Spike from my little pony costume

The results were released to me without a call from my OB's office, so I have no idea if this is normal, but my glucose rose 12 mg/dL from hour 1 (a little high) to hour 2 (a lot high). It fell below the standard range by hour 3...so I guess that's a pass?
Has anybody seen that in their own 3-hr tests?

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: Bilbo's Ring!
https://preview.redd.it/z9i9xgmogm3b1.png?width=400&format=png&auto=webp&s=ea0cf3fc22f4f991245daf26aef1995c643677cb
I already reviewed The One Ring earlier, since it was one of the first cards revealed. My review was not particularly positive. My problem with The One Ring was two fold: first I think The One Ring is mono-black. It promises power, to control your own destiny, before taking it all away. It's, in many ways, a deal with the devil style effect (in MTG terms). Since the ring offers you power according to your station: I felt the card should be more of a tutor effect, with some severe downsides.
As I try to remind people: I am grading this purely in terms of flavor. I am going to be harsh, as I am not considering play design and other concerns. In the original case of the One Ring: I felt they missed the perfect mark I am setting for each card individually. In this case I actually think they did a much better job. Why? Because, to Bilbo when he got The Ring: the Ring was nothing more than a useful tool. He can hide himself, avoid detection, and it made him happy. It's part of why the Ring's effect on Bilbo was so minimal. He took The Ring at first by accident, and then used it for non-evil means and critically (in Tolkien's mind): he kept himself. When Bilbo slipped on the Ring and saw Gollum it was not anger or fear that drove him, but pity. Bilbo's act of mercy saved the world in the end and allowed Bilbo to keep himself.
Color
Tough call, colorless isn't terrible. Given the abilities I might have preferred a blue color. But I do get that they're trying to make this as accessible as possible.
Abilities
In reverse order. Equip is fine, making it easy for Halflings is great (since it's Bilbo's ring after all) so that's all fine. Hexproof and can't be blocked are basically perfect transfers for what the Ring does for the bearer (in Bilbo's own mind; of course the Ring was also sapping away his will as we saw in Book I Chapter 1).
I will tell one final little story which fills in the flavor for me. Although Bilbo did his best to hide the Ring from his friends and neighbors: he was not fully successful. Meriadoc Brandybuck actually caught a glimpse of the Ring once. The story is silly: Bilbo was walking down the Road one day and almost ran into the Sacksville-Bagginses (distasteful relatives of Bilbo's). In a panic Bilbo slipped on the Ring to hide, and hid invisible until they passed, before taking it off. Merry saw this, and caught a first glimpse of Bilbo's Ring.
And this is generally how Bilbo used the Ring during his ownership: for petty and silly squabbles instead of serious matters. So once again this use fits into the flavor of this particular card.

I have been pet sitting for a very long time now (over a decade). I started when I was about ten years old in my neighborhood just going and letting dogs out for neighbors. This was about 2012ish, and I charged $10 a day to do so. I quickly built up a clientele and now at 20 years old I pet sit when I am home from college. I on average have at least 2 separate households a week (upwards of 4 some weeks) that I am pet sitting for. I charge a flat rate of $25 a day for each household. I make a morning trip at 8 am and then 4-5 visits till 9pm per day. Each visit ranging from 15-30 minutes at each household. I don’t stay in the house overnight and I walk the pets as requested by the owners with little to no compensation for it. I know I am selling myself short, however, with already established clients they are expecting such cheap rates now that I have been charging them for so long. Any advice? In suburban north carolina

Today my little girl turns 19.5 years old. She is a Bichon Havanese cross that was a gift from my Partner who passed away 3 years ago.
I'm only celebrating now because she is finally starting to slow down and may not make it to December. Her appetite is starting to change from her homemade dog food (which she always liked) to mostly meat. She's getting pickier and pickier. Her absolute favorite is chicken, so today I will pick up a roast chicken and she can eat until she's full and happy :)
Happy 19.5 years old baby girl! Thanks for sticking by your dad all these years.

I have a stockpile of unleveled season 1 5 stars, and a handful of hero of the months. In total, it's 3 hero of the months, and around 12 season 1s that I can use without any team loss overall. So who should I get from the 10-15 hero section? My top roster is Xenda, Leonidas, Frigg, Kageburado, 2 costume kiril, Lord Loki, Celidana, and Zagrog. I also have the 1st costumes of melendorf and rigard. I'm thinking Elizabeth to compliment the mana stealing of Xenda.

