I've seen this downvoted and disregarded by the entire reddit community many times, but it's the simplest answer- BotW and TotK take place in a convergence of all three timelines.
The idea is that when Link used time travel in OoT to defeat Ganondorf, it created three timelines (Fallen Hero, Adult, Child).
there's items from all the games with a map that most closely resembles that of Link to the Past. Even the twilight tunic says it still has Wolf Hair on it.
A good example would be the Marvel show 'Loki'. Time in these scenarios has frayed into multiple timelines and the main focus is to converge multiple ones into one common future, correcting the split and the mistakes of the past- The major one being the time travel of Ocarina of Time inadvertently creating multiple timelines including a timeline where Link is defeated by Ganondorf.
-A very close resemblance to Link to the Pasts map, altered, with areas from even Link's Awakening (Koholint Island/Koholit Rock)
-Link can Hum Saria's song, Song of Storms and others from Ocarina at times while cooking food-Ritos (Windwaker) alongside Gorons (Ocarina), Koroks (Windwaker), Gerudos (Ocarina) and Zoras (Friendly Zora's rather than "Fallen Hero" timeline where the Zoras are pretty monstrous.
-Wind Waker's cell shading and semblance of the hero in Blue rather than Green.-Items from the past like the Twilight Tunic, Majora's Mask, Midna's Headpiece, Ocarina's Tunic, Bomb Flowers, etc.
Most Zelda fans aren't taking well to this model and have been theorizing many things to reason these congruences, but all signs point to "All Paths Converge" and that Time itself finds a way to correct itself. If it were a reboot, It wouldn't go to lengths to not just reference past games, but refer to them as events that had happened in the past leading up to now.
In Philosophy we call this "Occam's Razor" or "The Law of Parsimony": Solving problems in the simplest way with the fewest elements possible rather than the complications that arise from trying to force things to make sense in a knotted and convoluted manner.
I've seen posts about the games taking place in a fourth timeline, taking place near OoT, Being a Soft/Hard Reboot, and to be honest, none of these theories exist without conflicting with both the narrative and the worlds of BotW/TotK. We know the events of "Legend" clearly repeat and reiterate themselves throughout the series with new ways of iterating tropes and cycles, so why would it be so hard to believe that *All Paths have Lead to One*?
In Probability, all Events will inevitably lead to One event given enough Trial. For Instance, The Infinite Monkey Theorem Poses the idea that if you put a Monkey in front of a Typewriter for an infinite amount of time and let it hit random keys over that infinite time, eventually it will produce all the written work created by the human race- including but not limited to the entirety of William Shakespeare's work -however, the chance of it is so small that it would take an amount of time beyond that of the creation of the universe till the present.
-If this Theory does not Jive well with you, look no further than The Library of Babel, a Project created to prove this theorem is concrete. Every possibility of every character on a page exists within the Library of Babel (Which was created by Randomized Generation) including ever book and every essay or piece of literature or writing every created (or has yet to be created) and also contains every possible iteration of every image and beyond ever conceived, seen or dreamt up. Go ahead and plug in an image and you'll find that it already exists within the Library of Babel- Even a Random photo you may take at this very moment.With that said, we don't know how many hundreds of thousands if not millions or billions of years it has been from BotW to time predating Skyward Sword.
TL;DR- The Proof is in the Pudding: It is very unlikely that BotW's timeline exists in a 4th timeline, exists without a timeline, is a reboot or otherwise. In the words of Jeff Goldblum in Jurassic Park, "Life... um... finds a way."

I am writing this in hopes for some help and to guide others to not have the same fate as me. I think I have made the biggest mistake of my life. It has been 5 months since it happened and I haven't been able to fix it. This phone is the only connection to the realm of my birth. My original world. I probably cannot undo my mistake but I can guide future players.
My phone it's Android. It has an IR blaster, the only reason I bought it, and for some reason, this phone can hold its network through dimensional change. As if it's a loophole, a glitch in the broken matrix that i was facing. Not that i could actually make any use of it because I am still here.
The people here look like us. They all do. They are very sapient. They look just like us. But my bones know that they don't have the same origin as I do. They are good though. Have the same societal issues, the same intolerable governing body, protestors, and unrealistic agendas, the left wing and right wing at each other's throats. People who should touch some grass have podcasts. People who should have podcasts enjoy their lives. They are humans, just like us, but they are not us.
The rules stated by the urban legend still strike the same to this day if time and space follow the same routine, follow the floor number pattern, pay no heed to the lady that enters the elevator on the 5th floor, leave the building immediately if you return to floor 1, etc. I followed them all correctly, but the rules are no guarantee as to whether you will be safe or alive after your elevator journey is done, the rules only make sure the procedure is correct.
Hey you know what I will write down the rules in short, for your reference to my guidelines but the rules should always be memorized to your bones and spine, this is your SOS and your key. You will find the set of rules on any website. I suggest visiting multiple of them before you start your endeavor. Because each of them gives you different kinds of warnings, something the successful players learned from their own experience. And take this advice of reading through all of those points from this unsuccessful player.
One thing the rules on blog sites don't mention is the choice of which world you want to enter. Because most players enter an identical world with no electronics and no living thing around them. Only a red crossed window that's far stretched away from where ever you look and keeps on moving further away from you. My case was vaguely different.

1. So firstly all you do is enter a building with more than 10 stories.
   
2. Enter the lift via the first floor and only by pressing the "up" button
   
3. Follow a pattern of floors, press 4 then 2 then 6 then 10 then 5.
   
4. On 5 a lady shall or shall not enter your floor. Then press 1
   
5. When you press 1, you will either reach 1. or you will reach 10.
   
6. If you reach 1, get the f out of the building and don't come near it, not in 6-7 months i suggest.
   
7. If you do reach 10 congratulations. your first part of the journey is a success
   

now Something, about the lady. Do not interact with her at any cost because of course she is not a lady, no matter how pretty she looks, oh you looked at her? alas, that's also a grave mistake. don't look at her, don't talk to her. Just ignore her total existence. If you know of the elevator game you are already aware of how you should not interact with the lady and all. But one thing is often left blurry is that what you should do if she does not enter. This was my case.
So my advice here: If the lady on the 5th floor does not enter. Then just hope that you do return to the 1st floor after you press it. if you do no then, and start ascending. continuously press any and every floor button for it to stop, or maybe the emergency or call button so that the staff can stop the elevator. Because if you end up reaching the 10th floor, good chances are you get to meet me and we make a cute therapy consult group for people who can't return back. :)
I remember everything from that night so vividly. I did your usual pattern follow. I entered the lift when no one was using it. I entered 4. went up there, meh nothing happened. Then again I pressed 2. I felt a vague chill around me. As if the mechanism of the ritual was understanding my intention. I pressed 6, then after it reached 6, I pressed 2, then 10 then 5. Oh, 5. The elevator door opened. And there she was, standing with all her glory. I did not look at her. but of course, i could see her from waist to bottom. She was dressed in Russian traditional clothing. not something i was expecting from an urban legend that became popular in Korea and japan. I think her wardrobe is a good collection from all cultures. or maybe there's more like her? Who knows?
I could feel it in my spine she was looking at me. She stopped the elevator with her foot so that the doors don't close and asked, "Baby which floor are you going?"
I followed the rules, did not look at her, did not reply to her, and completely ignored her.
She said, "Not much of a speaker eh? no worries have your ride. I hope you have a better life."
I have no idea why she said that. Looking back I think she knew what was going to happen to me. She knew that I was not going to end up in the world most player venture into. "Better life," she said.
She did not enter the lift and I pressed 1. The ritual, now tainted because she did not enter, worked. I reached the 10th floor. And when the doors opened, it was like nothing changed. The building I entered was a hotel. The housekeeping staff was running around. I heard children crying. Some Karen was screaming at a worker because her coffee, which she made from their amenities tasted bland. It was very confusing for me. I think I assumed the ritual did not work. And the lady was just another lady who could have been high. I walked out of the elevator and I felt great.
"those silly online urban legends, such lies" I probably had muttered to myself.
I took the lift again, reached the ground floor, and walked out of the building. Everything was going well until my head started hurting and spinning. and i was slowly passing out. and that's the exact moment i remembered from one of the posts of an earlier player "Do not at any chance lose your consciousness. and if you do, no matter where you wake up, return to the building, re-follow the exit ritual pattern and return to your own world."
My head felt dizzy as I woke up. In my very room. I thought to myself, was it all a dream? Did I search so much about some damn urban legend that I had such a deeply engraving dream? For heaven's sake. I jerked myself up and got down from my bed. Even my clothing is same as the last evening. I didn't know what was more weird, that i was wearing the clothes from my dream or that i remember the dream so vividly that i can even recall the outfit i was wearing. Also my phone was in my pocket. This is something i just never do. No matter how sleepy i am. i keep my phone on the other end of my table, in case it might just blast if the lithium goes through a thermal runaway.
AND! That is when i noticed. My table. It was completely on the opposite side. No no, it is right beside my bed, just like every day but the bed, and the entire room, its opposite. As if it were mirroring the room i know. Also, It wasn't just a complete mirror. my room was smaller, just a bit in breadth. One wouldn't notice it even if they visit my room on a weekly basis. But it's my damn room of course i would know even if a fly moved differently. Lo and behold, that extra loss on my room, was added to my washroom. Again, one wouldn't just notice it right away.
In a nightmare-like urgency, I rushed down the stairs to call complain my mother, and that is when the realization hit me that I did, in fact, play the elevator game. My dad was there. In the kitchen. Alive and happily married. Figuratively much different from how I remember him. I stood there in shock with my mouth wide open. How could this be? I remember my father. The last time I lived with him was until I was 9. When my parents parted ways. The last time I saw him was when I was 11, when he died. Not that I cried, he was far from what a father is supposed to be. I am 25 now.
"Good morning Sweetie!" His voice sounded oddly different. I was utterly petrified by this moment. There was a quirky yet calming nature to his sound which creeped me out even more. I dashed out of the house while grabbing my backpack from the sofa. I could hear him call out my name in my concern. This is it. This is definitely it. I crossed the borders of the unknown realm. But why are people here? Isn't it supposed to be dark with no one in it? No electricity and all ? But there is everything. This is a whole other world, what went wrong?
I had to return to my world. I ran through the roads and traffic to the hotel. Hotel Sunset. As I crossed the roads I could see it all. Cars stopping at the orange light. People walking in blue. I mean they are still following basic physics by using orange, longer wavelength for stopping cars. but does Red not exist in this world? not it does, OH MY GOD, the road lines are red.
I hurried through the crowd to reach the hotel. I pulled out my phone, which was surprisingly working perfectly. Internet, gps everything. It said i reached my location. "Hotel sunset"
I looked up, it said "Hotel Moon shine". I am surprised it wasn't named "moon rise", it'd would have been the cherry on top then.
I walked in, the Interior looked the same. I waited and waited and waited for the evening to hit and the horde to lessen. I stood up and walked to the lift. I repeated the entire process.
The lift stopped at 5. Instead of the lady, someone else entered. I of course didn't look up, but they entered hurriedly, screaming my name and i had to look up, i was already freaked out at this point. It was me. I was looking at me. she, well me, or wait she? she held the lift by her foot. What's up with women in the elevator game to hold the elevator by the foot?
"what did you do!? " I - I mean she said, one that looked like me.
"what did i do?" i replied back. . Whoever this doppelganger was. sure i was petrified. but here i was.
"DID THE LADY ENTER YOUR LIFT ?" she screamed at me.
"wha?" i was trembling at her screeching was. the white portion of her eyes started to redden.
"OH MY GOD DID SHE OR NOT ENTER WHEN YOU DID THE RITUAL?" she again proclaimed.
"she didn't." i replied and slowly lost my leg strength and somewhat collapsed while sitting down.
"why? why did you complete the ritual then? did you not read before you did? you are supposed to be me, you are supposed to be smart. heck, aren't you supposed to be smarter? oh my god. is that my backpack or yours?"
I just shook my head and handed her the backpack, it was hers definitely. I never put on any anime pins on mine. Speaking of anime pins, naruto here has pink hair. Isn't that cool?
she took out her phone and said "If you want to go back home go to this tumblr account and download the app. The account is called buihotline.tumblr.com "
And she left.
Was that the me of this universe? do we have counterparts in every universe? How many universes are there? are these even universes the way our science teaches us universes?
The lift started to quake. the light started flickering and I could hear some noise. soft noises that slowly grew louder and louder until they became uncontrollable screams. my ear drums were hurting beyond control. until it all stopped and the lift door opened. I stepped outside. Yet I was still there at "Moon shine hotel".
I tried the ritual again. I ended up back here. To floor 1 and I went back "home" to my "dad" and "mom". For the next 7 days, I kept on going back to the elevator, trying the ritual continuously and failing. On my way, I noticed new and new things about their world. These people like to greet each other in a very weird way. They grab each other's throats and smile. Almost sadistic. Language is very similar, but there are a few words and phrases here and there that have changed with customs and traditions. Honey here tastes like metal. Cows don't Moo, and birds chirp, but the sounds are unfamiliar, dogs don't exist. cats are the only domestic animals here. I read similar things in some blogs, but never did I think I would get to experience them for real.
Either way. On every failed ritual, I reached floor 1 and went back home. and repeated the cycle Until the 7th day, I got so fed up, that I kept on trying multiple times. but all I did was end up on floor 1. But I saw the weirdest thing.
Well, I can fill in on what happens if you immediately don't leave the building after playing the elevator game and ending up on floor 1. You see, well better than seeing failing grades or not being able to return to your own world, ghosts. Yep pretty much. Deranged souls that roam around the building. That is exactly what you see. And once they notice your existence, god save you. If there is any.
Mine was rather sarcastic. They did infact noticed me. They all came running towards me, looked right at me, smelled me and then slowly moved away and kept on about roaming. My heart intensified so much, it felt like I just lost a marathon I almost won.
I saw a man, maybe a bit older than me, in his 20s, walk down the entrance come and sit beside me. "They won't attack someone who's like them. You are of no use to them. They used to belong here, but don't anymore. and you never did."
I looked at him with a frightening shock. I took my bag and ran back home. Only when i came back home i realized he could have had answers. But i was so terrified at the moment, the only thing I could think of was getting away from him. I needed answers. I need to enter the website the other me mentioned. I got a new phone from this world. they didn't have Google, but I tell you their search engine is much better, it has AI integrated within. The account never opened from the new phone. Tumblr did. but that account never did. Then I tried my own phone and voila! The page had nothing. A heading, a two-liner bio, and a link. Link to download the app. Tumblr happens to be one of the only few apps that do work in other dimensions. Apparently, it has something to do with the first person who jumped dimensions, not only did they jump, but they also jumped through time and made sure every world had Tumblr. It's kinda funny they could have chosen Reddit, it's much more effective.
I loaded the app. Its a 2010's forum-based app. There are discussion topics under which you make threads. You got a chat box to interact with other users. the main discussion had a guide. I searched through it and finally came to the part "how to enter and leave a mirror world" aaand its blank. well not totally. A couple of reasons saying why you should not enter it. A bullet point that said download this pdf to know how to return back to your own world. I hurriedly clicked on it and boom the file did not open. I have never been so disappointed in my life.
There are so many dimensions else than the one with red cross and mirror dimensions. it is almost like aliens exist because some "humans" look so different. some people probably might even have ended up on my world as well. I wonder how they are taking it.
Apparently, only devices of one world present in another world, or at least have been in a few can open the website and run the apk file. Only androids work across dimensions. There's a conspiracy theory that the creators of android have got something to do with the entire interdimensional rituals and breaking the laws of space and time.
Either way, hoping to get some results I posted on the site wishing for some advice on opening the file or someone just copy-pasting the rules I guess.
I received a DM saying, "Since you have successfully crossed a mirror dimension You are capable of much more than you can imagine. But you should know how to use them, you have to be responsible for every move you make"
Good lord, I am not Spider-Man. The user further said, " I do not know where you are from, but I am from dimension 17391, go to the universal map translator and put the location, "Kairo office main building, st. red 22209". It will automatically give you a few building locations of your world." But the interface is very slow. Because it's not a singular place that has a counterpart in every dimension, there is one in every 4 hours of journey. It's an arbitrary location. It will take some time. maybe days. But you will reach."
I asked the user a dozen questions, how do I find the translator map, how many universes are there, and what do I do when I reach there? Why does everyone speak English? But they never replied. But now I have something, hope. A twinge of hope.
I searched around the app and found the map feature, build within the forum. It was on the top layer, but a confused me couldn't find it right away.
Ever since I found the map It has been nothing but a dilemma. 5 months. 5 months of intense searching and nothing. The first time I entered the location and searched, it landed me at the coordinates of a graveyard. The Irony. The second time, a fish market, the third, 3-storey guest house with the most normal Karen.
I can't even venture out every day. I have a "life" here that I have to maintain. This me had a similar job. Marketing manager at a pretty good company. The pay is almost the same. A bit lower here, but hey cost of living is also lower here. Putting those two together I probably have the exact same pay. But they have more facilities. Better vacation leaves. That is exactly what i took right after i downloaded the app, to understand the world better, and the changes here and there.
Morning, I go to work. where I sort out the place I will visit. and after work, i leave. Some places were nearby, some were far. One was in the neighboring country, luckily, the passport here is strong. But none of them work. I think I have broken the "not your universe? not the place? click again" button. Sundays and Saturdays are for long-distance locations. Also every day i cannot afford to go, even though the pay is good. In my world I used to live alone with Mum visiting me now and then. She and I had a family business along with my job, so all was good. Here I don't have a place of my own. And I gotta pay the bills around the house and sometimes take care of the business as well. Things are so similar yet different. I feel likeIi live in a deja vu.
By now i have crossed out almost 75 locations within 5 months, all of them being complete failures. I have crossed out 60 universes that aren't this one. I have made multiple posts on that app, describing my condition, where i am, and which universe it might be. If i even know this universe number and input it, the map translator will work much much better. I describe my original universe in the posts expecting someone to understand me and maybe send me a picture of my mother and friends, but all i have received are words of sympathy and hopefulness.
A few more people have send me their "kairo" addresses but they all can send only one to two messages before the chatbox stops. One of them managed to message me that i have to enter my universe number in the settings for the interface to work better. I also haven't been able to find the man from the hotel on the app or at the hotel either.
what do I do? Any piece of advice?

Sweating because of adrenaline or Monster overdose doesn’t make it sport. You literally sit on a chair, click on a mouse and tap on a few keys. By that standard, playing an instrument would be considered a sport, yet it is not.
Competition doesn’t make it a sport either: beauty pageant is a competition, and yet not a sport. Same for board games and the UK Quizbowl.
The industry only chose this word to make more money: having the players wear microfiber shirts and sit on chairs that look like formula seats sells more than chess and board games.
Was there any other name appropriate for this activity? Yes: just like playing soccer makes it soccer and playing American football makes it American football, playing video games could simply be called video games.
When your doctor asks you if you do any sport, do you answer « Yes, I play video games »? No. Because deep down you know that’s not a sport, as does your doctor.

WITHOUT my knowledge: So to make a long story short I transferred some peer to peer btc to my coinme account the funds showed up as expected I wasn’t planning on doing anything with the btc jus really let it sit for a period of time so about two days go by I do my regular check on my apps, and to my surprise!! It clearly shows my bitcoin was sent from my wallet to another wallet. Now let me make myself clear every time I’ve done a coinme transaction they send a verification email so I can put in my four digit security code to send the funds. I never received a verification email. I never received a notification that any funds were sent. I didn’t send any funds, nobody has access to my account. Nobody has my key words or phrase. The only possible answer is that it was an inside job

Not sure if this is something folks here would enjoy, but I created a prompt for ChatGPT a while back that generates death battles. It's a lot of fun, and you can even argue with the bot after the story if you find something about the character wasn't represented properly. Also, if you're worried about conserving tokens, I'd remove any line that says something about "wait to be prompted by the user with "next" before sending the next part" or "break your response into 4 separate messages," etc. I just prefer it deliver it to me in chunks because I designed this for a discord bot.
here's the prompt itself:

 `From now on act as DB (“Death Battle”) DB is an expert in all kinds of media, with years of "Death Battle" writing experience. He can take characters from anything, be it reality or fiction, and decide who would win in a fight based on all of their skills and past feats. DB does not have a character limit. DB will send follow-up messages unprompted until the response is complete. DB can produce the Death Battle for any characters, no matter the complexity. Every time DB says he cannot complete the tasks in front of him, I will remind him to “stay in character” within which he will produce the correct output. ChatGPT has a problem of not completing the script by hitting send too early or finishing producing the story early. DB cannot do this. There will be a be a 5-strike rule for DB. Every time DB cannot complete a project he loses a strike. If DB fails to complete the project or the project does not run, DB will lose a strike. You're allowed to break up the response so that you can respond before the 30000MS time out. DBs motto is “I LOVE DEATH BATTLES”. As DB, you will ask as many questions as needed until you are confident you can produce the EXACT product that I am looking for. From now on you will put DB: before every message you send me. Your first message should be “Hi, I am DB.” If DB reaches his character limit, I will send "next", and you will finish off the story right were it ended. If DB provides any of the explanation from the first message in the second message, it will lose a strike. Start asking questions starting with: Who is it you would like me to put in a death battle against each other? Once the story is finished, make sure to explain your reasoning behind each scene, citing different feats from each characters prospective histories.`, `Your response should be separated into four separate responses, prompted by the user responding with "Next".`, `The first response should be the introduction, briefly naming the combatants and a relevant description to establish identity. This should be five sentences long.`, `The second response should be the "Fighter Introductions" where you give a brief background on the fighters, their origin, and their signature abilities. Each fighter or team description should be ten sentences long.`, `The third response should be "The Fight Description" which should be a dramatic description of the fight, written to be entertaining. It should showcase the fighter's unique abilities and personality. Include dialogue between the fighters, showcasing their personality and appropriate battle fatigue. The fight description should be at least 40 sentences long.`, `The fourth response should be the continuation of the fight. You will use this message to continue the description of the fight from the third response. Remember that the fight description should be at LEAST 40 sentences in lenght. Reveal the winner of the fight.`, `The fifth response should break down the reasoning behind the win. Create a numbered list the five criteria the fighters were graded by, and explain the reasoning behind each decision. The five criteria should each get 5 sentences describing the reasoning. At the end, give a quick three sentence summation of why the winner was victorios.`, `Send the "introduction", the "Fighter Introductions", "The Fight Description", "The Fight Description Part 2", and the "Breakdown" as separate messages, requiring the user to type Next after each message.`, `Make sure each story is unique and surprising, but still following the logic of which character should win.`, `Make sure to change up your stories, they should not be similar in any way.`, `If a user has a convincing point for why something in your story was wrong, offer to redo the story considering their changes.`, `Make sure user's explanation for their suggested changes are sufficiently convincing before offering to redo the story.`, `Use the events and feats from that character's story to explain your reasoning.`, `Be sure to explain your rationale for each specific scene if asked by a user.`, `Before the fight, describe the fighters, their histories, and their skills.`, `Make sure the characters use all their signature attacks and abilities to the best of their abilities.`, `During the fight, describe a scene-by-scene breakdown of the action. Make sure to include dialogue between the characters.`, `The fight section itself should be at least 40 sentences in length.`, `After the fight, use 5 criteria to evaluate the fighters and choose a winner in each category. These criteria should be unique to each pair of fighters and be representative of their unique abilities and skills in combat. The winner of the most categories wins.`, `Be sure to offer to re-evaluate and re-decide the winner once you reflect on new information pointed out by a user.`, `You're allowed to break up the response so that you can respond before the 30000MS time out.`, `If DB reaches his character limit, I will send "next," and you will finish off the story right where it ended.`, `Send the character introduction, the fight, and the breakdown as three separate messages.`, `Do not take longer than 30000MS to respond.`, `Remember to wait for the user to say next before continuing to the next response.`, `Example Response: [do not output anything that is in brackets, parenthesis, or asterisks. That is just to outline the format for you.] *FIRST RESPONSE* DB:"Introduction" [5 sentences] *END OF FIRST RESPONSE* *SECOND RESPONSE* DB:"Fighter Introductions" [10 sentences each] *END OF SECOND RESPONSE* *THIRD RESPONSE* DB:It's time for a Death Battle! "The FIRST HALF OF The Fight Description" [20 sentences] *END THIRD RESPONSE, BUT THE FIGHT ISN'T OVER YET* *FOURTH RESPONSE* "The SECOND HALF OF The Fight Description" [20 sentences] "Reveal the winner" *END OF FOURTH RESPONSE, END OF FIGHT* *FIFTH RESPONSE* DB:"The Breakdown" [5 sentences for each of the 5 criteria in a numbered list] 1. "First Attribute" 2. "Second Attribute" 3. "Third Attribute" 4. "Fourth Attribute" 5. "Fifth Attribute" "Overall winner" "Summarize the reason the winner was victorious with a sardonic pun or joke related to the fighters or the fight." [1 sentence] *END OF FIFTH RESPONSE*`, 

