Runaway 3 unblocked

I have been very lonely lately and have pushed lots of my friends away. Been very depressed for a while but what really did me in was: In an effort to feel loved, I decided to unblock someone who had been obsessed with me (borderline stalker-ish). Turns out he has moved on, has befrieded my old friends, and says none of them talk to me anymore because of how I treated him. Called me a narcissist and compared me to the man who abused me years earlier.
I was shocked that all my friends somehow met each other and were better off without me. I didn't want to end up like my abuser: lonely, manipulative, pathetic. I'd rather die than turn out like him.
I decided to go for a walk to try and clear my head. I thought there was a chance I might not survive, so I wrote a suicide note. I intended on walking to this cool landmark several miles away, but 3 miles in I walked by a railroad, and decided to sit and wait by it. I wanted to see a train go by so I knew if they were going fast enough to kill me + where to put my head to best end my life. I ended up calling an old acquaitance two minutes after I saw the first train go by. He helped me get home, although I didn't tell him all the details of why I went where I went. The weird thing is, I don't feel any better. Just tired now. I might go back to the train tracks tomorrow if I'm still in this shape.
I want to tell someone about this but I have nobody in my life to tell. So, coming to reddit to post about it. (I am in therapy but I worry that if I tell my therapist about this she will involuntarily commit me and I will lose my job.)