Crowd sourcing here.
Symptoms and other stuff for early 30s female: Dystonic neck movements, complete anterograde amnesia, and intention tremor not present prior to treatment in any capacity. Dystonia and head tremor non distractible. Lingering aphasia, intractable Adhedonia and depression. Ataxia. Possible cognitive decline but baseline in the process of being evaluated (serial testing) Very little possibility of a previous Covid infection as I've been isolated due to a ridiculously high risk family member.
I'm being followed by an excellent team who. are. stumped. I have another team and an in touch with researchers as well. Basically after the reaction, five specialists descended upon me wondering what the heck was going on. I'm a terrible historian for this event due to complete anterograde amnesia, so I'm going off of my own notes after realizing I was not retaining memories. The prescribing doctor wrote absolutely nothing in my chart.
Has anyone seen anything this severe from a GNRH agonist with both symptoms indicative of permanent cognitive decline and progressive movement disorders? My partner tells me I started dystonic head movements about a month in but I'm not sure. Intention tremor and head tremor started during that time too.
It was recommended I get an out of state referral to a larger hospital

Chapter 1 Prev Next
I act quickly. There are puddles of color rising all around us into oozing monsters — it's almost disorienting. They're the only sources of color all around me. There's a heavy, thickset ooze-creature a few steps ahead made of a deep, mauve sort of purple, the same purple that tints the wood of the Hestian trees; there are whip-thin creatures that are barely humanoid, with stringlike arms and legs made of all the different shades of fall. The forest detritus combines into a muddy brown, creating bloblike creatures on the ground that stretch themselves to move forward, leaving flickering trails of brown Firmament that fade into nothing.
And that's only a small fraction of the creatures that are starting to appear. Fighting all of them almost seems like a pointless task, one that will tire me out needlessly, but I remind myself that I need to fight. If beating one of them grants me credits...
"We should find out if Naru is still here," Ahkelios says. He's noticed the way my fists have clenched. "Don't touch them directly. You'll need a weapon."
I don't have one — I didn't bring the scythe with me this loop. I glance around and pluck a small branch off the ground, sending a burst of Firmament into it to reinforce it; it's a minor imbuement with no anchor or enhancement, but that doesn't matter. I only need it to last as long as I'm in the Hotspot.
"Just checking," I say. "What's going to happen to me if they touch me directly?"
Ahkelios shudders a bit. "They eat your color," he says. "It's not fun, trust me."
That's vague, but considering that I've seen what happens when I use Color Drain, I'm willing to take that at face value.
Short term plan: Go straight for the obelisk. Kill any of the color-oozes in my way. If Naru's still here, we deal with him; if not, we use the translation stone on the obelisk, and see if these oozes are worth killing. If I get enough credits for killing them...
"Ready?" I ask Ahkelios, and he nods.
Triplestep. Firestep.
I'm still not used to how fast that combination of skills makes me. Mental Acceleration makes it easy to handle, but it's still so much faster than I've ever been able to run. The ground flies beneath my feet, and in no time at all I'm in front of my first target.
Crystallized Strength.
The sharp pain of crystallization runs all the way up along my arm as I concentrate the Firmament there. This time, I don't bother with a Barrier — I have the stick I'm holding to take the brunt of the blow. I swing the stick as I dart past the thick purple ooze, injecting another spike of Firmament into it to make sure it doesn't shatter—
—the ooze takes damage. I can feel it; the Firmament within it gets jumbled up for a fraction of a second, and it flinches, its entire body shuddering.
And then the ooze grips the stick I'm using, its flesh clinging on like glue, and yanks it out of my hand.
I don't waste time. I let go of the stick before the ooze can cover my hand and grab a handful of dirt off the ground, haphazardly forcing Firmament into it before lobbing it as hard as I can. Crystallized Strength together with that brief reinforcement keeps the clump of dirt together as it rockets towards the ooze.
It thunks into the center of its chest, and the whole thing staggers back, leaving chunks of purple behind on the ground. Strings of purple lash out from its fingertips, arcing through the air towards me, and I twist out of the way of them just in time. They're sharper than they look, considering how they pierce straight through the trees behind me.
Mental Acceleration is working overtime. As large as this monster is, it's fast and flexible, and it doesn't bother following any of the laws of physics. It's freely able to change its shape, so it isn't limited the way most humanoid fighters are...
...Wait. I'm an idiot.
Color Drain.
I know exactly what color to drain from it, too, because the whole ooze is composed of just the one color. I feel it resist the effects of the skill — it's good at resisting it, too, and it forces Color Drain to consume far more Firmament than it would otherwise just to leech all of that purple out of it — but it does work.
