Almost immediately after Glacier was established as a national park, Louis W. Hill, president of the Great Northern Railway, began building a series of hotels, chalets and tent camps throughout the park. The buildings were modeled on traditional Swiss architecture, and were part of Hill's strategy to portray Glacier as the "American Alps" or "America's Switzerland." The accommodations would in-turn help the railway promote tourism to the new national park, while at the same time promote their rail line as the primary mode of travel to the park. This would also allow them to compete against their chief rivals; the Canadian Pacific Railway and the Northern Pacific Railway, who were already transporting tourists to Banff and Yellowstone by that time.
The Belton Chalet in West Glacier, and the Glacier Park Lodge in East Glacier Park were the first two hotels to be constructed by Great Northern. Both acted as gateways from railroad depots to the interior of the park. Between 1910 and 1915 the railway also constructed eight Swiss-style backcountry chalet complexes, each connected by a network of trails. The complexes were strategically located at Two Medicine Lake, Cut Bank, St. Mary, Sun Point, Granite Park, Many Glacier, Gunsight Lake and Sperry Glacier. Tent camps were also established at Red Eagle Lake, Cosley Lake, Fifty Mountain and Goat Haunt. The chalet and tent camps were located roughly 10-18 miles apart. During their prime most of the chalet camps could host between 100 and 150 guests per night. Hill would explain to newspaper reporters that the “lodges would be located only far enough apart so that the man on foot even could make the trip and obtain sleeping accommodations,” and that “hotel accommodations of a more prestigious type or tents for the most modest could also be furnished.”
As construction on the new chalets progressed through the early 1910s, the railway also constructed the trails that would connect each of them by foot or horse travel. Because of a lack of federal funds, the Great Northern Railway assumed financial responsibility for all trail construction during this time period, but was eventually reimbursed as funding became available. Some of the earliest trails developed by the railway included Swiftcurrent Pass, Gunsight Pass, Mt. Henry, Red Gap Pass, Gable Pass, Triple Divide Pass, Piegan Pass, Pitamakan Pass and the St. Mary Lake trails. Many of these early trails were routed along Indian paths, prospector trails or old game trails. Great Northern would continue to improve or construct new trails within the park into the early 1920s. As the network of trails expanded, organized tours by horse concessionaires began to emerge. In 1915 the Park Saddle Horse Company became the sole concessionaire for the park, and began organizing a series of guided tours that utilized the existing network of chalets and trails. This included the North Circle, South Circle and Inside Trail trips, which encompassed roughly 163 miles of trails, each of which is now on the National Register of Historic Places. The company also offered the Logan Pass Triangle Trail trip, which traversed across the heart of the park utilizing routes from the other tours, as well as the now abandoned Logan Pass Trail. The concessionaire offered a variety of options, from half-day excursions to extended trips lasting up to two weeks. Most of the so-called circle tours, however, lasted between three and five days. During the 1920 season the company charged roughly $4.00 per person, per day to take one of its saddle-horse tours.
The park visitors that took these tours were “guided by ‘cowboys,’ lunched near glacial lakes and then dined in comfort on Chinese linen and blue willow china”. Park rules dictated that the Park Saddle Horse Company had to furnish at least one guide for each ten tourists on a trip. Parties could reach as large as 180 people and 200 horses. It’s estimated that the concessionaire used more than 1000 horses during its peak, with at least one source estimating as many as 1500 head of horses. The 1922 park brochure bragged that there were "more saddle horses used in Glacier than in any other similar recreational area in the world". From everything I’ve read that record has never been surpassed.
The saddle-horse tours were the dominant method of seeing the park until the Going-to-the-Sun Road was completed in 1933. Although the tours continued for another ten seasons, they came to a permanent end after the 1942 season when America became fully involved in World War II.
** This article is an adaptation from my book, "Ramble On: How Hiking Became One of the Most Popular Outdoor Activities in the World", which chronicles the rich and compelling history of hiking.

So, we already discussed what DC was doing to match the tenor of the early years of the War on Terror: A grim, smarter-than-it-thinks miniseries full of gratuitous rape that was meant to take the shine off the Silver Age by showing the darker side of its greatest heroes. Marvel, on the other hand, was trying to find a way to capture the zeitgeist of a post-9/11 era of existential threats, constant government surveillance, and the idea that if you weren’t with America, you were against it. A Captain America storyline saw Cap wrestle with the very concept of Guantanamo Bay; like any story arc that involves Cap doubting whether America lives up to its ideals, this made certain conservatives pissy, to the point that bad movie cataloguer Michael Medved wrote an entire article asking if Cap was a traitor. Avengers Disassembled briefly saw the Avengers face down their demons, as the Scarlet Witch goes crazy (again) and starts killing team members, her reality manipulations causing fault lines to form among Marvel’s greatest superteam. But there hadn’t yet been a storyline that would tie the entire Marvel Universe together with the burning question, “Which side are you on?”
Yeah, it’s got nothing to do with the Sokovia Accords. We’d be a lot better off if it did.
Part 1: Mark Millar’s March to the C-Word
Content Warning: Sexual assault. None of this is germane to the topic of the drama, so feel free to skip ahead to Part 1.5 if you don’t want to deal with this. Tl;dr: Mark Millar, the writer of the event, has a near pathological need to be a 3edgy5u contrarian.
Every comics crossover is ultimately a chance for one creative in the stable to shine or falter. The editors pick a writer who has turned out dependable work and give them a chance to try to alter the status quo but good. And for Civil War, Marvel’s EiC Joe Quesada decided the best person to lead the charge was Ultimates writer Mark Millar.
But who is Millar? Well, we could say “edgelord” and leave it at that, but we’re trying to dig deeper. Millar came up in comics alongside fellow Scot Grant Morrison, long before Morrison said the only time they want to bump into Millar on the streets of Glasgow is while going at 100 miles per hour. This antipathy is alleged to have stemmed from Millar copping several ideas from Morrison that went into Superman: Red Son. But after getting a start on Superman Adventures and as a cowriter on parts of Morrison’s JLA run, Millar soon branched out to WildStorm, where he took over The Authority from departing creatowritesex pest Warren Ellis.
The reason I bring up Red Son (for those non-geeks, an alternative universe comic premised on “What if Superman’s rocket had landed in Soviet Russia?”) is to frame a constant refrain about Mark Millar. He has good high-concept ideas… which often get trammeled up in an almost Pavlovian urge to shock, disturb, and/or titillate the reader. For instance, in The Authority, Ellis had introduced Apollo and Midnighter, two close companions who just happened to share the rough power sets and demeanors of Superman and Batman, with a few tweaks. Then he revealed they were boyfriends, which was a pretty bold move for a late Nineties comic book full of widescreen action and lovingly-rendered eviscerations.
In Millar’s first arc on the title, centered on a villainous Jack Kirby clone sending out a team of baddies who totally aren’t the Avengers, Apollo is subdued and is strongly implied to have been raped by someone who’s not Captain America. Apollo gets revenge by destroying EvilCap’s spinal column with his laser vision, then leaving him to the tender mercies of Midnighter, who is strongly implied to have sodomized him with a jackhammer.
In case you can’t tell, Millar loved him some rape. And it kept showing up in his creator-owned titles as well, all of which were basically written as Hollywood pitch docs. Wanted asks the question, “What if the supervillains won and secretly ruled the world from behind the scenes?” Well, an Eminem clone would take the opportunity to step into his dead villainous dad’s shoes and commit a lot of rape (yeah, there’s a reason the movie version replaced this with basically the Euthanatos from Mage: the Ascension getting orders from a magic loom). Chosen asks the question, “What if Jesus were born today?” Well, in a blatantly obvious twist, it turns out he’s actually the Antichrist, and part of his journey into realizing his evil nature involves being raped by all the demons of Hell.
It’s not that Millar can’t write innocent or restrained; he got started on the Superman: the Animated Series comic spin-off, and some of his titles such as Huck and Starlight have been praised for being relatively wholesome (keep in mind Huck is basically “What if Superman was Forrest Gump?” when I say “relatively”). And, as mentioned above, his works are made for high-concept log lines. You might recognize some of his various pitch docs: Kick-Ass, The Secret Service (source for the Kingsman movies), and, as mentioned above, Wanted. It’s just there’s this unctuous contrarian streak to a lot of his titles, a tendency to focus on venality, grotesquerie, and sodomy, with an air of pop culture edge. This also leaked into his image outside of his writing, with comments like “Games are for pedos” and ventures like the creator-owned comics periodical CLiNT (yes, the kerning is intentional). This streak continues to this day, as The Magic Order, a title that emerged from his deal with Netflix, features a magical escapologist who, she feels it very important to tell the reader in a direct monologue, escaped her own abortion. Bottom line, Millar has a sense of vision, but it’s betrayed at times by this reflexive desire to prove he’s smarter than the reader, to rub your face in the contradictions and make you a party to the artifice of it all. Usually with a dash of rape.
But at Marvel, Millar was riding the lightning of the Ultimate Universe. His Ultimates title was drawing on the wide-screen action image of JLA and The Authority, creating the cinematic language that would come to define the MCU. The choice to fantasy cast Samuel L. Jackson as Nick Fury is why we have Samuel L. Jackson as Nick Fury. He also painted the Hulk as a cannibalistic monster, cemented Hank Pym’s reputation as a wifebeater, and gave us Captain America yelling “Surrender? Do you think this A on my head stands for France?”, so let’s just keep that in perspective.
But the Ultimate Universe was its own pocket universe. Millar was being tapped to write a story for Earth-616, the main Marvel Universe. And he had a vision:

“I opted instead for making the superhero dilemma something a little different. People thought they were dangerous, but they did not want a ban. What they wanted was superheroes paid by the federal government like cops and open to the same kind of scrutiny. It was the perfect solution and nobody, as far as I'm aware, has done this before.”

