen on rares to help alleviate that.

which that last point leads into Druid. Druid early game was not fun. a slog. too slow for an arpg considering how different your clear is WITH legendary gear. but until then, druid and barb will not be fun classes to level with. nor, fast. if there's races in the future for seasons, nobodies gonna climb with druid or barb. this has to do with their resource engine not regenerating, and no spirit sustain other than spamming basic skills or EVENTUALLY getting to some resource gain skills on your tree (you have to waste points investing into btw) just slows the classes even more. barb is superb with gear, but i think things can be changed to benefit early game while not destroying endgame.
also in druids case, give it its goddamn specialization earlier. lv20 even. maybe that "fixes" druid, but it needs to be gotten way sooner than even 25 if nothing else is changed.

• Legendaries so far are mostly bad. the ones we got had very little synergy, and were too focused, with the good ones gave too much of a power swing, like the bloodmist one. power swings should be like a unique thing for specialized skills, while legendaries should be general benefits for your class (like more projectiles, bigger aoe for ANY skill, etc). and because of the poor rarity gear and poor skill customization in the trees, this leads to little in variance of builds early game, relying heavily on legenderies. and we can assume the same for uniques in endgame. Barb was one of the few exceptions with decent legendary synergy.
• dungeons gimmicks were bad. it would be okay if they had a chance top spawn in a dungeon, where a dungeon by default was a normal cave you went through and killed the enemies and boss with no conditions. but a mandatory puzzle each time is tiring. I'm sure later on there will be more interesting stuff with sigils and dungeon altering maybe, but when we progress its gonna be a slog solving a puzzle each dungeon we do.
• I hope bosses are great farms in the game. while not early game, i hope set bonus gear added in the future is not all found from dungeons, but some pieces can only drop from uber version of bosses, to split content up, and incentivize people rebuild to handle those hard bosses. and hopefully, with limited tries per run. poe maven and such were hard not just because they were hard, but because you had only 6 portals to clear. that needs to be done in this game, some limitation. this is post-launch stuff ofc.

there's couple more things but suppose thats the main concerns. if we're gonna have seasons, a fresh leveling experience is gonna be important, so it'd be nice if base skills and classes were more evenly balanced, and some power is taken away from legendaries and brought to trees so some skills can be effective (blood mist is really bad by itself and you'll likely never use it outside of hardcore for 1 free dodge every 20 seconds...). also for real....make ults better. they better not have backloaded ultimate to legendaries that give them like 1000 increased damage. plz no. druid needs spirit regen by default, and maybe barb shouldn't lose fury overtime if not in combat.

Here's a draft of a letter that I plan to send to my Representative. I thought it might help to share ideas. I'm not a legal expert, and there are probably mistakes. Maybe there are experts out there that can help us do better.
​
Dear [Congressperson],
I have concerns about S.686, the “RESTRICT Act.” I believe it will be abused by Administrations to censor a broad swath of speech on the Internet, and it would likely be bent to political ends.
Some of my concerns are that:

1. The bill covers a poorly defined and therefore unknown range of activities.
2. The bill doesn’t include any external oversight to encourage the Secretary to adhere to the law and constitutional principles.
3. The bill doesn't include any explicit protections for civil liberties.
4. The bill does nothing to promote privacy and safe data practices.

​
My concern in point 1 regards subsection 3.a, which specifies activities that create “an undue or unacceptable risk of...”

• “interfering in, or altering the result or reported result of a Federal election...”
• “coercive or criminal activities...”

“interfering in” and “coercive” are vague and could be interpreted to include a range of otherwise legal activity. It’s likely that information that is critical of a particular Administration is more likely to be construed as interference or coercion.

• “otherwise poses an undue or unacceptable risk...”

This could cover anything.
These apply to “...any covered transaction by any person.” From the definitions in section 2 of “transaction” and “covered transaction” (including “non-evasion”), I construe that these would apply to private citizens using commonplace technology, such as a VPN or even a search engine.
​
My concern in point 2 is that the bureaucracy created by this bill has influence comparable to the FTC, yet its members aren’t appointed by Congress, its decision process is secret, and it has sole discretion over whether to explain its actions.
For example, nothing stops the Secretary from harassing entities with actions that would be overturned upon judicial review. An Aggressive administration would likely take actions that are legally questionable, and the result would be a chilling effect on legal activity.
​
My concern in point 3 regards subsection 8.a and section 11. Subsection 8.a seems completely open-ended:
“In carrying out the responsibilities under this Act, the Secretary may establish such rules, regulations, and procedures as the Secretary considers appropriate.”
Section 11 begins with: “It shall be unlawful for a person to violate, attempt to violate, conspire to violate, or cause a violation of any regulation...”
My understanding is that the “regulations” and other orders of the Secretary could be practically anything, and they would apply to any person. There are many activities on the Internet that we assume are protected civil liberties. Many of them don’t have established case law. By not including any explicit protections, these civil liberties will be hashed out in the courts.
I expect that the current political and judicial environment would swing far toward restricting civil liberties. For example, I don’t see anything in the bill or current law that prevents the Secretary from establishing an American “Great Firewall.” So to combat the CCP, you might create a baby CCP inside the Commerce Department.
​
Finally, my concern in point 4 is that legislators only know how to ban things. They don’t know how to build things. The current lack of privacy and data security is built into the fabric of the Internet. You can’t ban it away. You need to build a framework that promotes privacy and good data practices.
​
Sincerely,
[Me]