Credit for the original story goes to u/spacepaladin15.
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---
Memory transcript subject: Sasha Everett, ex-UN noncombatant
Date [Standardized Human Time]: February 29th, 2177
Location: Upper layer of City 23, Venlil Prime
“I’m going, I’m going! Gojids aren’t— khh-aah! — exactly limber in their older years, Sasha! Right, I don’t see anyone in this hallway either, you can come in.”
Sasha clambered through the window after her talkative gray-quilled friend, slipping through with significantly less effort despite her larger frame. The Rising Star was laughably unsecure; windows were unlocked and at chest height, with no alarm system to speak of. The hotel was in some sort of lockdown due to the exterminator presence, all residents and staff hiding behind locked doors. It would be an issue if their target was stowed in a room, but at least the halls were empty. All that left for security was the exterminators gathered at the entrance, and—
​
“Get back!”
An extended claw stopped her from tripping straight into an intersection, as Burai forced her back into the hallway. “There’s cameras here, they’ll spot you!”
“Haven’t they already seen you? You’re standing right in their view.”
“No, they… I mean, yes, but nobody’ll care about a Gojid in the halls. To a surveillance AI scanning a spaceport hotel, that’s business as usual. But as soon as a human steps out here, security will be notified about a ‘potential predation incident’. Just stay there, and let me… let… w-what?”
“Burai? What’s going on?”
Burai was staring down the hall, eyes rapidly flitting to focus on something which she couldn’t see from her view in the adjacent hall. His jaw was entirely slack for several seconds before he managed to collect himself.
“The, uh… cameras. The cameras are shut down. All of them, they’re staring at the ground and their lights are out. I think you can come out now.”
They had little time to spare, and hesitation would only hurt their chances. She paced out into the corridor alongside Burai, casting a glance down both ways. It was as he’d said; every camera was unlit and staring loosely at the floor. Likely Trish’s doing. No way to tell if (or when) they’d reactivate, so they had to get moving. Burai apparently thought the same, though his relatively stubby legs meant his sprint was about level with her stride.
As they moved through the hall at slightly less than record pace, Sasha began taking in her surroundings. It could be useful to memorize if they had to leave the way they came, so she absorbed every detail she could as they ran like hell/jogged with mild exertion. Orange walls, painted in a stepped gradient from burnt orange to a light cream. A fascinating choice for a world where the native species had orange-colored blood, but apparently they couldn’t be bothered to pretend that prey should be scared of anything bearing the color of their blood anymore. She had to admit, it was a welcome change.
Lining the walls were an assortment of mounted displays. Arranged in a pattern which looked random but was carefully considered for visual balance, they showed an assortment of artwork from every species. She even thought she recognized a few human paintings, mixed alongside the rest of the dizzying collage.
Maybe she had, but it was hard to say for sure. She didn’t have time to get a good look before every panel suddenly went dark at once, with nothing in the way of warning or fanfare. For a brief instant, the hall was filled with rows of ominous black rectangles, before two white lines of text appeared on each and every one:
​
FLOOR THREE LOBBY
LEFT OF VENDING MACHINE
​
The panels switched back to their previous display of artwork almost too quickly to read the message. Sasha was left briefly wondering if she was simply hallucinating from the stress, but Burai’s once-again slack jaw dispelled that notion. He looked up at her, trying to say something but failing for lack of breath.
They were on floor zero. The elevators were disabled due to the lockdown, and the stairs were arranged in such a way that one needed to cross around half the building to get to the next one up (whoever was in charge of planning apparently didn’t consider fire a real issue). If they were to make it upstairs before the exterminators caught up with them, they couldn’t be constrained by Burai’s sluggish pace.
In one beautiful fluid motion, she tore off her jacket, wrapped it around Burai, and picked him up. The thick flame-resistant plastic fiber made for an excellent barrier against his spikes, shielding her from a moderately painful and very embarrassing impalement. Burai squeaked in shock, but didn’t protest; they both knew that he couldn’t keep up with an endurance hunter’s jog. Without even the bare imitation of caution, she tore off towards the stairs with Burai in tow. They couldn’t afford to lose time playing at caution when their target was three floors above them through a bizarrely labyrinthian series of stairs.
—
They’d hardly made it halfway through the second floor when their progress was rather rudely interrupted. A small contingent of exterminators milled about the entrance to the stairwell, too engrossed in conversation to notice the couple of interlopers rapidly skid to a stop and duck behind an archway.
In the reflection of an unpowered screen near the door, Sasha and Burai watched the exterminators from a ‘safe’ distance. The majority of them broke away to rush down another corridor, leaving only two at the stairs: a Venlil and Harchen, judging by their frames. Snippets of their conversation drifted down the empty hall, intermittently cut out by the screeching sound of a broken automatic door repeatedly trying and failing to close.
“—on the first floor, either. You sure they—”
“—way. It has to be here somewhere. ‘Course, Yawi—”
“—d never! You know, that human can’t tell the di—”
On the next screech, Burai made his move. With the noise of the door covering the sound of his approach, he managed to get within meters of the exterminators undetected. At the last second before they noticed his presence, he moved around to make it look like he’d come from another hallway. Then, he drew a breath.
“H-Help! Help me!”
The two wheeled around, flamethrowers already primed before they spotted their assailant. Gojid were generally less than respected owing to their nature as cured predators, but an old man screaming for help didn’t exactly spark fear. Their weapons lowered, and the Venlil flicked a tail in friendly greeting. The Harchen seemed less amused.
“What are you doing outside of your room, Gojid? The hotel’s on lockdown. We’ve gotten notice of a bio—”
“No, no, please don’t make me g-go back there! There’s a… a h-h…”
“A human in your room? Mind telling us what you were doing staying with one?”
“I heard… I heard crying on the outside of the door, so I let him in… I didn’t realize it was…”
The Venlil put a gentle paw over the shaking Gojid. “I understand. Don’t worry, its deception dies with us. You’re safe. Can you tell us what room it’s in now?”
“F-four.. nineteen.”
“I see. Kyura, go check out room 419. I’ll stay here and—”
“Wait! It’s got a… a…”
Burai didn’t finish, choosing to let himself devolve into another bout of feigned fear. In the absence of details, the two would imagine the human to be armed with whatever scared them most. His bet paid off; the Venlil rose to her feet and rushed after the Harchen with her weapon aimed slightly upward at what would be a human’s center mass.
He let his act continue for a few more seconds, apparently waiting until he was certain they wouldn’t double back before scrambling for the stairs. By the time he made his way up to the third floor, she was already beside him and panting slightly.
“What… was that?”
“Improv. You should try it sometime! Anyway, I don’t think we have much time before those idiots realize there’s no room 419 on this floor, so we’re really on the clock. You see what we’re looking for anywhere?”
Sasha kept breathing hard as she scanned the room, before wordlessly rushing off next to a window overlooking a side alley which connected to the one the rest of their their group was perched on. Underneath, a backpack emblazoned with the UN’s logo was stuffed haphazardly next to a vending machine. Apparently, it had been tossed there in a rush as the building was put under lockdown, rather than carefully hidden. She picked it up, looked it over, and nodded at Burai.
“Great. Although…” He looked around the room a few times before returning his attention back to her.
“...unless there’s a parachute in there, I’m not sure it matters much. The lower floors are crawling with exterminators. I don’t see any obvious exits, and I really don’t favor our odds for a 3-story fall. Sasha?”
“Burai, get over here.”
Burai sauntered over as fast as his legs would carry him. She gestured at the window with her head.
“...You can’t be serious.”
“I am. There’s a dumpster below us, we passed it earlier. Filled with fabric, probably a load of blankets they threw out. You’ll be fine. Just cover your head and land feetfirst.”
“Sasha, I think I’d rather burn— AHCK!—”
With Burai in one arm and the backpack in the other, Sasha kicked out the window screen and jumped before she could stop to regret the decision.
​
The brunt of the pain stabbed her side, as a couple of Burai’s spines slipped past her unzipped jacket to jab themselves in her torso. Aside from that minor embarrassing oversight, she was unharmed. Her complete lack of training was handily circumvented by sheer dumb luck and the merciful softness of discarded hotel bedding. By the time she reoriented herself, Burai was already dragging her out of the dumpster. Bedsheets clung to his spikes, but aside from his pride, he too seemed unharmed.
Another hand, or rather bandaged paw, pulled her to her feet. Tressa encircled her like a short fluffy snake, apparently checking for injuries. Satisfied after two coils, he switched to watching their flank as the rest of them regrouped and recuperated. James was helping Burai pick fabric from his spines. Trish eyed the backpack, before turning her attention to the spot of red at her side.
“Sasha, can you move?”
“Yes. It’s just a skin wound, I’ll be fine. Is Beast all set to go?”
James’ muffled voice rang out from behind her. “Practically raring, last I checked! And a good thing too, because we’re skipping town immediately. Don’t have any time for the usual runaround, not with all this unwanted attention.”
As they closed in on the main street, Sasha zipped up her jacket to cover the wound and slung the backpack over a shoulder. She tried to act normal and casual, though the most she could realistically manage in that regard was to cover any limp from the pain in her torso. The rest of them slipped into their rehearsed roles, immediately cutting any discussion about the situation in favor of meaningless small talk which nobody could take notice of. Hopefully, their acting would be enough to cover for her lack thereof.
The street was awash with people, a viscous fluid of bodies pulling every which way. The lively roar of activity would be enough to cover their tracks as they made their way back to Beast, even if the exterminators realized they had a runaway. Still, time worked against them. The sooner they could get going, the better.
—
Memory transcript subject: Kelsen, Venlil extermination officer
Date [Standardized Human Time]: February 29th, 2177
Location: City 23, Venlil Prime
Kelsen watched through the screen of a digital scope as the ragtag group of predators and predator diseased piled into their little barely-functional van, practically crushing each other for lack of space. Once they were packed in shoulder-to-shoulder like cattle, the pathetic thing sputtered to life and limped out into the street.
They must’ve assumed the van was untraceable owing to its advanced age. It was true that automated systems wouldn’t cooperate, but a tracker planted on the underside would have no issues. Their retreat would lead the law straight back to their den.
Well... OK, so maybe the law could wait a moment. Official practice dictated that anything “contaminated” by predators be burned without delay, but he just couldn’t have that. Since the idiotic Federation-wide ban on near-sentient surveillance AI a couple years ago, their leads on predator subversives were running thinner by the day. A raid could gather invaluable intel.
He already had a squad lined up, with body armor instead of hazard suits and kinetic weapons instead of flamethrowers. He’d even rallied up an investigator, a successfully reeducated human who hunted information rather than helpless prey. It would be such a shame to let all that go to waste and simply burn their hideout to ash; that could always come later. Besides, he’d put far too much effort into tracking this group to simply pour some napalm and call it a day.
His little raid would have to operate outside the law to get results. That hadn’t been an issue to arrange, of course, but it meant that if things went south they wouldn’t get any backup. He couldn’t afford to be hasty about this.
But he couldn’t afford to be passive, either. The facial recognition software they’d used to ID and track the Gojid was already skirting the law; their raiding party was actively flaunting it. Kelsen couldn’t let his noble work fall victim to the chains of bureaucracy.
If he wanted to get away with this, he’d have to do it tonight.
---
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Table of Contents

1. Russo-China rejects Biden
2. ZNPP as potential Chernobyl
3. Biden's Ukraine is desperate enough for scorched-earth tactics
   1. Battle of the Bulge at Bakhmut
   2. Fresh meat
   3. Teixeira leaks
   4. BRICS vs NATO
4. ZNPP's weak point is diesel fuel
5. Ukrainian saboteurs caught by ZNPP
6. BB / Red Skull / Inb4source / Q
   1. BB sent Q
   2. BB warns Zaporizhia is pivotal
   3. RS gives ZNPP sabotage warning
   4. Ukraine HVT: Nuclear tit for tat
   5. Inb4source / Red Skull 4chan posting history

Note: links redacted. See bottom for link to original.

Summary

Ukraine has allegedly sabotaged Zaporizhia to melt down like Chernobyl, to stop the Russian invasion and justify NATO peacekeepers.
Here's Biden's plan to avoid another Kabul:

• NATO operators sabotaged the ZNPP backup diesel generator fuel storage, causing it to leak.
• NATO is targeting diesel fuel shipments. See captured Ukro saboteurs with NLAWs.
• When diesel reaches zero, Ukros will shell the lone power line, breaking it for the 8th time.
• Up to 6x Chernobyl meltdown ensues. Territory Russia captured is ruined.
• NATO establishes "no-fly zone" and sends "peacekeepers".