Yeah. About that.
Part 1.5: What Has Come Before
Ultimately, the crux of Civil War is something that has been explored lightly in the past at Marvel: The idea that, instead of being unlicensed vigilantes who decide the best solution of societal issues is to beat up assholes in spandex, superheroes become licensed government officers that register their true identities with Uncle Sam and solve societal issues by beating up assholes in spandex. In Marvel’s history, it hasn’t gone well. The reality of government liaisons to superhero bodies has ranged from Valerie Cooper, who worked with government mutant team X-Factor but still found herself backing the genocidal Sentinel program as a big “Yeah, but what if…?”, to Henry Peter Gyrich, an inflamed obstructionist asshole who had to be held back from flipping a switch that would depower every superhuman individual on Earth. The idea of heroes themselves bristling against a government they disagreed with had a long history, as there was a period where Steve Rogers quit being Captain America, and the government had to find a replacement while he rode around on a motorcycle in a surprisingly slutty costume. But the idea of registering with the government has usually ended up on the “No” side due to one big cohort at Marvel: Mutants.
Ever since the days of Chris Claremont, a general conceit of the Marvel Universe is that mutants are a stand-in for your minority group of choice. Hated and feared, born different and feeling alienated, painted as an existential menace and threat to the status quo. Of course, it’s long been pointed out that the metaphor breaks down on the general grounds that, say, gays can’t shoot laser beams out of their eyes. I have my thoughts on that which I might share in the comments if someone pokes me hard enough, but it’s been general editorial consensus that people with powers, especially those of persecuted minorities, being compelled to share their true names, addresses, and natures with the federal government is a “That train’s never late!” move. Not only that, it’s a slippery slope. The classic X-Men story “Days of Future Past” is entirely premised on the idea that a government program of genocidal robots built to wipe out mutants will eventually run out of mutants… and then start turning on humans who could give birth to mutants, and then it’s Skynet all over again.
Another running meme in the Marvel Universe is that the X-Men usually exist in a Schrodinger’s cat situation with the rest of the superhero universe, both coexisting and in their own worlds. Yes, mutants have served on the Avengers, and yes, Thor intervened when the Morlocks were nearly wiped out in the sewers under New York. But Captain America, for all his proud statements of living up to America’s ideals, has a habit of missing the plot whenever the US government (or Canada, seat of all the Marvel Universe’s governmental evils - no, really) decides it’s Genocide O’Clock. And when the mutant nation of Genosha was completely wiped out by said murder robots, the Avengers seemed to be all “New phone who dis?” But when the two do intersect, there’s usually support for the mutants. One story in Fantastic Four had Reed Richards - Mr. Fantastic, stretchy man, greatest genius in the Marvel Universe, guy who’s probably being cucked by a fish-man - get tapped by the US government to make a device that detects mutants and other people with powers. He does… and then uses it to show why the government probably doesn’t want it, as it pings several members of Congress as having just enough genetic variation to qualify as “mutants,” even if they don’t have powers.
All in all, while the argument has some merit, for years, Marvel has come down on the position that asking people with powers to reveal their identities to the federal government is something that could go really bad if somebody with a hate-on for superheroes ends up in power. Something that would never happen oh yeah it totally did. But before it all went to Hell, Civil War at least gave an opportunity to reexamine the concept and see if it had merit.
It might have. But not with this argument.
Part 1.75: What Else Has Happened Before?
And now, some things that will ultimately give context for what happens next:

• In the pages of Thor, all of Asgard eventually runs headlong into Ragnarok. Thor and the rest of the Asgardians give their lives to save the earth, taking Thor off the board… for now.
• As mentioned above, the Avengers experience a critical fault due to Wanda going batshit (a common lament). With Avengers Mansion destroyed and the team at odds, it is eventually reunited under Tony Stark, who put the Avengers up in a tower he built.
• Nick Fury has vanished due to doing some skullduggery in the pages of the miniseries Secret War (no, not Secret Wars**, this is different). Acting head of SHIELD, the all-purpose super spy squad of Marvel, is Maria Hill, who can’t seem to draw her pistol without shooting herself in the foot.
• Due to Wanda continuing to go batshit, the House of M crossover event ends with her casting a spell: “No more mutants.” While the damage is staunched, Earth-616’s population of mutants (which was recently established to be somewhere around 16 million, meaning they outnumber Native Americans or the Romani) is reduced to 200, the rest being depowered or dying as a result of being depowered. This was because, as Editor-in-Chief Joe Quesada said, the idea of mutants being everywhere made them “boring.” The fact that mutants were starting to be written less as a minority stand-in and more as an actual minority group with fashion, culture, music, and neighborhoods might have had something to do with that. From the wake of this event emerges Sally Floyd, a journalist whose own mutant daughter died before the mass depowering due to having a power that was more curse than blessing. The series Generation M follows her as the viewpoint character as she investigates the stories of former mutants.

Part 2: Connecticut Can’t Catch a Break
The big kick-off for Civil War involves the New Warriors, a team of teen heroes who have, as of a recently canceled series, been trying to make it big as reality TV stars. They get in a fight with a bunch of villains in the small town of Stamford, CT, when exploding villain Nitro goes positively nuclear, resulting in a blast much bigger than any he’s generated. [1] Not only does this mostly wipe out the New Warriors (save for kinetic energy-absorbing goofball Speedball), but it also happens to hit a nearby school. In the end, 612 people are dead, many of them children, and the nation wants answers.
With public opinion turning against the New Warriors, former member Hindsight starts leaking secret identities to get the heat off his back. This only makes things worse. Secret identities have only recently stopped being a thing for some heroes: Captain America only came out a few years ago, it was only recently that Tony Stark stopped pretending Iron Man was his bodyguard, and Daredevil was almost outed in the pages of his book. But something needs to be done, so Tony helps work with Congress to pass the Super Human Registration Act, which requires that all people with powers or working as vigilantes register their identities with the government to receive training and oversight. If you don’t? Believe it or not, jail, right away.
Fault lines quickly develop in the superhero community. While Tony is leading the “pro” side, alongside Reed Richards (yeah, we’ll get to that), Captain America, usually painted as the embodiment of the dream of America despite its compromised history and many sins, is against it. He’s lived through Richard Nixon being a secret fascist and shooting himself in the head after being fingered as mastermind of a vast criminal conspiracy ([yes, that happened](SE02.jpg) ); he knows how badly this could go in the wrong hands. Needless to say, Maria Hill and SHIELD hear his concerns, understand his problems with it, and are willing to iron out the kinks through reasoned debate.
Just kidding. Before the law has even been signed, Maria sics SHIELD’s elite Cape-Killers squad on Cap with the intent of getting him behind bars. Cap swiftly goes underground and starts his own group of anti-registration superheroes.
The fight continues for the next few issues. Spider-Man, caught in the middle, reveals himself to be Peter Parker at a press conference, declaring his support for the SHRA. Doctor Strange is so powerful that he tells the government to fuck off, and somehow, Maria Hill doesn’t decide to go charging up his asshole. Ben Grimm, the ever-loving blue-eyed Thing, is so sick of all the conflict he goes to France. But things are still at a stalemate, and while SHIELD may be acting like a bunch of merry assholes, it seems like there’s a debate to be had that could still be resolved reasonably… except for one key factor.
Part 3: I Fought the Law, and the Law… Huh?
No one ever really defined what the Super Human Registration Act, the legislation that tore the Marvel Universe’s superhero community asunder, did. Every book that had an issue that touched on the event seemed to have a different understanding of its principles, as well as just how fascist it might be in the long run. In the pages of She-Hulk, attorney Jennifer Walters/She-Hulk argues the law is a net good, as it gives heroes the backing and resources they need to not have to go it alone, while also having some measure of government oversight. In the pages of Civil War Frontline (oh, and we’ll get back to Civil War Frontline, don’t you worry), Wonder Man is told by the government that he needs to do a job for them, and if he refuses, well, one thousand years dungeon.
Which then leads into the other issue behind the SHRA. Namely, that everyone in favor was either starting to swing towards fascism or embracing bootlicking as a lifestyle, not a kink. In the pages of Amazing Spider-Man, Peter asks Reed Richards, who has always bucked authority and once stopped the US government from doing something just like this with mutants, why he’s pro-registration. Reed then reveals that an uncle who has never been mentioned before was called before HUAC; he refused to name names, his career was ruined, and he killed himself. From this, Reed - the man who stole a rocketship because the government said “no” to his planned space voyage - has learned that the government is always right, especially when they could step on your neck (this was received so badly that a later comic revealed he’d actually borrowed the concept of psychohistory from Asimov’s Foundation, he’d made it work somehow, and his calculations showed that this was the only way to avoid a greater disaster). This comic also revealed that people who were in violation of the SHRA were sent to a literal extradimensional Gitmo, a prison in the Negative Zone that later comics would reveal was overseen by… Captain Marvel. No, not that one. No, not that one. The Kree superhero Captain Mar-Vell, who had famously died of cancer decades before. How did he come back from the dead? Fuck if we know.
This “the law says what you want it to say” approach spread across various books and miniseries meant to cross over into the event. In the pages of a crossover mini between the Runaways and the Young Avengers, this meant SHIELD Cape-Killer squads were using lethal force against teenagers. The second-to-last issue of the mini ends with several members of both teams in extradimensional Gitmo, about to be dissected by a guy who’s horny for torture. The fact that all the captive heroes were the queer members of both teams? Total coincidence. Honestly.
So, it quickly becomes clear that the editorial control on this event is less than cohesive. There are different ideas all over as to what the SHRA does, and some of those ideas are tacking pretty fashy. But if the law is being painted as that bad, then clearly, there must be some greater statement of freedom vs. security. Maybe Millar’s really painting a subversive picture of what happens when you trade liberty for control, right?
Part 4: Why Do You Hate the Good Thing?
After the publication of Civil War #3, Millar would say in an interview he was actually pro-registration. I can’t find that interview, but here’s a similar sentiment shared years later:

“Weirdly, some of the other writers would often make Tony the bad guy, which I thought was a strange choice because I was actually on Tony’s side... In the real world, if somebody had superpowers, I’d like them to be registered in the same way that somebody who has a gun has to carry a license. But a gun can kill several people while a superhero can kill several thousands of people, so on a pragmatic level I’m 100% on Tony’s side. Maybe on a romantic level, Cap’s position makes sense but I don’t think anybody in the real world would really want that."”

And again, here’s the thing: He’s not entirely wrong. As said above, the idea of civil liberties for all and “free to me you and me” falls down a little when one of your neighbors can blow up a city block by thinking real hard. But Millar is fighting against years of ideological inertia in the Marvel Universe, as well as painting Captain America, the guy who has always embodied the ideal of a righteous, just America, as in the wrong. He needs to make one hell of an argument.
So here’s what happens in the pages of Civil War #3 to sell the audience on the SHRA:

• Thor comes back from the dead… and he’s on Tony’s side! Well, not really. Tony and Reed both realized that having one of the most beloved gods of the Marvel Universe come out on their side would be a big win… if only he wasn’t dead. So, they cloned him. Or rather, they T-800’d him, putting cloned divine flesh on a robot skeleton. But I’m sure he’s perfectly under control, and - oh, he just killed Goliath. In the next issue, one of Marvel’s black male heroes, frozen at the size of a small townhouse in death, will be buried in a gigantic ditch, wrapped in a tarp and chains. You’d think Hank Pym could grow a large enough coffin, at least.
• With Cap and the anti-registration side escaping once again, Tony decides he needs a dedicated team that can track down fugitive superhumans. To do so, he creates a new version of the Thunderbolts, a concept long associated with “villains acting like heroes.” And who does he put on this team? Venom, the Spider-Man villain who eats people’s brains; Bullseye, the Daredevil villain who will kill anyone for the lulz; and Norman Osborn, a.k.a. The Green Goblin, who famously murdered Spider-Man’s girlfriend Gwen Stacy.