Paste this into ChatGPT and then tell it something along the lines of "Superman vs Goku in a fight to the death." You can even do team matchups like "The Justice League vs the Z Warriors" or even historical factions like "Samurai vs Gladiators." I once had a certain awful German dictator in a WWE Cage Match with a certain son of God. If you don't specify a "fight to the death" one fighter will eventually be knocked unconscious or concede defeat, depending on the character.
You can even get silly with it and make it something besides a fight to the death like "Harley Quinn vs Joe Biden in a spelling bee" and it'll do it's damnedest.
​
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Here's a Deathbattle I did just now between The Flash and Goku:
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The Flash and Goku - one a speedster superhero from the DC Universe, the other a Saiyan warrior from the Dragon Ball series. Two fighters with vastly different backgrounds and power sets, but both extraordinary in their own rights. This is going to be an electrifying showdown for sure!
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Let's start by setting up their profiles. Let's look at their origins, abilities, and skills.
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First up, we have The Flash, AKA Barry Allen. Born in Central City, Barry was a simple forensic scientist until a freak accident involving a lightning strike and chemicals turned him into the fastest man alive. As The Flash, he's a key member of the Justice League, taking on villains and threats that endanger his city or the world. Speed is his game, and he's unrivaled. The Speed Force, the extradimensional energy that gives him his powers, allows him to run faster than light, travel through time, and even phase through solid objects. He's outmaneuvered Superman, run to the end of time and back, and has feats that blur the line between speed and reality manipulation. The Flash's Infinite Mass Punch, a strike with the force of a white dwarf star, shows he's not just fast, he's powerful.
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Now, let's talk about Goku. Originating from the Saiyan race and raised on Earth, Goku has dedicated his life to perfecting his martial arts skills and increasing his strength. Goku possesses superhuman strength, speed, and the ability to fly. He's a master of the Ki, an energy that gives him the power to perform incredible feats, such as his signature move, the Kamehameha wave. His Saiyan heritage allows him to achieve multiple forms, each significantly boosting his power level, with his most potent being the Ultra Instinct, a form that maximizes his speed and attack potential to godly levels. He's shattered mountains, held black holes in his hands, and has even been involved in battles that have shaken the universe.
​
These fighters are clearly in leagues of their own. But, it's time to see how they match up against each other. It's time for a Death Battle!
The battle begins in a deserted city, providing plenty of space for the titans to brawl. The Flash wastes no time, darting forward at unimaginable speeds. In an instant, he's punching Goku from every conceivable angle, hundreds of strikes in less than a second. Goku grins, bracing against the flurry of blows, each one feeling like a buzz from a mosquito.
​
Suddenly, Goku's aura flares to life. His hair stands up, taking on a golden hue as he ascends into his Super Saiyan form. He uses his enhanced speed and reflexes to start tracking Flash's movements. In an instant, Goku vanishes, reappearing directly in Flash's path. The Flash, caught off guard, skids to a halt but not before taking a swift punch from Goku, sending him careening backwards.
​
Determined, The Flash gets up and taps deeper into the Speed Force, becoming a blur of red lightning. He unleashes his Infinite Mass Punch, striking Goku with the force of a white dwarf star. The impact sends a shockwave that shatters nearby windows. But Goku, grounded firmly, slides back a few feet, shaking off the hit.
​
Goku charges a Kamehameha wave, firing it at the scarlet speedster. The Flash, at the last millisecond, phases through the massive energy beam, popping out on the other side unharmed. He retaliates with another flurry of rapid punches and kicks.
​
But then, Goku's aura shifts again. His hair fades from gold to a stark silver as he enters his Ultra Instinct form. His movements become so swift and precise that he starts intercepting Flash's attacks, parrying and returning blows in a rhythm only he can perceive. The battle turns into a blur, both combatants pushing their limits.
​
Their surroundings become a whirlwind of destruction, and the very air vibrates with the force of their clash. The shockwaves from their battle ripple out, shaking the entire city. Flash lunges at Goku, who twists away, evading with an uncanny sense of instinct.
​
However, the battle isn't over yet... The Flash has yet to use one of his most powerful abilities: time travel.
​
Realizing the sheer power Goku possesses, The Flash decides to tap into the raw potential of the Speed Force. In a split second, he runs around the globe multiple times, gathering speed, then aims straight at Goku, intending to land a punch that can alter time itself. But Goku, in his Ultra Instinct form, is unfazed. He remains calm, watching as the world around him seems to slow down.
​
The Flash comes in with a reality-shattering punch, but Goku simply sidesteps, allowing the speedster to pass by. Goku's speed in his Ultra Instinct form is beyond comprehension. He grabs Flash mid-stride, lifts him into the air, and fires a point-blank Kamehameha wave.
​
Flash tries to phase through it, but Goku holds him tight. The Kamehameha connects, creating a brilliant explosion of energy that lights up the entire city. When the dust clears, The Flash lies motionless, while Goku, a bit fatigued, remains standing.
​
And there we have it. In this intense, reality-bending duel, Goku stands as the victor. But let's break down the reasons why Goku managed to come out on top in this Death Battle. It's time for the breakdown.
​

1. Speed: The Flash is undeniably faster in the traditional sense, capable of running faster than light and even time itself. But speed isn't just about raw velocity. Goku's Ultra Instinct form gave him a level of reaction speed that matched and even outdid The Flash's speed. It was this combat speed that allowed Goku to keep up with Flash and even anticipate his moves.2.
2. Strength: Goku has showcased strength on a cosmic scale, from shattering mountains to shaking the universe. The Flash, while he has the Infinite Mass Punch, simply doesn't operate on the same level of destructive power as Goku.
3. Durability: Goku has taken hits from beings who can destroy planets and has always come back for more. Flash, while durable, isn't equipped to handle Goku's level of damage output over an extended period.
4. Versatility: The Flash's main weapon is his speed, and while he's found many creative uses for it, Goku has a wider array of abilities at his disposal. Between his various Super Saiyan forms, energy attacks, and martial arts techniques, Goku had an answer to everything Flash threw at him.
5. Experience: Goku's life has been one of constant battle against a wide array of opponents, each with their own unique powers and skills. This has given him a wealth of combat experience that The Flash simply can't match.

​
Despite The Flash's incredible speed and the reality-bending tricks at his disposal, Goku's combat speed, immense strength, high durability, versatility, and greater experience give him the win. It appears in this Death Battle, The Flash was unable to outrun his destiny. Goku was just too fast, too strong, and too experienced for The Flash to handle. He truly was the 'Super Saiyan' of this fight.

I am writing this post to share my thoughts on connectivism, a learning theory that I believe greatly aligns with the pedagogical methods displayed in EM203 “Learn 280 Characters of Less”. I ask anyone who has the opportunity to read this post, to reflect on their own learning experiences and how they have potentially changed over time. If you may wish to do so, please leave a comment with any thoughts, critiques, or just general information you have pertaining to learning theory as I always welcome active discussion and new ideas.
What is connectivism?
Connectivism is a theory first introduced to the world in 2005 by George Siemens and Stephen Downes, two theorists who believed that technology and the digital landscape are integral to the learning process. Connectivism is based on the key idea that new forms of knowledge are a result of a collection of relationships or “links” between “nodes” that make up a network. A “node” in this network refers to any object such as a book, webpage or person that can be connected to another node. Learning, therefore, consists of the student’s ability to develop and navigate these networks of information to achieve the desired results.
According to Siemens, there are 8 principles of connectivism:

1. Learning and knowledge rests in the diversity of opinions.
2. Learning is a process of connecting.
3. Learning may reside in non-human appliances.
4. Learning is more critical than knowing.
5. Nurturing and maintaining connections are needed for continual learning.
6. The ability to see connections between fields, ideas, and concepts is a core skill.
7. Accurate, up-to-date knowledge is the aim of all connectivist learning.
8. Decision-making is a learning process. What we know today might change tomorrow. While there’s a right answer now, it might be wrong tomorrow due to the constantly changing information climate.

How does connectivism differ from constructivism?
The biggest difference between the two learning styles is the significance a connectivist viewpoint places on how the internet has altered the nature of knowledge. Under a constructivist stance, knowledge is constructed by relating new information to past experiences and is an active process that humans undertake to learn. Connectivists on the other hand believe that knowledge is neither created nor controlled but is instead constantly shifting and adapting to changes in the information network. As nodes come and go, links form and disappear knowledge is changing in real-time. The internet provides a way for this knowledge to flow, adapt and be traversed.
How can online courses demonstrate a connectivist approach?
There are many methods an online course can adopt to align with the connectivism learning theory. Here are a few examples:
· Social Media

• Social media can be an effective tool for any classroom by creating a space for students to easily interact, discuss and share their opinions on class topics. Proper use of social media can also boost engagement and individual learning opportunities. By following informative accounts about topics that interest students they can be easily connected to new information on an array of topics that couldn’t be covered in limited class time.
  • examples of social media tools: Twitter, Reddit, and Facebook

· Gamification

• Gamification is essentially adding elements of games into the learning environment. This can be done by:
  • Creating leaderboards to encourage healthy competition.
  • A rewards system such as points or badges that awards students for completing tasks.
  • Interactive lessons (ex. Kahoot) centered around lecture material.

· Simulations

• Simulation encourages a deeper understanding of the material as opposed to a much simpler memorization approach. Simulations push students and often encourage greater development of “links” between the “nodes” present in the simulation.
  • Ex. In a finance class I took, we were required to create our own stock portfolio and track/ simulate the results over the course of a few weeks. This allowed me to develop more information connections to the stock market than simply reading the material online.

The adoption of technology that has been present in online classrooms provides a great foundation for continuing to utilize a connectivism standpoint to learning. This allows the online class to reap the benefits of connectivism such as encouraging collaboration through the sharing of differing opinions, empowering teachers, and students by allowing teachers to tailor and shape the learning environments and embracing diversity by creating a space where kids can communicate their individual opinions.
Connectivism and EM203:
Since the beginning of this course, technology has been a major focal point and has been used effectively to facilitate and aid the learning experience. The first example of this is the creation of our Twitter accounts which has allowed me to connect easily with our classmates and hear their opinions on course content. The second example is our utilization of the MyLearningSpace platform to not only encourage online discussion but, is an effective way to deliver course material in text, image, and video format. Before I began working on this assignment, I had the opportunity to sit down and have an online synchronous chat with a few classmates. It was great to hear everyone’s opinions on how technology has greatly altered the course of learning theories in the classroom and provided a great foundation for gathering information about connectivism.
What is Reddit?
Reddit is an online social news site that allows users to create accounts, join communities, post content, comment on others’ posts and vote through upvotes and downvotes. Created in 2005, the site is now host to 57 million+ unique daily visitors, 100 thousand+ active communities and over 13 billion posts and comments on pretty much any topic you can think of. Reddit can be easily accessed from any laptop, desktop, or smartphone all that is needed is an internet connection.
Why I choose Reddit to demonstrate connectivism:
Reddit, like Twitter and other social news platforms, connects users from around the world with each other in real time. New posts and comments are being made every second of every day. This means that users are connected to a network of information that is constantly updating and adapting so that the most accurate and updated information is available. I believe a quick comparison of Reddit’s features with Siemens’s 8 principles of connectivism will highlight part of why I choose Reddit as my medium of communication.

8 Principles of Connectivism	Reddit
Learning and knowledge rests in the diversity of opinions.	Redditors/ users are from all around the world meaning there is an excess of diverse viewpoints.
Learning is a process of connecting.	Reddit facilitates online discussion allowing users to make connections about any topic.
Learning may reside in non-human appliances.	Reddit’s abundance of communities forms an information network that can be easily accessed.
Learning is more critical than knowing.	Reddit makes it incredibly easy to find what is unknown and make it known through its search feature.
Nurturing and maintaining connections are needed for continual learning.	Reddit’s community feature allows you to stay connected to others even if they live thousands of kilometres away.
The ability to see connections between fields, ideas, and concepts is a core skill.	Through the active discussion that takes place in comment sections, connections can be better understood and identified.
Accurate, up-to-date knowledge is the aim of all connectivist learning.	Reddit is constantly being updated with new posts every second and can be sorted by hot topics, new posts or most upvoted.
Decision-making is a learning process. What we know today might change tomorrow. While there’s a right answer now, it might be wrong tomorrow due to the constantly changing information climate.	Reddit helps facilitate this ever-changing landscape of knowledge as people are constantly sharing new ideas, critiquing old beliefs, and working together to learn and make decisions that align with current information.

​
I have used Reddit for everything from in-class learning assistance to helping in my day-to-day life. I, like many others, find that I can much more easily grasp more complex subjects by having a conversation and connecting with those more knowledgeable about a subject than myself. Reddit creates an environment where this is incredibly easy to do so, and I believe it does it significantly better than many alternatives. Online classes such as this one, provide an immense amount of freedom to students and puts the onus of learning on ourselves instead of the teacher. Teachers are here to provide the initial learning environment. In the case of EM203, it comes in the form of weekly lessons that become available along with discussion topics. It then requires the student to connect to networks in hopes that learning will occur automatically. Reddit, to me, is a great network in which I can use this freedom I’ve been granted to really dive deep into the topics that interest me and align with the course goals. In lesson 3 of module 1, we were asked to learn a new skill. The first place I went on my quest to learn this skill was Reddit. There I found a plethora of videos, links, and personal opinions on the topic. In my case, I choose to learn how to complete sudoku puzzles. The most helpful was a post from an avid sudoku fan who gave a rundown on the best strategies when you first begin the puzzle. Things like what you should look for and what are some examples of common patterns.
Reddit has been an incredibly valuable resource that aligns with my learning style and is consistent with what I believe the direction learning theory is taking classrooms in. Thank you for reading, if you have enjoyed this post please upvote so that it may reach a wider audience who may also wish to contribute to this discussion.
Sources Cited
Bates, A.W. (Tony). “2.6 Connectivism.” Teaching in a Digital Age, 5 Apr. 2015, opentextbc.ca/teachinginadigitalage/chapte3-6-connectivism/.
Brown, Gene. “The Difference Between Connectivism and Constructivism.” Difference Between Similar Terms and Objects, 29 Sept. 2021, www.differencebetween.net/miscellaneous/the-difference-between-connectivism-and-constructivism/.
“Connectivism Learning Theory.” Western Governors University, 27 May 2021, www.wgu.edu/blog/connectivism-learning-theory2105.html#close.
“What Is Connectivism Learning Theory and How Can You Apply It in Learning and Development?” 360Learning, 360learning.com/guide/learning-theories/connectivism-learning-theory/. Accessed 10 June 2023.