The purple is dragged out, and unlike most of my other enemies, this time, the ooze simply collapses.
[ You have defeated a Forest Slime (Rank D)! +7 Strength. +3 Reflex. +3 Speed. +2 Firmament. ]
The confirmation that they give me credits is a joy. I grin fiercely.
I'm going to have to fight my way to the obelisk, but at least it's going to be fun.
—
Losing myself in combat is a pastime that never gets old.
Not that I do it all that often, of course. It's not every day that an apocalypse is visited on Earth. But there's a small part of me that revels in fighting like this, in having to battle it out for my life; there's a part of the experience that's almost meditative.
Drop the translation stone. Swing. Dodge. Pick up a bunch of rocks off the ground, and imbue them with Firmament; toss them with enough force to make a bunch of holes in the slime you're fighting.
[ You have defeated a Forest Slime (Rank D)! +3 Strength credits. +3 Reflex credits. + 2 Firmament credits. ]
The credit rewards get lower the more of them I beat, but there's enough of them that that doesn't matter.
"Behind you!" Ahkelios calls. He darts away from me as a distraction, a bright source of light and Firmament, and I use the moment of distraction to enact another Color Drain.
[ You have defeated a Forest Slime (Rank D)! +4 Strength credits. +1 Durability credits. +2 Speed credits. + 2 Firmament credits. ]
A Barrier blocks off a blob of slime that gets lobbed at me — I notice it too late to dodge, so I react the only way I can. The liquid slime splashes onto the Firmament barrier and smears itself across it, then starts to eat into the Firmament.
Something about the sight creeps me out. I shudder slightly, and turn my attention to the slime that threw it at me.
It's a bright neon-green. I don't know where it got its color from — I've never seen this particular color in the Hestian forest. The monster itself is a spiderlike slime, with eight spindly legs emerging from a central, wobbly body; on top of its head is a horn it seems to be using to launch the slime balls at me. I dart towards it, and this time I don't bother grabbing a stick.
Barrier.
I shape the Barrier as it forms, using Firmament Manipulation and my natural ability to control my Firmament to guide it into the vague shape of a knife. I keep a protective film around my hand so none of that ooze gets on me, and I swipe it straight through its head, even as it tries to dodge.
[ You have defeated a Forest Slime (Rank D)! +1 Strength credits. +5 Reflex credits. +2 Speed credits. +2 Firmament credits. ]
It's nice that the number of Firmament credits I'm getting isn't going down. I'm making good progress, too — the obelisk is almost in sight, and most of the slimes aren't actively targeting me. I have to get within a few meters of them for them to even notice me, which makes avoiding them... not easy, exactly, but doable.
The problems mostly happen when I have to maneuver a lot to fight one of them and inevitably end up drawing more. Barrier is my friend in those cases, though. Barrier and Color Drain.
[ You have defeated a Forest Slime (Rank D)! +5 Durability credits. +2 Reflex credits. +2 Firmament credits. ]
[ You have defeated a Forest Slime (Rank D)! +2 Durability credits. +1 Reflex credit. +2 Firmament credits. ]
And then the obelisk is in sight. The translation stone is back under my arm, still emitting those waves of Firmament that make this Hotspot so much more dangerous — but I suppose that's the point. I wonder how Ahkelios ever found out that he needed the stone for this Hotspot in particular. Was it just luck? Had he just been carrying the stone around because it interested him?
I could see him doing that, somehow.
There's no sign of Naru. I'm almost surprised by how relieved that makes me feel, although I know I'm not exactly out of the woods — Naru might very well only appear after the Hotspot is activated by someone entering it. Given that I haven't sensed him so far and I've been fighting for a solid half-hour, though, I imagine it's unlikely that he'll show up.
Now to time myself carefully.
The Firmament pulses are coming in thirty seconds apart. I can dart in with plenty of time to spare, but I need to leave the translation stone there to start the translation process; I have to assume the stone will be undamaged by the Firmament waves emitted by the obelisk, unless the process takes less than thirty seconds.
...Or maybe I should test it first. Just in case.
I let the corner of the stone brush against one of the Firmament pulses from the obelisk. Thankfully, it seems entirely undamaged, and I breathe a sigh of relief, then steady myself and prepare to run.
Twenty-nine... thirty!
I activate both Triplestep and Firestep, leaving a trail of Firmament flame in my wake as I dash towards the obelisk. As I get closer, I can make out the runic inscriptions that must be the so-called 'ancient language'. I don't waste time trying to decipher it myself — instead, I touch the translation stone to one of the runes, pausing just long enough to make sure the Firmament circle has begun to fill out. Then I leave it there, still touching the obelisk, and dart back as fast as possible.
And now... to wait.
While fighting off more of these Forest Slimes, because they're back, and they're back in full force.
Chapter 1 Prev Next
​