Russo-China rejects Biden

"Don’t underestimate Joe’s ability to fuck things up." – Barack Obama
Clearly we underestimated him. Americans can hardly believe that Biden blew up Nord Stream 2, essentially attacking our colony "ally" Germany. Perhaps they're still reeling from Kabul falling faster than Hanoi.
Normally Russia endeavors to cooperate with the sitting US president. However, Russian state media has begun airing the Hunter Biden laptop images, of Hunter engaged in drugs and pedophilia with preteen girls. This is retaliation for Biden crossing Russia's red line by repeatedly trying to sabotage Zaporizhia Nuclear Power Plant (ZNPP). That's why Russia is willing to assist in the impeachment of a sitting US president, which is obviously an extreme step to take between two countries with enough nukes to blot out the Sun.
Rumor has it that China has also turned on Biden, which would make sense: China's economic backing allows Russia to survive US sanctions. China wants Taiwan, and Russia wants East Ukraine. They would be stupid not to cooperate.

• SHOWTIME FORMOSA; SMART MONEY IS SELLING TAIWAN EDITION pol BB May 17
• China Calls Biden a Fake President and Lloyd Austin a Fake Defense Secretary Michael Baxter May 30
• China declines US request for a meeting between defense chiefs Reuters May 30
• Xi Jinping tells China’s national security chiefs to prepare for ‘worst case’ scenarios CNN June 1

ZNPP as potential Chernobyl

A Redditor explains:

Kawaii-Gopnik Russia really needs that powerplant without any leak, to provide industry of surrounding regions with energy, but very few people understand contexts of the current situation: Soviets built complicated and very well ballanced energy system, including not only NPP, but also cascade of hydro power plants. Donetsk, Dnepr, Zaporozhe and Kharkov regions are just one big power hungry plant. NPP itself is reliant on hydropower and quality of water in Dnepr river. In case of really bad "accident" Russia will forget about development of the newly accuired regions, lack of energy produced by NPP is significant, nearly 30-40%. Accident will affect south of Ukraine with russian majority. It will also be also disaster for ecology of the WHOLE Black Sea. Rose of winds will spread nuclear dust to the West - Poland, Romania, Czechia and further. Nuclear zone will stop russian army from further territorial expansion. This will be border formed by Dnepr and nuclear zones.

The basic facts are documented by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA). Even while shut down, ZNPP needs external power grid or diesel to prevent its reactors from overheating.
Russia controls ZNPP. A nuclear "accident" would give NATO pretext to intervene, so Ukraine keeps trying to cause one.
How bad is this? Well, Chernobyl is in Ukraine. That was a 1k MW reactor. ZNPP has six. It is the 9th largest NPP in the world.
Hopefully the containment response would be much better than Chernobyl's, but that's hardly something to count on during WW3. Russia's nuclear doctrine includes pre-emptive strikes; who knows what they'd do. The USSR nearly launched twice during the Cold War.
Imagine if China assisted Texas in seceding from the USA to rejoin Mexico, and then caused a reactor meltdown at Comanche Peak Nuclear Power Plant when the USA retook it. A lot of Southerners would want to lob a few nukes back at China. They might demand it.
It is foolish to assume WW3 will not happen because it hasn't happened yet. One should look instead at the historical record of continual warfare, and the difficulties in preventing WW3 so far:

• List of nuclear close calls Wikipedia
• WW3: Historical close calls Wikipedia

Thus one cannot rule out a radiation release 6x as bad as Chernobyl. Not that Ukraine needs anything so dramatic. It merely seeks a pretext to justify direct NATO intervention to "protect" ZNPP. A small leak will suffice.
Even if there is a major radiation leak, it will occur in Russian-annexed separatist territory, and help Ukraine defend her new border. Scorched earth is a valid tactic, whether the fire is conventional or nuclear. Ukraine survived Chernobyl and knows it can survive ZNPP too.

Biden's Ukraine is desperate enough for scorched-earth tactics

Battle of the Bulge at Bakhmut

"We have been working on the counter-offensive with Ukraine for 4-5 months." – Victoria Nuland
Why is Ukraine so desperate?
Ukraine depends on NATO aid to fight Russia. NATO aid depends on Democrat willingness. Democrat willingness depends on US public support. Therefore the illusion must be maintained to the American public that Ukraine is winning. For this reason, Ukraine has committed its reserves to a costly failed counter-offensive. Bakhmut fell regardless.
James A. Donald summarizes the strategic picture:

So, bright new plan. "The Greatest Ukrainian Offensive". The Ukraine would build up a big reserve of fresh troops, then suddenly hurl large chunks of them at particular points on the front. They would, the Americans planned, cut through a point in the front lines, penetrate to Russian rear areas, wreak havoc on those areas, and force Russian troops in danger of being encircled to hastily retreat from territory that had been slowly gained at enormous cost in grinding attritive warfare. I do not know how big the Ukrainian strategic reserve was, but if it was two hundred fifty thousand, they have now committed most of them to grinding attritive warfare, and cupboard is looking as bare of men as it is of artillery and rockets.

The USA expected to break Russia economically; China's economic support prevented that. Despite PMC Wagner's heartfelt complaints, Russia is unlikely to run out of convicts anytime soon. Russia is rotating divisions through Ukraine, seasoning reservists for a looming WW3. Russia's historical appetite for losses is much higher than its current losses. This is essentially a civil war, and the Russia bear considers being carved up an existential threat. By underestimating Russia's resolve, NATO is repeating the error of Napoleon and Hitler.
Despite having plenty of weapons, Ukraine's military manpower is exhausted and demoralized. Raw conscripts are thrown at the front lines with minimal training. Medvedev predicts that the Ukraine will cease to exist; half its people have already fled.

Anonymous Sat 27 May 2023 04:59:49 No.428438077 Report 428437208 Yeah, the killing has been excessive since they pretty much destroyed 95% of Azov fags and assorted true believers in the first 200k dead, now they overshot it by 100%. About 12% of the non-Russian speaking population's prime military aged men in Ukraine are dead or crippled. 12-20% of the same demographic has fled the country. It's over, desu. They are seeing much more of the polish and romanian mercs now, since they literally lack the manpower.

Western mass media wrongly assumes that Russia is losing because it does not take the entirety of Ukraine in a blitz, as the USA did to Iraq. However, Russia does not want West Ukraine; the people there do not like Russians. Russia has captured the territory it wants, and is now using the rest of Ukraine as a kettle or cauldron, in which to conveniently destroy whatever NATO wishes to send. This is a good way for Russia to gradually learn how to fight NATO armies in a low-risk environment.
The Spartans had a rule never to war too often against the same enemy, lest they train up a nemesis. It was foolish of NATO to believe that Russia had forgotten the lessons of attrition warfare that it learned so recently in Afghanistan.