Again. Tony’s in the right. The SHRA is good.
Part 5: Yadda, Yadda, Yadda
The next few issues of Civil War might best be described as “They fight, and fight, and fight and fight and fight.” The anti-registration side picks up The Punisher, Marvel’s most avowed murderer of criminals - and Cap is somewhat shocked but not entirely surprised when two minor villains join the anti-registration side and Frank promptly kills them on sight. Spider-Man starts realizing things are weird on the pro-reg side and defects, after he has set his entire life on fire. The X-Men have continued to stay out of this whole mess. In the lead-up, Emma Frost called Tony out on the Avengers’ complete absence when Genosha got nuked. Later, Carol Danvers (then Ms. Marvel, now Captain Marvel) will show up at the Xavier School to pitch the SHRA just after a massive terrorist attack kills dozens of students. Emma responds by telepathically dogwalking her.
By the final issue of the miniseries, the SHRA has expanded out into the Fifty States Initiative, wherein each state gets its own superteam. There’s a big final battle, Hercules kills Robo-Thor, and Cap nearly takes out Tony, only to be stopped by… the heroes of 9/11. No shit, Captain America is subdued by cops, firefighters, and paramedics. And when that happens, Cap finally takes a look around, realizes their big ideological street brawl has resulted in collateral damage, and surrenders. The SHRA wins, though Tony feels a little bad about it. Cap is ready to stand trial and to argue that, while he may have done something wrong, he did it for the right reasons.
Once again: Yeah. About that.
Part 6: MySpace Tom Didn’t Die For This
Running alongside Civil War is Civil War Frontline, a street-level book written by Paul Jenkins that managed to capture this world-breaking conflict through the eyes of people on the street. Though it has side stories, its main leads are Ben Urich, Peter Parker’s journalist buddy at The Daily Bugle, and the aforementioned Sally Floyd. Throughout the series, they start to realize there’s a story underneath the SHRA, as if somebody is playing the angles.
Before we talk about that conclusion, let’s talk about a side story. Remember how we said part of the comics community saw Identity Crisis as a driven effort to make things less “wacky” and intentionally darken the DCU? Well, that same tonal approach led to one of the more laughable moments of a pretty laughable arc. See, despite the fact that, as established, it was Nitro who blew up Stamford, it’s Speedball, the only survivor of the New Warriors, that views himself as responsible and is held up as a scapegoat by the general public. In addition, the blast screwed up his powers. Now, he doesn’t absorb and reflect kinetic energy; rather, he generates energy based on pain. So, he builds himself a new, extreme outfit lined with 612 spikes, one for each person who died in Stamford. This will drive his crusade to make things right - not as Speedball… but as Penance.
It was so laughably DeviantArt “OC do not steal” that no one could take it seriously. Look what you did, you took a perfectly good goofball and gave him an emo streak. The turn is swiftly mocked in other Marvel books, and it’s eventually revealed that Speedball still had his original powerset and always intended to put Nitro in the Goofy Suit of Dark Inner Torment as punishment for his crimes. But this turn gives you a sense of the tone and heft Jenkins was bringing to the proceedings.
Anyway, back to the main plot. Ben and Sally follow the thread as Namor, as he is wont to do, declares war on the surface world after an Atlantean diplomat is shot. But it turns out the assassination was arranged by Norman Osborn, who decided it was better to beg forgiveness than ask permission and manipulated Atlantis into war so that Tony could have another piece of evidence for getting superhumans on a leash. And the two journalists deduce that, on some level, Tony had to know this would be an inevitable outcome of giving state backing to an unhinged mogul who dresses like a Power Rangers villain. Weighing what to do with this information, Ben and Sally, who are kind of sick of the collateral damage by this point, sit on it while they go in for an interview with Captain America, now in custody and willing to tell his side of the story.
And then. And then. The monologue. If you want a lesson in how to assassinate a character in 30 seconds or less, this monologue is a great example. Sally Floyd calls Captain America out as completely divorced from American values. Now, again, Captain America has long served as the beating liberal heart of the Marvel Universe. He has always represented an America that reckons with its legacy of things like internment camps, Manifest Destiny, and Jim Crow, in order to transcend these scars and embody the promise offered by Emma Lazarus’s New Colossus, carved on the side of the Statue of Liberty. Why is he out of touch with Americans at the dawn of the 21st century?
Well, he’s never heard of MySpace. [2] He doesn’t watch NASCAR. He doesn’t follow American Idol. There are pop culture moments that have aged like milk; this one had all the permanence of an ice cream cone in a blast furnace. But despite the inanity of Floyd’s argument - and trust me, there are fan edits dedicated to Cap pointing out how full of shit this argument is - it’s clear it represents something else. This is a post-9/11 world. Fuck civil liberties, we have a no-fly list and Gitmo, and if the American people really cared, they’d do something other than watch Simon Cowell read aspiring singers to filth. What does Captain America stand for in this moment of crisis?
Nothing. Because he just looks away from Sally Floyd. No doubt thinking, “Oh my God this bitch.” But to underline the argument in question, Sally storms out of the interview, Ben in tow. She still has that information on Norman Osborn’s false flag operation… and while she and Ben confront Tony on everything that went down, they decide the story should never see the light of day. Because they wouldn’t dare jeopardize the SHRA, because security is more important than the truth.
Oh. And then Cap gets shot. And dies. He totally dies (except he doesn’t but we’ll get to that). If ever there was an unintentional thesis statement for this event, running in the late stages of the Bush era, it would be this: “It’s better to trust that the powers that be who oversee the new America will keep you safe, even when they stage false flag operations, stick you in a gulag, and put their trust in monsters. All that civil liberty stuff was the old America. And the old America was hopeless. It wasn’t even on MySpace.”
Epilogue: Consequences Keep Consequencing
As you can tell from that last paragraph, a lot of the fan reception to Civil War likely had a lot to do with the period. This was the Bush era, a time where you were for America or against it. We were in the shadow of the Patriot Act, Gitmo, and widespread wiretaps, paranoid about what civil liberty we’d be asked to put on the pyre next in the name of Freedom. A story all about the warm, clenching fist of government control that tells you to ignore the collateral damage… well, it wasn’t great for the cultural moment.
The ideas of Civil War aren’t necessarily bad ones. I frame Cap as the liberal dream of what America could be, but there are good arguments to be made that America has never been that and Cap is just copium for liberals. His most recent title, Sentinel of Liberty, opens with Steve saying he is out of touch with the average American - not because he doesn’t watch NASCAR, but because he’s a WWII veteran who looks maybe 30 years old at most and whose best friends are all superheroes or spies. A narrative that has him on the wrong side of the issue and detonates his beliefs isn’t impossible, but it probably shouldn’t be one where people who got powers due to a fluke of birth or a radiation accident are told by the government, “Join with us or we’ll send supervillains after you.” Hell, as the Civil War movie proves, there is a way to tell a story about a superhero community torn in half by the idea of mandatory registration as government-controlled actors, and just why people would think that could be a bad idea (“Hey, remember when a good chunk of our intelligence apparatus turned out to be Nazi stay behinds?”).
But in the context of the era, and coupled with the execution, Civil War felt like a hard sell, and you could feel the thumb pressing on the scale every second while reading it. The moral center of the Marvel Universe is wrong, the winning side employs sadistic murderers and has an extradimensional Gitmo, and the writer is telling you that any sane individual would be on Team Green Goblin Employer.
So how did that all work out? Well…

• With Cap seemingly dead, shot by his brainwashed love interest Sharon Carter as part of a plot by the Red Skull, Bucky Barnes/the Winter Soldier becomes the new Cap. Only it turns out Steve wasn’t killed, but shot with a time bullet that Billy Pilgrims his ass. He eventually comes back.
• Thor comes back, finds out what Tony did, and beats his ass all the way across post-Katrina New Orleans.
• The Secret Invasion event happens next, which leads to Skrull infiltrators hitting everything (this is also the explanation for Captain Mar-Vell’s miraculous resurrection: He was a Skrull all along). With Tony caught with his pants down and Norman Osborn seeming to save the day, Norman - who has been losing his shit for some time - takes over the Initiative and forms his own fascist cabal, HAMMER. To try and stop Norman from learning everything on every hero ever, Tony goes on the run and actually starts deleting his own brain, which he then reassembles with a backup from before anyone even thought of the SHRA. The fact that getting rid of Tony’s “Oops I did a fascism” period came out alongside Iron Man hitting theaters is a coincidence, I’m sure.

As for Spider-Man? It might not shock you, but having a hero without the resources of Tony Stark out himself to the world carries liabilities. An assassin who tries to kill Peter instead hits Aunt May, and it appears she’ll die of her injuries. All this leads to One More Day… and if you thought the fans hated Civil War? Oh, BABY.
[1] This is eventually explored in the pages of Wolverine, of all books, as Wolverine decides maybe somebody should track down the person who actually killed hundreds of children. It’s revealed that Nitro was given power-boosting drugs by the CEO of Damage Control, Marvel’s designated “clean up after the super-battle” corporation, as a way of generating business. In a sign of how little this matters, Wolverine tells Maria Hill to her face that the person responsible for a mass casualty event is the pawn of a powerful conspiracy, and she basically says, “Not my problem.” Cobie Smulders must thank the gods that her Maria Hill is written as somebody with basic human decency.
[2] Hilariously, when Sally Floyd was brought back during Nick Spencer’s Captain America run because no one had piled enough dung on her corpse, this line was retconned to her asking him about Twitter. Given everything Elon’s been doing lately, we’ll see if that ages just as poorly.

Hiya! I'm a 28-year-old Brit based in leafy South Yorkshire. I have an inexplicably American accent acquired from my time in an international school in the Middle East, I'm 6'0", I have a bachelor's degree in the humanities, a master's degree in a business-related subject, and I work in IT.
I like to think I have an eclectic range of interests, but my I'm particularly passionate about films and books. You can often find my furrowed brow behind the yellowing pages of a hardback or in front of a big screen. I will almost certainly buy and read whatever you're currently reading, and I have what has been described as an endearing habit of buying people books and films I think they'll enjoy.
I have a slightly morbid interest in history, a slightly less morbid interest in personal finance, and after putting off travel as a consequence of the nomadic nature of my childhood, I've recently caught the travel bug, and hope to add to my tally of 13 countries explored in the near-future.
I'm far from perfect, and I've spent a fair amount of my young adulthood in a bit of a haze, but I'm proud to have made significant strides over the last two years, and I'm relishing the challenge of consistent self-improvement. Since the beginning of the year, I've lost two stone, I've completed a professional qualification related to my work, I've managed to tick two items off my travel bucket list, and I'm planning to end the second half of the year on the same note by continuing my weight loss, pushing myself out of my comfort zone and undertaking new hobbies, and being more proactive in my search for my forever person.
I'm looking for my life partner. Someone with whom I can celebrate life's victories and commiserate over life's setbacks. Someone I can enjoy new, thrilling, growth-inducing experiences with, and someone whose company I can enjoy on cold, lazy Sundays. Someone I can hold and dote on well into my golden years.
If any of this resonates with you, I'd love to hear from you. Thanks for reading, and best of luck with your search!
Here are some photos.

Hi everyone ,
I’m looking for some advice on how to get into the industry as a background designer /painter. Prior to the pandemic I was an animation major at an art school in my city but because of covid I ended up taking a gap year and transferring schools my juniosenior year of college because I couldn’t afford art school anymore and now my degree isn’t in animation . I was wondering if there’s still any chance for me to pursue my goals of being a background designer /painter? What should be in my portfolio? What shouldn’t be in my portfolio? Should I look for internships or apply for different jobs and work my way up to that position ?I’m in the east coast and as far as tv/animation jobs go I’ve only worked as a Production Assistant and did some story boarding while I was at that job.