Author's Note: A bit of a bridge chapter, but a lot of stuff is coming up soon. Consider this a cooldown, but like, with a bunch of punching.
Writing is going a lot more smoothly now that I'm doing it full-time. My back is still giving me issues and it's a little scary financially, but I'm pretty sure I've got this. Still really appreciate everyone for reading and commenting (I am very slow at checking them because anxiety, but I do check them, and usually fix things, even if I forget to directly respond).
Here's the standard Patreon and RoyalRoad links. Patreon is up to chapter 48, and should hit 51 by the end of the weekend.
Also a friend of mine debuted her novel on RR - The Roads Unseen. It's a story about twins who fuck around with magic and very rapidly find out. Very cool and vaguely existentially terrifying. If you're interested, check it out - I'm trying to help her out since she's not very confident in her writing (she is in fact very good).

What made you take the leap? I’ve been considering a Lowrider S, ST, or a Road Glide for longer trips but finding it tough to walk away from my Sportster. When I lived downtown it was the perfect bike to rip around on, but now I’m wondering if I need a little more for the front range and mountains of Colorado, or if I’m just fine on what I’ve got. Aside from walking into a dealership and impulsively riding away, what was your reasoning for trading up?

As salaamu alaikoom wa rahmatullahi wa baarakaatu my fellow brothers and sisters. As a result of a dire need for some more accountability, it’s time again for the nofap leaderboards challenge!
As usual it will be running on a week to week basis (to keep it more active) and we will be tracking who has abstained from PMO for the longest period of time (Set your day counter) and rank them accordingly. It’s obviously something we all struggle with and I know that the Prophet(S.A.W.) encouraged competition amongst the Muslims in terms of acts of worship. So why not make things a little more fun with a little competition and accountability! We will be going by the Islamic calendar, inshaaAllah.
SIGNUPS WILL BE DURING THE FIRST 2 DAYS OF THE POST (FRIDAY AND SATURDAY) AS IT’S QUITE TEDIOUS TO BE UPDATING EVERY SECOND.
What is required of those who wish to participate is to:
1. Turn on your streak counter (this can be found in the ‘about’ section of our forums) so that I can see the amount of days that you have.
2. Post on the thread stating that “you’re in” for the week, how the streak is going for you, and how you plan to improve/keep the streak going (also feel free to add some tips which have been helping you if you’d like).
3. You must TRY to pray 5 times a day.
4. No porn, no masturbation, no sexual stories etc..
LEAGUES:

• DIAMOND: 200+ days
• PLATINUM: 160+ days
• GOLD: 120+ days
• SILVER: 80+ days
• BRONZE: 40+ days
• PROSPECT: 20+ days

There will be update threads posted each week, inshaaAllah. Please post your updates.
If you relapse; shake it off and hop right back in! Allah is Most merciful and forgiving. Don’t despair in His mercy. He loves it when a slave repents and turns back to Him. We don’t have time to give up. Remember that we’re all in this together and that we should encourage and help each other out. May Allah guide us, straighten our affairs for us and rid us of these vile addictions. Ameen! Please sign up below! :)
LEADERBOARD RANKINGS
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The Ambitious (1 day - 4 days)- Unranked

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](4wcj6yw1yqa11.jpg). 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.@ 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@@. 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.
@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.
@@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.