The rules say self-dx is allowed sooooo
Also this was written originally with a doctor or psychologist who would already know who I am reading it in mind, so if there's any missing context I'd be happy to provide!
Different topics are marked with dashes
I tend to fidget with random objects and like to have at least one thing to mess around with in my pocket (ex. a yoyo, some legos, a rubber band, my phone's popsocket). I also used to (until 6th or 7th grade I think?) keep a bag of random stuff I collected that I like. Stuff ranging from bunch of erasers (some in interesting shapes), a bookmark I drew on to look like a ninja, some origami ninja stars, coins. Some of these objects are several years old, but I kept carrying them around just because. I would also play with them as toys to fidget around with or create stories with.
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There are some things I do or used to do that seem like they could be stims
Possible stims:
Making and popping a bubble using my saliva/mouth
Pushing saliva out of my mouth (did this as a kid)
Beatboxing, I do this like all the time for absolutely no reason
Hitting things to make a beat as if they were drums
Making pop sounds with my mouth, often melodic
Wiggling my toes (I do this a lot since it's easy to hide)
Whistling (maybe????)
I sometimes do these dances when I'm alone and often when I'm excited, and I've just now realized that that's 100% a stim
I stim pretty much all the time, now that I'm thinking about it. Sometimes to at once lmao. Way more than a lot of other people in school.
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I do "raptor arms" sometimes. It also feels more comfortable and natural to have my arms bent like that than to have them straight. If this is because of autism, then I often mask the behavior by putting my hands in my pockets or behind me.
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Certain feelings I dislike:
Dry hands on paper
Sharp fingernails getting caught on clothes
Sand in certain places
Smell and maybe taste of bubblegum (gives me a headache, haven't tasted in a while though)
Certain types of soft fabric, especially when the part of the body it's on is dry
Cold liquids, I hate having water with ice in it and usually won't put ice in other drinks if I have a choice, unless they're warm and and need ice
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I'm often the last person to understand a joke, or sometimes I won't realize until I hear it another time (like in movies and games)
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Entirely speculation, but I feel like my mind works differently the others. I have nothing to compare to, but something just feels different in the way I think.
Like, example: the way I write a lot of these things is in a very strange way, almost like talking about myself in 3rd person, or as if im talking about another person. Like, when I think and talk about my feelings, its in a very analytical and logical way, as if im talking about the way someone else is feeling. Is that a normal way people think?
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Eye contact is difficult most of the time
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Writing/typing to people is often easier that talking (which is why I'm writing all this instead of saying it). Kinda like selective mutism.
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I get overwhelmed sometimes and need to take a break in a cool, quiet place (so if I'm feeling overwhelmed on the main floor of my house and the tv is on, I'll go up to my room or the basement where it's usually quieter and a colder temp. Or sometimes during a party, I'll hang out in a more quiet room or the bathroom for a bit to have a break.
I remember one time I was at my cousin's house and all the adults were arguing about politics (as they do), and I went off and sobbed in another room because I was probably overwhelmed. And this happened relatively recently, so it's not like I was a kid who didn't know what was happening and just cried because I was scared. This sounds kinda like a meltdown?
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I have trouble determining intentions or obvious things and other stuff like that. Most easily seen when I watch movies. For example, I was watching a movie with my friends one time, and figured out something interesting. I pointed it out to my friends, but they said something like "well yeah obviously". Happens a lot, I don't realize something that, in hindsight, was obvious.
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Possible special interests? (That's a thing with autism right?)
A mobile game called My Singing Monsters that I usually play daily and first found as a child. I know everything there is to know about this game, so if I'm on the spectrum it's def an interest
Minecraft (or at least I used to?)
Legos (though I lost this one recently. It was a bad feeling.)
Storytelling (if an interest can be as broad as that)
A game called deltarune (my favorite game and idk why lmao)
Music
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There's a few things I do that make no sense at my age.
I always want a parent to come up to my room and "tuck me in" at night. I can go without it but I do like it, even though it's very childish.
I put break oreo cookies apart and put them in a glass of milk, let them soak for a min, then fish them out and eat them with a spoon. Weird but it tastes great lol
As I (might) have mentioned already, I played with toys regularly up until some time last school year, which was 9th grade. I stopped playing with them around the same time I lost my interest in legos.
I still sit in the back seats of cars most of the time. I'm not sure why, but I just prefer them for some reason even though I should prefer the passenger seat. It's not even like a "I feel safer in the back seat" either, I just enjoy it for some reason. My mom often asks me why I still sit in back seats and I have no answer other than "I like it for some reason".
Similar to the car seat thing, I usually prefer to sit in one of two seats at the dinner table and feel kinda weird when I have to sit somewhere else
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I've always been a late bloomer. Most recent example is that until relatively recently, i just did not understand romance or kissing. I understand it now, but it took a few years longer than my classmates. Same with other stuff like that, and I still can't say curse words. It's like my body will not let me utter a curse word, even though im a teen and its acceptable, and i want to. Idk why I can't. Really annoys me
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I do this thing sometimes where I see a face or maybe a sound someone makes and I copy it for some reason. I really don't know why, I just do it. It happens sometimes when I read an expression a character makes in a book as well. I also steal most of my humor and jokes from others, which would be another form of this copying.
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I think I have a usual constant emotion. Usually I feel like 📷 or just kinda content. I might be faking a smile a lot, but im not sure at the moment (Figuring it out rn). I can feel emotions though. Usually happiness/thinking something is funny, sometimes sadness but less so than the others, anxious a lot in a bunch of situations. I also have this one memory as a kid where I realized I was similar to a character from some show who almost always had the 📷 face. Take that with a grain of salt however, because I barely remember it so chances are i got something wrong
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I've already mentioned the bag of stuff I used to carry around but there's a few other things I was and still am unreasonably attached to
A plushie of a minecraft enemy, I think I used to bring it places too sometimes?
My og pair of drum sticks. Had them since 4th grade and I get super upset when I leave them somewhere, I worry a lot that they will get stolen or something. I care about a pair of drumsticks like that. It's not reasonable lol
My phone, but I might be attached to it just because I'm a teenager and it's a phone lol
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Feeling empathy for inanimate objects. I don't have any examples at the moment of writing but maybe I'll come up with something.
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Other quirks and weird things I do that could be related:
I lay weirdly in bed sometimes, it's hard to describe. It's like I'm doing a plank, but putting a ton of pressure
I used to lay on my belly with my legs up when i was going to bed, sometimes swinging them around. I don't do this anymore.
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I get hyperfixations a LOT. Basically if I like something I might latch on to that something for a few weeks or months till I eventually am not interested. I also intensely hyperfixate when I do some activities. I'll be doing a hobby and either not realize or keep putting off that I need to do something, like pee or eat or drink.
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Social problems
I have a few social problems and difficulties.
It's weird; I can hold a conversation with a friend, family member, or some teachers (but not lead it) pretty easily, but with tons of other people I get anxiety or selective mutism or both. Basically I'm better when it's someone I know
While I can converse with people I know better than those I don't, no matter what there's a bit of awkwardness and sometimes confusion, at least on my end. Like I said, I can't really lead a conversation and when the other person runs out of things to say I often don't have anything to say and we just sit in silence for a few seconds.
I can barely do small talk. Best I can to is a somewhat humorous "so the weather, huh" in most cases.
I have trouble understanding sarcasm sometimes and differentiating between sarcasm and serious stuff. Not all the time, but enough to be annoying. It's even more difficult on text.
I have a very odd sense of empathy. I often don't feel it that greatly or.sometimws not at all, like I have to consciously think about it, but sometimes something just gets me in the right way. A good example is the recent earthquake in Turkey(?), which made me really sad when I saw it.
I do something I heard that might be a sign of autism, called parallel play. It's basically when you and another person hang out together but do different things. I do this with cousins or friends sometimes and I enjoy it! Idk why, maybe the idea of being with someone even if we're doing different things is comforting.
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I know that autistic people often have trouble making friends but I have plenty of friends rn. I met most of them through others however. Those original friends, I don't really remember how I got them. And in terms of childhood friends, like elementary school, I did have them but I don't remember how we met and I can't ask them because either they've moved away or I've drifted away from them.
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So, if I am on the spectrum, I must either be pretty low needs or I'm really good at masking my symptoms. I seem to be able to function pretty well with life, relative to others with autism. I just have some weird quirks about me. I do have a history of trying to find something wrong with me, I'll latch on to mental illnesses or disabilities sometimes and try to figure out if I have them. The only I've had a real possibility of having so far is some kind of anxiety disorder (but im not here to talk about that) and now autism or another neurodivergency.
Also worth noting, my parents, especially my dad, work with kids with learning disabilities and stuff like that daily (mom is a reading teacher, dad is a speech teacher and i think he used to work with kids with disabilities privately as a second job when my mom didnt work) so I feel they they'd know if I was on spectrum? Unless a) I'm low needs enough that they never realized or b) they're biased because I'm their child so they wouldn't think I'm on the spectrum at all, and would never test me or anything.
I'd mainly be getting this diagnosis for myself as I doubt I really need any help or something. I struggle with imposter syndrome and it's really drains me, so knowing a yes or know about something like this would make me feel a whole lot better (I hope). Maybe give me a bit more confidence. It would also help me understand myself a bit better because then I'd know that I'm not just a weirdo because I'm a weirdo, but that I'm a weirdo because of a disorder.
Thank you for reading!