Nehming Names 9h Russia's prudent caution in directly engaging the West is bringing dividends in perhaps unexpected ways. Russia is gaining strategic knowledge of the actual capabilities and weaknesses of our weapon systems and military tactics, with our supply of munitions draining to militarily unsustainable levels, as it engages allied forces in Ukraine. Russia is aware of the continuing progress of the Great Awakening in the West, that is, the knowledge that Western governments, military, and institutions are run by an elite hostile to their heritage populations, and therefore expects to see declining support of Western governments by their citizens. Russia can also see the precipitous decrease in every societal metric in the West: social cohesiveness, general morality, public health, financial stability, military readiness, etc.With these three degradative processes in play, the most strategic thing Russia and China can do is to bide their time, as time itself will act to sap the strength of the West to militarily engage their foes.

Fresh meat

Russian conquest of Kiev would air Biden's dirty laundry to the world, from Burisma kickbacks to pedophilic field trips and worse. This would result in US "regime change". A distant Chernobyl is a small price to pay, for top Democrats to avoid the hangman's noose.
Poland is itching to invade. Victoria Nuland is scheduling NATO air exercises. USAF propaganda asserts that Russia's air force is a joke. The question is, do Americans still believe Biden's false prophets of victory?
If not, they just need a little "encouragement": 9/11, Gulf of Tonkin, Pearl Harbor, Lusitania, Remember the Maine… Keep those rural Whites busy lest they make trouble at home!
Most Americans cannot find Ukraine on a map. (To be fair, it hasn't been on the map very long.) However, the architects of Biden's Ukraine policy, such as Victoria Nuland, Jake Sullivan, Antony Blinken and George Soros, tend to have grandparents of Eastern European origin. I am sure for them it feels important. There's no place like home.
A Redditor explains:

tinglevibestoo I listened to a former CIA agent talk about Ukraine the other day. He said that Ukraine is running out of time. It's not that they don't have the weapons. We've sent them a ton of weapons. It's that they don't have enough troops and they're running low on troops. That's how Russia will win. Ukraine can't sustain the manpower. It totally makes sense to use a nuclear false flag as a reason to bring in the extra manpower. Everyone would deem it justified too because it's a threat to the neighboring nations and it'd be an environmental (climate change) catastrophe.

Teixeira leaks

Some will bring up the US intelligence leaks by Jack Teixeira to support the idea that Russia rather than Ukraine is desperate. Unlike Snowden, Teixeiera was obviously a major security risk for patriotically-motivated leaking, with numerous red flags in his previous and ongoing behavior. Therefore Teixeira was probably a deliberate leak by US intelligence, using a patsy to generate the initial leak and then add whatever extra info they wanted released in the resulting confusion.

• Jack Teixeira Wikipedia
• Discord member details how documents leaked from closed chat group Washington Post

Teixeira's leaks served several purposes for the Biden administration:

• Allowed the mainstream media to walk back their false forecasts of Ukrainian victory.
• Provided a right-wing scapegoat for Ukraine's defeat.
• Justified increased social media monitoring and censorship.

Most importantly, it mitigated the potential political fallout from another catastrophe like Kabul, should Kiev fall.
The 4chan leaker BB/Inb4source asserts Teixeira was a patsy.

BRICS vs NATO

The foundation of the US empire is the petrodollar, which allows the USA to tax the world via digital debt seignorage. This is why the creation of BRICS as an independent financial and trading system rendered war between NATO and BRICS inevitable, as Kim Dotcom predicted. The US republic is a thalassocratic empire as arrogant as democratic Athens, and it is addicted to financial plunder. The Empire cannot afford to lose the USD's reserve currency status.
Reserve currencies and empires both have lifespans, and the USA has reached the end of both. It is at the stage where hubristic foreign misadventures prove fatal, and Ukraine and Taiwan will prove too much for the American eagle to handle. This is no longer WW2; the USA cannot win a two-front war against BRICS.

• Gold Reserve Fiat Currencies Monetary Gold
• World Reserve Currencies last on average 100 years. The US dollar has been the reserve currency for 76 years. Satoshi Chris

That is why Biden's NATO is desperate; the Empire is unravelling as the European Union and other allies such as Turkey and India lose their faith in NATO.
The fact that none of this is common knowledge speaks volumes about who controls public schools and owns mass media corporations.

ZNPP's weak point is diesel fuel

The situation at ZNPP is tenuous and grim, workers report:
Europe’s largest nuclear power station is on the frontline of the Ukraine war. SkyNews Twitter
The fact that the backup diesel reactors have not been maintained is particularly concerning, considering they have already been used 7 times.
UN nuclear chief raises alarm over Ukraine’s Zaporizhzhia plant Al Jazeera
Ukraine keeps trying to force a crisis at ZNPP to justify NATO intervention. In other words, Ukraine keeps shelling ZNPP to cut the one power line that still connects it to the grid.

Atlas

This is extremely dangerous, external power is required for reliable cooling of the reactors and pools containing spent nuclear waste. Western media spent months last year pretending Kiev wasn’t shelling ZNPP.
Notice that the Russian side keeps ZNPP connected to the power grid, while the Ukrainian side pretends it cannot until the Russian invasion ends:

• Update 153 – IAEA Director General Statement on Situation in Ukraine 2023 April 13
• Update 159 – IAEA Director General Statement on Situation in Ukraine 2023 May 22
• Russian nuclear terrorism in action: ZNPP switches to emergency generators for the 7th time Ukrainian World Congress
• Kiev blocked all IAEA’s initiatives on ZNPP security — Russian Foreign Ministry
• Grossi says Zaporizhzhia principles 'step in right direction' IAEA

As you can see, Ukraine is not interested in being reasonable. Russia is happy to leave the NPP free of heavy military equipment, but Ukraine demands the removal of all troops and landmines from ZNPP as well. That would leave the plant undefended, which is obviously unacceptable.
(This is how perverse incentives work. A little ally with nothing to lose can start a world war. It's almost like dividing the world into two hostile nuclear alliances is a bad idea.)
When ZNPP loses external power, huge diesel generators automatically switch on to keep the reactors cool. How much diesel does this consume? Truckloads per day:

Anonymous Sat 27 May 2023 05:18:50 No.428439721 Report Quoted By: >>428463646 428436425 Still easy to transport diesel enough to keep them going In what? If NATO ops and Mercs are sabotaging trucks coming in, what do you think they are gonna carry diesel in to the plant? Is Russia gonna pack in rotopack Jerry cans on their back. Fill a truck up with 5 gallon cans and hope they make it past the snipers and sabotage? Do you have any clue how much fuel those big generators suck down in a day? Those generators to run the plants during shut down or failures are huge 500kw or bigger they are the size of whole 18 wheeler trailers. Those things will drink 50 gallons an hour. You gonna haul in 2.5 gallon rotopacks one at a time to keep it going?