Hey, guys! I'm ranked 273 on xbox for highest rounds completed and thought I could share some general strats I've learned over my time playing.
*All of these tips are assuming that you have all of your upgrades to max, if you don't, focus on fast rounds and not long runs until you are maxxed out.
**doing the Easter eggs and having your weapons at purple tier starting makes this significantly easier
The first thing to get prepped is your Loadout.
Weapon/Equipment/Power Choice
Definitely run Toxic Growth as its going to make revives, saves, and many of the objectives much easier. if you're playing with a team with several, then Ring of Fire is a good option as well.
The M16 and the Hauer 77 are the best non-wonder weapons you can use when you are in mid game (you'll notice many guns fall off around rounds 4-8), so it's great to start with them with your attachments.
For Support, you're going to want to get grapple hook as that will make many of the objectives much easier and can be used to escape tight spots if you get trapped. For Offensive, the Semtex is my favorite, but honestly I think they are all similarly effective Prioritize Upgrades
There are a couple upgrade materials you can use to upgrade your character, and it's important to know how to use them effectively.
For Scrap, you should prioritize level 2 armor above all else, but wait to get a level 1 armor off a drop. After that, get your gun to blue if you don't start with it at that rarity.
For Salvage: Similarly, get Armor 3, and then get your weapon to Legendary. It's useful to communicate with your team and use the wrenches to get purple to golds , and then blues to purple.
Only use leftover salvage and scrap to buy things from the bench.
Weapons and Perks
pack-a-punch your gun ASAP at a black chest or through points and buy the ice ammo mod, if you go down, you don't lose gun upgrades so it's better to spend money this way than to lose your few points early on rebuying perks**
Now the perks can vary a little depending on your personal playstyle, but typically this is what I run and would recommend the same or something very similar. Prioritize getting your first 5 perks in this order:
Juggernog, Stamina Up, Quick Revive, Death Perception, Speed Cola, don't buy any more perks until fully pack-a-punched
Buy the rest of your perks in this order: Elemental Pop, Deadshot Daiquiri, Mule Kick, PhD Slider, Tombstone
Do the Free Perk event at the end of the round until you have the first 4-5 perks
Do all the objectives on the map for the first 3-4 rounds and then play only main objectives, as points won't matter around this time anyway. For objectives, I usually prioritize side objectives first, doing them in whatever order is closest EXCEPT where free perk was mentioned above.
Bonus: its very easy to forget to refill/upgrade your armor in between rounds but make a huge difference late game.
I'll make a seperate post for doing the objectives in the easiest way possible, how to loot, and how to properly utilize toxic growth, as that's a lot to cover here.
Let me know if there is anything else you would like to know as well!

I had a pair of XC spikes in high school, black, white, red and blue. I've been trying to find a picture of them but can seem to anywhere. Anyone have any idea what I'm talking about?

Feature mix in the link below:
https://on.soundcloud.com/PJBRW
What does "Arhlo" mean and how'd you come up with it?
Arhlo: My oldest child's name is Thomas Arlo. There are a lot of Arlo's in the producer hemisphere so I doubled down and threw in the "h" to help make my name unique.
So speaking on that is it true you produced lullabies for your son during his infancy?
Arhlo: Yes. I felt creative enough and alert enough to do this. I knew what lullabies were. Very simple melodies. The point of a lullaby is to make someone sleep, no? I did that and made a soundtrack to my (then) infants life to help them go to sleep. I actually made 5 more lullabies when my second was born. I played them once for him and deleted them forever. I am weird about keeping my songs out in the open. I don't like attention.
Now digging a little deeper into YOU, you went through the Icon Collective course, ultimately do you feel it was a worthy experience, would you recomend it to other producers who are on the fence about it?
Arhlo: YES. 100%. Granted, I didn't physically attend Icon, but my experience has made me who I am today. Icon will throw out ideas you thought to be canon, and then shake up your life more. I was able to nuture and grow my strength as a producer through their curriculum. Icon was the difference between wanting to do something, and doing the f*cking thing.
You also went to school for jazz as well, yeah?
Arhlo: Correct. I spent almost 3 years going to college for Jazz performance. That was my major when I left. I grew up in Connecticut, and subsequently went to school in the state as well. I used to sit through jazz history classes, then take the train into NYC to go to jazz clubs like 55 Bar and Smalls and hear some of the greatest players in the world. Unfortunately 55 is now closed but I have fond memories of taking $50 to take the MTA into Grand Central, walking an hour down to the village, and going to one of the aforementioned clubs to spend my last dollar to hear these cats play. It is still the Mecca for musicians. No doubt about it.
I heard a rumor you had an ep mixed and mastered by Mayhem?
Arhlo: Yes the EP is on my private soundcloud. I just didn't feel it was right to release it at that time. Maybe now might be the time. I don't know. My barometer for music culture is so out of touch I didn't even know Alison Wonderland was pregnant until a week ago
So now that we have our more basic questions out of the way; we are gonna get a little personal, because we know you personally.
Arhlo: Understood. Cue the Shaq meme.
We have been to A LOT of shows together, that night at tabernacle, was waiting with me an hour and a half worth it?(you bought those tickets)
Arhlo: Yes. We saw an amazing show. Rickyxsan and NGHTMRE? Are you kidding me? Then we waited in the pouring rain. Luckily we caught Tyler coming out of the venue with Ricky and got to chat with them. Between Tyler blowing up and Ricky holding it down for the underground, we had an awesome time picking brains and taking names. (NGHTMRE) is an outlier in terms of mainstream artists, he is a consummate professional. He told us that he gave away the majority of his profits to increase the value of the show for the audience, something that is not done today at all by artists at his level. He would use his profit and throw it into the production, so the lights, sound, and overall experience were pieces that were curated and amplified due to his hard work and what he contributed to the production.
So when we talk about great djs, what seperates, a good dj from a bad dj?
Arhlo: A bad DJ plays what people want to hear; a good DJ plays what they want to hear. If the two sync up in some sort of serendipitous way, that's a great dj.
If you could have a conversation with yourself on the day you started pursuing music, what would you say?
Arhlo: I would tell myself to make music that makes myself happy. Don't try to be someone you're not, be the creative that you organically are. That's how one gets a unique sound and it's how you develop and evolve as a producer.
Whats a piece of advice you were never given, but try to pass on to other DJs?
Arhlo: The piece of advice that I try to pass on is that you're going to be faced with a lot of rejection. A musician I admire once told me you will fail 9/10 times, but that 1 time will make all the difference. Just brush off the rejection and move on. There's no time to dwell on rejection.
Who has helped you the most or supported you the most, this is the time to shoutout and thank your folks!
Arhlo: First off I want to thank YOU. You have supported me since the day we met. You're a true friend and fan and will always be there to support and give advice. You're honest and extremely helpful when it comes to bouncing ideas around and showing you WIP's. Other "mentors" I've had that have helped me get to where I am as a producer and DJ today include Protohype, my first mentor at Icon, Mayhem, for being the premier Atlanta producer and DJ, Pryzms, who has had an amazing journey here in Atlanta, and Blvk Sheep. I've taken several lessons from Blvk Sheep over the years and he has great knowledge when it comes to not only the craft, but the industry as well.