Disclaimer: This is a post examining how the current meta will be impacted by the upcoming rotation. It will NOT contain any opinions on how rotation is being implemented or if it'll be good for the game. Instead, it will contain a surface level comparison between each region's current decks and the tools being removed/added tomorrow in an attempt to speculate on what kinds of decks each region will have come tomorrow.
Bandle City:

Lulu Poppy Rumble Ziggs Aloof Travelers Arena Kingpin Arena Mechacaster Assistant Librarian Babbling Balladeers Bomber Twins Bouncing Bomb Cloud Stance Curious Shellfolk Double Tap Ember Monk Entrapment Event Horizon Fix-em-Uppers Flamespitter Friendship! Gruff Grenadier Gust Monk Heroic Charge Hexplosive Minefield Hidden Pathways Hothead Inventive Chemist Keeper’s Verdict Loping Telescope Mega Inferno Bomb Minion Mushroom Ring Papercraft Dragon Pokey Stick Pompous Cavalier Primal Strength Prowling Projectile Purpleberry Shake Quick Quill Rainbowfish Rissu, the Silent Storm Safety Inspector Scholarly Climber Shell Game Spirit Portal Stress Defense The Arsenal The Bandle Tree Thunder Fist Tornado Warrior Transposition Wizened Wizard Yordle Newbie Yordle Ranger Yordle Smith 

The most relevant removals here are the 4 champions, Pokey Stick and most of the multi-region followers. Given that Taliyah Ziggs was one of BC's strongest decks, this is a pretty big blow. Darkness and various flavors of Norra Control should survive, but BC/Demacia style swarm decks appear to be struggling. I predict BC will continue to be niche in the upcoming meta, as they lost quite a lot and aren't really getting anything in return. They might be able to make something happen with Prize Fight in Bilgewater, but the loss of Pokey Stick removes a major incentive to try and force that.
​
Bilgewater:

Gangplank Tahm Kench Twisted Fate Abyssal Guard Black Market Merchant Bone Skewer Boxtopus Crusty Codger Double Up Fortune Croaker Golden Narwhal Hunting Fleet Jack, the Winner Jaull-Fish Loaded Dice Lost Riches Lounging Lizard Marai Songstress Mind Meld Monkey Idol Monster Harpoon Mystifiying Magician Pick a Card Pilfered Goods Pocket Aces Prowling Cutthroat Ripper’s Bay Ruined Rex Shakedown Sleight of Hand Smooth Soloist Strong-Arm Sunk Cost The Dreadway The List Wise Fry Ye Been Warned Yordle Grifter Zap Sprayfin 

Bilgewater got off relatively lightly all things considered. The entire nab package is being shipped off, so value plunder is pretty off the table. They also lose Fortune Croaker + Zap Sprayfin, who made their way into virtually every BW deck to ensure they didn't run out of gas. That being said, they still have card draw in the form of Eye of Naga, they still have a large collection of extremely potent 1 drops like crackshot and jagged butcher, and their staples like Make it Rain and Mirai Warden are still very much intact. In addition to whatever Jack brings to the menu (I think pablo is gonna be real strong), pirate burn appears to be alive and well, despite Gangplank leaving. Deep and Lurk were mostly untouched.
​
Demacia

Fiora Lux Poppy Back to Back Brightsteel Formation Captain Arrika Cithria the Bold Concerted Strike Dragon Chow Egghead Researcher En Garde Field Promotion Gallant Rider Golden Aegis Greathorn Companion Laurent Bladekeeper Laurent Chevalier Laurent Protege Loyal Badgerbear Mageseeker Conservator Mageseeker Investigator Mageseeker Inciter Mageseeker Persuader Mobilize Molten Breath Petricite Stag Pompous Cavalier Radiant Guardian Radiant Strike Ranger’s Resolve Redoubled Valor Reinforcements Sharpsight Silverwing Diver Stalking Broodmother Stand Alone Succession Swiftwing Lancer The Grand Plaza Vanguard Bannerman Vanguard Firstblade Vanguard Lookout Vanguard Redeemer War Chefs Winds of War Yordle Ranger 

Scouts actually got hit surprisingly hard this rotation, losing Concerted Strike, Ranger's Resolve, Yordle Ranger, and Golden Aegis. The loss of Aegis in particular will be felt across virtually every Demacia deck. Demacia's 3 drop slot also took a surprising number of hits, losing important options such as Vanguard Redeemer and Laurent Protege. While most of the dragon package remains intact, losing Dragon Chow will be deeply felt and pretty much single handedly kills off any hopes for SI dragons being good anytime soon (Targon dragons still have some hope though). Lux/Jayce is very dead, even if Jayce himself is doing fine. Last but not least, Demacia loses an important anti-burn card in Radiant Guardian, making them far more susceptible to just being burned out. Fortunately for Demacia players, Vayne with all her flexibility is still here, meaning Gwen Vayne, Aatrox Vayne, and more are all very much on the table. Elites got hit in the patch, but virtually their entire package is still right there and I don't see them going anywhere either. While they lost the easy tech answer to aggro decks, they should still be very strong in the upcoming meta.
​
Freijord