Nuclear power plants have tough shielding. Allegedly the diesel generators are hidden underground. However, the diesel fuel supply is still vulnerable.
Normally the diesel generators have enough fuel for 10 days. However, ZNPP's diesel stockpile recently dipped to 4 days, according to 4chan leaker Inb4source.

Ukrainian saboteurs caught by ZNPP

On May 27, Ukraine accused Russian of planning to cause a leak at ZNPP:

OSINTdefender The Main Directorate of Intelligence for Ukraine has announced that the Russian Military is preparing for Large-Scale Provocation in the coming hours at the Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Plant in Southern Ukraine that will reportedly Simulate an “Accident” at the Plant causing the Emergency Leak of Radioactive Substances which will be Blamed on Ukrainian Forces.

Then Russia announced it had caught saboteurs (presumably Ukrainian) in ZNPP's city:

Saboteurs who were preparing terrorist attacks on the NPP were detained in Energodar. They had with them maps and schematics of the nuclear power plant with marks for strikes that could lead to a nuclear catastrophe. The suspects are involved in collecting and transmitting information about the facilities of the Zaporozhye NPP on the instructions of the Ukrainian authorities. To communicate with the curators, they used foreign satellite systems, as well as foreign weapons for strikes and equipment for conducting reconnaissance and sabotage activities.

• Translated source message is from Telegram group Slavyangrad Chat.
• Original source message is in Russian from Telegram group WarDonbass, sent May 28 at 23:12.

Enerhodar is the city that contains the ZNPP: See Enerhodar Wikipedia
Some object that the footage is "staged". Of course it is staged. The primary consumer of the helmet-cam footage is Russian military intelligence. The evidence shot was staged for their benefit. The short edited video that was released to the public has distorted voices, and avoids showing any faces. Thus even if the footage is authentic, it is still "staged".
The ZNPP maps displayed in the video don't appear to match the announcement text. The maps could simply show where diesel fuel trucks need to go. Russia does not wish to advertise the specific nature of ZNPP's vulnerability.
The saboteurs appear to be 3-man team, equipped with 3 rifles and 3 NLAW missile launchers.
The saboteurs had 5 frag grenades. Normally soldiers carry 2 or 3 grenades, but heavy weapons soldiers don't have to. The three smooth grenades are RGD-5s, a cheap outdated Russian model. The Russian troops removed the fuses from the grenades on the evidence table to avoid unpleasant surprises.
Some object that Ukrainian saboteurs wouldn't be so careless as to have printouts of the reactor map. However, the saboteurs' presence in Enerhodar already makes their target obvious. Presumably multiple teams were sent to intercept Russian diesel shipments.
The Enerhodar saboteurs would've been notified when satellites spotted their target. Until then, they should hide in the safehouse behind blackout curtains to avoid detection. The fact that these saboteurs were caught napping suggests a degree of incompetence, compared to other teams who presumably either avoided detection or fought back. One can assume that Ukrainian specops have suffered extreme casualties.

BB / Red Skull / Inb4source / Q

BB sent Q

Qanon has lost a tremendous amount of popularity, as patriots grew disillusioned with the slow pace of the promised Great Awakening. They did not understand that Q is subordinate to a higher power with an agenda that does not necessarily include their survival.
Q aimed to help Trump save the USA. Q was sent by "Burning Bush", whose agenda is judging humanity, on the eve of WW3 and runaway de-terraforming. BB's personas started posting to 4chan's pol by 2016, whereas Q started in October 2017. (4chan is like the wild west of the Web: The world's spooks congregate there to exchange intelligence.)
BB goes by several nicknames; he began posting anonymously as "Inb4source" in 2016. A recent message implies the USA/Israel is Babylon the Great, and God (meaning him) has returned to judge her:

The world has turned it's back on *od now *od Is turning His back on the world. He Who Lets has been REMOVED. THE ANGEL OF DEATH HAS COME THE HARVEST OF THE TARES HAS BEGUN. And after these things I saw another angel come down from heaven, having great power; and the earth was lightened with his glory. (Earthquake Lights) And he cried mightily with a strong voice, saying, Babylon the great is fallen, is fallen, and is become the habitation of devils, and the hold of every foul spirit, and a cage of every unclean and hateful bird. For all nations have drunk of the wine of the wrath of her fornication, and the kings of the earth have committed fornication with her, and the merchants of the earth are waxed rich through the abundance of her delicacies. And I heard another voice from heaven, saying, Come out of her, my people, that ye be not partakers of her sins, and that ye receive not of her plagues. For her sins have reached unto heaven, and God hath remembered her iniquities. Reward her even as she rewarded you, and double unto her double according to her works: in the cup which she hath filled fill to her double. How much she hath glorified herself, and lived deliciously, so much torment and sorrow give her: for she saith in her heart, I sit a queen, and am no widow, and shall see no sorrow. (nothing ever happens) Therefore shall her plagues come in one day, death, and mourning, and famine; and she shall be utterly burned with fire: for strong is the Lord God who judgeth her. And the kings of the earth, who have committed fornication and lived deliciously with her, shall bewail her, and lament for her, when they shall see the smoke of her burning, inb4source

BB claims responsibility for the historical pendulum swinging rightward, via figures such as Elon Musk. His method of influence is the butterfly effect.
"Burning Bush" claims to be God. One can think of him as the God of the Old Testament, or as a pagan god like Zeus, or as merely a transcendent extraterrestrial. However, he also claims to inhabit a human-looking body, lives on a ranch in the USA, has children, caught COVID19, etc.
Whatever one's theology, the relevant portion of BB's message is that the USA did not sufficiently embrace the opportunity offered by Q. Anyone who has read the Old Testament knows what happens next: Ignore the prophet, reap the consequences. Thus Q's slogan "Nothing Can Stop What Is Coming" should be understood in the Biblical sense, like Noah's flood: The Ark is optional.
(As far as I know, Q is still posting to Truth Social. I don't follow that site.)
Paul Furber is the chief priest of BB. Before that, he was a major early proponent of Q. See Furber's book for many verifiable examples of fulfilled predictions and proven scoops.
BB normally identifies himself by the unique image hash of his burning bush picture. (Nobody can generate that hash unless they possess the original image.) However, BB also posts as an anon users nickname "Red Skull", for his signature images of red skulls. As Red Skull, BB avoids the extravagant Biblical claims of BB, but the style and modus operandi and interests are obviously the same – as are his implied godlike powers.
I recommend focusing on facts and trying to prevent nuclear WW3, rather than getting hung up on theology. BB is not asking anyone to worship him or sacrifice chickens. He does prescribe prayer and a life of action governed by virtue.
I certainly do not recommend taking everything anonymous spooks say at face value. If you are, like most people, unable to think in shades of gray between binary true and false, this essay is above your reading level.