I have 2 systems in my home both built off of the X99 platform. Old, but still very capable. Let's focus on System B, but I'm going to include details for System A because it has the same ailments.
System A A - i7 5960x (8core\16thread) OC u/4.5Ghz\1.300v - Lian-Li 240 AIO cooled A - RTX2070super +125Mhz on the core, +100Mhz on the RAM temp capped at 91c via Afterburner B - PCIe 3.0 @ x16 A - 16GB Kingston FURY Beast DDR4 u/2666Mhz 1.3v A - Apevia Prestige 80plus Gold 800watt A - Razer BlackWidow v3 Pro + Viper Ultimate 2x Dell S2417DG GSYNC u/165Hz\1440p
System B B - i7 6950x (10core\20thread) OC u/4.3Ghz\1.330v - Deepcool 360 AIO cooled B - RTX3080 +150Mhz on the core, +150Mhz on the RAM temp cap at 91c via Afterburner B - PCIe 3.0 @ x16 B - 32GB Corsair Vengeance DDR4 u/3600Mhz 1.3v B - Thermaltake Toughpower Grand 80plus Gold 1050watt B - Logitech G915TKL + G502X Plus 2x Dell S2417DG GSYNC u/165Hz\1440p on each system
Both of these systems will run the GPU + CPU simultaneously at 100% when using a tool like Kombustor, AIDA64, or HWBOT x256 and never make it near throttling temps ....no significant or unusual spikes to speak of in terms of temps, framerates, power draw for both CPU and GPU...all graphs look smooth, steady, and as expected for the entirety of testing, and well within acceptable tolerances. As far as I can see here - there is no indication of a problem.
- The issue - BOTH systems display this behavior in an identical fashion but let's focus on system B since it's got more horsepower - During gameplay GPU usage is spiking heavily downward and VERY rarely reaches close to 100% in games. I have tested the following:
Overwatch 2 Warframe Jedi: Fallen Order Battlefield V Horizon Zero Dawn: Complete Metro 2033: Redux Hitman 2016: GOTY Sims 4 Gears of War 4 Apex Legends Bioshock: Remastered Shadow of Tomb Raider Lumote Destiny2
and all of these games behave the same. All settings are "turned to 11" in all games, framerates are uncapped in all games where it can be, and I have modified all the usuals in the NVIDIA control center and Windows to make sure that there aren't any power saving features enabled.
-The exceptions- If I fire up Portal with RTX, or Metro Exodus: PC Enhanced Edition the GPU usage finally is pegged steadily at ~99%, but frames are below 60 and CPU usage is below 65% in both of these instances
-The Icing on the cake - When mouse input is detected, the situation becomes even worse. Framerates and GPU usage PLUMMET - I have seen Overwatch 2 fluctuate from 200+FPS down to below 60 when mouse input is active, then back up to 200+ when I stop moving the mouse - BUT WAIT, THERE'S MORE!... If I use my Xbox Elite controller to play any of these games via USB or Wireless dongle the input issue goes away, but the GPU usage still stays well below average.
Constructive thoughts, comments, and concerns welcome..... Thanks for reading!