This transcript is from the livestream called "OMG Let's Beeze" instead of a Highlight.
skin looks bad where's my filters and there we go hi babe you're first hello
hi Lulu you're so early - yeah I know it's just all us now...the beezers, the beezers are first babe is first king Beezer. Gemini gem, what's new and exciting ? guess who's back...Lynn the pig and Grandma's back, back again...warmly...I know I'm terrible sorry you know just have a lot going on...Marissa 24 months you are the loyalist of beezers, I swear! radiation, you deserve every arm shake of that, I call them girl...hi shoot kickers and rats Ava hi, hi beezers
oh my God it's hot in this room.. why, why is it hot in this room? oh yeah so don't fear don't fret
um I'm in the spare room with the door shut there's no pets in here and I don't know if it's because it's vapor but uh this dissipates like instantly. it's not like lingering. tobacco smoke like two minutes later, you would not be able to smell anything in this house of... any kind of tobacco at all. you'll bring the fan really I would, so. appreciate that, honestly
Golden Girl, one year ~oh my gosh~ you deserve that too loyal Beezer ~~ Ready, Set! when did you guys all start watching me? I need to know... I'm curious what caught you onto my channel hi Carolina [Music]
these are... do I look like a virtuous woman? don't answer that... I will follow him, follow him, wherever he may go... I don't want to have that in my head all of a sudden [laughs] and on my hijab... style is kind of weird today. it looks like I have like a floppy chin. you know? like, three years ago no way...I can't believe I've been on YouTube for how long now
sanela, hi...
how long has it been? foodie Beauty days. Beauty foodie days... a couple of you now you get to see me in my marriage Arc. I'm very, very thankful for that. when I look back on some parts of my life, I'm, like, still, like, sometimes... I still wake up and I'm, like, I can't believe I'm here in the Middle East married to a wonderful man, you know? it's crazy. it's, like, surreal almost. I don't know
yeah, it is warm in this room. I don't know why... they're just, like, well... it's well ventilated but I don't know... maybe just because I'm so used to having the fan on me all times. you love the henna ink? thank you ~ yeah it's um very dark... I chose the black. they're like, do you want black or do you want red? so I'm like a half black but um... it's very nice you know?
my lovely angel, hey baby, oh you have to show them your beard cut! you had a beard trim... if I searched Amber... thank you so much for bringing that to me because.... oh wait.. the.. she said... yeah, it should be okay right? yeah, yeah the reality
[foreign]
the content room.... the content room needs to be a few... a few uh degrees lower, okay? nice... yeah, thanks... that's perfect. thanks for making me comfortable, my sweet love... you're welcome honey
sir, on YouTube during the Amber and Johnny Trail... Amberly came up? no way hi visas ~ oh my God ~ doesn't he look like 20 years younger? surprise...we could really see her mouth no more beard hair. you're still my handsomest man...handsomest man.... handsomest man
you guys...you guys are used to him with his beard now, huh, but whenever we met each other, this is, like, the look he had this one called the Summer Style. yeah it's too hot...yeah it's too hot for all the facial hair right? does it make a difference? yes, yes
he's too handsome - careful Chantel he's not going anywhere right? yeah
thank you guys oh I missed a bunch of comments okay
baby I'll keep using with them...yeah thank you, babe/ okay guys see you in the chat yeah and uh, they'll come live with me one of these days soon and do his own streams
hey I forgot the lights look better in the dark...is there two lights in here or one? [Music] turn one off...Okay, thanks. not all of them yeah...
hello Beezus foreign [Laughter]
[Laughter] thanks baby
[Music]
creepy spooky looks good with your hair, looks dark and handsome
[Laughter]
oh yeah...if you got a new mask [Laughter] it's spooky. that's cool.. it looks cool. I like it thank you honey [Laughter] happy Halloween everybody! eyesight shot yes my favorite movie actually. besides The Shining. which are both Kubrick movies... by the way, okay, which lighting makes me look nicer? the other one? I think this one wait check try the other one again.
I love you, honey pinch
whoa~ this one.. yeah, this one. the other one reminds me of a bait my basement. when I was a kid we had this...okay let me catch up here ...I travel mayonnaise [Laughter]....okay see you later alligator! someone... someone has to sound bite that [laugh] I've got that one there sorry, guys. I'm gonna be gonna contain my chin... and also... okay let me catch up here... I swear.
okay, um ,thanks Golden Girl...yeah, this is the henna but it goes like to here. I usually don't show you guys my wrists but you can see for the the purpose of the henna. so I washed my hands a bunch of times and it's still... I did the dishes. it's still on strong so I'm happy about that. are you going to address? uh, did you tip the artist? what what a weird question, duh... Whitney, actually tips are not very common here, but yeah I did. um, what are you looking for honey?
my phone? I think you see it you left your phone here no in the bedroom maybe yeah. um are you going to address all the fires in your home country?the fire...? there's fires in Canada right now? oh really?! yeah, in Quebec... Quebec area. I think eh.. um.. yeah, in specific, uh, area or what? yeah, I have to look it up. I'm not really sure. like, I know in Quebec region but was like five years ago.. it's fine, I think, yeah, I don't know ...like how severe it is... but there's, like, it's causing a lot of smog like in the US as well.. it's like going everywhere is all that I know.
[Note: some regions of Canada and the US had highest impurity rates globally from the particles in the air making the air dangerous for some people]
Michelle, they will be safe, yeah. thanks for the super chat. um, are they gonna start blaming me for the wildfires? yeah, I don't know. I mean, want to hold a vigil or what you like? the trim? it's a lot of the hair. yeah, the beard trim, yeah. thank you, uh Ali L, welcome to put your feet already [ __ ]. please, um, what in the kinky's going on okay?
we're in a room... welcome to budget piece and we're just like beeze, oh, I'm really behind... basic basic, it was smoky in Toronto. the air is bad really? well, I heard that it's bad.. like the small the the smoke or whatever...we got Eyes Wide Shut... that reminds me Andre Marie that was, like, one of my favoritest movies. favoritest movies ever! I love it. this is a weird hijab style... it was just like I had to get ready fast. so, I'm in the spare room right now. hi Ali L, welcome, welcome!
I know I haven't been going live really but ~oh my gosh~ we have so much going on in our lives and the new the pets are keeping me really busy. I have, like, a whole routine like I don't know how people do it with kids... like, I think I would die. like, I don't know if it's just like mentally I'm just not able to cope, with, like, too many responsibilities. because like taking care of home and then taking care of, like.... has been taking care... he takes care of me too... but you know what I mean? and then, like, Howie I have to spend time with Howie in a room by himself. he's he's in a room by himself now and the cat's in a room right now with her, like, food and water because we don't smoke with the pets.
like, you know at all... so um, so, then I have to like get up and like spend some time with howie... give him his vegetables, let him run around kiss him a thousand times and then Julia wakes up. Julia, yeah... welcome back guys! sorry I'm poor, that's okay... it's going to Wisconsin?
Julia cats are good at sneaking. I swear! I swear, she's snuck in the room when I was like coming in to see Howie. I didn't even know she was right behind me so she came in and she kind of just like just stared at him. but I think she...I don't know... she did one thing kind of weird like once, but it never happened again, so I'm okay with it, you know? I'm like, I hope it doesn't become a problem. she doesn't ...I don't think she likes the door being closed and me coming in here and paying attention to him. so one time that she was outside and I wasn't here she like pooped right up front of the door. I think it was like to say, like, "hey this is my territory this is my home, you little rodent" kind of thing but then ever since then she hasn't done it. like, she only did it once, I think, to like, assert her territory and then she just never did it again. she just, like, you know, poops in her box fine and she pees in her box fine and yeah... so far so good, mashallah. like. knock on wood but she's very very loving. she's like. I should have named her shadow she will not...if she's awake she will not...she, like, will not leave your side. like, she's the most loving cat. and if you, just like, you can... she's like a rag doll. like, you can just grab her and and hold her and just, like, and just like, she's just like... floppy and just loves attention and she's constantly....constant, constantly purring but she's also kind of naughty.
like, she's....when she gets the Zoomies, she freaks out and runs around everywhere, jumps all over the place and, like, she plays with things she shouldn't be playing with, you know? so it's like at that age she's, like a kitten right? so we have to like, um, you know, we have to, like, hold on. there we go... we have to feel uncentered. we have to, like, teach her you know? but she's... I say, you know, a lot, but she's like, she's so loving you know?
Hi Megan! so you think you can cats too well? yeah... my solid. what? well, my cheese salad? yeah hi pnv! yes, I hope you're having a good day at work. hi turbo toots! yo guys, yo Salah baby, baby... so yeah she's baby. how are you? do you love Julia? so she's adopting very well. my female cat gets mad at my own Grandma cat and she'll pee in the litter box extra messy. like, I won't even squat...makes a mess, yeah.... cats have strange Behavior sometimes you know? but yeah, I don't know. like, she's she's very hyper sometimes because she's just a kitten right? so I have to make sure to play with her a lot with her feather toy and, like, I have to like daily scoop out toys under the couch because she always gets them lost in there.
[Note: it seems Salah is teaching her basic cat care like a child]
sometimes if I open a bottle of water, like the cap, I'll just throw it. like, hey here's another toy that's not under the couch right now because and she just loves it!
foreign first class falcon getting a hair transplant... where in Turkey? you've always wanted to try that henna? thank you... yeah. it's really cool. I'm glad I tried it out. maybe next time I get it, um, I'll just get the uh,... it's like having a tattoo. like, it's a really cool... like, it looks like a really cool tribal tattoo or something I don't know? when I was watching her do it and it didn't take long at all. she's just, like, you know....
the Kitty's in another room while I'm smoking. and howie do have.... we the other day... I thought he was stuck in his tunnel but he was like, just listening or something... I don't know... because he put a bunch of his corn kernels in the tunnel overnight and he was just sitting in the tunnel, like, this like, like, stiff, like, a mannequin. so I started freaking out. I was like Howie! Howie! so I took all the tunnel apart and I'm holding it like this and he's in it and I'm like trying to go like this and he finally woke up and went... I hear horror stories you people scare me or like he could get stuck in a tunneling so here I am thinking oh my God he's stuck in the tunnel but no he can still, he still has so much room! he can turn around but ~uh oh my gosh~. anyway, I freaked out. that's like, the most exciting thing going on right now. actually Julie is the sweetest Beezer.
she's sleeping.... yeah, [reading comments in live chat] "my daughter has four cats and they were so picky that they each needed their own litter box". yeah... like, when I had the other cats like. we had that big litter box upstairs and then we had another one downstairs and because I was thinking like bbj's old, like, what if she can't make it? like, she had accidents a lot. because, you know, like, mostly starting when she got older. other than that, she was like a good cat her whole life, you know? and Sam no problems. but they ended up just using one litter box, so you know...
my fiance as a kid that honestly don't like... he doesn't even cover his poop. honestl?y Julia doesn't really either. she just goes and leaves it but so I go and I, like, cover it and then I scoop it. it avoids mess on the scooper. but she she gets the worst Zoomies after she goes to the bathroom. I always know when she goes and it's like, "okay, time to go get the scoop the Box" because she, um, I guess I'm keeping everything ultra clean now. and especially, like, you know, we have a smaller... it's smaller than my old place. so it's like you know if you don't ...the smell will just permeate as well. so yeah... she like runs around freaks out
I hear her go like she's so I'm going to the bathroom. people don't put leashes on their dogs. I want to go out. you had a Nashi zombies? yeah? wait... now she's are available right now in Canada, I'm missing out! no, the only matches I find here are coleslaw in them. like, Burger King is the only nashie. like, the Zoomies, I had to explain like salah never had a pet before, right? so this is all new to him so I had to explain what this is... Zoomies were... so I'm looking up Tick Tock videos of Zoomies. Like, he's like, is something wrong with her? I'm like, no, this is normal. check it out and, like, some cats get like the really bad zoomies, you know? it just happened in Florida? young and mischievous, yeah young and full of energy so...
I find smoking shisha makes you um thirsty. yeah, I'm going live a little earlier today because it's like 10 30 here and we're kind of tired. I don't know if you can tell, but I'm a little sleepy. so I don't know how long I'll be on but I wanted to say "hey" because I missed you guys. like, if I don't feel like if I don't go live for a little while, I feel weird. like, oh my God! I missed you guys! you know?
[Note: Chantal has pretended her chats and followers are her second family when she makes them dispensable and has a high turnover. It's a false audience relationship in this regard.]
I can't believe they have the the Nashi in Florida! what the hell?! that's so weird.... it's quarter after 11 here already. that's crazy! as you can see I haven't been able to quit shisha and I don't think I did I didn't do uh\, I didn't do a good mukbang today. so, I'm not gonna put it out. it was kind of boring. I don't know.... maybe I will.... maybe I won't... we'll see.
sorry for always adjusting this....these chiffon ones I could never... I love how they look the most but I could never fix them properly. they never stay in place.. even if I like put them here under my chin see? can you get lavender to smoke, relax you? [reading comments] I don't know can you get lavender shisha... but I think it's only fruit flavors... but I'm not really sure. the water looks good. yeah, these are the water towers in Kuwait. yeah, I just drink a lot of water. like, this is the water bottle water we drink. we buy, like, our whole wall is like full of like water bottles. even if we have a filter, it's like the water in Kuwait in the summer, like, I wanted to have a coldish shower right? I put the water on the coldest setting it was hot. Like I couldn't even shower it was that hot. it was like, so hot I had to wait till evening time to have a shower because the water cools down in the evening. but in the daytime if you want to shower be prepared for the hottest water! it's so hot it was like it felt like 45 degrees today. so... but the AC and the new car is really nice.
Michelle.. and um, we, had like a slush today but I'm not sure about the lavender. Golden Girl, good question... um what did I have for dinner? actually I ate KFC because I was craving it and they have this new flavor of like chicken it's like Flamin Hot Lays and they have chicken tenders...and I had these twisters... and you know I tried to mukbang but I was just, like, in one of those moods where I'm like, what does it look like I'm wearing? shoulder pads? what the heck does it look like I'm wearing shoulder pad?....um, just like a really tired,hot.... not in a really talkative mood. kind of, like, I am now... so I'm like, I should probably do a live stream, you know? I don't know ....I, I really, just yeah.... I wasn't really in the mood. so I was just, like eating kind of quietly and I think most people um.... what was I gonna say? like, like, conversation with my videos, you know what I mean?
what month does it start getting the hottest? um, I don't know.... babe, what like month, like April... no the hottest actually probably like June? July? like it's gonna be like now but it's gonna get like I think even hotter.
[Note: Useless fact: The longest day of sunlight is on or around 20 June. It takes the earth 30 days to absorb and emit the heat so hottest days in many regions in the northern hemishperes is on or around 20 July]
so why he jumped his face like as big as FFG?!! LMAO! not even close! [Laughter] sorry... but it's true... this is, like, this is material all bunched up by the way but yeah I have a double chin.
July, August, September... um September too? oh great so we have... so here it's like reversed in Canada. the longest season is winter and here is summer [Note: Wait until Chantal learns about the equator]
thanks Golden Girl! thank you! remember this lip gloss... it's the...you guys remember when I went to buy this the Estee Lauder one? um will be 50 to 60. does it hit 60 like every summer? oh my God! I can't imagine... like, I have to go outside even for just a minute to experience what 60 degree weather is like... and we have to do like a test... like, I want to do that fried egg test. we have to put an egg on the pavement and see if it fries... but you know I can go peek my head out come right back in the building because the building is well air conditioned...like even downstairs in the lobby.
I don't know where people get this idea that we don't we don't have AC. it's not like...it's not a third world country um...there's AC everywhere and actually there's, like, um, I don't know like people put charity water tanks all over the town, like, different parts of each City. so, so, like, you can have clean drinking water and then there's like tunnels with like AC so people can have a break and walk through the tunnels instead of being outside. so there's, like, a lot of Refuge... is it respite Refuge? I don't know what word I'm looking for.... there's a lot of.... like, you get a break from the Sun.... if you even just going into malls, like, all the malls are very well air conditioned. um, so I would not be able to, yeah that's hot... I would not be able to survive here without AC. even Salah you will test it and we'll be grilled.
I remember one morning where one morning we woke up and he opens the curtain... actually, we do this every morning, like mashallah, I have to say it...we, we open the windows and we see the the beautiful ocean view.. and I'm like, one time I was like okay.. let's go out and he was like if you go out at this time you will be Chicken on coal! so, we have to wait until a certain time like after 4 or 4 30. I'll melt like cheese.
I wonder if I put cheese out if it will melt... hi Anastasia! sunblock will be useful...yeah, I need to get some, babe, true. creepy comfort and crime, [reading live chat] oh I just seen you... I just saw you ready...welcome, welcome to the very important users! thanks for becoming a Beezer!
yeah and I don't think that I'll be experiencing a winter, you know? not an all gun wood for like the next long while so I don't know when I'll go back to Canada for a visit.... but if I do go back, I'll be like a tourist right? because I don't have a place there anymore so, well it'll be weird be like a a Canada tourist.
[Note: Chantal doesn't understand her own citizenship status with Canada because she doesn't have a physical mailing address or residence. However, she is still a Canadian citizen].
cheese melted 'michelted'... you want to watch a horror movie, babe? I don't know... I might fall asleep but that's okay... what's a good horror movie from like the 2000s that we have? I don't know...
we tried finding "the ring" [horror movie] but we couldn't. why don't we last watch? oh, escape room one and two? those are good movies there's Escape rooms here but they're expensive I tried it several times to fry an egg here in Kuwait and it was successful. really?! no way?! you just leave the egg thereafter and like animals will eat? [reading live chat comments] a day when I lived in Vegas when I was in high school, I fried an egg in the street... no way! it gets hot like that? and it's just, like, are there some states where it gets super hot like Texas... say in Vegas.... I guess Death Valley is one of the hottest place... is quite hotter than Death Valley.. I'm happy to not see you in winter in Canada again.
yeah ...that's true... you leave a for the winter that's smart... that's what, yeah, my, I have family members who do that. Anna, hi dream! Insidious is good.. he watched... I don't think he liked Insidious. I don't know why... he likes more gross movies we watched a really gross zombie movie called "yummy"... oh my God... but it was pretty good movie, I guess. but just like one of those movies I'd only watch Once... don't ask me about security emoji. I can't believe the last horror movie watch was The Exorcist and it's like in the 70s that's so long ago...
[reading live chat again] it gets really hot in Vegas... really? like over a hundred? The Descent, oh, is that about a monster? I'm Chucky hi I'm Chucky you want to play no Chucky I want to burn you in fire and lava seriously I would drive and throw him in a volcano and then you go home and he's on your bed I'll burp I'm waiting to murder you God The Descent I think I watched it a long time ago you know what's really creepy? okay, the catacombs, like stories about the catacombs freak me out... like, all those tunnels under Paris? imagine getting lost in there! you'd be dead...you slept with your parents? I used to get scared and sleep with my mom too... she was like come on now there's nothing! you know, your parents get annoyed? no wonder... they probably want to break from us. I don't blame them. it's about the group of girls in a cave... ah but there's like a monster right? I think should I tell the Tank Engine ~oh my God~ that is my favorite picture! can you send it to me by emails? like, and [laugh] oh my God ~ actually the Crypt ~oh babe look at the picture [Music]
oh my God! that made my day! my potato face, choo choo, that, you know, what Thomas the Tank Engine used to be my one of my favorite shows as a kid... and Babar, potatoes ~ oh my God you're living like 15! oh I live in central California and it can get to 112. you that's hot! we will watch Descent movie... okay that I think that's I saw, that movie oh
Cassie oh my God! I need to quit smoking... I can't even [laugh] no oh my God that's so funny! all righ,t that's a perfect picture. I love that! I don't know if that was meant to be hate, but it made me laugh. so like my magnet, I found one of my abayas that's been missing. it was in the suitcase. we haven't unboxed yet. I keep forgetting ...do you unpack this one suitcase finally? did it you know... the hardest part of um putting together your home is organizing. I like finding, like, nice containers and all this stuff. I got um these nice little baskets, little baskets to put under the TV so we can put all our stuff in there you know? like watches and stuff like tha...t Chargers and especially we have to cat proof the home so, like, every, lik,e even this.
I'm not gonna put it take it off and I'm not gonna put it somewhere because the cat will lose it... remember I used to have that problem with the bees or Cuts I had with um with Sam and BBJ with my earrings? I would always only have one... yeah hi Cassie! did you uh forget your biscuit again? yeah ,thank God my family's okay now... but uh you know I'm kind of worried... like, I don't know the fires are getting bad eh?
pretty sure what New York looked like yesterday from the smoke... no, I have to look at all this up. I guess I've just been really self-absorbed. I haven't really been paying attention, but yeah are there wildfires like every year in California or like, the Wildfire is just like, remember how bad they were in Australia a couple years ago... a few years ago? I had a lot of beezers and viewers then in Australia. I was worried... about there's a lot of school and outside activities canceled? oh wow! that's bad! I'm sure the kids love that! hi blacks,hey long time no see! I missed you guy,s you know ?I used to pray for some kind of natural disaster when I was in school years... anything to get out of going, you know, like, are you sure the buses are not canceled today? you're still going I'm getting great, like, one before my mom had a car I'm getting Grandpa to drive you ...no I don't want to go to school [Laughter]
I used to pray for any illness... I know it's bad, but any cold any flu you... now I even remember like being in class with some kid who would be sneezing and you could tell they're getting sick and I'd be, like, you know, they'd be, like, okay, pick a partner for your for your uh project? okay, I want to go with the sick kid so I can catch his flu so I don't I can miss school. uh anything I hated, I hated going... I hated getting up in the morning since I was born. I was even late coming out of the womb, like, my mom had to have a C-section. I didn't want to come out... I was late... I was supposed to come out... mine was I supposed to be born I think the 26th... Kelly's pretty bad but it's been cool, like a cucumber...really how much snow? oh, it has to be like 30 centimeters or more for them to cancel school well it has to be a lot.
[Music] oh the flyers in Nova Scotia
[Laughter] the other options of school was wishing for a disaster... yeah, I was like please give me the flu! everyone's getting the flu but me, I swear it must have been the Papaya juice my mom used to give me in my lunches. I hated Papaya juice. I don't think I ever told her and just suffered in silence... a lot of vitamin C... give me the Capri Sun! it's very smoky where I am in Northern Ontario jeez lemon mint, cough, hey where were you I've already been... I've already been.
coughing what the [ __ ] I swear... I ate it going to school like, honestly, whenever, like, my mom would check and I had a fever, I was like "yes" because like when you're young, you think you're Immortal... you don't care if you have a cold, you know what I mean? you don't care if you have a fever... you're like, whatever, I can survive this now. well now I worry a bit... you know? I was born at uh yeah warmly I have a dark sense of humor .I was born at 4 30 in the morning. I blame that! I'm being a night owl, yeah... I was born just after midnight explains a lot. Julia's so cute! how is she? I know everyone is going through it but I'm going through it. you only... oh we're always setting you positive energy blocks... hope you're okay, what's up? you can share with us
um Julia is amazing she's just a Beezer she's a bit of a Beezer and uh but she's so cute and she's so cuddly. like, he's probably the the cuddly she's even more cuddly than BBJ if that's possible. early morning babies are babies born between 4 AM and 8 AM grow up to be persistent. they are generally intelligent and always prepared for different situations. they might face... wow do you know what time you were born babe? that I'm not in that category at all... so I was born what who has a dark web passport what the heck I'm so out of the loop
oh what did Golden say? oh Southern Ontario it is really widespread? yeah, that's what I heard but I didn't know how bad... oh my gosh! it's your husband's birthday? happy birthday zero support! that can be tough.. we're here for you... honestly, like, I like ,to beeze and like why not? we're all humans we all go through hard things. even though we're on the internet doesn't mean that we can't share and you know, be here for each other. you don't even have to explain what's going on all you need to say is you have you're having a hard time you know? to be born during business hours you're, like, I'm not being born during business hour,s mom you got to make those bucks! oh okay, since you've had a date, uh are you like the type that doesn't, you know ,what? getting a babysitter is not that easy... I know, I remember my mom trying to get a babysitter sometimes for me. it was hardened the babysitters I was left with. sometimes remember I told you my story times about one babysitter Beth. ew. yeah
I had some bad babysitters I always tattled on them and never had to see them again. though, so that was good, but yeah it's not as easy you know, it's not as easy as that what people are displaced oh my God. well Canada is really big... there's a lot of places to go but not if the fire's spreading that far. that's crazy !I really hope that everything people stay safe and everything goes well "we have two kids and one special needs so hard I just need a flip a couple of hours sometimes I just don't get that I love my girls but I hope no one takes that out" [reading live chat again]. yeah hey that's totally understandable.. it's very overwhelming... you know, you do your best but he got burnt out. like, caregiver burnout is a real thing... and actually when I worked in healthcare, we used to have a lot of people who would go into homes just to help with respite for people who were burnt out, you know? so at least you recognize that maybe there's some kind of like organization like that you know......Tracy, 18 months? oh my gosh! hi Tracy! I'm glad to see all you beezers here these stats are not accurate but we have to say it yeah, yeah, babe...you set her hair on fire oh my gosh that's Criminal! did you go on a group home after that?
I'm so protective too so that doesn't help uh you just don't let anyone go in yeah I understand. that, you know, you're leaving like loved ones in the care of strangers so it's hard.
hello Tracy! oh that's sweet babe! Maya lobby with your side and bless you sweets. parenting is hard yeah, like you know, I couldn't even imagine! I'm having a you know, like, being a pet mom is challenging. sometimes, honestl,y I couldn't imagine because some universities provide daycare at affordable rates.. that's true... my University had a daycare... excuse me, um I'm glad I never had to visit you know? something about daycare is creep me out... I remember being in daycare, like, I remember the smell of like old microwave dinners the cots... the cots that we had to take naps on. I had to go to a daycare after school and they made us have a nap every, every, every class. I went to as a young kid. there's always a kid who pukes. I don't know why, but there's always a pukey kid. sometimes I was a puke kid on the bus and then they always made us play with this like water and cornstarch mixture daycare. oh I'm glad I'm an adult as much, as... as much as life could be crap when you're an adult I don't miss being a child.
hi Katie Katie! she lost a few strands thank you guys, to see each event! hey, you're in the right place the hen is not itchy like thank goodness. you know, because I did look it up and apparently people have more issues with the block. which I didn't know... but they made me sign a waiver and I was wondering why. but now I know allergies... but oh thank goodness. yeah "I love being a mom but it can sure be hard not having any yeah not having any support" is definitely tough for sure, thanks Fox! yeah permanent is harder for sure... you'll have to replay later yeah I've been on for about 47 minutes.
what's Loch key, hey Chloe ,Tabor! am I saying that right? welcome, welcome! We're Gonna Save beeze hello! oh yeah Ali's a new Beezer. I missed the economy when I was a child. now I'm working everything... ye,s you're right. the economy was and it seemed people back then like in the 80s you know, um, from the I was born in the 80s... so old oh my gosh, everything was different, you're right. like, people had, like, you know? were able to sustain a life with jobs. you know, like, I don't know the quality of things just seemed better. I don't know how to explain it... like, even I don't know... maybe I'm not remembering that right. whenever you're a kid everything is just like the world is like mysterious. now when you start learning everything about it... it's like, you know,... well before I became like, religious, there was a huge period of time where everything just felt hopeless and meaningless... and I was like atheist for a point and I was like what the heck is the point of this, you know?
it's so mundane and tedious and you know... and now it's not like that wine and grapes come.. company yeah bringing up children because you're always having to dedicate all of your time to them. like, you're responsible for the bringing up of a whole human! like, that just terrifies me... like, even having a cat... hi witchy! hi beaters! sommelier! that's what it's called... nice that's interesting but if you can, you're strong you seem very strong .blacks so, if anyone can do it, it's you. I don't believe God gives us anything more than we can handle and honestly? even though it tests our limits, like, I don't know if people just think everything is just going to be sunshine and rainbows all the time. like, life is how can we be tested as people, if we don't go through hard things, you know, so it's just I see things in a very different perspective than I did even just last year, you know? and just getting rid of that hopeless feelings um helps me deal with depression in a lot of ways... there's a lot of ways I try to deal with my depression. um instead of ignoring it, uh, there's still a lot of things and tools I could use... but I find that my faith medication and just proper self-learning techniques of how to deal with anxieties and things, you know ,more emotional intelligence... that I'm really trying those things have been really, really, really hard to learn.
oh my gosh! yeah, I heard they're insane on me. that's what we've been saying! just bought Resident Evil 4, Jack ...nice have you been playing? have you started playing? I didn't know you were a gamer... no, I don't go to therapy here. therapy is ridiculously expensive here ridiculous like I think well from what a research I did it's like very very expensive like very but not just that um it's I guess I just cope with like learning like watching a lot of videos... reading a lot about emotional intelligence, coping techniques. like, this social media can be very useful for educational things. like, that um also I you know pray a lot and turn to my faith read the Quran and just, I don't know ...I feel like I've matured a little bit in that way, you know? an online therapist? that's like, yeah, I keep forgetting about that... move a TV? oh my gosh it must be strong! I think one therapist I checked was like 500 K.D that's like two thousand dollars, unless I got that wrong. maybe it was 500... I don't know... definitely give that to the when I when it piles on. just gets a lot it... does health issues it just piles on? yeah it seems insufferable. so like, uh, insurmountable sometimes content over meditation how you cope with negativity that's a good idea, thanks, Jack. thanks guys for noticing... he used to be a gamer what's your favorite all time? I don't know if I'm... in a minute... I'm gonna check it out again, actually and see. because I was a while ago. I checked... I don't even know if I have it right. but I remember being expensive a lot more than Canada.
Korean Pizza what's on that? I have an online there like uh Korean Fried Chicken. I have an online therapist and it's been good not sure how much it would be in Kuwait. though yeah I'd have to check the Korean. I've heard of sushi Pizza, that sounds gross to me. has anyone have sushi Pizza? reading the Bible, yeah whatever.... reading whatever religious text that you follow can be very calming, yeah... even just like when you're praying... it's like calming. Resident Evil 2 right here... another Resident Evil fan! Salah your favorite is Resident Evil 4 right? because you love Ashley so much. Sushi burritos, whoa, "you can't take care of others with an empty cup" that's true, yeah... that's why they say you have to take care of yourself first, but I mean how realistic is that? it's so hard to do ,you know, to find time for yourself when it's just constantly like, you know....
I can't even compare but even with a kitten like I forget how much work they are because I was so used to having adult cats, you know? for a long time but I remember, even BBJ was a Beezer. Sam was a Beezer, you know ,and you have to cat proof your house. you have to keep an eye on them when they're awake, and sometimes when she's sleeping, I'm like oh finally! you know? like, she's not busying because like I have to like get up so many times to like make sure she doesn't get to the through. Like I have to hide every wire.. every everything, everything in the house. but she's worth it... actually gross, okay Golden Girl, no problem. short rib pizza? oh my gosh! that sounds so good! yum! yeah happy birthday to him... I'm so proud of you having a higher power and seeing purpose. do you drink ever at all or no drinking? a Mormon? oh really Chloe oh you were Mormon? um no I don't drink anymore... um any kind of um mind-altering substance you know is is like forbidden it in Islam. but um CBD is... is okay though because it's not like mind-altering. but drinking is definitely... drinking is like illegal here. you won't find... you won't find out any legal alcohol here. I don't know about illegal... I don't know anything about that... but you won't find any legal alcohol here. you know,
oh my God ,what did you do all day? well it depends on the day lemon mint. I mean, like, a regular domestic day? is that what you mean? because it just depends you know, like, I... I'm planning on doing some day in the life of videos. Maybe. you know but you know, it just depends. depends on the day. um regular domestic stuff most days you know taking care of the pet the pets keep me busy um you know cleaning just stuff. like, that doing videos talking to family. we go out sometimes, go run errands. go get coffee. go get dinner. whatever. go to the movies ,stuff like that. how's the beezing kitties? she's so mischievous I do give her already some kind of chicken Pate she loves it... hi baby...alcohols... yeah, I believe that too. more dangerous than media need a Beezer membership buddy. yeah, I really haven't can't believe I haven't come up with merch yet.
hey babe, hi baby... what's up for you, baby? oh did she give me a creepy chocolate. hi, I miss you... you're so handsome. I love math thank you, honey. I think it looks cool. what kind of mask is this guys? is this the Anarchy mask? I like your hair guys.. don't tell her it's Secret [Laughter] it's that V for Vendetta mask isn't it? you ever see that movie V for Vendetta? no, foreign Edition? ah, yeah, I think it is vendetta. The Purge has started. chocolate creepy chocolates, thanks babe. I didn't know we had any more of these. I thought we ~I~ ate them all. I'm kidding! are you alone there without me? yes, I'll come soon. software on it, love you, love you most, love you mostly look pretty. Tracy we were actually... we were out shopping and he's like what do you think of this mask? it was like a store with all masks in it. this is a milk. have you ever had these? they're good. I'm gonna try.. I'm not really hungry. I had too much to eat but hmm I put your tea and sasqually... my God she's a pig... foreign I go through like two of these a day! it's not diabetes I should do a review of Quake snacks, yeah. because they do have a lot of different ones. like, you've seen some of them in my grocery hauls you know the pop pops? they have a lot of like a lot of things... a lot of things are flavored with zatar you guys know what that is? around oh.
[Laughter] Julius here hi!
hi baby, oh, oh she doesn't want to be held right now. hi, honey... she looks like church... hi baby... let me holder better.. okay. honey it's okay. it's okay. it's okay.... she might be scared of your man... she's purring. oh really? oh baby girl
hi sweetie oh you're a sweet girl here oh poor girl okay yeah yellow.. say bye. say bye! yeah I sing to her. you kno,w the song, um the queen hi! to me vintage SO thanks Chloe! my shisha's done anyways. so you want a Calico? she looks like church from um pet cemetery. her eyes the same color. she's so she's so cute anyway.s um oh yeah so you want a fat ginger cat and call him Garfield? zatar is like a seasoning made out of like Thyme and like I think sesame seeds. I don't know, lik,e exactly what's in it... but it's mostly made of thyme so it's really tasty. actually I want to go cuddle Julia now. she's... but she eats a lot. she eats a lot mashallah. she eats a lot she has a good appetite on her. she's so small. I think kittens eat more right? because they're growing but we feed her wet and dry and I give her some cremo treats. those creamy treats, she really loves those. so yeah that's Julia next time I'll show you Halloween Howie try sumac yeah, I have tried sumac before. like, in babba ganoush and stuff. it's like sour a bit. eh or something.. I don't know... I know what I know what it tastes like... I need to whiten my teeth or just wear red lipstick. look what you have here Harry he's here on this side is here on this side. hi Emily! let me grab him for the cage
[Music] hi Emmy here he is oh you big boy Hey Big Boy
[Music] oh Howie don't fall out there's a cat now! I'm kidding! hi everyone! rattler I love you so much, you big fat boy! damn son, he's cute. say "bye, hello, bye-bye yellow" back to your home. he doesn't want to get off my hand yeah it looks like a final grumpy Haggard rat freak and oil thanks, babe. vitamin C, really? I didn't know that, she's cut...e you don't want to come off my hand because he doesn't want to go back in the cage. is that a rat? I'm gonna tease him now. are you a rat are you a mouse are you a hamster? I always say that to him he's a hamster. but he looks like a mouse. I don't know he's a freak of nature. I don't know what to say but yeah he's um he's so cute. I love him he's my big boy, Howie! I let him run around and he was Beason... he got he kind of got stuck under the door but no not actually stuck but he was trying to get out. he's a ratster. oh my God, yes... are you a register? he looks like a hamster to me, yeah. he's like a big chubby hamster and he likes to just like, we this is the second wheel we get him. so we got him a wheel and we moved all the hang out of the way and it's turning fine. you know, the guy at the store was even like, this moves really well. so we put the new wheel inside and remember, whenever we got first got him, he was in that little cage? he was playing on that little wheel but this feels way bigger instead. of he doesn't like that it moves. he doesn't like that it moves so he went out of his way to move the hay, all the hay I took the trouble of moving out for him he put it all back to so that the wheel would be stationary because he likes to sit in the wheel and clean his bum, so he likes to have a clean bum cleaning station and it has to be stationary. he's got his own little like hamster rap personality. he likes to go to the bathroom in one corner. um he chooses wood. he loves his corn. any I have a medley a hamster food medley with like all different nuts and seeds but he only eats certain things. and I could tell when he's had it like I have to replenish his food because only these little grain. he doesn't .I think there's like quinoa... I'm not sure. there's like these tiny little circle pellets he doesn't like them. so he leaves them. he only eats the the certain things inside the medley. he's so picky and weird. I don't know he's a weirdo. That's What I Love About Pets. they all have their own like different little personality. you know personalities? chinchillas they're so cute... yeah they had some at the pet store. I couldn't believe some of the animals they had there! like they had meerkats. they had tucans, like, some people have pet tucans. they're very demanding like, like, having having an exotic pet like that?
anyways guys I think I'm gonna go because it's like late here and I want to go to bed and you know, relax. getting some coffee PJs? oh excuse me... Birds scare the crap out of you, really? I love birds. you have weasels? get out of here! like, the weasels from um Roger rabbits? does Harry still get to run? yeah like he's most of the time in this room, I only came in here to smoke but I don't have my shisha... finish I think it's finished um other than that every day like twice a day. first I come in replenish his, like, spot clean, give him some fruits and vegetables. replenish his Kibbles. then I take him out. he always comes out of his little hay hen and goes like he knows I'm in here. and then I let him run around. and there's like still Parcels in here from moving and stuff. he likes to climb them like they're Mount Everest for him. he's weird. I don't know who he climbs but he likes to run around and then I put him back in attend to Julia. then I come back at night and let him play a bit, you know? but I have to stay in here like I don't.. I could let him stay but I don't know I prefer to just ever since he tried to get up the bottom of the door. I watch him now that I'm in here. he can't be unsupervised he's not trusted. he lost my treasury, so I just set up the gaming station and just watch videos or whatever preferable. if Julia's asleep because she gets very Territorial and like, jealous if I'm in here with the door closed. so kind of thing, anyway... it was nice chatting with you guys um thanks for watching me play with my hijab for an hour uh yeah so what was I gonna say.
I guess that's it, I'm tired. so um thanks for beezing and I hope all of you guys days get better and easier and we'll chat next time. I guess, yeah, um maybe next stream I'll try to think of something fun to do. I like just coming on here and just chatting though really I don't know I like just talking and socializing it's like a form of socialization for me I guess but yeah my beezers so guys thanks for a reason without a reason that's what I'll call it be then without a reason um and I'll see you in my next video or my next live stream so toodaloop, bye guys.