Preface:
I am a huge Lord of the Rings fan; I re-read the books typically once a year. I also adore the movies, and find all of Tolkien's legendarium absolutely awesome. Truly one of my favorite hobbies so I'd like to offer some critiques and excitement of flavor gems from Tales of Middle Earth. I won't do every card, but I'll comment on some individual cards and how WOTC did on it. I will comment on the cards abilities but only insofar as it impacts the flavor; i.e. what the card is doing not power level, etc.
To be clear: I understand there are sacrifices you need to make for the greater game, and sometimes those come first. For these articles: I am looking at each card in a vacuum, so if I seem harsh it's because I am using a single lens.
Next up: Bath Song!
​
https://preview.redd.it/gghsgkmefm3b1.png?width=400&format=png&auto=webp&s=9be316ec45aacc404410bbf2213b125b09a371d6
Flavor
So in the books Frodo does not go immediately from Hobbiton to Bree. Instead the story progresses slowly: Frodo plans to leave the Shire and make his way east. His first stop is a little country called Buckland; where Merry is from. Buckland is a colony of the shire, and it allows Tolkien to slowly ratchet up the feeling of adventure. Frodo first goes from one Hobbit land to another, before going to Bree (where both Hobbits and Men live) and only then going to Rivendell. At his stop in Buckland Frodo takes a bath at his 'new' home, there they sing a bath song. Here is the song:
Sing hey! for the bath at close of day that washes the weary mud away! A loon is he that will not sing: O! Water Hot is a noble thing!
O! Sweet is the sound of falling rain, and the brook that leaps from hill to plain; but better than rain or rippling streams is Water Hot that smokes and steams.
O! Water cold we may pour at need down a thirsty throat and be glad indeed; but better is Beer if drink we lack, and Water Hot poured down the back.
O! Water is fair that leaps on high in a fountain white beneath the sky; but never did fountain sound so sweet as splashing Hot Water with my feet!
It's a silly song, and one of Tolkien's many expositions which flesh out his world (and far more natural than most fantasy, even eclipsing A Song of Ice and Fire).
Color
Which brings me to my first critique: this song shouldn't be blue. The song is all about returning home after a long walk and mild adventure. It's not intellectual at all; and the bath isn't really 'water' per se but the enjoyment of making it home after a journey. It feels far more Green-Red to these eyes.
Abilities
Which, again, is my big critique. I would have made this more about 'washing away' which I think could have been a rummaging ability. Maybe a mulching ability instead of just draw and discard. I could also see something like 'remove poison counters' to build into the flavor of 'cleaning'.
This isn't bad in my opinion, it's just a touch imperfect. My guess is they made the card and then found the flavor next, which works fine. There are going to be misses and the fact it hit at all is kinda neat. It's not one of the more famous parts of The Lord of the Rings even if it's one of Tolkien's better songs.

Our son started having table food at dinner with us a few weeks ago and has loved everything and has had no gagging/choking issues. We also started sending some food to daycare this week - just cut fruit so far and he has been doing well with that too. I've been following the recommended food shapes that solid starts recommends by age but his teacher actually has cut his fruit in more bite size chunks and he had no problems self-feeding. I've noticed with table food sometimes too he prefers pieces smaller for things like animal proteins and cooked veggies.
Is there any issue offering food in that way if our son has the dexterity/swallowing skills for it? He has good fine motor skills and started self-feeding his bottles at daycare around 5 months and has taken to the open cup for water well, too.

I recently added a spring steel build plate to my photon m3, but after putting the build plate assembly back on and trying to rehome it, instead of stopping at the bottom the z motor begins skipping. Even with the side screws loosened it still wants to go farther down. I can get it to continue by loosening the main screw holding the build plate assembly on, but obviously I can't print like that.
I know I'm doing a horrible job of explaining this, but this type of adhesive-magnetic buildplate seems like a very common upgrade so I'm sure I'm missing something obvious. Any help is appreciated

Good Morning RonaPA!
Still having some tech issues over here on my end. I will edit this post multiple times so I don't lose my work. Please check back later or reload if it looks wonky. Many apologies. 🙏
Still a bit of a breather for the beginning of the summer. So far, so good.

VOCs

[Nationally,]() still not much changing on the leaderboard, but XBB.1.5's lead now down to under 30%.
FU.2 (which is XBB.1.16.1.2) is now showing up on the leaderboard and this has to be watched carefully along with FE.1.2 and FU.1.
The amount of [sequencing has changed dramatically.]() Sequencing is the primary "early warning system" we have. Fewer samples being sequenced impacts the effectiveness of this system. The US is still in the lead with sequencing, though.

Wastewater

Nationally and across all regions, the amount of C19 material in wastewater continues on a good downward trend.
Some PA shed highlights:
Very slight upticks in [Butler]() and [Chester]() areas. Please continue to take advantage of good weather to improve ventilation. Stay home and use a quality respirator if sick..... focus on NOT transmitting this! COVID-19 is not the flu.
[IndianaCo]() is starting to show dropping levels after an increase slightly above national average. KUTGW IndianaCo!
[MontCo]() is SMASHING IT!!! Way below national average!! Good job MontCo!

C19 Research

The next [vaccine/booster we might see for the Fall]() will probably be based on XBB.x.y. Ancestral vaccines have been rwndered nearly irrelevant due to antigenic drift. Please get them when available!

Editorials

Neat trackers:
🔴-Covid Variant Dashboard and Tracking SARSCoV2 XBB.1.16 Lineage Over Time by Arkansas data scientist Raj Rajnarayan
🔴-Biobot (Wastewater)
🔴-CDC NOWCAST variant proportion tracker
🔴-Honey/Gilchrist variant proportion visualizer and How to Use It!
Education:
🔴 -An important post here (found on Twitter, posted by tern) recently on this EXTREMELY IMPORTANT .PDF release from the CDC that contains:

However, patients who recover from the acute phase of the infection can still suffer long-term effects (8). Post-acute sequelae of COVID-19 (PASC), commonly referred to as “long COVID,” refers to the long-term symptoms, signs, and complications experienced by some patients who have recovered from the acute phase of COVID-19 (8–10). Emerging evidence suggests that severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2), the virus that causes COVID-19, can have lasting effects on nearly every organ and organ system of the body weeks, months, and potentially years after infection (11,12). Documented serious post-COVID-19 conditions include cardiovascular, pulmonary, neurological, renal, endocrine, hematological, and gastrointestinal complications (8), as well as death (13).

It's under "Certifying deaths due to post-acute sequelae of COVID-19".
If you didn't catch/test +/deal with symptoms of COVID-19, DO NOT seek out to get infected with it.
If you caught COVID-19 once, DO NOT seek out catching it again.
And WEAR A MASK. Don't spread it!
🔴 -COVID-19 Immunology 101 for Non-immunologists by Dr. Akiko Iwasaki
🔴 -How the Immune System Works, beautifully illustrated by Kurzgesagt. (Seriously, Kurzgesagt is wonderful, go check it out.)
🔴 -The T-cells are Not Alright, an interview with Dr. Anthony Leonardi
🔴 -How SARS-CoV-2 Battles Our Immune System: Meet the protein arsenal wielded by the pandemic virus
🔴 -How to Build a Corsi-Rosenthal Box and then make them look snazzy!
🔴 -Safer, more cautious gatherings.
🔴 -MASK TYPE MATTERS with the latest Omicron Sars-CoV-2 mutations. Here is a chart comparing mask types, mutation type, and the time it takes in each to receive a problematic dose of Sars-CoV-2.
🔴 -A thread by Dr. Jeff Gilchrist explaining how high level respirators work, more mask comparisons, and answers to why we can still smell things even with high level respirators on.
Continue to have a great and safe spring season!!! 🌷🌷🌷

Company Name	Title	City
Bayer	Veterans Preferred - Senior Quality Engineer	Grace
Bayer	Veterans Preferred - Senior Quality Engineer	Soda Springs
Bayer	QA Engineer	Soda Springs
West Valley Medical Center	OR Circulating RN	Caldwell
West Valley Medical Center	Float Pool RN Days	Caldwell
Amazon Warehouse	Amazon Warehouse Worker - Benefits Day One	Coeur d Alene
Mid-American Research Chemical	Sales Representative	Baker
Ascendion Inc.	Channel Marketer	Boise
GEO Reentry Services	Assistant Case Manager	Boise
Amvac	Formulator	Marsing
GEO Reentry Services	Assistant Case Manager	Meridian
US Foods	Grocery Retail Sales Representative	Nampa
Mid-American Research Chemical	Sales Representative	Pocatello
Pepsi Beverages Company	Alcohol Sales and Warehouse Relief	Twin Falls
Synchrony	AVP, Account Management Strategy	Boise
Valmont Industries, Inc.	Warehouse Associate	American Falls
Nordstrom, Inc.	Retail Stock - Boise Town Plaza Rack	Boise
B and D Foods	Production Utility Operator / Forklift Operator	Boise
Frito-Lay	Sales/IMO Warehouser	Boise
Capstone Logistics	Warehouse Associate	Boise
Lithia Motors, Inc.	Shipping/Receiving Clerk	Boise
Old Dominion Freight Line, Inc.	Dock WorkeForklift Operator	Boise
Bigelow LLC	OperatoPacker	Boise
DuPont de Nemours, Inc.	Warehouse OperatoMaterial Handler - Shift	Burley
DuPont de Nemours, Inc.	Warehouse OperatoMaterial Handler - Days	Burley

Hey guys, here are some recent job openings in id. Feel free to comment here or send me a private message if you have any questions, I'm at the community's disposal! If you encounter any problems with any of these job openings please let me know that I will modify the table accordingly. Thanks!