hey, guys as a lot of you here i grow up in a house, that taught that straight hair is beautiful and curly hair isn't that beautiful, they even used to talk about my hair and how it's now bad because i don't take care of it, little did they know that it was just curly, but they wanted me to brush and treat it like straight hair, i hate my fucking life, anyways i learned about how my hair is curly from this sub, so i started my routine and grow my hair out, and started taking care of it as curly.
and omg my family were so unsupportive even though i liked, my opinion doesn't matter what matters is my parents opinion and they used to comment on how bad it looked and give me backhanded insults, but what can i say but stfu, it got even to a point that even my siblings started insulting me and making jokes about my hair, it truly hurt i didn't even want compliments i just wanted them to leave me alone.
but no they continued till cut my hair and returned back to brushing it, and everyone went on with their lives like nobody did anything they forgot so bad, and i was bitter for a whole year, this was a year ago or 2 years ago, anyways last month i wanted to return to taking care of my hair. because it was one of the only thing i liked about myself.
so i bought myself a conditioner and shampoo, and ordered a gel (because the gels we have locally are awful and i found this one with a great discount 50%)
so today i went to the bathroom with my clothes and i have put my products inside my towel because i didn't want to hear there comments, and i went to shower opened my clothes and one of my products the gel that isn't avaliable here, and it dropped inside the toilet seat, omg i felt so broken i felt like crying) but anyways i stfu and came here to vent because i don't have nobody to talk to, and i cant even afford therapy for my suicidal thoughts and i don't feel like anybody understand me.
so where do i put this things other than here.
ps: i hate my life, the idea of death is soothing to me now (i'm not exaggerating there's other problems than my hair problem i'm so distant from my parents even if i tried talking to them my feelings get shut down, i have zero self confidence i feel like failure even though i got into the best uni in my country but i still hate myself, everytime i see someone doing what i couldn't do because i got bullied for it in my household i hate my life, i talked to my mother about my hair thing and she just denied that she did anything i fking hate my life)

My coworker got this question the other day and wasn’t sure of the answer. Wording is a little tricky. “On June 2nd, your customer writes 1 XYZ 40 call for 5 when XYZ is trading at 42. In Oct, XYZ is 35 and the call is exercised. What did the seller take in from the sale?” My rationale was - sell for $500 premium plus obligation to sell as the writer at $4000, so $4500? Thoughts?

I have been training BJJ for two years now. I am a blue belt and I compete in super fights and tournaments at least once a month. I have recently started personal training at my friend's private gym. There he offers, personal training for... really anybody, boxing, Muay-Thai, and workout classes. He asked me to do a BJJ class with his youth program(13-15yr Boys). Wanting to stay away from any form of 'McDojoing', being that I am still only a blue belt, decided to take an ecological approach instead of teaching technique. I was inspired by Greg Souders from Standard jiujitsu while planning my first class.
https://youtu.be/V4QtQTRwwD0
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I started by stretching and familiarizing them with basic movements, rolls, shrimps, technical stand up, switching hips, etc. After warming them up we played the first three games shown in the video. I spent a little more time with each game, considering they were brand new, taking up the entirety of the session time. It ended up going really well. The kids really enjoyed it and it was really interesting to see them naturally do advanced movements, that would usually take someone months to learn, without being taught a single technique.