Anivia Braum Trundle Abominable Guardian Ancestral Boon Ancient Yeti Augur of the Old Ones Avarosan Marksman Avarosan Outriders Avarosan Sentry Babbling Bjerg Blighted Ravine Call the Wild Catalyst of Aeons Caught in the Cold Ember Maiden Entreat Faces of the Old Ones Feel the Rush Feral Mystic Gift of the Hearthblood Hearthblood Mender Iceborn Legacy It That Stares Kindly Tavernkeeper Pack Mentality Revitalizing Roar Rimefang Wolf Scarmaiden Reaver Scarmother Vrynna Scarthane Steffen Spirits Unleashed Stalking Wolf Take Heart Tarkaz the Tribeless The Howling Abyss The Scargrounds They Who Endure Troll Chant Troll Ravager Troll Scavenger Troop of Elnuks Unscarred Reaver Voices of the Old Ones Wyrding Stones 

I'm gonna level with you, this one hurt to look through. Their easy in-region ramp payoffs in FTR and Anivia are very gone, but I'm not actually all that worried on that point, win conditions will be found. What's more concerning is that many of their strong board stabilization options are gone. Kindly Tavernkeeper, Hearthblood Mender, and Trundle are all key cards in ramp, control, and even some midrange decks to give the region a fighting chance against burn while they try to survive to their ramp payoff. These removals mean that Freijord goes from being a very important check to burn decks to honestly being rather vulnerable to burn, and given how strong burn traditionally has been in this game, that's very concerning. I'm willing to be proven wrong, but I think any sort of Freijord control/ramp gameplan is pretty dead now. On the bright side, frostbite midrange was essentially untouched, but I still fear that Freijord is about to become a rather 1 dimensional region starting tomorrow.
​
Ionia

Irelia Lee Sin Lulu Yasuo Blossoming Blade Charm Claws of the Dragon Dawn and Dusk Deep Meditation Defiant Dance Dragon’s Rage Emerald Awakener Eye of the Dragon Flower Child Fuzzy Caretaker Go Get It Greenglade Elder Greenglade Lookout Health Potion Homecoming Inspiring Mentor Jeweled Protector Ki Guardian Kinkou Lifeblade Kinkou Wayfinder Lead and Follow Memory’s Cloak Mushroom Ring Navori Highwayman Pix! Ribbon Dancer Ritual of Renewal Scattered Pod Shadow Flare Solitary Monk Sown Seeds Steel Tempest Storm of Blades The Mourned Twin Disciplines Vanguard’s Edge Whimsy! Windfarer Hatchling Windswept Hillock Yone, Windchaser Yusari Zephyr Sage Zinneia, Steel Crescendo 

Ionia lost a lot of combo tools. Stuff like Eye of the Dragon and Deep Meditation leaving are going to be pretty substantial blows to the region. Blade Dance is completely gone, so no more azirelia. Yasuo rally is also gone. It's a good thing Sett's getting added, otherwise I'm not sure what the region would have going for it outside of elusive aggro. On the bright side, most of the region's control tools like Will of Ionia and Deny are very intact, so splashing it into other control regions to enable their wincons is just as strong as it was before.
​
Targon:

Aphelios Soraka Taric Zoe Against the Odds Arbiter of the Peak Battle Bonds Blessing of Targon Crystal Ibex Earth Elemental Fledgling Stellacorn Freed Colossus Frightened Ibex Giddy Sparkleogist Gift Giver Gifts from Beyond Ground Slam Loping Telescope Mentor of the Stones Messenger’s Sigil Mountain Goat Mountain Scryer Mountain Sojourners Out of the Way Paddle Star Rockfall Path Scholarly Climber Shards of the Mountain Sleepy Trouble Bubble Sneaky Zeebles Spacey Sketcher Sparklefly Spell Thief Spring Guardian Star Shepherd Star Spring Starbone Stargazer Starlit Epiphany Starry Scamp Startipped Peak Supercool Starchart Targon’s Peak The Fangs The Flight The Sky Shadows The Veiled Temple Wish 

RIP Da Fangs. Ok on a more serious note, the big losses here are Zoe + Aphelios, two champions that made up the backbone of countless Targon Value decks, and Mountain Goat, a surprisingly critical card in Fated decks. On one hand, the excellent Daybreak package was untouched, so Targon still has an excellent midrange deck to stomp around with. Dragons could potentially make a comeback, especially with Targon being one of the few remaining regions with strong anti-burn cards to slot in. While The Winding Light has largely taken back seat to Demacia's Champion Strength in terms of "Big midrange wincon", the card is still there for folks who want to experiment with midrange outside of Demacia.
​
Noxus

Draven Katarina Rumble Vladimir Arachnoid Host Arachnoid Sentry Arena Bookie Arena Kingpin Arena Mechacaster Arrel the Tracker Battering Ram Black Rose Spy Blade’s Edge Blood for Blood Captive Yeti Crimson Aristocrat Crimson Awakener Crimson Bloodletter Crimson Curator Crimson Disciple Crowd Favorite Culling Strike Death Lotus Death’s Hand Decimate Draven’s Biggest Fan House Spider Hunt the Weak Legion Grenadier Legion Rearguard Legion Veteran Legionary Charge Mimic Noxian Guillotine Ravenous Flock Ruined Reckoner Shiraza the Blade Shrieking Spinner Shunpo Sigil of Malice Survival Skills Thorn of the Rose Thrashing Snapper Whispered Words Wild Claws 

Noxus is a strange case. It feels like they got hit hard and not hard at the same time. Swain control decks are going to be extremely sad with the loss of Ravenous Flock, and a pretty wide variety of decks are going to miss Wispered Words, House Spider and Legion Grenadier. Burn decks will finally be forced to cut Decimate, and the loss of Rearguard is going to incentivize them into Bilgewater even more than before. That being said, Noxian burn still feels pretty intact? They're getting an excellent plunder package, Crimson Pigeon is still terrifying, imperial demolitionist and saboteur still push the damage, it feels like most of what's being lost are midrange to control tools. The loss of flock does make it particularly difficult to level up Swain in region though. I recommend players still looking to use him to either look at PnZ and try to force control to work or to look at strike spells like Brutal Skirmish or Prize Fight.
​
PnZ:

Ezreal Vi Viktor Academy Prodigy Aloof Travelers Amateur Aeronaut Ambush Assembly Bot Astute Academic Ballistic Bot Bandle Painter Boomcrew Rookie Calculated Creations Caustic Cask Chempunk Pickpocket Chempunk Shredder Concurrent Timelines Counterfeit Copies Coup de Grace Death Ray – MK 1 Defective Swapbot Eager Apprentice Eminent Benefactor Fallen Feline Fanclub President Flash of Brilliance Get Excited! Give it All Glorious Evolution Hexcore Foundry Hextech Transmogulator Insightful Investigator Intrepid Mariner Iterative Improvement Jae Medarda Mechanized Mimic Midenstokke Henchmen Parade Electrorig Patrol Wardens Poro Cannon Professor Von Yipp Progress Day Rising Spell Force Scrapdash Assembly Shady Character Statikk Shock Stinky Whump Stress Testing Suit Up! Sumpsnipe Scavenger The University of Piltover Thermogenic Beam Trail of Evidence Tri-Beam Improbulator Unlicensed Innovation Unstable Voltician Used Cask Salesman Vault Breaker Volunteer Elnuk 