I had a feeling I knew what was being asked of Fauve. A young media expert with smarts, ambition, ability, and whose work was slowly creeping outward into my counterparts among the other species…and who had already developed a rapport with dangerous ones to the point where she had no fear of them?
And one more thing.
She’s terribly cute.
This is hard to explain to some species, but the simple fact of the matter is that as an unmodified human with no meaningful combat training and only a reasonable level of fitness associated with a normal level of activity… Fauve appeared to be distinctly nonthreatening. She did not tower over ‘most’, the maxiki notwithstanding. She did not have any evident savage appendages or claws, and even her canines were underdeveloped even relative to my own.
Simply put… she did not look like an apex predator whose species was like a coiled spring ready for the pressure holding it down to release and spring it to undreamt of heights.
With a slender frame and wide, intent eyes, you had to be familiar with the common divergences of predator and prey to recognize that she was from a predator species at all. For example the front seated eyes for depth perception as opposed to the side facing eyes to search for predators. The slight canines for the tearing of meat after a creature is defleshed. The upright body that let them see farther.
She wasn’t even particularly fast, so you’d have to know enough about human anatomy to know that a tribe of her kind could walk almost anything to death.
So, Fauve looked harmless. It didn’t hurt that any attempt at delving into her identity would reveal that it was being in danger that ultimately led to her coming into her current state.
Of course, I knew the truth. In a strange sort of way, if Bonny Red was right, and I was more dangerous than she, then Fauve was at least as dangerous as me, you see. I wanted to change one Empire, one people. All else was an afterthought that I saw as a possibility but could be developed later.
Fauve had her eyes set on the whole galaxy, and my work was one of the weapons in her arsenal.
Do you see why I adore humans so? They are beautiful, dangerous, charming, kind, and relentless all at once, when something tickles their ambitions.
I will not trouble you with the drab details of my backchannel work, it is as it seems. I relayed a request to the league fighters. The fighters reached out to their embassy on Earth. The embassy received my message, a time was ‘suggested’ and I relayed that and then they would handle the rest themselves.
It was done in the time it took to finish lunch and write about it here, which was to say, about an hour.
To pass the time, I chose to amuse myself in the fruits of one of Fauve’s projects. I had a headset to engage in the game world that Fauve made, and followed the story she laid out. My character began as a family man, a wife, hair like ink, and the slight almond shape to her eyes that marked her heritage as coming from the far east.
In the game I played, she held a child who was a mix of both of us, and my role was that of a scientist… for three ‘days’ I tended ordinary tasks and played through the preprogrammed warmth of their household. Then I got to see the world erupt in flames outside of our window.
From there, safety. Cold storage… and my wife and child were stolen, from within the glass, I heard the ones taking them say, “They agreed to this…”
The scene faded out… and when I was ‘awake’ I was not alone, or the same. For one, I now had animalistic features, as did they… and yes, my ‘family’ was there. And I played for sixty in-game days until I died… only to take over and play as my wife, then when she died… I took over playing as my daughter. The game carried me through generations, parent to child, until I found myself playing a very familiar face.
Usagi.
I do love my humans, particularly Fauve… but they’re very good at ripping your heart out.
It was a combination adventure and survival game played over generations, and a history lesson that ended with my character’s demise, right down to her final words, and even her real voice.
Thinking of the horrors of the human past, everything took on a kind of urgency that it was difficult to describe, like being caught in the midst of a battle and knowing you must do something, but knowing anything you might do could just as easily lead to your death as your salvation.
I took the headset off and closed out the game. I had to do something… productive, I suppose.
I stretched out, laid myself back on my bed, and stretched myself out yet again. It was hard to be productive right now. It just felt like I was being pressed to death by an invisible weight…from every direction.
I grabbed my datapad and switched the screen over to my cooperation structure to do a little other work… it might work, it might not, but if it fails I lose nothing but credits. While if it works, who can say what positive impact might follow in the future?
What I was doing was going for the compensation section where pay and bonuses for players were managed. I selected my ‘discretionary’ options. As founder and the head of both organizations, in theory under the old human system I had total control over everything, in reality under that system there was an amalgamation of checks and balances that… frankly didn’t work very well, from what I’ve seen.
Under the new system, founding documentation always included discretionary percentages to where the head could act on budgets without oversight, beyond which changes had to be run through a board that handled day to day operations.
I wanted to provide an incentive for more species to send competitors to Ballyball and toward my fighting tournament, to that end, compensation needed to go up. If I wanted the Hundred Terrors to all be represented within three years, I’d need to increase the profit considerably, and expanding the range of players would further my ‘bonding’ experiments.
After this volume was released, I was asked if I ever felt guilty about essentially ‘manipulating’ so many into positions that not only caused injury, but also potentially toyed with their emotions in unpredictable ways.
No.
That is my answer.
No.
Not really.
Or if I did, not enough to get in the way of doing it. It wasn’t about my career anymore. Perhaps this is just proof that I am a dlamisa…
Or perhaps it is just proof that I am, and was, and maybe always will be, just as damaged as everyone else in my species.
Sometimes the right thing to do isn’t evident.
Sometimes the right thing to do will just get a lot of innocent people killed.
And sometimes the only way to do anything right, to save a lot of lives, to make a lot of lives better, is to do the wrong thing.
Even if that means a few have to go down hard for that to happen.
If a few bruised and bloody people in an arena played a part in making sure worlds didn’t burn, then it was absolutely worth it.
I’ll accept the judgment of history for my actions, because it means that even if I was wrong, there are people still alive to judge me for them.

First Previous Next Ko-fi
"Hey Juice. Did you mean what you said about Tweek's wife being with another man at the moment?" Honey asked while they flew past trees. Juice was a little surprised at Honey Badger's ability to keep up with his pace. His large feet touched at the forest floor gently, propelling him forward in an endless torrent of speed and agility, and beside him Honey Badger kept pace.
"She cheated on him, he disappeared, that won't make her go 'My husband is gone, now is the right time to be faithful'." He shook his head from side to side, his arms pumping with every kick forward. "No, she's with the other man."
Honey suddenly stopped forcing Juice to halt his run, "What is it?" Juice whispered. Then he heard it, through the trees, the unmistakable sound of footfalls crunching leaves. A man appeared trailed by six wolves, the duo darted to either side of a the trees, using the bark as cover.
"The wolves have a scent, looks like unknowns at the south side of the wilderness." The man said to a receiver that dangled across his ear to come to rest at his cheek, mouthpiece dangling just above the lips. The wolves sniffed at the forest floor, inching ever closer. Honey darted from behind the tree, he jumped and twisted himself mid air, he fired two shots, one hit the man right at his forehead and the other took him down at the neck. Blood spluttered on the forest floor. The wolves tensed, hackles rising but Juice rushed them. The wolf at the front, the alpha, a large male with a coat of white fur charged Juice, it came in low thinking Juice would follow suit but Juice went high, jumping over the wolf and as he jumped his legs spun and the sword came down in a twirling arch to cut the wolf's head off then its midriff and a part of its hide. Juice landed behind the wolf and behind him the wolf fell to pieces. Seeing this the other wolves let out howls of fright and scattered to either end of the forest leaving Honey Badger and Juice standing alone amidst the trees.
Honey walked over to the wolf and raised its decapitated head. "Metal casing between the ears." He said.
Juice leaned down over the body of the man and stood up with a metallic object in hand. "This one has been set to scouting, I think it is used to control the alpha whom the pack follows."
"It's quite clever, control the leader of the pack to control the pack." Honey Badger said. "It's like communism."
Juice smiled. "We're fighting communist wolves."
They marched on, steady feet tapping the forest floor in swift movements. They ran for what could pass as half an hour until they came to a clearing where two men stood amidst a dozen wolves, eyes peering in either direction. Honey and Juice lay flat on the ground, their weapons held at the ready.
"Do you spot the alphas?" Honey asked.
Juice squinted. "There are two, the one to the North East, brown fur, metal casing on its head. To its right, two clicks, is the second alpha."
Honey stood up, all heads turned to him including those of the wolves. The two men started approaching and tapping at the metal casings at their sides. Honey raised his arm, gun in hand. He fired four shots that hit their targets, two alpha wolves lay headless on the forest floor and those that controlled them lay with ghastly wounds to the necks, bleeding out on the ground. The other wolves scattered. Honey and Juice approached the two figures on the ground.
"Say, have you ever thought about marriage?" Juice asked as he raised his sword and thrust it into the midriff of one man whose mouth gurgled with blood.
Honey aimed his pistol at the second man and fired at point blank rage, the man's head exploded in a flood of gore. "Marriage is a delicate topic, you have to consider the aspect of love, is it necessary for marriage to occur? If not then what's the point."
A man walked into the clearing, trailed by wolves. Honey pointed at him and pulled the trigger, the plasma ray shot forward at blinding speed, tearing through the air to hit the man in the eye, the back of his skull exploded in a mist of blood. The wolves charged, six of them, at the forefront was the alpha. Juice ran to meet them, the wolves split into two groups, flanking Juice's approach. Juice moved head on, aiming for the wolf with a metal casing upon its head. The black furred wolf pounced but Juice slid beneath it and as he slid he swiped at its legs with the light sword, cutting off its limbs. The other wolves approached but half hearted after seeing their leader's whimpering limbless form. Juice drove his sword through one wolf's chest, ejected it and sliced through another's snout. He then dove for the limbless wolf and impaled it through the head, breaking its metal casing. The other wolves scattered.
Honey walked to meet up with Juice and together they matched strides, heading for the Palace in the distance. "If marriage isn't for you then why did you propose it to Asumpta of the Solstice army?" Juice asked.
Honey rested his plasma pistols on his shoulders as he walked. "She had a metal arm."
"And?" Juice asked.
"Do you know what it's like to receive a hand job from a metallic hand?" Honey asked in return. Juice smiled. "I don't but one thing's for sure, as long as that hand has been oiled down well there's no tiring to the jerking motion. That means unlimited hand jobs, fast paced without tiring."
Juice nodded. "You are a wise man Honey Badger, you can read between the lines."
"And Thergo's body is metallic. She's basically capable of tirelessly satisfying me day in and day out."
"You think about the Princesses too?"
"I do."
Three men appeared before them, swords drawn at the ready. No wolves in sight. Juice rushed forward and the three ran to meet him. The first man raised his blade but Juice ducked low and cut inside the man's elbow, tearing tendons and ensuring the limb hang useless. The other two tried to flank him but Juice dove hard to the left, brandishing his blade he struck, thrusting just beneath the man's chin. The blade stuck between jaw bones and Juice let go of it after a failed yank. He turned to meet the man on the right but a plasma ray passed just a hand's breadth from his ear and took the man out through the eye. Juice turned to see Honey Badger shoot the man with the useless limb thrice through the chest. Honey walked on until he stood next to Juice who leaned down and picked up a light sword. They nodded at each other and continued their march towards the palace.
"I thought it was just Thergo's dress that was metallic." Juice said as they passed overhang trees, the canopy sheltering them from the sun's rays.
"Parts of her body are metal or some alloy resembling metal. The way she shapes her dress into weapons is probably because of some magnetic overlay that works with her flesh." Honey said and sighed. "Man I miss her flesh, it's like having sex with a microwave."
"Like fucking the Droid?" Juice said and they both laughed then quickly cut their laughs short as a man appeared before them, between the trees, wielding a plasma riffle with four wolves with metal casings flanking him on all sides.
The man took aim and fired but his plasma shot met with the plasma shot from Honey's pistol. The man gawked at Honey Badger, he raised his riffle and fired once more but Honey's plasma ray met with his shot once more in an eruption of sparks.
"Well I'll be damn—" The man's sentence was cut short as plasma shot from Honey's pistol took him out at the head, chewing a chunk off his skull. The wolves ran forward to meet them and Juice darted to answer their charge. The first two wolves pounced, aiming for his neck but Juice spun with the blade in hand, eviscerating them mid air. The wolves collapsed with whimpering death cries. Juice's feet still running he launched himself at the third wolf, darting to the side so its leap may meet plain air, swiping with his blade to cut through the wolf's snout in a deliberate line that ran from its mouth, through the neck to end at its chest. The fourth wolf tried to charge at his legs but a downward swipe of his blade severed its spine and ended its life.
Honey walked forward and met Juice. They nodded at each other and continued their journey, quickening their pace to a jog they etched on towards the now near palace.
"I see Sirenala within my mind from time to time, what Tweek said about Pepsharh is somewhat similar to what I experience." Juice said, his breath even despite the exertion thus far.
"It's like whatever we shared with them was special."
Juice stopped his ran and Honey Badger brandished his plasma pistols in an arch before him only to meet no foe.
"Special?" Juice asked.
Honey lowered his guns. "That's the word for it." He smiled. "What we shared with the princesses was unique, distinguished with a quality."
"Could it be love?" Juice asked, looking down on Honey Badger.
"Do you know Sirenala's birthday?" Honey asked.
"No"
"Then it's not love."
They continued on their forward march, exiting the cover of trees to emerge at the mouth of a bridge. On this bridge stood seven men with packs of wolves surrounding them. The foremost standing man had something in his hand which he raised high to the eyes of Honey Badger and Juice. In his hand was a tie, it's color yellow with red polka dots adorning its surface.
"We have your man." He shouted at them.
Honey's shoulders slumped. "Just our luck."
Juice's brows furrowed. "They have Tweek."

So my cousin's highschool just ended their track season at the end of Spring, finishing off the year... I'm sure you understand where this is going already.
She's a biological female and won second place! Most of them were pretty neck and neck except for the biological male who got pretty far ahead and finished around 6 seconds before my cousin.
We actually had a few protestors there because my town knows about this particular issue and I was listening to a lot of the people arguing in support of the trans runner but it seemed like none of them were educated on the biological differences when it comes to running/sprinting, instead they kept making stupid political statements. One lady yelled out "Boys literally run faster than girls, are you stupid?" and the other woman had the nerve to call this lady misogynistic!! I feel so bad for my cousin and frankly, I'm kinda on the side of the protestors.
Am I being ignorant of hidden facts??? Otherwise this a real concern that admittedly most people are scared to think about due to social pressure

Can anyone recommend a river access point for an elderly dog that isn't too far of a walk? She's obese and I'd like to get her in the water for some exercise but a long trek is out of the question in her current condition. We're in the Sandy Springs area but anywhere within an hour would work. Thanks in advance!