We decided to go for a drive in the countryside one Saturday morning. I’m the type of person who usually plans everything, leaving nothing to chance. I’m not spontaneous at all and it gets on my wife’s nerves. This was going to be different. It was all my idea and I assured Tammy we were just going to ‘wing it’. She rolled her eyes. She knows me. She realizes even my ‘spontaneous’ excursions are planned, somehow.
The truth is, it bothers me to not have a game plan. I’m usually the one driving on these rogue adventures and I have to decide to turn left or right if there’s no predetermined path or destination. I hate doing that with a passion but I wanted to prove to her I could drive without advance research or scouting. Inside it was going to kill me, but I had to pretend to be ok with it. You know how couples can get. I had to prove her ‘wrong’.
We loaded up the car with a couple of bottles of water and snacks before steering toward the rural part of the state. In the beginning, I’d been to parts of the area, but the longer we drove, the further I left behind my comfort zone. Tammy was loving it. I’d glance over at her occasionally and she’d have this genuine glow of contentment from the random drive. I sincerely think part of the enjoyment was relishing in my discomfort, but I wasn’t about to let on. Regardless, I wasn’t much of an actor and we both knew I was a bundle of knots inside.
Every few miles we’d see an old farmhouse or weathered barn with cows in the pasture. The scenery was lush and picturesque. The weather itself was beautiful too. All in all, for a random drive in the country being officiated by an obsessive planner, it was pretty darn enjoyable. I didn’t feel the crippling apprehension which usually came over me when I was trying to find a specific location in the dark. It was easier to be ‘lost’ in the daylight, with no set agenda. You might even say I was adjacent to enjoying myself.
The deeper Tammy and I drove into ‘Nowheresville’, the more we started noticing some odd little things. There were weird symbols painted on the side of the houses and barns visible from the old county road. They weren’t anything either of us was familiar with, but clearly they meant something to the locals. The first few didn’t register as anything to take note of, but eventually it became an obvious thing which stood out, in an otherwise idyllic country drive. I found myself anticipating them with each new home we approached. All of the symbols were somewhat different in ‘character’ formation, but they were similar enough to be related.
Neither of us spoke about them at the time but those strange markings troubled us, deeply. It was definitely on our minds when we stopped at a small country store for supplies, and to use the bathroom. As is usually the case with folks in the countryside, the store owners were very friendly. We must’ve stood out like sore thumbs, because they asked where we were from. We bought food and drinks for the road, and yukked it up with them for a couple minutes.
That is, until I summoned the courage to ask what the symbols on the buildings meant. Immediately their whole demeanor changed. It was night and day. Tammy noticed it too. She looked at me with a side-eyed glance as their mood darkened. To their credit, they didn’t try to change the subject. That would’ve been too obvious; but they did look down the aisles first to make sure there were no other customers within earshot, before answering. That definitely raised our hackles. It was creepy as hell. The truth was apparently something ‘outsiders’ like us weren’t supposed to know.
Suddenly it felt like we were about to be sucked into the middle of a rural conspiracy. They leaned over and whispered: “You folks seem real nice. Please don’t ask anyone else about them. It’s for ‘protection’, and for heaven’s sake, don’t be around here once the sun goes down. There’s a full moon tonight and they prefer the dark.”
I looked at Tammy’s mortified face. Her reaction was probably the same as my own. The suspense widened. We kept waiting for them to burst out laughing about winding up the big city folks, but the grins never came. They just handed us our receipt and told us to have a safe trip back home. There was a strong emphasis on us leaving soon. Like a couple of traumatized school kids, we thanked them for their prior hospitality and walked out. It was already dusk, and we were halfway across the state. We’d been seeing those bizarre markers for fifty miles or more.
Was it some secret sect? Tammy dared to take a photo of one of the ‘protection markers’ with her phone as we drove back toward home but the internet service in the boonies was spotty, at best. Since it was some deeply held rural secret, she hoped an image search would tell us what they meant. The country store proprietors acted like it was blood painted on the door of their homes to signal for the Biblical Angel of Death to pass them by.
Night fell quickly, with us still being in the middle of ‘Nowheresville’. We were definitely spooked and needed fuel for the car. Predictably, there were no stations around and the needle was below ‘E’. My OCD nerves were kicking way in. I was tempted to lash-out about why THIS is the reason I didn’t like to be spontaneous, but I held my tongue. It wouldn’t have helped. The image lookup netted very little helpful information. The only thing she could find was that it was somehow tied to ‘a secretive society of occult Freemasons’.
What? There were too many of them for it to be an ‘inside joke on city folks exploring the backroads’. We wouldn’t have thought there would be anything other that devout religious people living in that isolated section of the county. Not only that, but what did the shop owner’s vague statement mean? ‘They prefer the dark’? They made it sound like there were bloodthirsty werewolves roaming the woods. As laughable as it sounded, they weren’t laughing when they said it, and they didn’t appear to be kidding either.
They warned us to be completely out of the area before nightfall, and yet here we were, running on fumes and hoping to find a gas station before we were stranded like sitting ducks. The wind picked up until it blew our little car around like a sailboat in a churning sea. If there was any good from our unplanned misadventure, it was that all the dust we’d picked up from the long drive would hopefully be blown off the car.
It was barely 9pm on a Saturday night but every house we passed was as dark as could be. Not a single light shone in any of their windows. Either they went to bed early in the country, or they didn’t want to invite strangers to their doors after dark. Intellectually I knew rural folk were known to sleep early, but I couldn’t help but hear the shopkeepers conspiratorial words echo again in my ears. I couldn’t see Tammy’s face well but I know her. She was dwelling on it too. Under the circumstances it would’ve been impossible to ignore.
As growing nightmares tend to do, the car began to shudder. It was choking on its last few ounces of fuel left in the line. I wanted to shake the steering wheel in terrified frustration but it’s an inanimate object. I’m the damn fool goaded into ‘proving how unprepared I could be’. This was my ‘reward’. I was going to have to walk in the dark with a gas can until I found the next house. Then I was going to have to beat on their front door and hope they would take mercy on us. It was the perfect checkbox list of ‘NO!’ for me.
Walk alone in the dark. The FULL MOON dark.
Traverse a rural two lane blacktop where I didn’t know a single soul.
Ask for help from total strangers that could have been avoided if I’d just used my damn head in the first place.
And the ‘piece de resistance’:
Be on the lookout for ‘werewolves’ or Moses’ Angel of Death sent to kill the firstborn sons.
My own anger generated a certain level of false bravado which I needed to ‘get it done’. I cursed myself for not having gas already in the fuel can in the trunk but the truth is, I would’ve been afraid it was an explosion risk. It’s hell being an over-thinker. Tammy had the audacity to ask where I was going. I just turned toward her with a disgruntled scowl. She didn’t mean it the way it came out. It was obvious I had to go for help. She just didn’t want to be alone in the car. I think she felt bad for all of her past attempts to ‘loosen me up’ about over-planning things. Perhaps on the eve of our mutual doom, I might’ve won one. Ah, the bittersweet irony.
The two of us held hands. We’d started the journey together and we’d finish it together. Whatever that meant. Like a gentleman, I placed her away from the roadway but it was mostly a symbolic gesture. There were no other cars driving by. She was the first to notice how quiet it was as we walked. There was only the sound of our shoes clacking the pavement. In a place with all manner of wild animals living in nature, it was deathly silent. She gripped my hand tightly. It seemed like we’d walked a long way but the truth is, we were relatively lucky. The nearest farmhouse was less than a mile from our stranded vehicle.
Like the rest, it had one of those arcane symbols painted right on the front door. Also like the others, there wasn’t a single light shining in their windows but the driveway had three cars. They were definitely home but I had my doubts they would answer us. We didn’t want to be shot for startling them so we tried to make some unsubtle noises on the doorstep to announce our benevolent presence. Country folks like their twelve gauge shotguns. I hoped they would realize we were harmless and in need of help.
We both heard sounds of lamentation coming from inside. If anything, they were more frightened than we were. I’d characterize it as terrified. I spoke up in my friendliest voice to reassure them.
“Hello there. We’re terribly sorry to bother you folks so late at night. We’re just passing through from out of town and our car ran out of gas. Do you happen to have some? We’d be happy to reimburse you. I’ve got a hundred dollar bill. I can slide it under your door as compensation.”
A man on the other side spoke up. There was a noticeable tremor in his voice. He appeared to be trying very hard to balance his innate sense of politeness and hospitality, with a crumbling wall of courage. It didn’t bode well to reassure either of us.
“I’m terribly sorry for your trouble mister, but there’s something very evil lurking in these parts you don’t want to encounter. They come out at night time and for that precise reason, we don’t dare open the front door, for anyone. I’d be happy to siphon some of my own gas for you; but I won’t set foot out there until daylight. I have to protect myself and my family. I hope you understand. Now, run back to your car and lock the doors. Quickly! Cover up the windows and take this and put it on the hood of your vehicle in a conspicuous place. It’ll save your lives.”
In the unnatural quietness of the night air, I heard the electronic whirl of an inkjet printer running inside their home. A piece of letter-sized paper slid under the door jamb. It contained one of those strange symbols.
“Leave your fuel can on the porch. I’ll bring some gas, first light. I promise. If they come for you, do not look them in the eye. Go!”
We did exactly as instructed. To the letter. I gotta tell ya, the missus and I would’ve been ‘husband and wife, three-legged race’ winners if we’d entered such a competition. Both of us sprinted at a pace I hardly thought possible. I could barely keep up with her. Then I scrambled to get the keys to open the door. It might’ve been comical if we weren’t racing for our lives. Inside, we located a sun-visor and blankets to block off the windows as best we could. An old paper road map and catalogs from the glove compartment served to complete the job, in record time.
We were almost in the clear when I realized the most important part of the plan wasn’t in place. The protection sign was still in the car with us! I didn’t have any masking tape so there was no way to secure it to the window or hood. Using a rock as a paperweight would’ve blocked it from being visible. In a flash of invention I had an idea. The SUV was so dusty from the county roads that I scrawled the symbol as large as I could into the dirt of the windshield, hood and trunk with my fingers. I hoped that would suffice to spare us from the fury of whatever frightening creatures roamed the hillsides during the full moon.
I jumped back inside just in time. First the smell hit us. It was positively rank and the source of the stench was very, very large. We could feel ‘them’ walking around the car inspecting it. There were tiny voids in our hasty wallpapering of the windows but I didn’t dare look through the cracks. I was too scared I’d make eye contact. We heard them pulling on the door handles to see if they were unlocked. I have absolutely no doubt anything that huge could’ve simply ripped them open but that apparently wasn’t the point. They were checking to see if we’d taken the precaution of locking them.
Tammy had to stifle a scream as the whole vehicle shook back and forth violently. I thought the intent was to flip it upside down. She looked at me in wide-eyed terror. I’d love to suggest she drew strength from my calm masculinity but that would be a bold-faced lie. It was all I could do to keep from squealing like a toddler myself. The things on the other side of the car were definitely not natural. That much was clear to us. Then one of them spoke with a ‘voice’, not of this earth.
“You drew our sacred sigil of mercy on your vehicle, incorrectly. You have parts of the character backwards but we have decided to forgive your ignorance, this time. Leave our home and never return again. Our patience is limited.”
“Thank you!”; We both cried out in unison. Without response, they finally left us, but we dared not leave the impotent ‘safety’ of the car to confirm their departure; even to use the bathroom. Leftover drink cups temporarily served that purpose.
In the morning, the farmer came just as he’d promised. He brought us fuel and something to eat. Not that either of us had an appetite. He saw the evidence of our nocturnal visitors and remarked how fortunate we were, especially with my botched depiction of the ‘sigil’, as they had referred to them. We thanked the man again and we’re on our way. Neither of us breathed a sign of relief until we reached the suburbs.
I drove through an automated car wash to blast off the layers of dirt from our terrifying ordeal, but it didn’t do anything about the savage claw marks and unnatural dents to the sheet metal. I told my coworkers it was from a grizzly bear attack. That would’ve been horrific enough story, but the truth was infinitely worse. These so-called ‘grizzly bears’ could speak, read, and took considerable umbrage to my poorly drawn protection sigils.
My insurance agent demanded to inspect the damage first. He asked me where it occurred. I told him and he adopted the same pale demeanor change as the country store owners. He knew what we faced that night. Obviously there had been other claims like ours over the years. Without acknowledging what we both knew, he said: “You two are lucky to be alive. Don’t go back there again. Your claim will be covered in full. And one more thing, that sigil should look like this.”
He pointed to the clean area of the windshield where I had drawn it. Despite it being washed, you could still see the remnants of my ‘artwork’ on the glass. He took his finger and reversed one of the vertical marks in the middle. Now I know the correct way to draw it. More importantly, Tammy doesn’t try to stop me from planning out all the details of our trips anymore. She finally sees the benefit of NOT being spontaneous. Win-win.