I found the burn nerfs guys, looks like they were just concentrated almost entirely in PnZ. Get Excited, Boomcrew Rookie, Cask Salesman, pretty much all the classic PnZ burn cards save for Jynx herself are getting rotated out. I'm not sure what the logic of this was, imo PnZ has been the weakest of the 3 "burn" regions for a long while and this rotation cements that. Obviously an entire archetype is going away in the form of Ezreal combo. Control got off lighter, but the loss of Static Shock and Thermo Beam are definitely going to be felt. Jayce Heimer should survive, but I'm not seeing a whole lot else here in the region. Darkin Harp + Vayne might also be able to live without Vi, but at that point it's less a PnZ deck and more a Demacia deck that splashes one or two PnZ spells. At least Ekko might finally be able to branch out of Shurima (clearly we should run him in Bilgewater so that Ekko can predict off of Prize Fights).
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Shadow Isles

Elise Hecarim Kindred Thresh Absorb Soul Ancient Crocolith Arachnoid Horror Astral Fox Atrocity Blighted Caretaker Brood Awakening Crawling Sensation Cursed Keeper Doombeast Fading Memories Frenzied Skitterer Fresh Offerings Gluttony Go Hard Hapless Aristocrat Haunted Relic Iron Harbinger Lamb’s Respite Minion Mistkeepers Mistwraith Neverglade Collector Oblivious Islander Onslaught of Shadows Pesky Specter Phantom Prankster Possession Ravenous Butcher Risen Mists Shroud of Darkness Song of the Isles Soul Sheperd Soulspinner Spectral Matron Splinter Soul Stirred Spirits Stygian Onlooker The Box The Twisted Treeline Thorny Toad Tortured Prodigy Unspeakable Horror Unto Dusk Vile Feast Withering Mist Withering Wail Wraithcaller 

I will never understand why Kindred had to go. Anyway, the three big headlines here are spiders are extremely dead, ephemeral burn is dead (and with that ephemerals as an archetype most likely), and Vile Feast is going to drastically weaken the aggro matchup of any SI control deck. Fortunately(?) Hallowed was almost literally untouched, so most of your favorite Gwen decks should still be on the menu (Red Gwen losing Kat will def sting, but I doubt the deck is dead). As mentioned earlier, if any control deck can survive the loss of Vile Feat, it'll likely be Darkness. Blighted Caretaker, Ravenous Butcher and Cursed Keeper leaving pretty much kills any sort of slay midrange ideas, as you can no longer do the "SI Special" of Barkbeast into Keeper into either Caretaker or Butcher to instantly create a massively threatening board that heavily swings the game into your favor. Atrocity leaving doesn't help that either. Viego is still here, even if his primary wincon of Atrocity is gone. Depending on where the meta goes there might still be a home for Viego control.
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Shurima:

Sivir Xerath Ziggs Zilean Acolyte’s Reliquary Bomber Twins Boomerang Blade Callous Bonecrusher Careful Preparation Chronoshift Construct of Desolation Desert’s Wrath Endless Devout Herald of the Magus Hothead Imagined Possibilities Inner Sanctum Payday Preservarium Preservationist Profiteer Raz Bloodmane Ricochet Risen Altar Rite of Calling Rite of Passage Rite of the Arcane Ruin Runner Ruinous Acolyte Ruinous Path Sai Scout Sanctum Conservator Sandseer Shaped Stone Spirit Fire Stoneweaving The Absolver The Time Has Come Thrumming Swarm Treasure Seeker Unleashed Energy Unraveled Earth Unworthy Waste Walker 

Man almost every Shurima archetype got hit here. Shurima Girls is gone with Sivir and Ruin Runner. Acolytes are dead and buried. Sun Disk probably returns to meme tier without Xerath (won't stop me from trying though). Preservium leaving is going to hit a lot of decks, and Taliyah in particular got utterly pummeled this rotation. She lost Ziggs, Herald of the Magus, Endless Devout, and even Shaped Stone. I'm not calling the gal dead, but if she does manage to hang on, I'll be impressed. Even Akshan managed to get hit with Absolver getting removed. If I had to find a silver lining here, it's that Azir got some neat support this expansion and Akshan isn't gone gone. That being said, I don't see too many obvious routes for Shruima to go. Maybe Prize Fight Renekton? (I really like Prize Fight, can you tell I really like Prize Fight?)
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Anyway, that's all I really got today. Bilgewater appears to be the obvious winner of this rotation and expansion, with Demacia and Noxus getting through relatively unscathed. The rest of the regions got hit pretty hard and don't have obvious directions to go post-patch. Freijord in particular is really struggling, even more than it was in the previous meta. Anyway that's all I got, night folks.

Making five points of contact with an object (i.e. putting all five of your fingers) lets you gain total control over it. While under your control you can do anything to an object that you can imagine.
Five points of contact on a piano, and you can make it produce any music that a piano can produce.
Five points of contact on a computer case and you can control it even without peripherals.
Five points of contact on a locked door and you can make it unlock and swing open.
Objects are any object, even living things. You can control an object as long as it remains in contact with your 'five points' - for example you can control a pool of water but the moment you throw a water ball at someone you lose contact and its no longer under your control.
Control is not purely kinetic, its also heating/cooling, deforming things etc.

It’s essentially useless now because it’s nearly impossible to follow up with a melee for the kill. Why wasn’t shoulder charge nerfed? Most of the titans I play against are running around with juggernaut and a shotty with shoulder charge. I don’t remember the last time I saw a Titan using ballistic slam. It’s usually only me. Most titans run around like apes because it’s so brain dead easy. What’s the counter to that? Shotty out and hope for the best? That’s a far bigger issue imo.
Don’t even get me started on the straight up neutering thundercrash received. It’s absolutely terrible now. It has less radius than the nova warp blast, or at least it feels that way. And being able to get kills while flying around? That’s straight up gone. Like it literally does not work ever, unless they’re directly in front of you in which case you just wasted the super on one guy. I know it’s much easier to control on M&K, but you can’t just instantly swing backwards in the super on controller. I don’t understand these changes. There are so many infinite range supers and bullshit abilities in this game, why go after ballistic slam and make thundercrash all but useless?

Just a few questions about possible problems. I am an experienced off-roader, coming from several lifted jeeps throughout my day and a very capable Toyota Tacoma that I used to adventure everywhere before I got rear-ended (total loss).
I know that those are different beasts and also I know they have much higher clearances than my stock WRX. But that doesn't face me at all. I've already been to places in my VB, that I never thought it would possible to reach. So far no damage, no scratches, Just being smart and careful but still having fun.
The only thing I am really worried about is the sand getting into the turbo and messing things up, since it is mounted so low in the engine bay. I have the factory skid plate already installed but I don't think that would help since sand gets everywhere. Anything else you can think of? Can I get your thoughts and impressions?