Detailing all the little things of the next few weeks would tell you that, all things considered, my life was a rich one, but it would not offer great insight…at least not in things I hadn’t already conveyed in previous observations and experiences, save for one exception, which I will relay next, but after that, the next few weeks of journal entries were labeled as ‘scraps’. I couldn’t bring myself to dispose of them, so in the nonacademic work, ‘The Scraps of My Life’ they can still be found. They however, are not included here, as they detail the more ‘ordinary’ things that were pleasant and charming, but in areas where I had already reached conclusive observations.
This was ‘Michael’s Return’. Before I explain what this entailed, it must be understood that since the end of the Silent Civil war, a lot of things changed, a few years were come and gone, Fauve was no longer under constant guard, and though she would never have a normal life without ‘some’ security…
Humans are flexible, and she’d gotten used to having a security team around within some proximity to her. Unsurprisingly, her relationships with others of a more adult nature were now only with those who also had to deal with having considerable security concerns. The daughter of an admiral, the son of a lawmaker… she seemed in a hurry for a permanent bond, but it was clear that she’d taken a lesson from her time with Halbert.
People who cannot understand your life or your pressures, whatever their character, will never be a good fit. This in the end, is why I have concluded that nepotism becomes the dominant method of governing, over and over again even in their far more egalitarian present.
I wish I could have had more time with my human, of course, but… we do still have coffee at night together sometimes even when she’s traveling. When it comes to humans, you can be together, even when you’re apart, as long as you make the time for it and have a proper network connection.
But I digress. What this departure and shift in her security meant was that Byron and Boatswain were now fixated solely on the security of the Walker house, meaning that their residence was always monitored, but the people themselves were not, unless the trip took someone away for an extended period of time.
Which in Michael’s case meant going to Fort Knox for classes taught by the ‘JSFT’ or the ‘Joint Special Forces Team’.
The brainchild of the human and dlamisa soldiers, a request signed off on by both units through to both chains of command fell on the same day on the desks of both commanding Generals, that the two teams be based together and undergo a series of joint exercises with an eye toward, and I quote, ‘The mutual security of vital trade lanes currently under consideration’.
That was quite a ways away, but I knew the truth. Probably most people involved did. It was an excuse… the humans didn’t want the dlamisa to go, and the dlamisa didn’t want to leave ‘their humans’.
I think we can probably credit Bonny Red for some influence here, as her ‘mass resignation’ remained a blight that would never be washed off, and she probably warned Gaozu that if he tried to force them to leave…they’d quit.
So, conveniently enough, a joint unit was created on an Earth military base that was now part of the community… and which taught children various forms of martial arts.
Since Genghis wasn’t going anywhere, he and Iskandar became part time instructors, and Michael continued to burn off his superabundance of energy in their training hall.
Notably though… despite being what amounted to a ‘star pupil’ to some of the most dangerous people I’d ever met, he still lost.
And yes, I said ‘lost’. He placed second, which means he didn’t actually ‘win’. I have to analyze my own mindset here before relaying the events… my thinking is very ‘Dlamisan’. In my culture, on my homeworld, your only real value is in excellence at your field, your identity is tied to your triumphs and the degree to which knowing you is helpful, dictates your wider influence on others, which means you have ‘currency’ when it comes to asking for or doing favors for others.
To be the expert on humans, the one to rise to the heights of my people’s renown would not only ensure my immortality in our histories, but also would have provided me with broad access to creature comforts and quality of life unrivaled by those mired in mediocrity. To put it another way, if you have to be an apple in a barrel, do you want to be at the top, or at the bottom?
To be the second best at anything was to be ‘lesser’ than someone else.
Or so that had been my thinking… not that many years ago, really. It’s hard to believe, but even having left that behind, it still lingered in the back of my head as some great misfortune that he wasn’t the ‘very top’ and the best of all the others.
Now that my thinking and my inherent bias is out of the way… I turn to his arrival.
I was coming up the stairs to get coffee when Michael burst through the door shouting, “Mom! Dad! I won second place!”
Here is the first distinction. He considered ‘second’ to be a victory. He was thrilled, running into the house and waving a silver trophy around, it was shaped like a closed fist pointed skyward, nice work, really.
“They haven’t gotten back yet!” I shouted from the kitchen as Byron and Boatswain entered after him.
As I worked the old fashioned coffee maker, he followed my voice. “I won second! I won second!” He shouted again as if I hadn’t heard him the first time.
Human young are very loud, especially, I’ve noticed, their young males.
And the happier they are, the louder they tend to be. He rushed into the kitchen and I just barely had time to set my favorite coffee mug down on the countertop before he barrelled into me and squeezed me in a hug. Affection in young humans is heavily focused on interpersonal contact, even more so than that between more mature adults. They actively seek out that contact often, as it helps their brains form more neural connections and improves their overall cognitive function.
Some humans have said, ‘Love makes you stupid’ and…admittedly I’ve seen people make some bizarre decisions over affection. But the general truth is that this ‘love’ emotion in humans actually assists the development of their emotional intelligence that makes them function far more effectively in a social environment.
It doesn’t mean they’ll be better at learning calculus, but it does mean that they’ll be better able to understand how to ask for or offer help when they need assistance in learning it. In short, it’s the foundation of their social reasoning skills.
I returned his gesture and said, “Excellent work!” He squeezed again, he was getting bigger, faster, growing at an impressive rate and was rapidly building the muscle that would one day make him a particularly capable and, with training, dangerous adult human male.
I had to restrain myself from saying, ‘Maybe next time you’ll win first.’
And that was hard to do. This is what people coming to Earth and settling here struggle most with… as human ‘therapists’ began trying to help…albeit somewhat clumsily given the differences in our species, we did encounter one common thing.
Breaking patterns of thought, refraining from saying what was once second nature, is very difficult.
Instead I said, “You did great.” I then looked past him to see Byron and Boatswain walk into the house, it was very different from the old days, when they would have swept the grounds first… but with so many dead that might have once been a threat… they’d earned something closer to a familial existence.
“That he did.” Boatswain agreed, “He’d have taken first too, if not for a bit of bad luck.”
“Meh, it’s not a matter of whether you win or lose, it’s what you learn from either.” Byron offered his pragmatic advice and sat at the table, “Coffee?” He asked.
“Coming up.” I said, and when Boatswain gave me a look, I got two more cups out. “Next time I’ll win first… but second is a good start!” Michael emphasized with determination in his voice.
My conclusion from this, and from my other observations, is that a focus on opportunity and a praise for progress, together with supportive interpersonal contact and a sense of safety and security at home, is the leading indicator of future confidence and success in growing humans.
In short, in my own view, right then…
I was watching a boy prepare to one day become a very great man, and one whom I would take great pride in.
“Can I try some coffee too?” Michael asked, and I furrowed my brow, he was a little young for it but… “I’ll pour some milk, and add a little coffee to it, let’s just start with that, and you can tell me how it all went.” I suggested, and got out another cup to share at the table, which he promptly sat down at, an unspoken agreement to tell me absolutely everything I missed.

First: I want to say this isn't so much a criticism and more of an analysis of the arguments I've been seeing about Pharaoh and the mixed feelings.
Ok so one of the big conversations right now is that that one of Pharaoh's weaknesses is the lack of unit variety. A lot of people point out that ultimately Shogun 2 also didn't have that much variety between factions and its widely regarded as one of the best total war games. I think part of the issue isn't so much "between faction variety" as "within faction variety" in addition to both familiarity with the setting and the extent of the scope.
Using Shogun 2 as an example, in that game you had spearmen/pikemen, archers, glaives (naginata), halberdiers, swordsmen, light cavalry, heavy cavalry, ranged cavalry, mangonels, canons, gunner, firebombers and rocket troops.
In Pharaoh, it seems like most factions will have spearmen, archers, slingers, chariots, axemen, clubmen, swordsmen. Yes there will be heavy and light versions of them as well, and like two handed axemen vs axe and shield etc.
These may differ greatly between the three cultures we have, but this is where another factor comes in: Familiarity. Ultimately, Napoleon also didn't have much variety between factions. Everyone had line infantry, cavalry, cannons etc. Same with Empire for the most part with some exceptions like the Maratha elephants. Hell, even in Medieval 2 and Rome 2, a large chunk of the factions shared many units. How many factions had Mailed Knights or Citizen Cavalry?
So why does it feel worse in something like Pharaoh for a lot of people? I think it's because a lot of people just aren't as familiar with the time frame. For Shogun 2, people are at least somewhat familiar with the idea of Samurai and there was a waring states period. As such, people at least had a vague idea what they were going to get with the game, and most people would expect most of the factions to be fairly similar, and that's kind of what we got. Reasonably, they couldn't do much more than that given the game was about that.
For Pharaoh, people just aren't as familiar with warfare in this time period, and to be honest aren't as invested in it. Ancient Egypt is almost as popular a historical subject as Feudal Japan in general, but tbh I think casual history fans in west (TW's primary market) focus on different things in Egypt. For Japan, the "coolness factor" is the Samurai and Castles. For Ancient Egypt, it's Pharaohs and Pyramids and Ancient Egyptian Gods. You, the individual, may think bronze age warfare is amazing, I'm generalising here.
As such, to the casual history fan, if you see a game about Samurai Warfare and everyone has Samurai: Awesome, makes sense See a game about bronze age warfare: Everyone basically just has the same units, it's just Hittite chariots vs Egyptian chariots. Not exciting.
Is this argument logical, does it make sense, is it fair: Not really. However, games are, at the end of the day, entertainment designed to give an emotional response. There is a potential logical argument that ultimately there were more types of units in Shogun 2 and by that time in history the technology had improved so that battles will be more dynamic and interesting by default. I'm not entirely sure how true this.
What I do know is that watching the battle replays on YouTube, to a lot of people it feels like there is less unit variety than Shogun 2 even though there is, in reality, more because each culture will have its own units. I can't defend this argument as logical, but I also can't deny that I also feel it.
Another factor at play is the game's scope, and this one goes back to what you could expect from a game in a particular time period. Let's go back to Shogun 2. It's a game all about warfare in Feudal Japan. What will be included in that map: the main Japanese islands, probably excluding Hokkaido because it was still mostly Ainu at that time.
What's Pharaoh going to be about? Warfare in at the tail end of the Bronze Age. Ok, so you'd expect the map to cover the overarching area most of those civilisations... except we only get three of them at the start: Egypt, Canaan and the Hittites. No Assyria, Babylon, Mycenaeans, Elam or Kush? Yes, they could be added later as DLC, and yes this game is clearly more about the eastern Mediterranean civilisations, but these other groups had a lot of interactions with those civilisations so it feels weird they're not there at the start.
I'll give an example of how it feels: Imagine if when Thrones of Britannia launched it didn't include Ireland. Well, the game is clearly just about the Anglo-Saxons, Vikings and Celtic realms of Wales and Scotland. Yeah, but Ireland's also right there and it's factions had a lot of interaction with the other main factions in the game. It would feel weird if it was left out.
This feel of missing out a big chunk of the game's potential scope confounds with the lack of familiarity: "Well, I don't really know about the units and warfare in this time period, so ultimately they seem kind of samey, even though that might not be fair. Well, they could make up for that by exploring as many cultures as they can in the time period and then showing how they are different. That way we'd get 6 or 7 different unit rosters and really get the opportunity to explore and conquer the whole Bronze Age near east... oh we only got three at the start... huh..."
This is why faction variety matters more in time periods people are less familiar with. I personally would love for CA to explore more time periods and regions like like India, Southeast Asia, Africa and so on. However, when exploring those time periods it will be important to try and get as many of the big players as possible because most of their audience won't be as familiar with that time period.
There is ultimately one other thing which I think has impacted Pharaoh's hype: timing. I think if this had been announced after Med 3 or Empire 2 or something similar to that, people would be more hyped. The reason is that for many historical fans, they are most familiar with history post 1000 AD in Europe. Again, it's not really fair, and I personally think other parts of the world are equally interesting.
The other thing is that they have been waiting for many years for a BIG historical game to come after Warhammer. I don't doubt that if a Medieval game had been announced and it just focused on Western Europe (eg. Hundred Years War: Total War), a lot of people would still have been disappointed.
However, for Pharaoh it's actually worse. The factors I mentioned above like the unfamiliarity of the time period and the fact that a big chunk of the potential factions are missing at launch mean that even though it covers a fairly sizable area of map, bigger than Shogun 2, it feels small to a lot of people. Incidentally, this is where a lot of the arguments that it's basically a saga game without the saga title come from.
Now, is it logical to think that after working on WH3 there would be a big game coming as the next title? Not really. However, I can't help but feel if CA had released something saying "hey we've got a big historical title coming in 2024 you've been waiting and we've got another surprise historical one in the meantime", the reactions would be less mixed.
Anyway, these are my thoughts and thanks for reading this far, feel free to add your own thoughts below.