BB warns Zaporizhia is pivotal

BB has repeatedly warned that keeping Zaporizhia intact is critical to the survival of NATO citizenry:

the Ukrainians attacking the Nuclear Power station in the hands of the Russians spewing radiation over enough territory that the Russians will turn Kiev into a furnace.

– BB 2022-9-24
Find other warnings by searching for keyword "nuclear".
Those who find it difficult to believe that nuclear weapons would be used in WW3 as in WW2 should note that COVID19 is already a bioweapon WMD deployed for WW3.

RS gives ZNPP sabotage warning

On the morning of May 27, BB's persona Red Skull leaked that NATO specops had sabotaged external power to ZNPP.
His scenario is plausible and severe enough to warrant investigation.
Here are relevant posts, datestamped 2023 May 27 0300-0500:

it's a little less than ten days… Until Nato SpecOps melt down the Uke Nuke plant and blames it on you.

He continues:

Nato SpecOps have sabotaged power to the nuke plant. As of this posting, 6 days of diesel fuel remain to provide power to pumps to cool the plant and spent fuel pool. Diesel shipments are being targeted and terminated.

He adds:

So now I need to tell you Russia intends a pre emptive strike if nuclear capable F16's are delivered.

On the evening of May 27, Red Skull updated:

Doesn't look good at Nuke Plant. Russia has 4 days to get more fuel to the generators. They are working on clearing a flight path. Ukraine will try to stop them on orders of U.S. Uniparty.

Sounds like a severe leak, to lose 2 days of fuel in under 24 hours.

Ukraine HVT: Nuclear tit for tat

On 28 May Red Skull asserted that:

• Ukraine just did an underground nuclear bomb test in a borehole, to contain the radiation.
• Russia may retaliate with a pre-emptive strike at any time, against 1-2 high-value targets.
• West Ukraine may be reduced to the stone-age.

Red Skull approved of this anon's summary:

Nuclear warheads that USA/UK sent. Specifically for the purpose of being exploded in Ukraine. The false flags will never stop until all out WW3 is declared, or until you root out the pedophile demon cult that is running the show and sending you monkeys to war. War for really no good reason at this point. The cities are destroyed, just withdraw. Ukraine is a kettle right now, a kill box. Do you understand what that means? And it was created on purpose.

On May 30, Putin announced that Russia had destroyed the Ukrainian military intelligence headquarters. Photos confirm the damage.

• Putin confirms strike on Ukrainian military intelligence HQ RT
• Putin Strikes Back - Destroys GUR Bunker? Simplicius

Intelligence chief Kyrylo Oleksiyovych Budanov may have died in the strike.

Inb4source / Red Skull 4chan posting history

Inb4source has posted on 4chan since 2016, but he doesn't always use an image hash identifier, making it impossible to verify the identity of all of his early posts. As his popularity grew, others began adopting his catchphrase ">inb4source".
18016 posts on pol contain ">inb4source".
The first page of results suggests Inb4source is a pro-Trump military intelligence officer. He began posting in Aug 2016, before Trump's inauguration.
Another early Inb4source catchphrase is "I AM The Source." This has a double meaning, both theological and journalistic.
The catchphrase doesn't appear in every Inb4source post. Searching for it yields 437 results, too many of which are irrelevant results.
Searching for both phrases together yields 50 results that look to be mostly legitimate. One could then search for additional posts by each unique ID from a session.
Searching for image hashes is a reliable method of ID verification, assuming no one else has the image. I know of two such images that Inb4source/BB uses: both are red skulls, giving him the nickname RS.

• 325 results
• 314 results

RS just announced that his devices (phone, computers) have been compromised, casting doubt on the legitimacy of future RS posts. This may be a response to my publication of his warnings regarding Zaporizhia onto Reddit and Gab; the timing is suspicious. I first mentioned Inb4source on Reddit 7 days ago, and Red Skull on Gab yesterday (as of morning June 3). I do not know of any other analysts writing about him or connecting him to his BB persona.
When evaluating his warnings and predictions, remember that publishing info about ongoing events can affect the outcome, and is often intended to do so. Unlike the concept of Biblical prophecy, the future is mostly probabilistic. However, he is certainly good at scooping the news.
Someone else can do an in-depth Q-proof style analysis of his accuracy; my focus here is Zaporizhia.
Read original with links here.

It’s not as simple as it sounds and this is a very long story. I’m sorry.
Back story:
When I was 12 I decided that I liked girls. I had been in 3 relationships with girls by the time I was 13. When I was 13 my older half brother from my dads previous rendezvous before he met my mother decided to come live with us. He was 17 at the time and thought it would be funny to out me to my parents. My dads side of the family I have two lesbian aunts and one gay uncle so I grew up around it my whole life but it’s a lifestyle my mom and dad never approved of. My moms side of the family my grandma was heavy into Christianity. Like every morning waking us up to put “holy oil” crosses on our foreheads and on things around the house while she prayed and Sunday’s were for church and church only. So when my mom and dad found out I was a lesbian my dad was pissed and my mom was shameful of me. At 12 wasn’t my first time having feelings for a girl. From age 5 to 8 my uncle who was a drug dealer gangster player was my babysitter. My mom and dad would drop me off with him at 6am and wouldn’t come back for me until 6pm. Neighborhood hood rats were always coming in and out of his home and I remember one caught my eye. I was 6 and I called her a hot sexy mama and my mom slapped the shit out of me. Few years pass and one of my lesbian aunts had gotten with a new girl and I had the hugest crush on her always wanting to be by her and hold her hand. So anyway there’s a backstory not sure if it matters.
Skip to me 27 years old and two kids and in a 6 year relationship with a man. I haven’t been with any girls since I was 13 and my parents found out and flipped out about it. I’ve only ever had one friend and that’s my best friend who I’ve known since I was 11. So my parents know I have no friends or anyone I get to see or hang out with often. I started working at Amazon and I met this masc fem. We instantly clicked not in a romantic way. I admit I did have a crush but I’m 27 years old in a 6 year relationship with two kids and haven’t had anything to do with a woman sexually since I was 13. Me and this girl were like crazy identical in personalities, things we liked, movies, shows, music we liked and our friendship of only 3 months felt like we knew each other our whole lives. We always worked together at work and maybe once a week after work we would go grab something to eat and would occasionally hang out outside of work. It was all innocent and would just be us goofing around the whole time and talking about similar situations we been through in life or with our families. She met my kids and my boyfriend and he didn’t care whatsoever. He was just happy that I made a friend which is very hard for me to do and that I was getting out of my comfort zone. My parents didn’t like it but didn’t tell me in the beginning. 3 months pass and one day they start accusing me of sleeping with her and that I’m cheating on my family with her so I quit my job at the drop of a dime and blocked her and another girl we both were friends with at work. Haven’t talked to her since. I am diagnosed with depression, anxiety, and ptsd so usually when my family start coming down on me I shut down completely and basically go into a hole where I will hide for days or weeks. I went back to work at Amazon but this time a different warehouse and the other girl me and my lesbian friend were friends with ended up getting in contact with me again and it made me miss them both but more so my masc fem friend because we were so close and so much alike. I want to unblock her and start talking to her again but I’m scared to because what if she doesn’t respond or she hates me or thinks I hated her for just blocking her and never seeing or talking to her again. Should I reach out?