I was diagnosed with Aspergers Syndrome (now just Autism Spectrum Disorder per the DSM 5) at the age of 6, after a battery or tests done by a psychiatrist.
I have gone my whole life struggling with, what I consider it to be, an affliction or disease. I have gained very little from being ASD that warrants anything resembling pride. Maybe I am a great writer and "smart", but so what? I have struggled to socialize and just sit in my head half the day. Letting life pass me by. I resent that.
In grad school, one of my advisors had an all ASD student lab studying autism, mainly in women and girls as boys and men get diagnosed at 3-4 times the rate. I did my capstone project as a systematic review of studies using intranasal oxytocin as a treatment for the core symptoms of ASD, something most other drugs have failed to alleviate.
To me, through my clinicians lens, ASD is a neurodevelopmetal disorder in need of better treatments and ways to prevent it in utero. To be, it is a problem in need of solving. I don't view as something I draw strength from, rather I view it as a curse and wonder where I might be without it.
I do admire the neurodiversity movement. In high school (12 years ago) people used autism as an insult and targeted people while me for abuse. So I totally get behind bringing public awareness to this concomplicated disorder. Whether you like or dislike veing born with ASD is up to you really.
What I can't support is the notion that ASD is "not a disorder" and a "difference of neurap expression". By that criteria, schizophrenia isnt a disorder either, but you'll affirm that is a disorder. This view (which I acknowledge doesn't represent everyone in ND) does not coalesce with the science on ASD.
Yes, scientific research has flaws and limits, and there is much of ASD we have yet to learn. What we do know is that there is generally disturbances in blood oxytocin level. Brain structure an s functioning is different and these fMRI results have enough consistency to see abnormalities in both gray and white matter circuits. Genetically, ASD has hallmark abnormalities with males having an upregulation or genetic enrichment of genes expressing inflammatory markers like cytokines and increased methylation of the oxytocin receptor gene, reducing expression of the receptor. Oxytocin, as it turns out, has anti-inflammatory properties. And of course, we can't forget all the behavioral things kids, adolescence, and adults display.
This isn't to say we need to stigmatized ASD, we don't, and I generally support erasing that prejudice from our social norms. But I can't support doing so by proclaiming that ASD simply isn't a disorder. That has a high degree of conflicting with many modern studies. And yes, some were diagnosed as a kid when our understanding was even weaker and are diagnosed as adults. There is also misdiagnosis as the other neurodevelopmental disorders ADHD and OCD have comorbidities and clinical overlap with ASD, do this might mean those diagnosed with ASD might actually just have severe OCD and vice versa.
I'll tread lightly on the topic of self diagnosis, as I have seen many people in my life do this. To be clear, the core symptoms of ASD consistently observed are deficits in social communication, interpersonal functioning, repetitive behaviors, and restricted interests. People think they are weird, quirky, or socially awkward/shy and that equates ASD. It might, but that's not how neuropsychology ot psychiatry work. Other features include learning and memory impairments, delays in the development of speech pathology, abnormally high spontaneous aggression or irritability (in my personal experience usually a specific trigger causes this).
So to those here I say welcome. I am not a mod and not trying to rustle any feathers, but (as with many topics) the public takes I not the social impairments and assumes ASD. Sometimes you are just socially awkward instead.
I support making us be integrated into society more through media exposure and destigmatizing autism. I can't support a notion that this isn't a disorder, which most current research disagrees with.
Thanks for your time

So my boyfriend (24m) and I (22f) are going to be taking in his little sister (11f) over the summer. Their home life is not good at all, and now that she’s 11 she’s starting to become aware of it. Aside from emotional trauma we know she’s been having, this on top of teen hormones has made her start to have a hard time regulating any emotions, to the point we’ve had to restrain her from hurting herself. I’m looking for help from foster parents who have taken in kids from troubled homes to give me any idea on how to help her and make her feel welcome and loved. I would love to take her to therapy, but unfortunately we were lucky enough to be able to just get her over the summer, because anytime her mom sees someone trying to help her kids, she cuts off all contact and keeps the kids away. And yes, CPS has been involved for years but hasn’t done anything to help.

My client goes to daycare in the mornings until afternoon, where they receive ABA services in both settings. By the time in-home sessions begin, my client is very tired and unmotivated. They will verbally mand for “sleep” and engage in maladaptive behavior when we try to keep them up. Parents request that I do whatever it takes to keep my client awake. They are trying to transition the client out of napping in general. Reason being is that parents report that when the client does nap, they tend to still be awake around 11pm - 12am. However, I feel a little uncomfortable always having to physically prompt my client to stand up and go for a walk. I incorporate lots of play, pairing and NET as well but it’s very obvious there is an EO for sleep. I understand where the parents are coming from too. Thoughts on how to go about this?

Yo, dadders. I built a sandbox for my little dude and am researching types of sand that might be appropriate to put in it, and would love feedback or knowledge if you have experience. My neighbor has offered to loan his pickup to go to a local place to grab the raw materials.
I've called two local places, asking what sand they might have that's appropriate for a sandbox (as I understand there can be chemicals or silica in certain construction sands you don't want your kid in). One suggested their "washed beach sand" and one suggested their "washed masonry sand" which they said they supply to the local Y's for their playgrounds.
My own dad built our playground growing up and said he just went to a local building supply place and got whatever sand they had, and doesn't know what it was. I liked that stuff. It seemed less fine and held its shapes more than the pretty, smooth stuff that other kids had which were presumably bought in bags from the store.
I'm leaning toward the beach sand as that sounds more natural and I don't think we care if there are some random pieces of junk in it (mine growing up was full of crap, but I don't know if that was sticks and nuts and things falling in over time when we left it uncovered). I'm not too worried about "dirty" sand as in general outdoors bacteria - I want my kid to be "dirty" here and there - just want to avoid silica and other chemicals, and would like it to be good for building and making off road trails (my dude loves cars and things, as did I).
Thanks for any feedback!