We decided to go for a drive in the countryside one Saturday morning. I’m the type of person who usually plans everything, leaving nothing to chance. I’m not spontaneous at all and it gets on my wife’s nerves. This was going to be different. It was all my idea and I assured Tammy we were just going to ‘wing it’. She rolled her eyes. She knows me. She realizes even my ‘spontaneous’ excursions are planned, somehow.
The truth is, it bothers me to not have a game plan. I’m usually the one driving on these rogue adventures and I have to decide to turn left or right if there’s no predetermined path or destination. I hate doing that with a passion but I wanted to prove to her I could drive without advance research or scouting. Inside it was going to kill me, but I had to pretend to be ok with it. You know how couples can get. I had to prove her ‘wrong’.
We loaded up the car with a couple of bottles of water and snacks before steering toward the rural part of the state. In the beginning, I’d been to parts of the area, but the longer we drove, the further I left behind my comfort zone. Tammy was loving it. I’d glance over at her occasionally and she’d have this genuine glow of contentment from the random drive. I sincerely think part of the enjoyment was relishing in my discomfort, but I wasn’t about to let on. Regardless, I wasn’t much of an actor and we both knew I was a bundle of knots inside.
Every few miles we’d see an old farmhouse or weathered barn with cows in the pasture. The scenery was lush and picturesque. The weather itself was beautiful too. All in all, for a random drive in the country being officiated by an obsessive planner, it was pretty darn enjoyable. I didn’t feel the crippling apprehension which usually came over me when I was trying to find a specific location in the dark. It was easier to be ‘lost’ in the daylight, with no set agenda. You might even say I was adjacent to enjoying myself.
The deeper Tammy and I drove into ‘Nowheresville’, the more we started noticing some odd little things. There were weird symbols painted on the side of the houses and barns visible from the old county road. They weren’t anything either of us was familiar with, but clearly they meant something to the locals. The first few didn’t register as anything to take note of, but eventually it became an obvious thing which stood out, in an otherwise idyllic country drive. I found myself anticipating them with each new home we approached. All of the symbols were somewhat different in ‘character’ formation, but they were similar enough to be related.
Neither of us spoke about them at the time but those strange markings troubled us, deeply. It was definitely on our minds when we stopped at a small country store for supplies, and to use the bathroom. As is usually the case with folks in the countryside, the store owners were very friendly. We must’ve stood out like sore thumbs, because they asked where we were from. We bought food and drinks for the road, and yukked it up with them for a couple minutes.
That is, until I summoned the courage to ask what the symbols on the buildings meant. Immediately their whole demeanor changed. It was night and day. Tammy noticed it too. She looked at me with a side-eyed glance as their mood darkened. To their credit, they didn’t try to change the subject. That would’ve been too obvious; but they did look down the aisles first to make sure there were no other customers within earshot, before answering. That definitely raised our hackles. It was creepy as hell. The truth was apparently something ‘outsiders’ like us weren’t supposed to know.
Suddenly it felt like we were about to be sucked into the middle of a rural conspiracy. They leaned over and whispered: “You folks seem real nice. Please don’t ask anyone else about them. It’s for ‘protection’, and for heaven’s sake, don’t be around here once the sun goes down. There’s a full moon tonight and they prefer the dark.”
I looked at Tammy’s mortified face. Her reaction was probably the same as my own. The suspense widened. We kept waiting for them to burst out laughing about winding up the big city folks, but the grins never came. They just handed us our receipt and told us to have a safe trip back home. There was a strong emphasis on us leaving soon. Like a couple of traumatized school kids, we thanked them for their prior hospitality and walked out. It was already dusk, and we were halfway across the state. We’d been seeing those bizarre markers for fifty miles or more.
Was it some secret sect? Tammy dared to take a photo of one of the ‘protection markers’ with her phone as we drove back toward home but the internet service in the boonies was spotty, at best. Since it was some deeply held rural secret, she hoped an image search would tell us what they meant. The country store proprietors acted like it was blood painted on the door of their homes to signal for the Biblical Angel of Death to pass them by.
Night fell quickly, with us still being in the middle of ‘Nowheresville’. We were definitely spooked and needed fuel for the car. Predictably, there were no stations around and the needle was below ‘E’. My OCD nerves were kicking way in. I was tempted to lash-out about why THIS is the reason I didn’t like to be spontaneous, but I held my tongue. It wouldn’t have helped. The image lookup netted very little helpful information. The only thing she could find was that it was somehow tied to ‘a secretive society of occult Freemasons’.
What? There were too many of them for it to be an ‘inside joke on city folks exploring the backroads’. We wouldn’t have thought there would be anything other that devout religious people living in that isolated section of the county. Not only that, but what did the shop owner’s vague statement mean? ‘They prefer the dark’? They made it sound like there were bloodthirsty werewolves roaming the woods. As laughable as it sounded, they weren’t laughing when they said it, and they didn’t appear to be kidding either.
They warned us to be completely out of the area before nightfall, and yet here we were, running on fumes and hoping to find a gas station before we were stranded like sitting ducks. The wind picked up until it blew our little car around like a sailboat in a churning sea. If there was any good from our unplanned misadventure, it was that all the dust we’d picked up from the long drive would hopefully be blown off the car.
It was barely 9pm on a Saturday night but every house we passed was as dark as could be. Not a single light shone in any of their windows. Either they went to bed early in the country, or they didn’t want to invite strangers to their doors after dark. Intellectually I knew rural folk were known to sleep early, but I couldn’t help but hear the shopkeepers conspiratorial words echo again in my ears. I couldn’t see Tammy’s face well but I know her. She was dwelling on it too. Under the circumstances it would’ve been impossible to ignore.
As growing nightmares tend to do, the car began to shudder. It was choking on its last few ounces of fuel left in the line. I wanted to shake the steering wheel in terrified frustration but it’s an inanimate object. I’m the damn fool goaded into ‘proving how unprepared I could be’. This was my ‘reward’. I was going to have to walk in the dark with a gas can until I found the next house. Then I was going to have to beat on their front door and hope they would take mercy on us. It was the perfect checkbox list of ‘NO!’ for me.
Walk alone in the dark. The FULL MOON dark.
Traverse a rural two lane blacktop where I didn’t know a single soul.
Ask for help from total strangers that could have been avoided if I’d just used my damn head in the first place.
And the ‘piece de resistance’:
Be on the lookout for ‘werewolves’ or Moses’ Angel of Death sent to kill the firstborn sons.
My own anger generated a certain level of false bravado which I needed to ‘get it done’. I cursed myself for not having gas already in the fuel can in the trunk but the truth is, I would’ve been afraid it was an explosion risk. It’s hell being an over-thinker. Tammy had the audacity to ask where I was going. I just turned toward her with a disgruntled scowl. She didn’t mean it the way it came out. It was obvious I had to go for help. She just didn’t want to be alone in the car. I think she felt bad for all of her past attempts to ‘loosen me up’ about over-planning things. Perhaps on the eve of our mutual doom, I might’ve won one. Ah, the bittersweet irony.
The two of us held hands. We’d started the journey together and we’d finish it together. Whatever that meant. Like a gentleman, I placed her away from the roadway but it was mostly a symbolic gesture. There were no other cars driving by. She was the first to notice how quiet it was as we walked. There was only the sound of our shoes clacking the pavement. In a place with all manner of wild animals living in nature, it was deathly silent. She gripped my hand tightly. It seemed like we’d walked a long way but the truth is, we were relatively lucky. The nearest farmhouse was less than a mile from our stranded vehicle.
Like the rest, it had one of those arcane symbols painted right on the front door. Also like the others, there wasn’t a single light shining in their windows but the driveway had three cars. They were definitely home but I had my doubts they would answer us. We didn’t want to be shot for startling them so we tried to make some unsubtle noises on the doorstep to announce our benevolent presence. Country folks like their twelve gauge shotguns. I hoped they would realize we were harmless and in need of help.
We both heard sounds of lamentation coming from inside. If anything, they were more frightened than we were. I’d characterize it as terrified. I spoke up in my friendliest voice to reassure them.
“Hello there. We’re terribly sorry to bother you folks so late at night. We’re just passing through from out of town and our car ran out of gas. Do you happen to have some? We’d be happy to reimburse you. I’ve got a hundred dollar bill. I can slide it under your door as compensation.”
A man on the other side spoke up. There was a noticeable tremor in his voice. He appeared to be trying very hard to balance his innate sense of politeness and hospitality, with a crumbling wall of courage. It didn’t bode well to reassure either of us.
“I’m terribly sorry for your trouble mister, but there’s something very evil lurking in these parts you don’t want to encounter. They come out at night time and for that precise reason, we don’t dare open the front door, for anyone. I’d be happy to siphon some of my own gas for you; but I won’t set foot out there until daylight. I have to protect myself and my family. I hope you understand. Now, run back to your car and lock the doors. Quickly! Cover up the windows and take this and put it on the hood of your vehicle in a conspicuous place. It’ll save your lives.”
In the unnatural quietness of the night air, I heard the electronic whirl of an inkjet printer running inside their home. A piece of letter-sized paper slid under the door jamb. It contained one of those strange symbols.
“Leave your fuel can on the porch. I’ll bring some gas, first light. I promise. If they come for you, do not look them in the eye. Go!”
We did exactly as instructed. To the letter. I gotta tell ya, the missus and I would’ve been ‘husband and wife, three-legged race’ winners if we’d entered such a competition. Both of us sprinted at a pace I hardly thought possible. I could barely keep up with her. Then I scrambled to get the keys to open the door. It might’ve been comical if we weren’t racing for our lives. Inside, we located a sun-visor and blankets to block off the windows as best we could. An old paper road map and catalogs from the glove compartment served to complete the job, in record time.
We were almost in the clear when I realized the most important part of the plan wasn’t in place. The protection sign was still in the car with us! I didn’t have any masking tape so there was no way to secure it to the window or hood. Using a rock as a paperweight would’ve blocked it from being visible. In a flash of invention I had an idea. The SUV was so dusty from the county roads that I scrawled the symbol as large as I could into the dirt of the windshield, hood and trunk with my fingers. I hoped that would suffice to spare us from the fury of whatever frightening creatures roamed the hillsides during the full moon.
I jumped back inside just in time. First the smell hit us. It was positively rank and the source of the stench was very, very large. We could feel ‘them’ walking around the car inspecting it. There were tiny voids in our hasty wallpapering of the windows but I didn’t dare look through the cracks. I was too scared I’d make eye contact. We heard them pulling on the door handles to see if they were unlocked. I have absolutely no doubt anything that huge could’ve simply ripped them open but that apparently wasn’t the point. They were checking to see if we’d taken the precaution of locking them.
Tammy had to stifle a scream as the whole vehicle shook back and forth violently. I thought the intent was to flip it upside down. She looked at me in wide-eyed terror. I’d love to suggest she drew strength from my calm masculinity but that would be a bold-faced lie. It was all I could do to keep from squealing like a toddler myself. The things on the other side of the car were definitely not natural. That much was clear to us. Then one of them spoke with a ‘voice’, not of this earth.
“You drew our sacred sigil of mercy on your vehicle, incorrectly. You have parts of the character backwards but we have decided to forgive your ignorance, this time. Leave our home and never return again. Our patience is limited.”
“Thank you!”; We both cried out in unison. Without response, they finally left us, but we dared not leave the impotent ‘safety’ of the car to confirm their departure; even to use the bathroom. Leftover drink cups temporarily served that purpose.
In the morning, the farmer came just as he’d promised. He brought us fuel and something to eat. Not that either of us had an appetite. He saw the evidence of our nocturnal visitors and remarked how fortunate we were, especially with my botched depiction of the ‘sigil’, as they had referred to them. We thanked the man again and we’re on our way. Neither of us breathed a sign of relief until we reached the suburbs.
I drove through an automated car wash to blast off the layers of dirt from our terrifying ordeal, but it didn’t do anything about the savage claw marks and unnatural dents to the sheet metal. I told my coworkers it was from a grizzly bear attack. That would’ve been horrific enough story, but the truth was infinitely worse. These so-called ‘grizzly bears’ could speak, read, and took considerable umbrage to my poorly drawn protection sigils.
My insurance agent demanded to inspect the damage first. He asked me where it occurred. I told him and he adopted the same pale demeanor change as the country store owners. He knew what we faced that night. Obviously there had been other claims like ours over the years. Without acknowledging what we both knew, he said: “You two are lucky to be alive. Don’t go back there again. Your claim will be covered in full. And one more thing, that sigil should look like this.”
He pointed to the clean area of the windshield where I had drawn it. Despite it being washed, you could still see the remnants of my ‘artwork’ on the glass. He took his finger and reversed one of the vertical marks in the middle. Now I know the correct way to draw it. More importantly, Tammy doesn’t try to stop me from planning out all the details of our trips anymore. She finally sees the benefit of NOT being spontaneous. Win-win.

We decided to go for a drive in the countryside one Saturday morning. I’m the type of person who usually plans everything, leaving nothing to chance. I’m not spontaneous at all and it gets on my wife’s nerves. This was going to be different. It was all my idea and I assured Tammy we were just going to ‘wing it’. She rolled her eyes. She knows me. She realizes even my ‘spontaneous’ excursions are planned, somehow.
The truth is, it bothers me to not have a game plan. I’m usually the one driving on these rogue adventures and I have to decide to turn left or right if there’s no predetermined path or destination. I hate doing that with a passion but I wanted to prove to her I could drive without advance research or scouting. Inside it was going to kill me, but I had to pretend to be ok with it. You know how couples can get. I had to prove her ‘wrong’.
We loaded up the car with a couple of bottles of water and snacks before steering toward the rural part of the state. In the beginning, I’d been to parts of the area, but the longer we drove, the further I left behind my comfort zone. Tammy was loving it. I’d glance over at her occasionally and she’d have this genuine glow of contentment from the random drive. I sincerely think part of the enjoyment was relishing in my discomfort, but I wasn’t about to let on. Regardless, I wasn’t much of an actor and we both knew I was a bundle of knots inside.
Every few miles we’d see an old farmhouse or weathered barn with cows in the pasture. The scenery was lush and picturesque. The weather itself was beautiful too. All in all, for a random drive in the country being officiated by an obsessive planner, it was pretty darn enjoyable. I didn’t feel the crippling apprehension which usually came over me when I was trying to find a specific location in the dark. It was easier to be ‘lost’ in the daylight, with no set agenda. You might even say I was adjacent to enjoying myself.
The deeper Tammy and I drove into ‘Nowheresville’, the more we started noticing some odd little things. There were weird symbols painted on the side of the houses and barns visible from the old county road. They weren’t anything either of us was familiar with, but clearly they meant something to the locals. The first few didn’t register as anything to take note of, but eventually it became an obvious thing which stood out, in an otherwise idyllic country drive. I found myself anticipating them with each new home we approached. All of the symbols were somewhat different in ‘character’ formation, but they were similar enough to be related.
Neither of us spoke about them at the time but those strange markings troubled us, deeply. It was definitely on our minds when we stopped at a small country store for supplies, and to use the bathroom. As is usually the case with folks in the countryside, the store owners were very friendly. We must’ve stood out like sore thumbs, because they asked where we were from. We bought food and drinks for the road, and yukked it up with them for a couple minutes.
That is, until I summoned the courage to ask what the symbols on the buildings meant. Immediately their whole demeanor changed. It was night and day. Tammy noticed it too. She looked at me with a side-eyed glance as their mood darkened. To their credit, they didn’t try to change the subject. That would’ve been too obvious; but they did look down the aisles first to make sure there were no other customers within earshot, before answering. That definitely raised our hackles. It was creepy as hell. The truth was apparently something ‘outsiders’ like us weren’t supposed to know.
Suddenly it felt like we were about to be sucked into the middle of a rural conspiracy. They leaned over and whispered: “You folks seem real nice. Please don’t ask anyone else about them. It’s for ‘protection’, and for heaven’s sake, don’t be around here once the sun goes down. There’s a full moon tonight and they prefer the dark.”
I looked at Tammy’s mortified face. Her reaction was probably the same as my own. The suspense widened. We kept waiting for them to burst out laughing about winding up the big city folks, but the grins never came. They just handed us our receipt and told us to have a safe trip back home. There was a strong emphasis on us leaving soon. Like a couple of traumatized school kids, we thanked them for their prior hospitality and walked out. It was already dusk, and we were halfway across the state. We’d been seeing those bizarre markers for fifty miles or more.
Was it some secret sect? Tammy dared to take a photo of one of the ‘protection markers’ with her phone as we drove back toward home but the internet service in the boonies was spotty, at best. Since it was some deeply held rural secret, she hoped an image search would tell us what they meant. The country store proprietors acted like it was blood painted on the door of their homes to signal for the Biblical Angel of Death to pass them by.
Night fell quickly, with us still being in the middle of ‘Nowheresville’. We were definitely spooked and needed fuel for the car. Predictably, there were no stations around and the needle was below ‘E’. My OCD nerves were kicking way in. I was tempted to lash-out about why THIS is the reason I didn’t like to be spontaneous, but I held my tongue. It wouldn’t have helped. The image lookup netted very little helpful information. The only thing she could find was that it was somehow tied to ‘a secretive society of occult Freemasons’.
What? There were too many of them for it to be an ‘inside joke on city folks exploring the backroads’. We wouldn’t have thought there would be anything other that devout religious people living in that isolated section of the county. Not only that, but what did the shop owner’s vague statement mean? ‘They prefer the dark’? They made it sound like there were bloodthirsty werewolves roaming the woods. As laughable as it sounded, they weren’t laughing when they said it, and they didn’t appear to be kidding either.
They warned us to be completely out of the area before nightfall, and yet here we were, running on fumes and hoping to find a gas station before we were stranded like sitting ducks. The wind picked up until it blew our little car around like a sailboat in a churning sea. If there was any good from our unplanned misadventure, it was that all the dust we’d picked up from the long drive would hopefully be blown off the car.
It was barely 9pm on a Saturday night but every house we passed was as dark as could be. Not a single light shone in any of their windows. Either they went to bed early in the country, or they didn’t want to invite strangers to their doors after dark. Intellectually I knew rural folk were known to sleep early, but I couldn’t help but hear the shopkeepers conspiratorial words echo again in my ears. I couldn’t see Tammy’s face well but I know her. She was dwelling on it too. Under the circumstances it would’ve been impossible to ignore.
As growing nightmares tend to do, the car began to shudder. It was choking on its last few ounces of fuel left in the line. I wanted to shake the steering wheel in terrified frustration but it’s an inanimate object. I’m the damn fool goaded into ‘proving how unprepared I could be’. This was my ‘reward’. I was going to have to walk in the dark with a gas can until I found the next house. Then I was going to have to beat on their front door and hope they would take mercy on us. It was the perfect checkbox list of ‘NO!’ for me.
Walk alone in the dark. The FULL MOON dark.
Traverse a rural two lane blacktop where I didn’t know a single soul.
Ask for help from total strangers that could have been avoided if I’d just used my damn head in the first place.
And the ‘piece de resistance’:
Be on the lookout for ‘werewolves’ or Moses’ Angel of Death sent to kill the firstborn sons.
My own anger generated a certain level of false bravado which I needed to ‘get it done’. I cursed myself for not having gas already in the fuel can in the trunk but the truth is, I would’ve been afraid it was an explosion risk. It’s hell being an over-thinker. Tammy had the audacity to ask where I was going. I just turned toward her with a disgruntled scowl. She didn’t mean it the way it came out. It was obvious I had to go for help. She just didn’t want to be alone in the car. I think she felt bad for all of her past attempts to ‘loosen me up’ about over-planning things. Perhaps on the eve of our mutual doom, I might’ve won one. Ah, the bittersweet irony.
The two of us held hands. We’d started the journey together and we’d finish it together. Whatever that meant. Like a gentleman, I placed her away from the roadway but it was mostly a symbolic gesture. There were no other cars driving by. She was the first to notice how quiet it was as we walked. There was only the sound of our shoes clacking the pavement. In a place with all manner of wild animals living in nature, it was deathly silent. She gripped my hand tightly. It seemed like we’d walked a long way but the truth is, we were relatively lucky. The nearest farmhouse was less than a mile from our stranded vehicle.
Like the rest, it had one of those arcane symbols painted right on the front door. Also like the others, there wasn’t a single light shining in their windows but the driveway had three cars. They were definitely home but I had my doubts they would answer us. We didn’t want to be shot for startling them so we tried to make some unsubtle noises on the doorstep to announce our benevolent presence. Country folks like their twelve gauge shotguns. I hoped they would realize we were harmless and in need of help.
We both heard sounds of lamentation coming from inside. If anything, they were more frightened than we were. I’d characterize it as terrified. I spoke up in my friendliest voice to reassure them.
“Hello there. We’re terribly sorry to bother you folks so late at night. We’re just passing through from out of town and our car ran out of gas. Do you happen to have some? We’d be happy to reimburse you. I’ve got a hundred dollar bill. I can slide it under your door as compensation.”
A man on the other side spoke up. There was a noticeable tremor in his voice. He appeared to be trying very hard to balance his innate sense of politeness and hospitality, with a crumbling wall of courage. It didn’t bode well to reassure either of us.
“I’m terribly sorry for your trouble mister, but there’s something very evil lurking in these parts you don’t want to encounter. They come out at night time and for that precise reason, we don’t dare open the front door, for anyone. I’d be happy to siphon some of my own gas for you; but I won’t set foot out there until daylight. I have to protect myself and my family. I hope you understand. Now, run back to your car and lock the doors. Quickly! Cover up the windows and take this and put it on the hood of your vehicle in a conspicuous place. It’ll save your lives.”
In the unnatural quietness of the night air, I heard the electronic whirl of an inkjet printer running inside their home. A piece of letter-sized paper slid under the door jamb. It contained one of those strange symbols.
“Leave your fuel can on the porch. I’ll bring some gas, first light. I promise. If they come for you, do not look them in the eye. Go!”
We did exactly as instructed. To the letter. I gotta tell ya, the missus and I would’ve been ‘husband and wife, three-legged race’ winners if we’d entered such a competition. Both of us sprinted at a pace I hardly thought possible. I could barely keep up with her. Then I scrambled to get the keys to open the door. It might’ve been comical if we weren’t racing for our lives. Inside, we located a sun-visor and blankets to block off the windows as best we could. An old paper road map and catalogs from the glove compartment served to complete the job, in record time.
We were almost in the clear when I realized the most important part of the plan wasn’t in place. The protection sign was still in the car with us! I didn’t have any masking tape so there was no way to secure it to the window or hood. Using a rock as a paperweight would’ve blocked it from being visible. In a flash of invention I had an idea. The SUV was so dusty from the county roads that I scrawled the symbol as large as I could into the dirt of the windshield, hood and trunk with my fingers. I hoped that would suffice to spare us from the fury of whatever frightening creatures roamed the hillsides during the full moon.
I jumped back inside just in time. First the smell hit us. It was positively rank and the source of the stench was very, very large. We could feel ‘them’ walking around the car inspecting it. There were tiny voids in our hasty wallpapering of the windows but I didn’t dare look through the cracks. I was too scared I’d make eye contact. We heard them pulling on the door handles to see if they were unlocked. I have absolutely no doubt anything that huge could’ve simply ripped them open but that apparently wasn’t the point. They were checking to see if we’d taken the precaution of locking them.
Tammy had to stifle a scream as the whole vehicle shook back and forth violently. I thought the intent was to flip it upside down. She looked at me in wide-eyed terror. I’d love to suggest she drew strength from my calm masculinity but that would be a bold-faced lie. It was all I could do to keep from squealing like a toddler myself. The things on the other side of the car were definitely not natural. That much was clear to us. Then one of them spoke with a ‘voice’, not of this earth.
“You drew our sacred sigil of mercy on your vehicle, incorrectly. You have parts of the character backwards but we have decided to forgive your ignorance, this time. Leave our home and never return again. Our patience is limited.”
“Thank you!”; We both cried out in unison. Without response, they finally left us, but we dared not leave the impotent ‘safety’ of the car to confirm their departure; even to use the bathroom. Leftover drink cups temporarily served that purpose.
In the morning, the farmer came just as he’d promised. He brought us fuel and something to eat. Not that either of us had an appetite. He saw the evidence of our nocturnal visitors and remarked how fortunate we were, especially with my botched depiction of the ‘sigil’, as they had referred to them. We thanked the man again and we’re on our way. Neither of us breathed a sign of relief until we reached the suburbs.
I drove through an automated car wash to blast off the layers of dirt from our terrifying ordeal, but it didn’t do anything about the savage claw marks and unnatural dents to the sheet metal. I told my coworkers it was from a grizzly bear attack. That would’ve been horrific enough story, but the truth was infinitely worse. These so-called ‘grizzly bears’ could speak, read, and took considerable umbrage to my poorly drawn protection sigils.
My insurance agent demanded to inspect the damage first. He asked me where it occurred. I told him and he adopted the same pale demeanor change as the country store owners. He knew what we faced that night. Obviously there had been other claims like ours over the years. Without acknowledging what we both knew, he said: “You two are lucky to be alive. Don’t go back there again. Your claim will be covered in full. And one more thing, that sigil should look like this.”
He pointed to the clean area of the windshield where I had drawn it. Despite it being washed, you could still see the remnants of my ‘artwork’ on the glass. He took his finger and reversed one of the vertical marks in the middle. Now I know the correct way to draw it. More importantly, Tammy doesn’t try to stop me from planning out all the details of our trips anymore. She finally sees the benefit of NOT being spontaneous. Win-win.