Something went wrong. Related “I’ve said [how I’ll win] it before I’ve been wrong before — and I won’t be wrong again” Oliveira told MMA Fighting. “He’s not Colby Covington so he’s not going to get a title shot off of beating ‘Street Judas’ (Masvidal). That’s a tough one. “The fact that they say ‘Oh while he’s doing this he’s not getting tested right now because of his leg. ’ No – you can still get tested. Well I’m sure Conor understands and it’s more ballyhoo but I just wanna make sure that you guys understand they’re under contract” he said. “And the first step and the first swing to this fight have been thrown and it’s been thrown by the sport’s biggest star” he said. It’s a fight I didn’t know was going to happen” he said on his YouTube Channel. Dagestan’s finest proved too much for the 10-year-plus Ultimate Fighting Championship (UFC) veteran submitting Oliveira in round two with an arm-triangle choke (watch highlights). “If he thinks he’s gonna fight in the Ultimate Fighting Championship and sidestep USADA that’s not going to end well. 1 contender for welterweight champion Leon Edwards but he doesn’t see the same fate for Burns with a win. “Gilbert’s a nice guy family guy” Covington said. I’ll fight him I’ll wrestle him. “I’ll tell you the truth being real here I’ll hunt in this fight. You just have to declare and say ‘Hey this was a therapeutic exemption. ’ But that’s not the case (with McGregor). “And that’s Conor’s point. - Alpha AI

Maeng Da Lovers (Gilang) -
While scrolling, I came across a vendor named Gilang shipping out samples, and decided to take a swing to see if it was quality or not. Got my sample in the mail yesterday, and dosed today for my morning dose, and my evening dose. First dose was 2g, second was 2.25g. I'm beyond happy with the quality of his Green strain. As soon as I opened the bag I could tell it was one of the fresher samples, if not the freshest sample I've gotten to date. I was tempted to dose immediately, but had just dosed 30 minutes prior. Decided to take it the following morning, and was greeted with a very unique feeling of calm. It was the experience you'd imagine a good green would give, but came with a very serene mood boost that, typically, greens tend to not do much for. Mixed excellently in water too, very minimal grit in my experience. Had some very good legs too for the dose size I took. Was very pleased with this sample, and I look forward to putting in another order through Gilang and his company. As far as I can tell, his business is still in its early phases, but I expect that to change fairly quickly. He even included a small handwritten note with my sample, and charged nothing for shipping which says a lot in my opinion. If you are looking for a smaller, lesser known but quality vendor, message u/maengdalovers69. I highly doubt you'll be dissappointed.
Denette's 615 -
While looking through threads and forums looking for a while back, I came across Denettes615 and I have to say, I'm very impressed with the product. I got the Deep Forest Green, one of his 2 fermed reds as well of one of his 2 oxidized (one is red bone, cant remember the other) , and gold Koneng. Every one of them hit very well. Both of the reds almost put me to sleep the first time I took them, super chill vibes, nice body sensation & pain relief. Green gave me a nice mood boost and energy, as well as a bit of warm blanket surprisingly, but the gold was what really stood out to me. I was a red guy before Denettes, but now definitely sticking with more Golds. Strong euphoria and warmth with mild energy and great pain relief. Regardless, his stuff is sure to not disappoint, and he has a rotating menu which lists his last batch as well as the current one, in case you need to go back for some powder you regret not ordering more of. Beyond happy with my purchase, and he really hooked it up for a very affordable price. Couldn't suggest denettes more for someone looking for good kratom at an affordable price.
Peace and love, and enjoy your leaf!
Ps. I'll post pictures in the comments shortly, and label each with company name

I'm trying to help my 77 year old dad buy a used truck, but we're running into some roadblocks. He lives in a rural area in Iowa, outside of town on about 15 miles of county gravel road. About 3 times a month, he has to go up to the state VA that is about 2 hours away (paved hwy) for various health check-ups. His needs are: 4WD, crew cab, small/medium size truck for easy access, automatic, V6, PW, PL and reliable. He would like leather seats because he takes his German Shorthair dog on trips, but he can go with cloth if needed. Personally, I would like it to also have back-up camera/navigation and lane departure for obvious safety reasons.
I've been trying to talk him into something a little newer, within the last 3 years, to get those newer safety features and maybe even have some warranty left. But, the biggest obstacle is he can be very cheap, so it's hard to find something that he's willing to pay. He doesn't want his payments over $500/month. He does have a 2013 Buick Enclave (2WD) with a little over 98,000 miles on it that he could possibly trade or sale, but I'm not sure he'd do that because it was the last car he and my mom bought before she passed away. I also believe he could put around $2000-$3000 down on something. He's been looking at the Nissan Frontier, Toyota Tacoma and Chevy Colorado but he's not found anything in his price range. Is there maybe something different that would fit his needs and still be in line with his price?

So I’m currently searching to buy either a tundra or Tacoma truck (used/pre-owned) I found one at a small dealership nearby it’s a 2011 toyota tundra limited 4x4 4dr Crewmax 5.7L v8. But my thing is the place it’s at wants 19,500 for it and it has about 212,000 miles on it. My main point is it really worth it I know I could probably talk them down a tad and I didn’t know if a truck with those miles on it is even worth looking at

I have been reunited with a guitar I last played 10 or 11 years ago. I'd say I'm a dabbler. Apart from occasionally playing I don't know much about guitar maintenance.
I'm fairly certain I need new strings, so I took off all the strings. Well a quick youtube video later and that may have been a mistake (something to do with maintaining tension on the guitar. Which makes sense.)
So should I have it serviced? It was about $300, a Honer (I think) when I bought it new. (I don't have it in front of me at the moment)
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I could probably buy new strings and figure out how to get them on. Is there any value to taking it to a shop to have them rub some magical oil on it, restring it, and make me feel better that I can enjoy this thing again?
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Oh, it's been in a case, in a "climate-controlled" house all this time. I'm not saying it was in the perfect environment, however, from what I know it wasn't subjected to crazy temperature swings or humidity swings.
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It's a guitar I had written off and I assumed I'd never see it again. Now that I have it I want to play it and take care of it. Your advice on how to do that is appreciated.