It’s not as simple as it sounds and this is a very long story. I’m sorry.
Back story:
When I was 12 I decided that I liked girls. I had been in 3 relationships with girls by the time I was 13. When I was 13 my older half brother from my dads previous rendezvous before he met my mother decided to come live with us. He was 17 at the time and thought it would be funny to out me to my parents. My dads side of the family I have two lesbian aunts and one gay uncle so I grew up around it my whole life but it’s a lifestyle my mom and dad never approved of. My moms side of the family my grandma was heavy into Christianity. Like every morning waking us up to put “holy oil” crosses on our foreheads and on things around the house while she prayed and Sunday’s were for church and church only. So when my mom and dad found out I was a lesbian my dad was pissed and my mom was shameful of me. At 12 wasn’t my first time having feelings for a girl. From age 5 to 8 my uncle who was a drug dealer gangster player was my babysitter. My mom and dad would drop me off with him at 6am and wouldn’t come back for me until 6pm. Neighborhood hood rats were always coming in and out of his home and I remember one caught my eye. I was 6 and I called her a hot sexy mama and my mom slapped the shit out of me. Few years pass and one of my lesbian aunts had gotten with a new girl and I had the hugest crush on her always wanting to be by her and hold her hand. So anyway there’s a backstory not sure if it matters.
Skip to me 27 years old and two kids and in a 6 year relationship with a man. I haven’t been with any girls since I was 13 and my parents found out and flipped out about it. I’ve only ever had one friend and that’s my best friend who I’ve known since I was 11. So my parents know I have no friends or anyone I get to see or hang out with often. I started working at Amazon and I met this masc fem. We instantly clicked not in a romantic way. I admit I did have a crush but I’m 27 years old in a 6 year relationship with two kids and haven’t had anything to do with a woman sexually since I was 13. Me and this girl were like crazy identical in personalities, things we liked, movies, shows, music we liked and our friendship of only 3 months felt like we knew each other our whole lives. We always worked together at work and maybe once a week after work we would go grab something to eat and would occasionally hang out outside of work. It was all innocent and would just be us goofing around the whole time and talking about similar situations we been through in life or with our families. She met my kids and my boyfriend and he didn’t care whatsoever. He was just happy that I made a friend which is very hard for me to do and that I was getting out of my comfort zone. My parents didn’t like it but didn’t tell me in the beginning. 3 months pass and one day they start accusing me of sleeping with her and that I’m cheating on my family with her so I quit my job at the drop of a dime and blocked her and another girl we both were friends with at work. Haven’t talked to her since. I am diagnosed with depression, anxiety, and ptsd so usually when my family start coming down on me I shut down completely and basically go into a hole where I will hide for days or weeks. I went back to work at Amazon but this time a different warehouse and the other girl me and my lesbian friend were friends with ended up getting in contact with me again and it made me miss them both but more so my masc fem friend because we were so close and so much alike. I want to unblock her and start talking to her again but I’m scared to because what if she doesn’t respond or she hates me or thinks I hated her for just blocking her and never seeing or talking to her again. Should I reach out?

so basically this time last year I had a situationship that lasted like 3 months, it was actually pretty great for the 1st month and then he started getting distant, in the end he tells me he’s just not happy with himself and he ends things and ghosts me. fast forward a little I get into a relationship and he unblocks me and starts to view my stories but that’s it, I block him back bc obvi my relationship. That relationship ends it’s been like a month now that I’ve been single. He’s (situation) been viewing my stories almost every day for the last month, he reached out to me last week about something unrelated and then we got into the topic of him buying me a amusement park pass, I tell him thank you and he blindsided me with “you’re gonna have to pay me back lol” and I responded as I think anyone would and reminded him he had said it was for me to keep & that you don’t re pay a gift. He said that was then & this is now which caught me off gaurd really bc it was never discussed to pay him back, I tell him he’s crazy he tells me he has a deal for me I buy a,b & c and it’ll be an even trade. I ask if he’s serious he said “game is game what can I say” I’ve gotten multiple opinions on it saying one he was flirting didn’t know how to go about it, another says he’s just seeing what he can get out of me & lastly he just seems bothered and mad. But I’m not sure how to take any of it? We haven’t spoken since then & he continues to watch my story. Anything ? (I’m 20 F he’s 21 going to be 22 M!)