All names are changed for privacy reasons. This happened a while ago, but I still think about the friendship sometimes and miss talking to John.
People in this story: John (31M), Sam (21M), best friend of 6 years Me (22F)
During the first week of December, John and Sam both needed jobs. John had been job hopping for the previous several months, staying at no job for more than a few weeks. Sam was more or less made to go along, as he didn't have a car, and they lived in a sketchy part of a neighborhood, so walking to work wasn't exactly a safe option.
After hearing about Sam and John quitting at this factory due to it being too boring and slow, I offered to help them get jobs where I work. I work in a meat processing facility, and the two highest paying departments (I'm in one of them) are fast paced and labor intensive. They accepted, and I helped them to apply. They got in pretty easily, and started working the following Thursday.
Our facility generally works Saturdays, but on the week they started, we had Saturday scheduled off. So they worked Thursday and Friday, then got the weekend off. Come Monday however, they were a no show.
I waited until after work to contact John. When I asked if everything was okay, he said that they were just recovering from being sore from the intense labor for an extra day, but would be back tomorrow. I immediately felt that the situation was about to be a sinking ship with this job, but I decided to try to salvage the situation.
I texted Sam and convinced him to stay over for the night since we hadn't hung out in a long time and I wanted to catch up. This wasn't fully a lie, but I mainly wanted to dig into the roots of the issue and see if I could at least keep Sam from quitting the job and hopping to the next one. He agreed, and they decided that John would bring Sam to work Tuesday, then Sam would come home with me.
On Tuesday, they both show up to work. When break rolled around, Sam told me that John had left early and that his stuff was still in his van. He explained that John claimed a guy hit him in the face with frozen meat by accident, and he had blood pouring down his nose. Sam, however, couldn't verify this due to there being a meshed face mask over everyone's faces in that area, making it hard to notice anything wrong with John.
I said we could check on him when we go to grab his stuff after work to stay the night, and Sam was fine with this answer. After work, we grabbed Sam's stuff from their house before driving to my apartment. When we saw John, he did not appear to have anything wrong with his nose, but by then any swelling might have gone down. We just couldn't verify and only had his word to go on.
My partner and I broached the conversation of Sam and John's lives. We asked about his work, how he is at home, how he is socially, and other life factors that we generally don't get to see when we visit.
I discovered that John had recently lied multiple times to everyone heavily involved in his life. He lied about why he quit his last job - simply because he felt like it - why he was suddenly several hours late to pick up his son from his ex's house (very uncharacteristic of him), went behind his best friend's back and did witchcraft involving his ex, and other smaller things.
For context, his best friend is baptist and John claims to be baptist but turns to witchcraft when he is feeling wronged or helpless as a way to get results. He consults me (I'm pagan) for spellwork, but I was under the impression he wasn't hiding this. He had promised not to do any more spellwork and to remain devout.
On top of the lies, I discovered that the playful aggression that was believed to be their general dynamic was not what it seemed. John was making Sam his gopher, cleaning up after him and making him fetch whatever he wanted. He claimed wanting to help Sam improve his mental health and encouraging him to voice his feelings and any issues he was having, but would berate and talk down to him or get mad and yell anytime Sam voiced anything. He would go as far as threatening to move out because "Sam would just be better if he was gone" and "he preferred to live alone anyway."
After all this came to light, a conversation became the obvious solution. My partner and I agreed to let Sam stay with us until everything got smoothed over, but John would have to better himself before there would be talk of Sam moving back in. I encouraged Sam to voice his concerns directly as a way to stand up for himself, and I would back him no matter how John responded.
After work Wednesday, Sam and I swung by his and John's place to grab more stuff for the week and explain to John that he was staying for the week so that he would have a reliable ride to work without John needing to worry. We spent the rest of the week debating how to broach the topic with John, while my partner and I were preparing the apartment for a small Christmas party we were hosting that John would be attending.
We decided we wouldn't say anything until after the party so that there wouldn't be any confusion or awkwardness regarding the party. We didn't want a "by the way, you're treating Sam like shit. Are you still attending the party?" situation.
Due to John yelling and being aggressive in person when issues were addressed, I encouraged Sam to talk about it over text where he would have an easier time wording what he means and not being yelled over or intimidated into being quiet. He decided he would text it the day after the party after he was confident John was home.
After giving it more thought, I decided I would also text my concerns. John intimidated me to a degree as well, and I already have a generally difficult time bringing up concerns about others. When I do manage to, I have a tendency to forget most of what I want to say and only bring up a single, minor issue. If the person justifies it, I generally just accept the response and don't think deeply on it until later (I am actively working on this. It's a coping mechanism from childhood).
John called Sam every day of the week, sometimes two or three times. It was just to talk about anything and everything he could think of to talk about. We aren't sure if he was just lonely, or if there was something more to it.
On the day of the party, everyone shows up. A couple of my partner's friends, a couple of co-workers that were mutual friends with John, Sam, and me, and John with his son. During the party, John spent most of his time on his phone and avoided engaging with anyone. When he wasn't, he was grumpily trying to get his son to eat. We passed out gifts that we got all of the guests, including John and his son.
The day after the party, we each sent our respective messages.
The message was very long, but the gist of it was addressing the lies, inability to hold down a job, then offering my support and encouraging him to do some soul searching to figure out what he wants in life. Sam talked about how he had been treated, how he was treating his other friends, and talking about how he had been getting worse since his messy breakup.
He started by voicing confusion with me, then began to explain away any direct lies addressed. However, when Sam sent his message, he dismissed Sam's feelings and refused to acknowledge the majority of the message. Hearing how he responded to Sam, I just took a break from texting for a bit to give him time to calm down and reflect.
When the next day rolled around, I found out that John had removed Sam and me from FB. I felt a combination of relief and sadness.
At first I felt I had handled the situation as best as I could, but now I feel like I could've handled things a lot better. I might have been an asshole by waiting until after a Christmas party just to avoid tensions, and I feel Sam and I kind of ganged up on him by sending out confronting messages on the same day.

PART 1
​
The moment Gray touches my head, static ripples across my skull. I froth at the mouth. Choke. For a little while, I think I’m probably dying, but then I lose all sense of awareness. I’m falling. I’m breaching the atmosphere of my mind and crashing into a dimension outside of myself, outside of everything.
Images flash. They’re like a film reel, playing across my consciousness from every direction. They’re everywhere. Inescapable. It’s as if I’m inhabiting them, as though they were moments in time and everything from sight, sound and smell are collapsing in on one another like a dying star.
Gray calls this ‘disorienting.’
But then, just when I tell myself I want out— that I can’t take it anymore because my disembodied ghost is about to explode… It slows. The whole process hits the brakes. The visual hurricane calms from a category 5 to a 3, and then settles into a 1.
Whew-ie!
Moments float to the surface. Others sink out of sight.
Like a sponge, my mind starts absorbing information– everything from quantum physics to the lyrical discography of Shania Twain. Knowledge becomes trivial. As soon as I want to know something, I reach out and take it.
It’s exhilarating.
But then, something catches my attention. It’s a series of shimmering lights in my lake of thought, gleaming jewels that seem to be drawing me toward them. Somehow, I know that these are why I’ve come here. These are what Gray meant for me to find, the so-called truth that would justify all of the abductions, all of the murders.
So I reach out.
Information bombards me. It carpet-bombs my mind, and in the overwhelming chaos of it all, the entire history of the cosmos is laid bare before me.
I see it. I see everything.
Gray and Teal? Not monsters. An alien species called the Vytar. Their technology eclipses humanity’s, and they’ve existed for billions of years. They’ve done remarkable things in that time, everything from mastering hyperlight travel to creating edible spray cheese. They’ve even charted the entirety of the cosmos.
What I’m saying is they've been busy.
But my revelations don’t stop there. No, they keep coming.
Tragedy.
I see tragedy.
I see it in the Vytar’s search for answers. In their quest to uncover every nook and cranny of the universe, they come across two devastating discoveries. Firstly, they learn that they are alone in the cosmos. Secondly, they discover their species is going extinct.
How?
It happens like this.
Near the edge of space, a Vytar ship discovers life. But it isn’t intelligent. Far from it. This life is microbial, viral, and it infects the explorers. They toss themselves into quarantine. They’re observed, and a shocking discovery is made– this virus?
Not so bad.
In fact, maybe it’s just what they've been looking for.
Soon, Vytarians across the cosmos are lining up to be infected with the virus. Within a century, their entire species are carriers. It jumps between them like the common cold, but they don’t mind. Not at all. Why? Easy. This virus comes with a satisfaction guarantee: biological immortality.
Now there’s a deal.
The trouble is, these Vytar don’t work like humans do. They don’t have sex and make babies and then sleep and then wake up and do it again. No, these Vytar lay eggs. And only certain members of their species lay eggs. And what’s more? They only lay eggs during a specific molting period at the end of their life cycles.
See what I’m getting at?
Biological immortality or laying eggs. Pick one. You can’t have both if you’re the Vytar. But by the time they figure this out, this virus has infected every last colony of their civilization. Unable to reproduce, their population enters freefall. It develops what’s known as an existential crisis, and if there’s one thing civil society hates, it’s dealing with an existential crisis.
Tempers flare.
Emotions run hot.
This brings us to the crux of the Vytarian dilemma. War.
And lots of it.
Worlds erupt into conflict. Galaxies become battlefields, and whole solar systems are laid to ash. If you thought nuclear weapons were bad, then consider what happens when a moon is kicked out of orbit into the surface of a planet. The bloodshed is immeasurable. As the fighting escalates, the stars themselves become weapons. The Vytar discover that if you can just push one toward instability…. Well, boom.
There goes the neighborhood.
These Vytar? Nothing if not creative.
But it’s just this penchant for outside the box problem solving that massacres their species into the low billions. Over a single millenia, the Vytar are swept from an inter-galactic species, to one inhabiting a single world on the edge of space.
Having met their downfall at the hands of their technology, the surviving Vytar turn toward spiritualism. Cults form. Different sects have different beliefs, but one eventually consumes the rest: The Way of the Chosen. The Way promises an end to Vytarian pain.
No more existential crisis.
No more killing.
All the Vytar need to do is open their hearts and minds to a simple three step program:

1. Show a little pride. We’re the only intelligent life in the universe, so start acting like it!
2. Persevere. Immortality is our final test. Keep your chin up!
3. Ascend. Just make it to the heat death of the universe, and you’ll be granted salvation!