My brother currently curses at me everyday and try to pick a physical fight with me bc hes stressed my parents lost their job. As always hes the golden child and I am the black sheep and whenever something goes wrong they ignore me or in my brother’s case take out their anger out on me.
My little brother that I’ve known wasn’t like that when he was a child and just wanted to play with his big bro. Ever since my sibling became the golden child he becomes violent for no reason hitting walls to try to scare me muttering curse words. If I do the same shit I would get the cops called on me. If I threaten to call the cops when he does that, I get threatened to get disowned with my parents threatening to move back to their country and leave me homeless in the US. For fucks sake my little brother is 16 now. Hes not a fucking kid anymore to be swinging his fists wildly and get away with it. If he hits me it actually hurts. 2 more years and hes an adult like me but he still has anger issues.
Whenever my nparents go through a emotional tyrant my little brother emulates that stuff. Hes not even my brother anymore hes just a menace.
My friend who is a christian at school interacts more to me than my little brother who hit stuff whenever hes angry. Hes more of a brother to me than he ever will be.
Its so funny when my parents remind me that my little brother is all I have once they are dead. If my little brother is what I am gonna get after they pass away then I am pretty sure I am not gonna last long either from the stress.

This is not a fully tested load order. There is still bound to be errors or possible mods being in the wrong space. But I’m mostly just sharing this so that other people can take notes on my set up. As I’m rather happy at how I have implemented all the changes I’ve done to all the enemies, weapons, encounters, as well as setting a sense of atmosphere for my play through. I just hope that I have this all set up correctly.
I have many more light sources throughout the game. Some of the members of factions will have flashlights, while some items have glow mapped textures to make them easy to see in the dark. NAC X is also used to take out the HUD in the game and instead replaces health and radiation warning with visual effects. Also hiding the hud and all its pop up and animations means its not taking up processing power on my xbox. While I use other texture mods to make the moon bigger while the stars are more pronounced in the sky. All around I am proud of how visually I’ve improved the game while giving all the enemies more variety through very vanilla means of script mods.
MASTER FILES
Settlement Framework
Far - Faraway area reform
Better Coastal Waves - Wilder Water
Distributed DLC Leveled Lists – I have it set to unhinged. Love what it does to all the enemies!
Retro Radio Replacer
Gatorclaws revamped
FRAMEWORKS
SKK Fast Start
NAC X - Nuka World
NAC X - Far Harbor
Faction and AI Overhauls
Randomized Weapon Templates
Deleveled World
Friendly Radroaches - Makes them an ambient creature. Don’t activated tell after saving in Root Cellar.
Mirelurk Eggs Never Hatch
Deathwings
NEW LANDMASSES
NEW FACTIONS
VANILLA QUESTS MODIFICATIONS/COMMUNITY FIXES
SETTLEMENT AND WORKSHOP MENU ITEMS
Wave Spawner
OCDecorator - Static Loot
OCDecorator - DLC
Home Decoration Daisy Rugs
Fusebox Generator Plus
The Zap Gun, a Makeshift Laser Weapon - I put this here because it adds turrets under defense,
Graf’s Security Fences
You Can Crash on the Couch
Guard Posts and Towers With Spotlights
SETTLEMENT AND WORKSHOP MENU ITEMS
SETTLEMENT AND WORKSHOP MENU OVERHAULS
JunkWalls_More_Snaps
ConcreteWalls_More_Snaps
Improved Shack Bridges
GAME-PLAY CHANGES AND TWEAKS
More Legendary Enemies
Non-Lethal Radiation
Please note that the two mods above are xbox exclusives and that they may not work for everyone. So far they’ve not given me any trouble.
Radiation Overhaul
Effective Melee Blocking
Economical Sprinting
SolarPowered Perk Alternative
Realistic Death Physics - No Animation
Realistic Ragdoll Force
Drinking In the Zone
Lunchboxes - More Food, Less Junk
Valuable Robot Models + Buttercup
NEW COMPANIONS AND PETS
WRVR - New Companion and radio station
NPC AND COMPANION CHANGES
Follower Stealth Distance Fix
Ball - A Fetching Mod - Can be handy and fun to play fetch!
Legendary Kellogg - Also makes changes to all Coursers.
Protected Unique Brahmin
Enemy Workshop Turrets - I think this is another xbox exclusive mod. I haven’t gotten it to work tell I put it in this spot. Tell me if it gives you all any trouble.
RADIO AND AUDIO MODS
(UI ONLY) ScreamingLake Soundscapes - Horror
Classic Fallout Ambient Music Non-Replacer
Not Great Not Terrible - Scarier Geiger Counter sounds
Real Heartbeat Sound
PipBoy Flashlight Sounds - Metro
Existence 2.0 Radio
Visual, Texture, Atmospheric Improvements
Bye Bye Clouds - Removes the clouds in the distance. But helps with FPS. IT JUST WORKS!
Fallout Texture Overhaul - Stars
Vanilla Moon (4X)
Clarity - A Visual Overhaul
NAC X LITE
Clarity + NAC X Patch
Vivid Fallout (HD) - Trees
Vivid Fallout (HD) - Roads and Bridges
Optimized Vanilla Textures - Main
Wooden Shacks Re-Done
Jester’s Better Destroyed Vehicles
Valius’s High Quality Textures
No Ugly Plants and More
Wetness Shader Fix by Ablaze666
Remove Ugly Flat Trash - Helps a little with FPS. But also just cleans the environment up just a little.
Gritty Subway Stations
Redder Rocket
Retextured Chems - Ephla’s
Glowing Children of Atom Armor
Nugs instead of Rad Rabbits
Fallout 3 NV Feral Ghoul Replacer - This is a good performance ghoul texture.
Glowing Animals Emit Light - All DLC
Pre-War Food Classic Volume 1 - We don’t have the second one sorry!
Resident Evil Ammo Boxes (Clean)
The M38 Gas Mask - A ‘Gas Mask Replacer’
ETSGS - Easy To See Glowing Stuff
Immersive Mouth And Teeth - It always bothered me how people’s mouths looked in the game.
Glowing SuperMutant Eyes
Gibs of Glory - Head Explosions and More (Gore)
Limited Blood Decals
Power Line Physics
Swinging Animated Meat Bags - For some reason these have a light on them. But it kind of helps when it’s night out.
Immersive Candles
LIGHTING AND WATER CHANGES
Water Enhancement Textures
Forest Fungus De-Lit
Live Action Handy
Neon Lights
Dynamic Lights for Glowing Drinks
Shadow resolution 2048 > 512
VANILLA SETTLEMENT CHANGES AND TWEAKS
SORTING MODS
HUD AND DEF_UI MODS
HudFramwork
PIP-BOY MAP MODS
Pip_Boy Dual Colors - Green Ghoul
Pip-Boy Flashlight - Large
CHARACTER MODEL REPLACERS, ENHANCERS
NEW WEAPONS, ARMOR, CLOTHING, ECT. NON CRAFTABLE
Dogmeat Helmets and Hats - DLC - It also adds to the Rader dogs level lists!
The Charger Pistol - A Gauss
Reanimator
Dak’s Ballistic Mask
CRAFT YOUR OWN
Scavver’s backpacks
TNR Shoulder Lamp - These can be found on both Gunners and BOS. You will see enemies using flashlights in the dark.
CROSS_Jetpack
K-9 Harness - Tactical Body Armor
Stealth Boy Classic
A Simple Sleeping Bag
NEW SETTLEMENTS, WORLD EDITS
Mogomra’s Home Plate Overhaul
Settlement Salvage Bot - Still Can’t find other spots for it could possibly go to.
NEW QUESTS
Flirty Commonwealth(Female Player)
Flirty Commonwealth(Same Gender) - What I love about these two mods is that they make everyone say more things. All of it uses Vanilla voice lines and some maybe choppy at times. But I’ll never forget having and old lady comlement my but in Good Neighbor.
WEAPONS AND ARMOR MODIFICATIONS
Tactical Weapon Mods - Mounted Lasers, flashlights, bayenets
See Through Scopes - GOTY
RE4 Ammo Pickup Sounds - Moved it here because it does the sound when you pickup a gun. Thought I’d put it here just in case.
Hollywood Laser Bolts
Hollywood Bullet Tracers - What I love about this mod isn’t just that they make the bullets and bolts more pretty. But they Also slow down their velocity. Making it possible for you or enemies to dodge.
Realistic Recoil - look up KupoKinz if your not finding this.
Automatically Lower Weapons - Up loaded by KupoKinz
Free Weapon Downgrades - DLC
Unique Explosives [Season Pass] - Note that this is an xbox exclusive and that it maybe different for everyone as we can’t look deeper into it on Nexus. Still having it here seems to stop the troubles I’ve had with it before.
CROSS Crit Gore-verhaul
Restored Radium Rifle
Perforation - Automatic Weapons - the more you land your hits with automatic weapons the bigger the damage you cause to enemies. Works by scripts to put an invisible gun mod on. May cause you to go unarmed for a little while if your console is being slow. Also does this if you pick up the same kind of gun you're holding.
VAFS - Vaultec Accelerated Focus System - Bullet time!
VAFS Patches
NOTE ON VAFS WITH PERFORATION: These two mods basically work the same way. They both add an invisible mod to your gun. Having just one means their scripts will run faster. While having them both it will be slower to switch to your gun and you may be unarmed while the scripts work. This can also happen when you pick up the same kind of gun that you're holding. So be careful.
SCRAPPING, WORLD EDITS, LANDSCAPE, AND TERRAIN
Notes of the Commonwealth
Advanced Stealth Ring - Another xbox Exclusive mod. So who knows if it will always work for you!
Dead Financial District
Boston - Less Enemies
Fallout 4 AI Overhaul - I’ve not tested this mod. But I think it shouldn’t be activated tell you save in the Root Cellar.
FRAMEWORK BOTTOM
Cheat Terminal
—-------------------------Keep these unactivated until you save in the Root Cellar —----------------
English Full Dialogue Interface
No Combat boundaries
Search and Destroy - Extended combat range and stealth searches
Ferals Can’t Open Doors!
—-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Unlimited Combat Followers
Quick Step
Combat Settlers
Ammo-o-Matic
Hack Protectrons as Settlers
SKK Companion Weapon auto upgrade
SKK Dynamic Damage Manager
Dynamic Loot reduction
Flashy(Joer) - Feral Infestations
SCDC Subjective Cinematic Dialogue
Silent Protagonist by StupidDunmer - This may not work for things like WRVR or may have trouble in DLC areas. As I’ve found it to not work in Far Harbor. But I love what it does with the cut scenes and makes dialogue a lot quicker and better.
—-------------------------------- INI Changes mods that shouldn’t be active tell in the Root Cellar—----
Longer Power Lines
Disable Tutorials
Faster Enemy Respawns - Diamond City Security just got a lot more busy.
Fast Corpse Despawn
Please note that the faster respawn and despawn mods work by time on the wall. Not by waiting or sleeping. If Bodies don’t disappear it's possibly because your to close for them to despawn and should leave.
So here is what your gonna have to do when you first leave the vault. Your gonna head on over to the Root Cellar. Go in there and hot the clothing you get for NAC. Your going to go through and turn off all of it’s features except for just a few. You’ll want to keep the Comlex hit FX, chem FX, weather fx and radiation FX. You can now fully hide your hud if you wanted to and make it a modern FPS. Best of all this will help with performance to get rid of those pesky Pop ups.
Everything else should be turned off as it will eat up the processor in terms of what it will be needing for everything else. Then you save your game and go to the main menu.
When on the main menu you’ll go in and activate the rest of the mods. Then back out and let the xbox load all the new mods you activated. Then you’ll want to restart your xbox. When it comes back on you’ll load the save. Don’t leave the Root Cellar just yet as you’ll want to do another save. Maybe look at the beautiful retro Radio when you save so you’ll know which save is the right one.
Then after the second save you’ll want to fully close Fallout 4 by quitting and fully turning the game off. Only then is it safe to load that save game in.
Now there are a few problems that I’ve noticed and can’t seem to find. For the most part my game runs great. I do have crashes still in Boston. But they’re not as often. But it’s when I’m in the workshop and I’ll get screen tears. They are not often and it’s usually when I’m weapon crafting or building new things. If anyone has advice for me on what it could be. Please let me know.