I am playing for about 8 hours straight now and this is the characters I see in ranked matches (silver):
Super common tier (everybody plays them)

• Marisa (by far)
• Ken
• Ryu
• Kimberly
• Zangief
• Cammy

Common tier (I have seen them more than once)

• Lily
• Luke
• Jamie
• Honda
• DJ
• Manon

Rare tier (only seen once)

• Guile
• Juri
• JP

Mythical tier (not seen yet)

• Chun Li
• Blanka
• Dhalsim

I am really surprised by the results tbh. I would never have expected Marisa to be so popular, but every second fight is her. On the other hand I would have expected a lot more Juri and JP players. If you are in a different ranked bracket, please share your findings :)

Linkedin profile
Seeing a lot of opinions on this that just speak volumes about the commentors inexperience or small world view. Having a 25 year somewhat ambitious career across 3 different industries I can speak from personal experience and observed experience that people will try anything to differentiate themselves when trying to find stable work or transition to a new industry. While the ‘about me’ section is long winded and could be from a writing perspective better organized to tell a coherent story, most of the people commenting on it see a wall of text someone copy/pasted into a comment. It is broken down per statement make it much less ‘odd’. I also see a lot of people getting hung up on the fact that his family referenced him as an engineer when he is not. His position is an design technician, which absolutely is an engineering role although not a degreed engineer he would work in that environment, it is one of the modern day names given for draftsman or equivalent, it is entry level. As for his family calling him an engineer that is likely the quicker unfamiliar way to reference his work to outsiders. Its also a job he has only had for a few months and likely hasn’t had a lot of conversations with family about how to describe it to other people yet.
https://i.imgur.com/Enunan1.png - Colby’s About section on Linkedin
Now for some actual information I have found. Before reading all this
As has been discussed at length, and I believe the family has finally addressed this with their long post recently, the amount of information sharing of even basic habits/patterns/interests that could have aided in the wider search effort has been lacking. Again, I do believe they mostly fixed that the other day but there are some items that I saw early on that I am just now sharing that I still think were a bit strange leading me to believe that there was more information early on that was not shared.
Within the first two days when the FB page was sharing areas they had searched the day prior, they were still focusing on the area around their house, with two exceptions. One was in Creekside Park, the other east of Hardy. When these maps were posted to FB page people’s obvious reaction was to ask why they were searching so far away, each time the page admin (which I believe is not and has never been Callie btw even though that is presumed frequently) would avoid the question when replying.
https://i.imgur.com/cOSUMAP.jpg - Pundt park search area from Colby FB Page
. In the case of the Pundt park location it looks to be a previous address for Callie. It also has the odd fact that is doesn’t appear to be a previous address for Colby? Even though they have been married since 2019. You can see in the link I provided that the FB page posted that they go straight to that neighborhood drive around the street in question and then search the nearby park area. Now with these people search sites even when you pay for them you have to realize they pull from ANY source they can to populate their databases, public records, voting information, unsolicited mailer database purchases, public court filings etc. So the integrity of this is to be taken very lightly, BUT if you want to added context or understand their limitations I encourage you to search yourself and see what they come back with for accurate and inaccurate information. Typically, recent addresses is a thing that while it might not be up to date they will be valid. It appears that a few pictures from Colby’s IG are taken in the driveway at this house and in the creek near pundt park still a bit odd it never pops up as an associated address for Colby though. Also strange this would be a priority area for them to search in the beginning for someone who left without keys/wallet/phone.
https://i.imgur.com/7B8Ui47.png - Colby Richards truepeoplesearch
https://i.imgur.com/wEhgoW2.png - Callie Rogers truepeoplesearch
Now for the Creekside one.
All of the posts relevant to Creekside seem to reference someone getting doorbell cam footage of a person walking through the neighborhood at 0235AM on Saturday the 27th. Assuming this was shared with someone which prompted the search in the area? The issue with that is the doorbell cam footage was taken in a different spot in the neighborhood no where they had indicated on their map at all. The Family has also somewhat referenced this saying people have been driving around talking to people in their areas of interest, getting in contact with houses where they see a doorbell cam. I can personally vouch this has not happened in Creekside in this searched area. The doorbell cam and timeframe prompted a few other people in Creekside to check their cameras around the same time one of my neighbors referenced seeing a 10/11th generation ford F-150 creeping through the neighborhood less than 30m after the person is seen on the original doorbell cam. This truck was driving slowly taking pictures of either vehicles or houses as it went along. I also saw this truck in question on my ringcam.
https://i.imgur.com/bNJ2pqH.jpg - Creekside Search area from Colby FB page
https://i.imgur.com/azRq4qd.png - Creekside ringcam comment on original Callie missing persons post
https://i.imgur.com/bJM5815.png - additional reference to person walking around creekside
https://i.imgur.com/67ZLmti.jpg - distance from original ringcam video
This information was shared with both the police and the FB page via direct message. The information provided gave them marked locations of where the truck can be seen driving and the source video recordings. Without much discussion the FB page replied
“Help Us Find Colby Richards FB page - That was likely one of our search team looking for folks with ring cameras to ask. The search map tracks our teams GPS coordinates with the lines you see on the map. We've searched areas closer to home pretty thoroughly and are expanding our search outward. He is very athletic so he can walk a long distance, and someone did post a ring video pretty far from his last known location. We don't know if it was him but we are following all leads”
While I don’t think the truck is directly related or even that the person seen on the original ring camera was Colby, what is a takeaway from this is that it was way to quick of a response or excuse about what it could be. The truck was seen less than 30m after a person was seen on another ringcam. The FB page is saying that it was one of their search teams looking for people with ring cameras to ask? Even though the original video hadn’t been shared with them yet? Also this information was provided to them Sunday-Monday. So if someone was going around looking for people with cameras to talk to or look at recordings why had they not actually talked to anyone and just driven around? Also why would they be doing that at 2-3am?
All of this seems like really poor practice in general, in my opinion they should be looking to take in ANY information available for them to internally assess as helpful or not. The immediate disregard and weird illogical explanations provided just seem unnecessary and would have been better served to just reply “thank you for providing the information!” or similar.

FRIDAY

• First Friday, Downtown, Raleigh
• Durham Bulls vs. Jacksonville, DBAP, Durham
• UNC Health Championship presented by STITCH, Raleigh Country Club, Raleigh
• Smooth Nights, KBA, Cary
• BANDS, BITES, AND BOATS, Bond Park, Cary
• PLAYlist Concert Series: Raíces, Rutas, y Ritmos, Durham Central Park, Durham
• 1776, DPAC, Durham
• Leslie Jones: Live, Carolina Theatre, Durham
• DeRay Davis: Too Much?!, Raleigh Improv, Cary
• Pride Plaza Party, Exchange/Market Plazas, Raleigh
• Tacarra Williams, ROOM 861 AT GOODNIGHTS, Raleigh
• The Soccer Tournament, WakeMed Soccer Park, Raleigh
• Music in the Park Celebrates Pride, Healthy Food Hub, Morrisville
• BOHEMIAN RHAPSODY (PG13), The Cary, Cary
• Spider-man Movie Premiere with Dell Technologies and Presidio, Cinemark Raleigh Grande, Raleigh
• Durham Pride Silent Disco, Hi-Wire, Durham
• Techstars Startup Weekend: Health & Wellness, Duke University, Durham
• Halocene, Motorco Music Hall, Durham
• Mamis & The Papis and Party Illegal Present: Moodboard, Rubies on Five Points, Durham
• An Evening with North Mississippi Allstars, Lincoln Theatre, Raleigh
• Apex Peakway 155, Wake County Speedway, Raleigh
• Freight Farms Pop Up Event, Nanue's Farm, Raleigh
• Hands on a Hardbody, Raleigh Little Theatre, Raleigh
• Jessica Kirson, Goodnights Comedy Club, Raleigh
• Oak City Gliders vs Reidsville Luckies, Optimist Park, Raleigh
• Our Prism, The Raleigh Night Market, Raleigh
• Pride First Friday: Sip + Shop, Curate Raleigh, Raleigh
• Urban Soil, The Pour House Music Hall & Record Shop, Raleigh
• BUTNER SUMMER FESTIVAL, Butner Gazebo Park, Butner