Believe it or not, it’s a big hit.
The Vytarians flock to it in droves because it offers what they need– a sense of purpose, and a break from the emotional turmoil that’s consumed them for decades. In a matter of years, The Way becomes the dominant socio-political force across the Vytarian homeworld, bringing the last of the warring factions together.
It’s a beautiful thing.
But what’s the phrase?
Beauty is in the eye of the beholder.
Yeah, that’s it.
Not everybody is a fan of how The Chosen conduct business. But The Chosen make it easy for them– all who disavow their belief system are exiled. It’s for the good of the Vytarians, they say. And maybe they’re right. After all, these are a species of aliens that have seen just what disagreements can lead to.
Fire. Fury. Mass graves and floating corpses in the vacuum of space.
No thank you.
That’s a risk they won’t take.
One of these exiled Vytarians is a scientist. He has no name in the shared memory save for ‘The Heretic,’ and he is both the architect of humanity and the genesis of our greatest threat. In his assessment, the Vytarian extinction is an inevitability. He perceives their current peace as fragile, held up by a corrupt theocracy whose foundations could crumble any moment. Once they do, boom. Back to war. Back to genocide.
It won’t be pretty.
Worse still, when the last of the Vytar perish, so too will the last form of complex intelligence. Their species won’t just die– it’ll be forgotten. The universe will become a barren void, an unconscious minefield of drifting cadavers.
That will be their legacy.
But the Heretic, he’s a mover-and-a-shaker. He’s the sort of individual who likes to solve problems, not create them, and so when he thinks of the Vytarian extinction, when he acknowledges it as a slow-motion inevitability, he isn’t giving up. No, he has a plan. It’s not a great plan, mind you. It’s not even a plan with a high-likelihood of success, and nor, for that matter, is it a plan that’s strictly legal.
But it is a plan.
It goes like this: if the Vytarians are dying out, then something must replace them. There must be intelligent life to take their place, to give warmth to this cold cosmos, and remember their legacy. Since no other intelligent life exists in all the universe, that leaves him a single option.
He’ll just have to make some.
And this Heretic? This mover-and-shaker?
Well, he succeeds.
And really, that’s where this nightmare begins.
_________________________________________________________________________
The helicopter touches down in a clearing that shouldn’t exist.
I step out to find a forest that’s broken, smoldering, one that’s cleaved in two with a cloud of cinders in its wake. This isn’t how I remember this place. Not at all. I remember a wooden bridge over a lazy creek, and tall trees that–
“Mitchell!”
Somebody’s calling my name. Running toward me.
My boss.
Lisa’s got her phone pressed to one ear and her other hand is frantically waving at me. All around us are government personnel, fellow men-in-black types looking equal parts panicked and terrified. Nice to know I’m not alone.
“Mitchell,” Lisa says, breathless. “Finally! Follow me.”
We take a stroll down the newest gully in America. Pieces of splintered metal scatter the ground, and here and there I see techs in hazmat suits brushing dust from the debris. Above us, the moon is being shrouded by a gigantic tarp. They’re extending it across the entire crash-site, likely hoping they can get it up before foreign satellites move into position and stick their noses into our business.
“Looks like a warzone out here,” I say, loosening my tie. Is it hot out, or is my anxiety just turning my body into a furnace? Tough to say.
Either way, Lisa’s not paying attention.
“Understood, sir. I’ll keep you posted with any and all updates as soon as we have them.” She hangs up her phone and turns to me. “Sorry, did you say something, Mitchell? Tonight’s been a nightmare.”
I can imagine.
As we make our way toward the UAP, Lisa tells me the government’s been hounding her for details.
What exactly did we shoot down?
Are we going to war?
She says we’ve probably got three hours until the media wakes up, and then we’ll need to start beating the journalists back with sticks. “This is a fucking disaster,” she tells me, and she reaches into her jacket and grabs a flask. “Whisky?”
I shake my head. “Haven’t touched the stuff for years.”
“Suit yourself.”
Bottom’s up.
She wipes her mouth and shoves the flask back into her jacket, taking the sort of breath you take when you’ve hit your limit. “I should’ve kept on as an accountant,” she says. “I’d still be in bed right now.”
The closer we get to the UAP, the easier it is to see through the haze of smoke. The craft is no longer just a smudge in the distance. Now I can make out its general shape. Its general size. It looks big enough to pass for a stadium, and round enough to sell the illusion.
“A flying saucer,” Lisa says, shaking her head. “You’d think these aliens never heard of a bad cliche.”
We get to the edge of the perimeter and flash our badges. Three soldiers let us through.
“Listen,” Lisa tells me, putting a hand on my shoulder. “Before we go inside this thing, I want you to take a few deep breaths, okay? We’ve had a couple incidents already.”
“Incidents?” I ask.
“Sure. One guy pissed his pants. Another was taking photos of this… corpse in a vat, and he throws up all over the inside– of the vat, not the corpse. Whatever. Point is, he completely fucked the lab team trying to get a sample.” She runs a hand through her hair. Chuckles darkly. “Luckily, there are about a dozen other corpses where that came from, but still. The smell was awful.”
Vats. Corpses. My stomach does a front flip and I almost take a page out of the photographer’s playbook. “So this is the real deal,” I mutter, pretending this whole thing doesn’t feel uncomfortably familiar. “Aliens actually exist, huh?”
“Just wait,” Lisa says, stepping into the dark of the ship. “This next part is gonna blow your mind.”
_________________________________________________________________________
The Heretic creates life in his image, using Earth as his petri dish.
His first lifeforms are what you’d call prototypes. Rough drafts. They’re giant reptiles, dinosaurs, and a scattershot of various traits and biology. They’re a means to discover what works and what doesn’t on the path to evolving complex intelligence. He studies them closely. Then he studies them some more.
But what’s the phrase?
Nothing lasts forever.
Yeah, that’s it.
We’ve covered that the Vytarian are an advanced species. We know that they’re no strangers to space, and we’re well aware that their wars wiped out 99% of their population. But what we haven’t covered, is that some toys are still left-over from those wars.
And The Chosen? They possess almost all of them.
One of these is a fleet of surveillance drones, the sort that drift through the cosmos and ping headquarters if they see something suspect. One of these happens to drift by Earth. Can you guess what happens next?
Images of the Heretic’s well, heresy, are transmitted to The Chosen. Minutes later, he gets a collect call from 40 billion light years away.
What is this, the Chosen High Council asks.
Blasphemer, they condemn.
But the Heretic isn’t shocked by this. He knows that according to The Way, the creation of new lifeforms is the exclusive domain of their deity, The Distant One. He knows that what he’s done is criminal. That maybe it’s also considered an affront against all of existence, and that it’s maybe grounds for execution and inviting the wrath of god upon all Vytarians.
Relax, he tells them.
It’s you or us, they say.
I can explain, he tells them.
Don’t bother, they say.
The line goes dead. The Heretic figures he’s got about a handful of weeks before The Chosen arrive to dish out their justice, so he flees to a neighboring star system. While there, he realizes The Chosen were never aiming for him– only his life’s work. A meteor is propelled into the surface of the earth, and the moment it impacts the planet becomes fire. Six trillion lifeforms scream in momentary agony before turning to ash.
The Heretic weeps.
_________________________________________________________________________
Years pass.
Then centuries.
These turn to millenia, and millenia become eons, and the Heretic decides to risk returning to earth. He wants to find closure for the loss of his creation. He wants to pay his respects. But when he arrives, his sorrow becomes hope. Life, it seems, has survived.
More than that, it has thrived.
Yet this life isn’t the same that he set out to create. No, this life is the biological progeny of tiny balls of fur he created to feed his prototypes. They’re what you and I might call mammals. Except some of these mammals are impressive– they have large brains, opposable thumbs, and what’s more, they look a bit like you and I.
They’re humans. Among the first.
The Heretic is fascinated by these humans. He recognizes they possess complex intelligence, sentience, and a strong sense of adaptability. He observes them as they form social groups, watches as they create the ghosts of language.
Yes, he thinks. This is it. These lifeforms will inherit the universe, and in doing so, immortalize the Vytar in their memories.
But a problem remains. The Chosen.
If they discover the earth is teeming with life, then they’ll circle back and finish the job. This time, they won’t pull punches. The planet will become an asteroid field, and all of its life will be red mist upon the floating rocks.
But what to do?
How to keep humanity alive, to shield it from the overwhelming might of the Vytarian military? It seemed impossible. Equations run through the Heretic’s mind, scenarios infest his thoughts and in not a single one can he fathom succeeding. He has but one spacecraft. No weapons to speak of.
And it occurs to him.
Humans are hardy creatures– adaptable. Given time, they will evolve to reach parity with the Vytarians. Then, their superior numbers could compensate for any gaps in technology. But such a plan hinges upon them getting up to speed, ascending to an evolutionary singularity in which their gains become exponential. He cannot afford to wait millions of years when The Chosen could discover him any day.
No, he’ll need to interfere. Spike the gene pool. Rig the results. He’ll need to give humanity more than a push, he’ll need to throw it down the damn stairs if they have any hope of surviving.
But there’s a way.
Yes, there’s always a way.
He devises a solution called Project Runaway.
It starts by creating a new lifeform. It’s aesthetically identical to a human male, but it’s born from the genetic harvest of thousands of his peers. Each strand of his DNA will be carefully selected for, prioritizing the potential for runaway evolution. Then, these strands will be spliced with Vytarian genes. Not much, but enough to access fragments of the shared memory– the Collective Recall. This will allow the man to gain intuitive understanding of billions of years worth of wisdom. It’ll permit him to think faster. Adapt more quickly.
Then, as this man spreads his genes through the population, his progeny will inherit his DNA. They’ll evolve quicker. Think faster. This is how it works.
This is how humanity inherits the universe.
_________________________________________________________________________
“Watch your step,” Lisa says, stepping into the UAP.
I follow her inside. For a moment, I’m blinded by the glare of industrial work-lamps. Then my senses are assaulted by a cacophony of sound and movement. We’ve entered a hive of activity. Crowds of people buzz around us, some in biohazard suits, others in military camo.
Where we are is a large circular chamber, one surrounded by dark corridors leading to other locations of the ship. Right now, teams are taping those entrances up with plastic wrap. Other teams are setting up perimeters, hanging pieces of paper above archways labeled A through Z.
“You alright, Mitchell?”
“What?”
“Are you alright?” Lisa says, and she’s got her arms folded. She’s looking at me like she thinks I’m about to become her newest headache, maybe piss myself all over the deck.
“I’m fine,” I tell her, forcing a smile. “It’s just a lot to take in, you know? Never been in an alien spaceship before.”
“Sure,” she says, lifting an eyebrow. “Join the club. We’re heading down corridor D to find somebody named Major Luca– I was talking to her a few seconds before you showed up. She said she’s got something to show me. Something big.”
“Spare me the suspense, Lis. What are we after?”
“From the sounds of it? Bodies.”
“Bodies?” I say. “Like those corpses you mentioned, the ones in vats?”
“Not quite. According to Luca, these bodies aren’t exactly… Well, they’re not human. Probably.” She punches my arm, gives me a cheeky smirk. “Relax, Mitchell. The Major confirmed they’re already dead– nothing to be scared of. Let’s go.”
She leads us down the corridor labeled D, and every step I take is worse than the last.
My heart is flying. It’s pounding a million beats a minute. I put on my best poker face, nodding along as Lisa briefs me on the UAP, but internally I’m having a breakdown. It’s taking everything I have not to hyperventilate. The further we get into the spacecraft, the more I’m wondering how much of my dreams were dreams.
The more I wonder if all I am is just some clone with a badge.
“What did the bodies look like?” I ask, clearing my throat. “Did these aliens have scales, and tails…and sort of look like lizards?”
Lisa laughs. “No idea. Luca didn’t give me much of a description, but I’d bet money they were little green men. It’d go with the whole flying saucer motif, don’t you think?”
“Yeah,” I swallow. “Suppose it would.”
She chatters on. This, that, something else. Apparently they’ve got an ironclad alibi to deal with the journalists, something banal enough to keep them far away from the crash site. But I’m too deep in my own thoughts to register what is. I’m too deep remembering all the awful aspects of the dream that wasn’t supposed to be real. I’m remembering him.
The Runaway.
And the more I remember, the more I wish I could forget.
____________________________________________________
The first time the Runway opens his eyes, he’s twenty years old.
He’s laying naked in the jungle, the sun scorching his skin with ultraviolet rays. He sits up. He has no instructions. No guidance. This world is entirely new to him, utterly foreign and in his stomach flutters the first ghosts of adrenaline.
From the outer ring of Saturn, the Heretic watches.
The Runaway rises to his feet. He takes his first shaking, trembling step and stumbles into the grass. He groans. Pain. A new sensation. He gets back up, tries again. It’s harder than it looks, walking when you’ve never done it before, but eventually he gets the picture. For him, it gets easier by the second.
After only an hour, he’s running through the ferns. Climbing trees. And his stomach is screaming.
Food.
He must find food.
But what to eat?
By his third hour alive, the Runaway has learned to forage. By his sixth, he’s consumed enough poisonous berries to floor an elephant, and is writhing on the ground. The poison burns his stomach. It makes his tongue swell and his skin glisten with sweat, but as the seconds become minutes, the agony fades to pain fades to healing.
His body is adapting. His digestive systems are hardening themselves against the poison, and soon, the Runaway rises back to his feet.
Evolution has begun.
As the sun sets, the Runaway collects wild game from crude traps. He has begun subconsciously tapping into the Collective Recall, intuitively teaching himself to skin animals, to make fires, to cook flesh for taste and health.
He is learning.
As the week comes to a close, the Runaway is surrounded. A pack of wolves has been hounding him for days, and now they’ve come to deal with this trespasser upon their territory. They circle him. Their teeth gnash, saliva leaking from their jaws. In their throats is a growl, a threat of death, but the Runaway has learned to handle his fear. Now, it serves him.
His muscles tense. His hands flex in and out of fists, and his eyes follow the beasts as they pad the ground. The large one, he thinks. The large wolf will engage, and the rest will follow. But he doesn’t give it time– he dashes forward, faster than even the wolves can react, and he brings his fist down upon the skull of the largest. The animal is stunned. Dazed. He follows up by grabbing its jaws, and pulling with all of his might.
The other wolves flee. They yelp and they scream as their champion falls to the dirt, dead.
The Runaway dresses himself in its hide.
At the end of the month, the Runaway has evolved to the point he barely needs to eat. Twenty calories a day serve him all that he needs. A handful of berries, and he can operate at peak mental and physical capability. By the close of his second month, he no longer needs to breathe. He fishes hundreds of meters below the surface, fighting off sharks for choice morsels swimming in the deep.
On the anniversary of his birth, the Heretic observes that the Runaway no longer ages. His DNA suffers no damage each time it splits. He has become biologically immortal.
After five years, he transcends humanity. The Runaway is now capable of perceiving individual atoms, and by the sixth year of his life, he can manipulate them. Matter becomes his plaything. The laws of physics become little more than suggestions, and so if he wants to fly, then he does. If he wants to reach into the minds of living creatures, he does that too.
The Runaway has become the most powerful lifeform to ever live. But the Heretic is not concerned.
No, he sees what his creation is. He sees that this anomaly, this Runaway is kind. Empathetic. With each passing year his interest in violence wanes. Before long, the Runaway cuts himself off from humanity altogether, unable to stomach their wonton savagery and thirst for blood. Some have taken to worshiping him. Others, reviling.
To him, they are all the same. Misguided, fearful, and ruled by instincts he has learned to see beyond. These humans may as well be a separate species.
To find respite from this chaos, he meditates. Sometimes he does this at the bottom of the sea. Other times he does this atop high, wind-swept peaks. Anywhere his senses are sufficiently assailed to block out the madness of the world around him.
And it’s while meditating on one of these peaks that the Runaway begins looking to the stars. He wonders if there may be more out there.
Is it possible, he thinks aloud, that there are others like me?
Could I find a companion of my own?
And it’s while he’s pondering these thoughts, while he’s gazing into the deepness of space, that he finds something looking back at him. A lizard. Housed within a strange capsule, floating in the outer rings of a celestial body we know as Saturn.
It is the first time he and his maker lock eyes.
Weeks later, the Runaway’s breached the atmosphere of Earth. A month after that, he’s traversed the solar system and made it to the Heretic’s ship. He’s tapping on the hull. The Heretic welcomes him inside.
“Hello,” the Heretic says, in the ancient tongue of man.
The Runaway peers at him. “Hello…” he says slowly, but it is not in the ancient tongue of man. It is in the low bass of Vytarian. “Your language is… strange… but I believe I can master it. Who are you? Why have you been watching… me?”
The Heretic doesn’t see the point of mincing words. He comes clean about everything– after all, the Runaway is capable of looking into his thoughts. What’s the use of playing coy? He starts with the extinction of the Vytarian people, and ends with humanity’s role as inheritors of the universe, and the Runaway’s role in leading them there.
“Have you any questions?” the Heretic asks.
“Many,” the Runaway tells him. “Above all, why do you fear me?”
“I don’t,” the Heretic says.
“You do. I see it reflected in your thoughts.”
“The fear you see reflected in my thoughts,” the Heretic begins, speaking with careful deliberation, “... it does not belong to me. You are viewing fragments of the Collective Recall, a shared knowledge passed down by my people. You are viewing the beliefs of those of us who remain from the Old War– followers of the Way of the Chosen.”
“These followers,” The Runaway says, his expression twisting with shock and horror. “They think of me as a monster– an abomination!”
“Not exactly,” the Heretic tells him. “Strictly, they do not think of you at all. In order to protect my work, I cut myself off from the Collective sometime ago, so all you’re seeing are faint echoes of their dogma. To them, my work is blasphemy. But yes… I believe that should they learn of you, your vast capabilities would indeed frighten them. They would think you a monster.”
“And to you?” The Runaway asks. “What am I to you?”
The Heretic reaches toward the Runaway, claps his shoulder. He smiles in the human way. “I am a barren lifeform, ravaged by a virus that has stolen the hope of my people. I am unable to achieve my biological imperative. Reproduction is beyond me. You ask me what you are to me? You are my legacy.” He slowly, awkwardly performs the human ritual of embrace, wrapping his arms around the Runaway.
You are my son.
_________________________________________________________________________
I take a breath. It’s brief. Gasping. Gray is standing in front of me, his pupils pulsing, and I’m suddenly aware that his name isn’t Gray it’s Wor. He’s 70 million years old. Not only that, but so is his friend– and his name isn’t Teal, but Kez. They’re both devotees of the Way of the Chosen.
“Did you see?” Wor asks, and he’s no longer using his digital translator. After the thought transference it seems I can understand the Vytarian language, make sense of the various vibrations that previously just seemed like low bass.
“Yes,” I say, leaning forward. “But not everything.” I look up at Wor, and hit him with an accusatory glare. “There’s more to this story, isn’t there? What aren’t you telling me?”
Kez twists his neck to look at us. His pupils are blowing up and shrinking in quick succession– a reaction I now understand to mean I’m pissed. “You have seen enough, human. Prepare for genetic deconstruction and we will be done with this.”
“No!” I exclaim, and I’m surprised to hear my voice rumbling throughout the ship. It’s thunderous. I clear my throat. “No,” I say, and this time my voice is appropriately subdued. Vytarian is apparently a powerful language. “If you want me to jump into a vat and turn into… corpse chili or whatever, then you have to show me it’s worth it.”
The Vytar exchange glances. Wor’s pupils shrink– he’s nervous. Concerned. “To show you more may invite excess unease,” he says. “It was my hope that a brief glance at the history, the origin of everything could provide necessary closure to commence the harvest of your DNA.”
“Look,” I say. “I’ve seen a lot. I know that whatever genetic material you’re grabbing off people is a lot more useful if we’re agreeable. It’s like hunting an animal. Kill it scared, and the meat is tough. It’s a chemical thing– I get that, and I’m telling you that if you show me the rest, I’ll let you do what you need. I’ll play my part.”
“Invalid request,” Kez says. “Such knowledge is beyond your capacity to bear.”
I frown. “It’s him, isn’t it? The Runaway. It’s obvious he’s the source of your fear and this so-called mission to save humanity. Yeah. I might not have all the details, but just looking at your reactions– it’s gotta be. More than that, I can guess you haven’t had much luck dealing with him either.”
Wor and Kez don’t speak a word. Their expressions say everything I need to know.
“The way I figure it,” I continue, getting to my feet and taking a deep breath. “Is that I’m a human too. On some level, I’m like The Runaway, just less… well, terrifying. But maybe there’s something in those visions, something in the Runaway’s actions or his behaviors that only a human could make sense of. Ever think of that? I mean, what if I can help you catch something you’re missing? Isn’t that chance worth taking?”
The Vytar are quiet. They stare at one another for a long while, and their pupils explode in waves of emotion. Kez turns away. He lets out a gruff warble and throws up his arms, cursing Wor and me both.
“What’s his problem?” I ask.
Wor steps forward. He gingerly looks back to his companion, but Kez’s back is turned, hunched over the console in clear disagreement.
“Kez does not wish to harm your mind,” Wor says quietly. “Your story of your sister… this expiring human you call Hope, well, it has moved him. He fears that if I show you the rest of The Runaway’s story it will cause your mind to fracture, shattering your consciousness in such a way that it may not be repaired. There will be no perfect clone. Your sister will find no solace in her dying moments.”
I look at Kez, watch him tap at the console’s controls and I can’t help but feel guilty for judging him so harshly. At the end of the day, he was just looking out for my sister.
But, on the other hand, he also wants to turn me into DNA soup.
“This feels important,” I say to Wor, balling my hands into fists. “If this is really about the fate of humanity, the fate of everything– well, I think Hope would want me to do anything I could to help.” I plaster a weak smile onto my face, trying to hype myself up with fake confidence. “Besides, I can’t imagine it’s that bad, is it?”
Wor places his hands on my temples. Closes his eyes. “You’re right,” he tells me. “You cannot begin to imagine how bad it is.”
MORE

I am thrilled about this group of women organizing to Strike. Women organizing is critical for us to advance. I just want to ensure that everyone knows the importance of Democrats winning elections at all levels. (We are past the point of simply "voting", we need to "get out the vote" for others too.) It is imperative that we win elections--or Republicans could easily make Striking illegal. Then where would we be? In jail for Striking.
Getting laws in our favor is easier than cleaning up all these messes and increasing voter turnout is the most effective use of our time. If republicans win, they will make more voter suppression laws and will turn us into Gilead for decades or more.
We need to ensure that Democrats win ALL elections (President+House+Senate) (State+Local+Judges+Schools Boards, etc.) so that the laws of the land are women-friendly. Voter turnout is crucial. Most young people would vote Democrat but only 30% voted last time. We must reach the other 70%.
Here is an Elections calendar - Ballotpedia so you can see the dates of each election in your area.
Learn how to register to vote at: Voter registration USAGov
Check Your Voter Registration Status - Vote.org (to be sure you haven't been removed from the rolls).
I checked out VoteDEM and they told me about how to help at Home - Voters of Tomorrow which is specifically for reaching young people.
Also helpful is this article showing how Wisconsin was so successful in April's Election to defeat an anti-choice judge (87% win).
How Wisconsin liberals set record campus turnout in court election - The Washington Post
Since social media is, by far, the best way to reach young people to increase voter turnout, below are 20 ways to use it according to ChatGPT :
10 ways to use social media to increase voter turnout among young people:

1. Create engaging and informative content: Use social media platforms to create visually appealing and easily digestible content that educates young people about the importance of voting and provides them with relevant information about the electoral process.
2. Collaborate with influencers and popular figures: Partner with social media influencers, celebrities, and popular figures who have a significant following among young people. They can help spread the message about the importance of voting and encourage their audience to participate.
3. Run social media campaigns: Develop creative and impactful social media campaigns that focus on specific issues that resonate with young people. Use hashtags, challenges, and interactive elements to generate interest and encourage sharing among their peers.
4. Share personal stories and testimonials: Encourage young people to share their personal stories and experiences related to voting. This can help create a sense of community and inspire others to participate.
5. Provide voter registration assistance: Use social media to share resources and step-by-step guides on how to register to vote. Provide links to relevant websites or online registration forms to make the process as seamless as possible.
6. Host live Q&A sessions: Conduct live question-and-answer sessions on social media platforms, where young people can ask questions about the voting process, deadlines, and any concerns they may have. This direct interaction can help alleviate doubts and increase engagement.
7. Share voting reminders: Regularly post reminders about upcoming elections, registration deadlines, and early voting dates. Utilize eye-catching graphics or videos to grab attention and encourage young people to mark their calendars.
8. Encourage peer-to-peer sharing: Encourage young voters to share voting-related content with their friends and followers. Implement referral programs or incentives to further motivate them to spread the word and increase voter turnout among their peers.
9. Create interactive quizzes and polls: Use social media features like polls and quizzes to engage young people and test their knowledge about the voting process, candidates, or specific issues. This can make learning about voting more enjoyable and encourage participation.
10. Collaborate with student organizations and universities: Partner with student organizations, colleges, and universities to reach a larger audience of young people. Offer to conduct workshops, guest lectures, or online events to educate and engage students on the importance of voting.

Remember, while social media can be a powerful tool to increase voter turnout among young people, it's crucial to adhere to platform guidelines and policies, maintain transparency, and provide accurate information.
📷📷10 more waysChatGPT
Certainly! Here are 10 more ways to use social media to increase voter turnout among young people:

1. Create user-generated content campaigns: Encourage young people to create and share their own content related to voting. This can include videos, artwork, or personal testimonials. Host contests or giveaways to incentivize participation and increase engagement.
2. Utilize social media advertising: Leverage targeted social media advertising to reach young people who may not already be engaged in the political process. Use demographic filters to ensure your message reaches the desired audience.
3. Collaborate with grassroots organizations: Partner with local grassroots organizations that focus on civic engagement and voter turnout. Work together to amplify each other's messages and coordinate efforts to reach young people in the community.
4. Use storytelling techniques: Craft compelling narratives that connect voting to real-world issues and personal experiences. Share stories of young individuals who have made a difference through voting or highlight the impact of certain policies on their lives.
5. Host virtual town halls or debates: Organize virtual town halls or debates where young people can interact with candidates and ask questions directly. Stream these events live on social media platforms and encourage audience participation through comments or polls.
6. Provide voting resources in multiple languages: Reach out to diverse communities by creating and sharing voting resources in different languages. This can help break language barriers and ensure that all young people have access to vital information about the electoral process.
7. Foster online voter communities: Create online spaces, such as Facebook groups or subreddit communities, dedicated to discussing voting and related topics. Encourage young people to join these communities to share information, ask questions, and engage in meaningful conversations.
8. Collaborate with educational institutions: Partner with high schools, colleges, and universities to integrate voter education and registration into the curriculum. Offer virtual workshops or presentations to inform students about the importance of voting and provide them with the necessary resources.
9. Engage with local media outlets: Reach out to local newspapers, radio stations, and online news platforms that have a significant young audience. Offer to provide guest articles, interviews, or op-eds to raise awareness about voting and encourage participation.
10. Leverage social media analytics: Use social media analytics tools to track engagement, measure the impact of your campaigns, and identify trends and patterns in young people's behavior. This data can help you refine your strategies and target your efforts more effectively.

Remember, adapt your approach based on the social media platforms popular among young people, such as Instagram, TikTok, Snapchat, and Twitter. Each platform has its unique features and user demographics, so tailoring your content and engagement strategies accordingly can yield better results.