Hello everyone, I have an issue with my car audio system on my Toyota Tacoma. I recently had the front 6x9 speakers and a 6 channel amp installed onto the truck from a professional car audio shop. I noticed recently that when first starting up my truck in the morning, the right side speaker would be off. It would continually cut out and come back on at random intervals and sometimes on bumpy roads. After about 5-8 minutes of driving, the speaker would get back to normal and play regularly without cutting out over bumps or randomly. I took my truck to my installer and he switched some cables so that the right speaker connection was now going to the left speaker. This yielded the same results on the left side speaker. The amplifier was then changed to a new one and the problem still persists.
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Any idea what this problem could be and the solution?
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TLDR: Driver's side right speaker was cutting out on starting of truck. Took the truck to my installer and connections were changed. The problem then persisted on the Driver's side left speaker. The amplifier was swapped out and the problem is still persisting.

I received a letter notice that applies to my 2022 Toyota Camry. It is a recall to inspect a potential faulty crankcase case vent.
Special Service Campaign 22TC05 "...The subject vehicles may have been equipped with an engine containing an incorrectly manufactured Crankcase Case Vent. If the engine is equipped with an incorrectly manufactured Crankcase Case Vent, the vehicle may release crankcase emissions."
I haven't found much information on this, but the repair (potential) process is pretty involving, from dismounting the intake manifold, other front end components, along with a number of gaskets.
I guess my concern is that this doesn't affect the reliability of the engine, it just releases a little bit of unnecessary emissions? I don't know if I want someone dismantling the front end of my engine if there is no concern of long term reliability/engine oil contamination. Should I just not be concerned?