​
SATURDAY

• Durham Bulls vs. Jacksonville, DBAP, Durham
• Family Fun Fest, North Carolina Museum of History, Raleigh
• Raleigh's International Food Festival, City Plaza, Raleigh
• Bubbles & Brisket, Smoky Hollow, Raleigh
• Ever After: Fairytales, Food, and Flowers, Fred Fletcher Park, Raleigh
• UNC Health Championship presented by STITCH, Raleigh Country Club, RaleighSummerfest: The Music of Whitney Houston, North Carolina Symphony, Cary
• Mid-Town Square Spring Festival 2023, Bond Brothers Beer Company, Cary
• NC Summertime Beer Fest, Clouds Brewing Taproom, Raleigh
• NCAA Division II Baseball Championship, USA Baseball National Training Complex, Cary
• North State Bank’s Summer Salute for Transitions LifeCare, North Ridge Country Club, Raleigh
• Run For Love 5k, Dorothea Dix Park, Raleigh
• Dermot Kennedy The Sonder Tour, Red Hat Amphitheater, Raleigh
• Hands on History: Butter-making, Natural Dyes, and Flower Pressing, Borden Building, Raleigh
• International Children’s Day, City of Raleigh Museum (COR Museum), Raleigh
• Jessica Kirson, Goodnights Comedy Club, Raleigh
• Jubilant! A Juneteenth Experience, CAM Raleigh, Raleigh
• Matt Maeson, The Ritz, Raleigh
• Tacarra Williams, ROOM 861 AT GOODNIGHTS, Raleigh
• DeRay Davis: Too Much?!, Raleigh Improv, Cary
• Summer Sol - Vinyasa Flow, Raleigh Municipal Rose Garden, Raleigh
• The Soccer Tournament, WakeMed Soccer Park, Raleigh
• UNC Children's For The Kids Concert Featuring: Cooper Alan, Lincoln Theatre, Raleigh
• Hands on a Hardbody, Raleigh Little Theatre, Raleigh
• MAKRS, Durham Central Park, Durham
• Gimme Gimme Disco, Motorco Music Hall, Durham
• Paradox: A 90s Rave Experience, The Fruit, Durham
• Cygnus X-2, The Pour House Music Hall & Record Shop, Raleigh
• Techstars Startup Weekend: Health & Wellness, Duke University, Durham
• Running of the Bulls 8K, Historic Durham Athletic Park, Durham
• Boxyard Turns 2 Celebration, Boxyard RTP, Durham
• Nasher Community Celebration, Nasher Museum of Art, Durham
• Record Show, Durty Bull, Durham
• Bimbé Celebration, Rock Quarry Park, Durham
• Beaver Queen Pageant — Once Upon a Wetland..., Duke Park, Durham
• Mother Tongues: Louise Toppin, soprano, with Stephen Jaffe & John O’Brien, pianists, Nelson Music Room, East Duke Building, Duke University, Durham
• Old North State Antique Gun & Military Show, North Carolina State Fairgrounds, Raleigh
• Propagation Workshop: Advanced Softwood Cuttings, JC Raulston Arboretum at North Carolina State University, Raleigh

​
SUNDAY

• UNC Health Championship presented by STITCH, Raleigh Country Club, Raleigh
• Durham Bulls vs. Jacksonville, DBAP, Durham
• NCAA Division II Baseball Championship, USA Baseball National Training Complex, Cary
• Esther Povitsky, Goodnights Comedy Club, Raleigh
• Parlor Pride Party, Heights House Hotel, Raleigh
• Satisfaction, Lincoln Theatre, Raleigh
• DeRay Davis: Too Much?!, Raleigh Improv, Cary
• Bringing it Home: Chamber Music with the Durham Symphony and Friends, Hayti Heritage Center, Durham
• Al Strong Presents Jazz Brunch at Alley Twenty Six, Alley Twenty Six, Durham
• Mike’s Dead, Motorco Music Hall, Durham
• A Celebration of African American Art with Song, North Carolina Museum of Art, Raleigh
• LGBTQ+ Pride Ride with the Historic Raleigh Trolley, Mordecai Historic Park, Raleigh
• Old North State Antique Gun & Military Show, North Carolina State Fairgrounds, Raleigh
• Techstars Startup Weekend: Health & Wellness, Duke University, Durham

​
Join the Thingstodo919 email list here for a weekly events newsletter. Doing anything interesting this weekend? Let us know your plans in the comments!

DETACHING FROM EMOTIONAL PAIN (GROUNDING)
Lisa Najavits, PhD
WHAT IS GROUNDING?
Grounding is a set of simple strategies to detach from emotional pain (for example, drug cravings,
self-harm impulses, anger, sadness). Distraction works by focusing outward on the external world—rather
than inward toward the self. You can also think of it as “distraction”, centering,” “a safe place,” looking
“outward,” or “healthy detachment.”
​
WHY DO GROUNDING?
When you are overwhelmed with emotional pain, you need a way to detach so that you can gain control
over your feelings and stay safe. As long as you are grounding, you cannot possibly use substances or hurt yourself. Grounding ‘anchors’ you to the present and to reality.
Many people with PTSD and substance abuse struggle with either feeling too much (overwhelming
emotions and memories) or too little (numbing and dissociation). In grounding, you attain balance
between the two—conscious of reality and able to tolerate it.
​
GUIDELINES
 Grounding can be done any time, any place, anywhere and no one has to know.
 Use grounding when you are: faced with a trigger, having a flashback, dissociating, having a
substance craving, or when your emotional pain goes above 6 (on a 0-10 scale). Grounding puts
healthy distance between you and these negative feelings.
 Keep your eyes open, scan the room, and turn the light on to stay in touch with the present.
 Rate your mood before and after to test whether it worked. Before grounding, rate your level of
 emotional pain (0-10, where 10 means “extreme pain”). Then re-rate it afterwards. Has it gone down?
 No talking about negative feelings or journal writing. You want to distract away from negative
 feelings, not get in touch with them.
 Stay neutral—no judgments of “good” and “bad’. For example, “The walls are blue; I dislike blue
because it reminds me of depression.” Simply say “The wafts are blue” and move on.
 Focus on the present, not the past or future.
 Note that grounding is not the same as relaxation training. Grounding is much more active, focuses
on distraction strategies and is intended to help extreme negative feelings. It is believed to be more.
effective for PTSD than relaxation training.
​
WAYS TO GROUND
Mental Grounding
♣ Describe your environment in detail using all your senses. For example, “The walls are white; there are
five pink chairs, there is a wooden bookshelf against the walt...” Describe objects, sounds, textures,
colors, smells, shapes, numbers and temperature. You can do this anywhere. For example, on the
subway: “I’m on the subway. I’ll see the river soon. Those are the windows. This is the bench. The
metal bar is silver. The subway map has four colors...”
♣ Play a “categories” game with yourself. Try to think of “types of dogs”, “jazz musicians”, “states that
begin with “A”, “cars”, “TV shows”, “writers”, “sports”, “songs”, “European cities.”
♣ Do an age progression. If you have regressed to a younger age (e.g., 8 years old), you can slowly work
your way backup (e.g., “I’m now 9”; “I’m now 10”; “I’m now 11”...) until you are back to your current
age.
♣ Describe an everyday activity in great detail. For example, describe a meal that you cook (e.g., First I
peel the potatoes and cut them into quarters, then I boil the water, I make an herb marinade of
oregano, basil, garlic, and olive oil...”).
♣ Imagine. Use an image: Glide along on skates away from your pain; change the TV channel to a better
show think of a wall as a buffer between you and your pain.
♣ Say a safety statement. ‘My name is _________; I am safe right now. I am in the present, not the past.
​
I am located in _____________ the date is _____________.
♣ Read something, saying each word to yourself. Or read each letter backwards so that you focus or the
letters and not on the meaning of words.
♣ Use humor. Think of something funny to jolt yourself out of your mood.
♣ Count to 10 or say the alphabet very s..l..o..w..l..y.
♣ Repeat a favorite saying to yourself over and over (e.g., the Serenity Prayer).
​
Physical Grounding
 Run cool or warm water over your hands.
 Grab tightly onto your chair as hard as you can.
 Touch various objects around you: a pen. keys, your clothing, the table, the walls. Notice textures,
colors, materials, weight, temperature. Compare objects you touch: Is one colder? Lighter?
 Dip your heels into the floor— literally “grounding” them! Notice the tension centered in your heels as
you do this. Remind yourself that you are connected to the ground.
 Carry a ground object in your pocket—a small object (a small rock, clay, ring, piece of cloth or yarn)
that you can touch whenever you feel triggered.
 Jump up and down.
 Notice your body: The weight of your body in the chair; wiggling your toes in your socks; the feel of
your back against the chair. You are connected to the world.
 Stretch. Extend your fingers, arms or legs as far as you can; roll your head around.
 Walk slowly, noticing each footstep, saying “left,” “right” with each step.
 Eat something. Describe the flavors in detail to yourself.
 Focus on your breathing. Noticing each inhale and exhale. Repeat a pleasant word to yourself on each
inhale (for example, a favorite, color or a soothing word such as “safe” or “easy”).
Soothing Grounding
♥ Say kind statements, as if you were talking to a small child. E.g.. “You are a good person going through
a hard time. You’ll get through this.
♥ Think of favorites. Think of your favorite color, animal, season, food, time of day, TV show.
♥ Picture people you care about (e.g., your children; and look at photographs of them).
♥ Remember the words to an inspiring song, quotation or poem that makes you feel better (e.g.. the
Serenity Prayer).
♥ Remember a safe place. Describe a place that you find very soothing (perhaps the beach or mountains,
or a favorite room); focus on everything about that place—the sounds, colors, shapes, objects,
textures.
♥ Say a coping statement. “I can handle this”, “This feeling will pass.”
♥ Plan out a safe treat for yourself, such as a piece of candy, a nice dinner, or a warm bath.
♥ Think of things you are looking forward to in the next week. Perhaps time with a friend or going to a
movie.
​

WHAT IF GROUNDING DOESN’T WORK?

♠ Practice as often as possible. Even when you don’t “need” it, so that you’ll know it by heart.
♠ Practice faster. Speeding up the pace gets you focused on the outside world quickly.
♠ Try grounding for a Iooooooonnnng time (20-30 minutes). And, repeat, repeat, repeat.
♠ Try to notice whether you do better with “physical” or “mental” grounding.
♠ Create your own methods of grounding. Any method you make up may be worth much more than
those you read here because it is yours.
♠ Start grounding early in a negative mood cycle. Start when the substance craving just starts or when
you have just started having a flashback.
​
​
Copyright: Guilford Press (New York). From: Najavits LM. “Seeking Safety”: A Treatment Manual
for PTSD and Substance Abuse (in press). Cannot be reprinted without permission.

Company Name	Title	City
United States Secret Service	Criminal Investigator	Fort Myers
Surgery Center of Aventura	Operating Room Nurse PRN	Aventura
Gulf Coast Surgery Center	PACU Nurse PRN	Bradenton
Countryside Surgery Center	Operating Room Nurse PRN	Clearwater
Nicklaus Children's Hospital	Physician/Attending - (PICU) - Naples, FL (Full Time, Day Shift)	East Naples
SIm10Consulting	B737 Contract Instructor	Marion County
Nicklaus Children's Hospital	Physician/Attending - Palliative Care (Full Time)	Miami
First Vehicle Services	Diesel Mechanic - Miami Springs	Miami Springs
Asd East Fl Ops Support	PRN Float OR Nurse	Miramar
North County Surgicenter	PRN Endoscopy Nurse	Palm Beach Gardens
First Transit	Automotive Technician -Pinellas County	Pinellas Park
Brambles USA Inc	On-Site Manager	Alachua
Trustco Bank	Customer Service Coordinator- FT Day Shift-Altamonte Springs, FL	Altamonte Springs
Icc	Field Sales Representative	Altamonte Springs
Trustco Bank	Part-Time Customer Service Coordinator - PM Shift	Altamonte Springs
Strategic Staffing Solutions	Construction and Engineering Project Manager	Apollo Beach
Orangepeople	Sr Business Analyst	Bay Lake
RAYUS Radiology	X-Ray Technologist	Boca Raton
Konica Minolta Business Solutions	Field Service Installer	Boca Raton
Konica Minolta Business Solutions	Field Service Technician	Boca Raton
Ushealth	Junior Account Manager	Bonita Springs
Beverage Manufacturing Company	Warehouse Forklift Operator	Bradenton
CenterWell Home Health	Home Health Licensed Practical Nurse	Bradenton
HCA Florida Blake Hospital	Registered Nurse Med Surg	Bradenton
Allied Universal®	Security Officer - Armed Lobby 1st Shift PT	Bradenton

Hey guys, here are some recent job openings in fl. Feel free to comment here or send me a private message if you have any questions, I'm at the community's disposal! If you encounter any problems with any of these job openings please let me know that I will modify the table accordingly. Thanks!