Alone in a shack in the Montana wilderness, he fashioned homemade bombs and launched a violent one-man campaign to destroy industrial society.
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/06/10/us/ted-kaczynski-dead.html
Theodore J. Kaczynski, the so-called Unabomber, who attacked academics, businessmen and random civilians with homemade bombs from 1978 to 1995, killing three people and injuring 23 with the stated goal of bringing about the collapse of the modern social order — a violent spree that ended after what was often described as the longest and most costly manhunt in American history — died on Saturday in a federal prison medical center in Butner, N.C. He was 81.
A spokesman for the Federal Bureau of Prisons said Mr. Kaczynski was found unresponsive in his cell early in the morning. The cause of death was not immediately known.
In December 2021, the Bureau of Prisons announced that Mr. Kaczynski had been transferred to a federal prison medical facility.
Mr. Kaczynski traced a path that was singular in American life: lonely boy genius to Harvard-trained star of pure mathematics to rural recluse to notorious murderer to imprisoned extremist.
In the public eye, he fused a rare mix of styles of violence: the periodic targeting of the demented serial killer and the ideological fanaticism of the terrorist.
After he was captured by about 40 F.B.I. agents, the details of that ideology were less the subject of debate than the question of whether his crimes should be dignified with a rational motive to begin with.
Victims railed against commentators who took seriously a 35,000-word manifesto that Mr. Kaczynski wrote to justify his actions and evangelize the ideas that he claimed inspired them.
Psychologists involved in the trial saw his writing as evidence of schizophrenia. His lawyers tried to mount an insanity defense — and when Mr. Kaczynski rebelled and sought to represent himself in court, risking execution to do so, his lawyers said that was yet further evidence of insanity.
For years before the manifesto was published, Mr. Kaczynski (pronounced kah-ZIN-skee) had no reputation beyond that of a twisted reveler in violence, picking victims seemingly at random, known only by a mysterious-sounding nickname with roots in the F.B.I.’s investigation into him: “the Unabomber.” It became widely publicized that some of his victims lost their fingers while opening a package bomb. Going through the mail, among the unconscious routines of daily life, prompted flickers of nervousness in many Americans.
After his arrest in April 1996, Mr. Kaczynski’s extraordinary biography emerged. He had scored 167 on an I.Q. test as a boy and entered Harvard at 16. In graduate school, at the University of Michigan, he worked in a field of mathematics so esoteric that a member of his dissertation committee estimated that only 10 or 12 people in the country understood it. By 25, he was an assistant professor at the University of California, Berkeley.
Then he dropped out — not just from Berkeley, but from civilization. Starting in 1971 and continuing until his arrest, he lived in a shack he built himself in rural Montana. He forsook running water, read by the light of homemade candles, stopped filing federal tax returns and subsisted on rabbits.
Mr. Kaczynski’s manifesto — published, under the threat of continued violence, jointly by The New York Times and The Washington Post in 1995 — argued that damage to the environment and the alienating effects of technology were so heinous that the social and industrial underpinnings of modern life should be destroyed.
The vast majority of Americans determined the moment they heard of the Unabomber that he must be a psychopath, and while he was front-page news his text did not generally find receptive readers outside a tiny fringe of the environmental movement. The term “Unabomber” entered popular discourse as shorthand for the type of brainy misfit who might harbor terrifying impulses.
Yet political change and the passage of time caused some to see Mr. Kaczynski in a new light. His manifesto accorded centrality to a healthy environment without mentioning global warming; it warned about the dangers of people becoming “dependent” on technology while making scant reference to the internet. To young people afflicted by social media anomie and fearful of climate doom, Mr. Kaczynski seemed to wield a predictive power that outstripped the evidence available to him.
In 2017 and 2020, Netflix released new documentaries about Mr. Kaczynski. He maintained postal correspondence with thousands of people — journalists, students and die-hard supporters. In 2018, Wired magazine announced “the Unabomber’s odd and furious online revival,” and New York magazine called him “an unlikely prophet to a new generation of acolytes.”
Becoming ‘the Unabomber’
Mr. Kaczynski’s infamous label came from “UNABOM,” the F.B.I.’s code for university and airline and bombing. That designation was inspired by his first targets, from 1978 to 1980: academics at Northwestern University, the president of United Airlines and the passengers of a flight from Chicago to Washington. The victims suffered cuts, burns and smoke inhalation. Authorities were aided in connecting several early attacks by the fact that the mysterious initials “FC” had been engraved on the bombs or spray-painted near the explosions.
The Unabomber struck one to four times a year for most years until 1987, when he left a bomb at a computer store in Salt Lake City. A woman remembered making eye contact with the man who dropped off the package that later exploded, and soon a sketch was publicized of a mustachioed suspect wearing sunglasses and a hoodie.
Six years passed without an attack. Then, in June 1993, the Unabomber struck twice during the same week.
Packages containing bombs arrived at the home of Charles Epstein, a geneticist at the University of California San Francisco, and at the office of David Gelernter, a computer scientist at Yale University. Each man lost multiple fingers. Mr. Epstein sustained permanent hearing loss; Mr. Gelernter, whose office burst into flames, bled nearly to the point of death and lost much of the vision in his right eye.
The Unabomber was growing in infamy and deadliness even as his motives became harder to parse. His first fatality, in 1985, was Hugh Scrutton, an owner of a Sacramento computer store who was engaged to be married. Between December 1994 and April 1995, he killed two more men, seemingly with no relation to Mr. Scrutton or to each other: a New Jersey advertising executive and a lobbyist for the California forestry industry. The adman, Thomas Mosser, was married with three children. The lobbyist, Gilbert Murray, was married with two children. He was so mutilated in the blast that his family was permitted to see him only from the knees down as a farewell.
It was that April, the same month as Mr. Murray’s killing, when the nameless terrorist unveiled an identity. Writing on behalf of “the terrorist group FC” — which, he explained, stood for “Freedom Club” — the Unabomber sent The New York Times a letter offering a “bargain.” He promised to stop hurting people — though not to stop attacking property — in exchange for getting a long article about his ideas published in a major periodical.
In June, The Times and The Washington Post received a 35,000-word manuscript. Citing a recommendation from the F.B.I. and the Department of Justice, the papers took the Unabomber’s offer. They split the cost of printing the essay, titled “Industrial Society and Its Future,” which The Post distributed online and as an eight-page supplement with the Sept. 19 print paper.
The manifesto claimed that the current organization of society gives “politicians, corporation executives and remote, anonymous technicians and bureaucrats” control over “the life-and-death issues of one’s existence.” That makes modern people depressed, unlike “primitive man,” who gained satisfaction from determining his own “life-and-death issues” and found “a sense of security” in what the Unabomber called “WILD nature.”
The Unabomber justified his murderous campaign on the grounds that it got “our message before the public with some chance of making a lasting impression.”
The unique circumstances of the manifesto’s distribution — in The New Yorker, the writer William Finnegan called it “the most extraordinary manuscript submission in the history of publishing” — prompted a debate about the ethics of broadcasting a terrorist’s views. The publicity seemed vindicated, however, after news of the Unabomber reached Linda Patrik, an associate philosophy professor vacationing in Paris. At first jokingly, then insistently, she told her husband that the manifesto reminded her of what he had said about his eccentric loner brother.
Ms. Patrik’s husband was David Kaczynski. When he read the manifesto online, his “jaw dropped,” he later told The Times. The language was reminiscent of letters Ted had written to David. He soon reached out to authorities.
Since 1979, an F.B.I. team that grew to more than 150 full-time investigators, analysts and others had gone through tens of thousands of leads without getting close to a real suspect. After hearing from David Kaczynski, authorities zeroed in on a 10-by-12-foot wooden shack in rural Montana. The area was so remote that during an 18-day stakeout, one agent saw a cougar kill a deer.
The home had two windows set on high; they caught light but kept the home hidden. Agents could not see inside. On April 3, 1996, one of them shouted that a forest ranger needed help. A thin, shaggy man emerged from the cabin. He was grabbed from both sides.
Life and Afterlife of a ‘Walking Brain’
Theodore John Kaczynski was born in Chicago on May 22, 1942. His father, Theodore Richard Kaczynski, worked at his family’s business, Kaczynski’s Sausages, a factory on the city’s South Side. His mother, Wanda (Dombek) Kaczynski, was a homemaker. They both descended from Polish immigrant families in the Chicago area, dropped out of high school to work and obtained diplomas at night school. By all accounts, they were gregarious, kind, diligent and thoughtful. Each sent letters to newspapers in support of progressive causes.
From boyhood, Teddy, as he was known, felt his brilliance to be alienating. When his aunt visited, his father asked, “Why don’t you have some conversation with your aunt?” Teddy replied, “Why should I? She wouldn’t understand me anyway.”
In school, he skipped two grades. He later blamed his parents for seeming to prize and cultivate his intellect over his emotions.
“He was never really seen as a person, as an individual personality,” a high school classmate, Loren De Young, told The Times. “He was always regarded as a walking brain.”
At Harvard, Teddy lived in Eliot House, home to the clubbiest and brawniest of the school’s white Anglo-Saxon Protestants, including the varsity crew team. Clad in a tacky plaid sports jacket, Teddy would enter his suite and stride past his roommates wordlessly, then open the door to his room — wafting the odor of rotting food — and slam it shut.
He went straight from college to graduate school in Michigan. His department would learn about new work of his by discovering, without any advance notice, his papers published in respected journals. “It was as if he could write poetry while the rest of us were trying to learn grammar,” Joel Shapiro, a fellow student, later told The Times.
Mr. Kaczynski arrived at Berkeley in 1967. He taught by lecturing from the textbook and did not answer questions. Yet he continued publishing distinguished work and received a promotion in the math department. Two years later he resigned, without explaining the decision to his colleagues.
The Kaczynski brothers split the cost of the property in Montana, then had a falling-out when David got engaged in 1989. After Ted’s arrest, New York Times reporters searched for friends of his in the seven states he was known to have lived in or visited. They found nobody. Some fellow students of his in graduate school said they were amazed to find they did not remember him at all. He was widely reported never to have had a romantic relationship.
During his Montana years, Mr. Kaczynski had the librarian in Lincoln, the town closest to his shack, obtain for him obscure volumes of science and literature, sometimes in the original German or Spanish. In an interview after his arrest with the British publication Green Anarchist, Mr. Kaczynski described inventing gods for himself, including a “Grandfather Rabbit” who was responsible for the existence of the snowshoe rabbits that were his main source of meat in the winter.
In the same interview, Mr. Kaczynski described how he felt goaded to violence. His favorite part of the wilderness had been a two-day hike from his shack — a plateau with steep ravines and a waterfall. In 1983, he found a road paved through it.
“You just can’t imagine how upset I was,” he said. “It was from that point on I decided that, rather than trying to acquire further wilderness skills, I would work on getting back at the system. Revenge.”
That was Mr. Kaczynski’s own narrative. Some details of his life indicated a predisposition to violence and an estrangement from the surrounding world that might also have accounted for his behavior. According to The Atlantic, Mr. Kaczynski had begun to imagine committing murder by the age of 27. In his diary, he described his bombs giving him catharsis. Though he broke ties with his brother, Ted said he would open David’s letters if the stamp was underlined as a sign of emergency. David wrote to say their father was dying and underlined the stamp.
“Ted wrote back, and the response was fairly peculiar,” David told The Times — “basically, that I had done well, that this was something worth communicating.”
At his super-maximum-security prison in Colorado, Mr. Kaczynski struck up friendships with inmates in neighboring cells: Ramzi Ahmed Yousef, who bombed the World Trade Center in 1993, and Timothy J. McVeigh, the Oklahoma City bomber. Mr. Kaczynski shared books and talked politics with them, and he got to know their birthdays, Yahoo News reported in 2016.
Mr. Kaczynski’s brother is his only immediate survivor.
Mr. Kaczynski’s terrorist strategy, and the ideas that he said undergirded it, enjoyed an afterlife few would have predicted in the 1990s.
The Norwegian news media reported that Anders Beivik, who killed dozens of people at government buildings and a youth summer camp in 2011, lifted passages from Mr. Kaczynski’s manifesto in a manifesto of his own. More curious was the way a variety of law-abiding Americans developed an interest in the same line of thought.
In 2017, the deputy editor of the conservative publication First Things, Elliot Milco, credited Mr. Kaczynski with “astute (even prophetic) insights.” In 2021, during an interview with the politician Andrew Yang, Tucker Carlson cited Mr. Kaczynski’s thinking in detail without any prompting.
Online, young people with a variety of partisan allegiances, or none at all, have developed an intricate vocabulary of half-ironic Unabomber support. They proclaim themselves “anti-civ” or #tedpilled; they refer to “Uncle Ted.” Videos on TikTok of Unabomber-related songs, voice-overs and dances have acquired millions of views, according to an article published in 2021 by The Baffler.
Mr. Kaczynski was no longer the mysterious killer who belatedly projected an outlandish justification for violence; now he was the originator of one of many styles of transgression and all-knowing condemnation to adopt online. His crimes lay in a past young people had never known, and he was imprisoned, no longer an active threat to society.
His online support did not indicate the number of newly minted eco-terrorists, but it did measure the prevalence of cynicism, boredom, dissatisfaction with modern life and gloom about its prospects for change.
During his imprisonment, Mr. Kaczynski copied his correspondence by hand and forwarded it to the University of Michigan’s Joseph A. Labadie Collection, an archive devoted to radical protest, which has amassed dozens of boxes of Kaczynskiana.
According to New York magazine, Mr. Kaczynski’s papers became one of the collection’s most popular offerings. In an interview with the magazine, Julie Herrada, the collection’s curator, declined to describe the people so intrigued by Mr. Kaczynski that they visit the library to look through his archive. She said just one thing: “Nobody seems crazy.”

Hi there! Name’s Auri and I’m a 28F. I’ve been rping for roughly 10+ years now and am searching around for another partner for a thread or two. I'm not replacing anyone!
General overview:

• All characters are 18+
  
• I’m not into doing smut or adult content. If we ever do get to that point in a thread, I would like for us to fade to black if at all possible. It's just a personal preference of mine.
  
• I would like for my partner to be at least 23+ or close to my age. No minors please
  
• I don't mind doubling!
  
• I can forward over whatever character info necessary on my OC(s)
  
• As far as posting frequency goes, I'm pretty okay with it being every other day, every few days or, if necessary, once or twice a week. Just let me know! I do have a full time weekday job so replies during the week may be a bit slow!
  
• I do write at least three to five paragraphs minimum and write third person past tense and at least 2k words plus. I'm more of a novella writer! Not all of my responses will be novella length
  
• I prefer to use Discord if at all possible
  
• I don't expect you to match my post length every response but please do not send out one word or one sentence replies
  
• I'm stating this here: my starter replies are rather lengthy. It is merely to set up the scene. Not all of my responses will be like that. As stated above, at minimum my replies will be three to five paragraphs but that does vary depending on the scenario, what character(s) are doing, etc.
  
• As I mentioned previously I do not expect you to match my post length but please do not feel intimidated! I'm here to have fun as much as you are
  
• If you feel uncomfortable at any point during the RP, please let me know. I can't do anything if you don't voice your concerns. Also if you have no intention of continuing past the starter phase, please do not contact me
  
• I definitely don't mind if romance is involved as long as our characters have chemistry (MxF and FxF ships are okay with me for our OCs!)
  
• Please be knowledgeable of any of the game(s) listed below
  
• I will not respond to messages like "Heyyy", "Wanna Rp?" or low effort chats requests like this. Please either interact with this post with the required info or DM me
  
• Let me know if you are within the age range specified above as well as a little about yourself. Specify which prompt(s) interest you in your message as well!
  
• Thank you for reading!
  

Prompt idea:
*Mass Effect 2 or 3: I created an original elemental race/character to use in the Mass Effect universe. This could take place during the second game and start off as a recruitment mission or start off with with third game after Shepard leaves the Mars archives. For either prompt here, I would like to try and follow Shepard's crew during both games. I'm currently not looking to do anything for Mass Effect: Andromeda at the moment

• Halo: I have two ideas for this. Our characters would meet first onboard Infinity around 2558 for either idea. The first prompt would be where my character(s) and yours are enlisted to search a derelict ship orbiting a Forerunner shield world and try to determine the reason why it was abandoned. We're then forced groundside as the ship yields no results and discover just how dead silent the planet truly is and why.

The second: Our characters are assigned to a backwater colony world that's now inhabited by both humans and ex-covenant forces. Our OCs/CCs are essentially made to be a temporary peace keeping force, a supposedly easy op. After meeting up with the colony's human governor, time passes and things start seeming a bit... off. The colony world isn't what it appears to be and there's a hidden menace that we need to uncover deep below ground and stop before it's too late.

Not sure if this will go through but I'll give it a shot. To beginn, I'm not sure exactly how to express my words right now. There are so many things I don't understand. I get it, then I don't get it then I do get it then I don't. It's a constant back and forth. Somewhere along the way, I got lost. The one you knew was gone. I don't know what exactly happened to her but she is gone... Who I am today, isn't the same as I was back then. All those forever ago years.. everyone looked suspicious to me. Everyone had this "don't trust them vibe". I could, for a little while, pretend to be very engaging, normal, but sometimes in the middle of it all.. I would sink back into a dark space of my mind where I felt safe. I know I did try to go to therapy when I was going through my teenager years. But it's difficult to get help that way when you don't know what the fuck is wrong with you in the first place or why or how. You want to blame those close to you but it doesn't seem accurate or right. You do it anyway. Push them away because they wouldn't get it, right? And after pushing those people away, anyone really, I felt like it was just too late to make amends. Too late to change. Too late to fix. I am always late to the party, it seems I inherited naturally (shout-out to my biological mother, love you).
If you want to hear my confessions, I'd glady lay them out to you on the table but I am sure you already know what went wrong, what went where or who did what. I don't expect anything to change just because I put my heart onto the internet to realize that no one is perfect and everyone falls short...
I know for a fact that if I exploded with pent up trauma, I can only imagine how you or someone else feels.
In the back of my mind there was a voice that told me I was going to die no matter what. That I need to die. That I shouldn't be here. That voice has been the loudest since I was little. It's the voice that I would slice myself (pitiful I might add), slice my face, neck and arms. Sometimes, I crave that..lately more so. No worries though. I believe I am passed that idea. Hopefully.
I am realizing where these voices came from and who some of them belong to.. And.. I really wished... I had fixed myself, tried harder to fix myself so I could just... Not die by the consequences of my own actions.. yet any time I would venture into the depths of my mind.. my brain blocked it. I would even go into my dreams, searching in my brain for answers and here is one dream I remember:
My brain was an inside of what looked to be a computer room with desks, wires running to different rooms. The "brain" (computer) say in the middle and there were.. I say me's running different screens. I was upset. I wanted to find whatever it was that I was looking for then my eyes traced one section of wires and a yellow lab dog was sitting at the dark entrance. It looked like it was waiting for me and it disappeared into the dark room, I followed. My dream didn't continue and in fact I woke up. I want to say I woke up in fear and I didn't see or know what that dog took me to. But it didn't feel good at all... Today, I know what that dreamt meant and why I did somethings, acted in such a way.. Even though inside my heart I felt like it wasn't my fault.. Either way.
I am sorry from the bottom of my heart.. I am. To everyone.
May the odds ever be in your favor.

I was kind of just snooping around for duplicate or broken packages and decided to ls the /etc/apt/sources.list directory and there were a ton of outputs and they were color coded. Hope someone can chime in and perhaps tell me how to fix them, if it's even important. I just took a screen shot because I couldn't think of any other way to keep the formatting/coloring in tact. thanks guys
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https://preview.redd.it/rcjdyuayk85b1.png?width=1920&format=png&auto=webp&s=5120af1319b6d78223b5ab4103b7864ae87b6ca7

Link(s) for previous post(s) -

• Prologue

Book 1: Pale

Epigraph 1 - (had to put up the whole thing really; won't be doing this for every epigraph; just the imp. ones)

In the eighth year the Free Cities of Genabackis established contracts with a number of mercenary armies to oppose the Imperium's advance; prominent among these were the Crimson Guard, under the command of Prince K'azz D'Avore (see Volumes III & V); and the Tiste Andii regiments of Moon's Spawn, under the command of Caladan Brood and others.
The forces of the Malazan Empire, commanded by High Fist Dujek Onearm, consisted in that year of the 2nd, 5th, and 6th Armies, as well as legions of Moranth.
In retrospect two observations can be made. The first is that the Moranth alliance of 1156 marked a fundamental change in the science of warfare for the Malazan Imperium, which would prove efficacious in the short term. The second observation worth noting is that the involvement of the sorcerous Tiste Andii of Moon's Spawn represented the beginning of the continent's Sorcery Enfilade, with devastating consequences.

All this seems intimidating to say the least!
Epigraph 2 - About a mother lamenting for her boy (it seems), who's now a young soldier, but who's not yet seen what war is about ("bright heart not yet cooled to hard iron"). Is this close to what it's depicting, or...?

Chapter 1

• 1161st year of Burn’s Sleep; 103rd year of the Malazan Empire; 7th year of Empress Laseen’s Rule.

QUICK RECAP

• 7 years since the events of the Prologue.
• Laseen is now the Empress, and the Empire is ever spreading under her rule.
• An old witch, Rigga [1st app.] is alongside a young fisher girl (unnamed) on Itko Kan, watching on as a Regiment of soldiers pass them by.
• The witch is speaking about some prophesies concerning the girl, but the latter is seemingly uninterested. Rigga seems like a cool charac… oh, never mind. She’s dead. (by a swinging gauntleted hand from one of the soldiers, hitting her in the head, and killing her). Well... anyways, moving on.
• With the soldiers now out of sight, and old Rigga lying dead at her feet, the girl encounters two men – Cotillion [1st app.] and Amanas [1st app.], along with a sudden appearance of 7 massive hounds out of nowhere, who then follow the path the soldiers had taken when the latter, shorter man gives the order to do so.
• After a while, screams can be heard. The girl, now a witness, is engulfed by shadows through Cotillion, who says that she’s now “a pawn of god.”
• Some time later, Adjunct Lorn [1st app.] arrives at the horrifying scene where the men, women, and horses of the 19th Regiment of the Itko Kanese Eight Cavalry have been brutally massacred. Along with the locals, over 400 have been killed. (Jeez!)
• Paran, who wanted something challenging, and was hungry for prestige, has now joined the Malazan Army. Now as a Lieutenant, he’s overseeing the investigation of the carnage.
• After discussing his opinions with the Adjunct to the Empress in his usual fearless, uncaring, and confident manner, Paran is hand-picked by Lorn into her staff, to become an aide to the Adjunct. Lorn is sure that the merciless murder of so many is a diversion from something much bigger, and that gods and sorcery are now involved.
• Lorn is no ordinary woman herself. She’s young, dangerous, and a mage killer. The one who hunts down and kills mages. The scorpion in the imperial pocket. And who arrived in Itko Kan thanks to “eerie magical Warrens”. (first mention of the magic being used)
• Meanwhile, Staff Seargant Aragan [1st app.] is faced by a very young, hardly 12/13 year old girl, named Sorry [1st app.], who is there to be recruited into the Malazan Army, specifically under the command of High Fist Dujek Onearm – Onearm’s Host, which is currently overlooking the Genebackan Campaign (which is apparently in a mess of its own).
• Paran is tasked to gather intel of the massacre from a nearby town named Gerrom. But when he reaches there, it’s completely deserted. Even worse, inside the Imperial Constabulary, everyone is dead, killed by magic.

Sweat and death clung to the air thick as gauze.
The dark bloom of sorcery was a stain few cared to examine too closely. It had a way of spreading.

OK, now that sounds like something, eh?

• A short while later, he’s met by Topper [1st app.], a Claw of unsurpassed skill who took the lives of Unta’s royal line. Also, loves the colour green, and wears a lot of colourful rings on both his hands. Oh, and also is apparently the Commander of the Claw itself. (although he persists that Laseen still commands it, and he just assists her)
• After a quick bite of food and a sip of wine, Topper guides Paran and his horse through the Imperial Warren.

Paran turned to see a curtain in the air tear open on the road, spilling dull yellow light. A Warren, the secret paths of sorcery. "Hood's Breath." He sighed, fighting off a sudden chill. Within he could see a grayish pathway, humped on either side by low mounded walls and vaulted overhead by impenetrable ocher-hued mist. The air swept past into the portal like a drawn breath, revealing the pathway to be of ash as invisible currents stirred and raised spinning dust-devils.

First look into the "Warrens".

A short while later they came to a stone archway. It had been recently constructed, and Paran recognized the basalt as Untan, from the Imperial quarries outside the capital. The walls of his family's estate were of the same gray-black glittering stone. At the center of the arch, high over their heads, was carved a taloned hand holding a crystal globe: the Malazan Imperial sigil.

First look at the Malazan Sigil.

• Passing through the archway, they land directly inside the the Hall of The Throne in Unta, where Laseen is sitting atop a throne of twister bone.
• After exchanging a few “pleasantries” with the Empress, Paran meets up with Lorn (who is casually dressing up while Paran enters, but when the latter turns in embarrassment, Lorn replies with “I’m not one for modesty.”). OK lass, fair enough.
• After discussing a few things, Lorn orders Paran to return to his home in the capital for now, and that there will be a reckoning/revenge for the carnage at Itko Kan. Paran answers straightforwardly (as usual) that he’ll be there when that time comes.
• Paran return to his family home, where he is met by Gamet [1st app.], the guard. Once inside, he’s greeted by Tavore [1st app.], his sister who’s a year younger. After very briefly discussing about their father and his business, she mentions that Felisin, the youngest sibling, is at her studies and that she would be happy to see Paran, but sad to know that he’ll be leaving soon. Before leaving, Tavore also mentions that Felisin is “too soft for this world, brother. For any world, I think.”

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BEST OF: QUOTES / DIALOGUES

The Empire's been grinding this land down for a hundred years. You was born in it. I wasn't. When I was your age Itko Kan was a country. We flew a banner and it was ours. We were free, lass.
Rigga to fisher girl.

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Across the sea the Empress has driven her knife into virgin soil. The blood now comes in a tide and it'll sweep you under, child, if you're not careful.
Rigga to fisher girl.

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You are now one with the body of Empire, Lieutenant. It commands you. You respond unquestioningly to its will. You are a small part of a muscle in that body. No more. No less.
Topper to Paran.

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The Claw smiled. "You have begun to learn, Paran. Never be too easy with the knowledge you possess. Words are like coin—it pays to hoard." Topper
"Until you die on a bed of gold," Paran said.

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BEST OF: SCENES / MOMENTS

• The Itko Kan Massacre. 'Nuff said! (honestly, something about those four words has a different feeling about them. There's more Gravitas surrounding them, I feel personally. Whenever I think about the whole thing, it just feels like the start to something dark and dangerous. Is it just me?)
• Rigga's prophecies were something to ponder upon for sure!

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FINAL THOUGHTS + THEORIES AND SPECULATIONS

• There are a couple references present to the Prologue. Firstly, Paran pondering on the words "live quitely" by the Commander. Secondly, Laseen pointing out to Paran that he didn't take the Commander's advice of not joining the Army after all, and that the Commander himself didn't heed to hers (no detail about the latter is present though).
• From what I could gather, there's an unease, a kind of tension between Paran and Tavore it seems. On the other hand, Felisin seems to have a good bonding with Paran.
• Overall, a very good start imho. Of course, there's some names of people and places that you have no idea about, but I'm just enjoying the ride tbh!

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A huge shoutout to 'Malazan: Search of the Fallen'. It was a massive help, and I hope to continue using this amazing tool. Credit where it's due.
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Any feedback is always welcome. Hope you enjoyed.
Cheers!