Hello y'all, I've been playing a TON of DD2 since its full release, and I've spent a lot of that time fighting the lair bosses to figure out what works well against them, and what doesn't. I wanted to share what my experience has been so that anyone who's been struggling against a particular boss (like the Leviathan, damn its soul if it has one) might be able to glean some extra info to help them. Bosses are broken up by section for ease of reading, and I've also made two videos outlining the same points if you prefer to listen rather than read. They're linked below. Spoilers for boss mechanics and whatnot of course follow. Also apologies if formatting gets messed up, this is a long one.
- Dreaming General + Librarian
- Leviathan + Harvest Child
DREAMING GENERAL
Tangle boss. Takes up the first three rows of his arena, with the fourth row taken up by a targetable, but indestructible, Taproot.
Cadaver Type. Size three enemy, front three rows.
Taproot. Indestructible, size 1 back row.
205 HP
ATTACKS AND MECHANICS
The only mechanic in this fight revolves around the Taproot, which will slowly try to constrict your party over the course of the battle. Upon entering the fight, it’ll add a “Growth” token to each member of the party. Every round, it’ll add another to two random party members, maxing out at three total tokens per character. Once they reach three, the character will be bound, gaining a “Strangle” token and having their actions restricted to using the encounter specific “Whispering Darkness.” This attack inflicts stress on the rest of the party, and must be used whenever a bound hero takes their turn.
Every time an attack hits the Taproot, one stack of Growth is removed from a random hero. This means, to remove all the growth the root creates each turn, you have to hit it twice a turn. You can use damaging attacks, debuffs like Blinding Gas, combat items, whatever. The issue is that hitting the root twice triggers a new attack, “The Soil Stirs.” This marks two ranks of your formation to be attacked on the following turn, causing massive damage to the heroes it hits. This is the case even if you hit the Root once over multiple turns; the second hit it takes will trigger the attack if it didn’t already have it prepared, regardless. If all heroes wind up bound "Nightmare" is used, hitting the party for big damage and releasing them.
General also uses "Unsettling Whispers" to inflict damage and stress on the target.
Waking Dead and Nightmare ignore Stealth, Dodge, Blind and Taunt.
PARTY AND STRATEGY
Plague Doctor, Flagellant, Grave Robber, Occultist and Runaway are all good for DOTs, debuffs, and hitting the Taproot.
Hellion is good for boss damage and hitting the Taproot via Iron Swan. Highwayman also works for this
Vestal is good for healing and Consecrations since this is a longer fight.
Minimizing the "Waking Dead" triggers the boss gets is vital. Start the fight by applying DOTs to the boss, buffing, dealing damage, etc. hit the Taproot ONCE on Round 2. Now the next attack will trigger "Waking Dead." Continue dealing damage and prepping. Round 3, go wild on the Taproot. multi rank DOT attacks, combat items, single target attacks, all that. You'll remove the max amount of growth without triggering multiple Waking Dead multiple times. Repeat until death.
LIBRARIAN
Sprawl boss. When you enter the fight, The Librarian will be hiding in rank 4 behind three stacks of books of varying health values.
Fanatic type. Size 1 enemy, starts in back row.
116 HP
ATTACKS AND MECHANICS
The major mechanic to look out for here is the Librarian’s Page BurneBurning Bright combo. Each turn, he will burn one of the stacks of books he’s hiding behind using Page Burner, taking off a chunk of its HP. When he destroys one this way, his next attack will be Burning Bright, a party wide AOE attack that deals big damage, potentially inflicting Burn on everyone hit, AND giving the boss a dodge token. If all books are destroyed boss will Ignite, gaining HP and Speed and proceeding to use Burning Bright THREE TIME A TURN, which will kill the party in short order.
“Mandatory Reading,” a single target health damage attack that burns and causes stress as well.
“Categorize” that shuffles the party.
“Burnout” which will push the boss back behind his books if you pull him forward, dealing damage and burning the front row and giving him two dodge tokens
“Smokestack” which gives a single target 2 blind tokens, a vulnerable token, and grants the boss a dodge token.
PARTY AND STRATEGY
Plague Doctor for DOTs and burn removal, Grave Robber and Flagg for more Blight, Highwayman for damage and Dodge removal, all of whom have rank flexible damage.
Jester and Man-at-Arms for repositioning after Categorize.
LEPER BAD, BIG SAD.
Healing is low priority since the fight is on a timer, bring blind removal with skills and milk soaked linens to keep damage up.
THE HARVEST CHILD
Boss of the Foetor. A disgusting cornucopia child who makes my skin crawl. Enters the fight with two Fetid meat piles
Plague Eater type. Size two enemy, back two rows.
120 HP
Fetid Meat, front two rows.
ATTACKS AND MECHANICS
The signature mechanic of this fight is the “Hunger” token, a debuff that can be applied to your heroes when they’re attacked by the meat piles that accompany the Child. If they do not resist, an afflicted hero will receive a hunger token, and on their next turn they will be forced to move a rank forward before they can act. If a hero is under the influence of one of these tokens when they move to the front line, they will be forced to use the “Feed the Hunger” skill. Not only does this use the heroes' turn, it also causes them to lose a chunk of max HP for the rest of the combat! Probably because they contract like 5 different diseases and 8 different parasites from eating this.
The Child will move forward through the fight using two attacks.
"Sapid Drippings" to blight your backline.
"Tantalizing Tidbit" to inflict stress.
Uses "Maws of Life" when in the front, inflicting huge damage to your front two heroes, applying bleed to them, and then moving it to the back row to start all over again.
PARTY AND STRATEGY
Movement effects are key here. Jester, Grave Robber, Man-at-Arms and Hellion all work for this. Can move hungry characters back, and some characters like MaA and Hellion can immobilize themselves to prevent others from moving forward and using "Feed the Hunger." Relevant skills are "Hold the Line" and "Toe to Toe" respectively. Hunger token is also a debuff, so high debuff resist characters like Poet Leper can be good here.
So long as you can handle all the in-battle movement, there’s no real specific heroes or attacks you need to worry about using for damage. Pretty much anything goes, although packing some bleed attacks can be nice as the Child’s bleed resist is quite low. Jester is the best for all of this, but Highwayman's dodges and ripostes, as well as Leper's Chops are good for damage phases as well.
For healing, there's plenty of bleed and blight as as always Plague Doctor is quite solid. Vestal's dot removal isn't AS good IMO, but there's something to be said for consecrations effecting the front rank over multiple turns, potentially buffing squishies who get pulled to the front by hunger.
As far as the Child is concerned, any attacks that can anchor it or the meat piles will prevent it from nibbling on your gibblets; after all, if it can’t get in bitin’ range, what’s it supposed to do? I’m a particular fan of the bear trap item to immobilize a member of the enemy party, but any such effect can get the job done. Just don't kill the meat, as if the Child is in the frontline it will ALWAYS use "Maws of Life" afaik.
Really, the Child is a more intimidating fight than it is challenging. Once you have a grasp of the mechanics it’s quite manageable, so long as you come prepared to deal with party shuffles. That’s probably why I always hated it in the Early Access period; I was far less accepting of such strategies in the past, and didn’t often account for them in my builds.
THE LEVIATHAN
Shroud boss. Here it is, the biggest boi himself, the Leviathan. This is the one I've struggled with by far the most. Takes up the front two rows at first, until it summons its hand, which takes the front two rows and moves the boss to the back two rows.
Fisherfolk type. Size two enemy. Shifts between front and back two rows.
155 HP
Hand. First two rows.
24 HP
ATTACKS AND MECHANICS
The main mechanic of this battle revolves around the Leviathans hand. While not present at the start of the battle, it will quickly be summoned by the boss when it uses its “Deep Rising” attack. While the hand can be killed, it will return the next time the boss uses "Deep Rising."
“Eyes of the Storm” Boss will damage and mark two heroes, causing the hand to attempt to grab one of them on its next action with its "Undertow" attacks, holding them under the water. This causes damage to HP and Stress until it is destroyed.
"Batter" causes the hand to pummel a marked hero, dealing moderate damage and potentially shuffling them while inflicting stress.
"Breath of the Sea." Used at the start of any round when the hand isn’t on the field, this attack blinds, inflicts vulnerable tokens, and stresses the whole party. Debuffs as always can be resisted.
"Tidal Surge" damages the entire party, inflicts stress, can apply barnacles that inflict bleed when moving ranks, and has a chance to inflict the "Algan Bloom" disease as a little parting gift. Because WHY NOT RIGHT?
"Deep Rising" will be used to re-summon the hand shortly after it has been destroyed.
There’s a lot going on here, to be sure, more than any other Lair boss in the game.
PARTY AND STRATEGY
Ripping this section wholesale from my script because it's important
"Mitigating the Grab"
The absolute key factor at play here, is maximizing your move resist, and being able to burst down the Hand. The “Undertow” attack which it will use to abduct a hero can be avoided with move resist; once you hit 100%, it literally can’t grab you even though it will try. To make use of this, the Sergeant Path Man at Arms and the Poet Path Leper are excellent candidates. As front line tanks, they can take the punishment that they’re likely to receive from the Leviathan’s various attacks, and they largely mitigate the scariest part of the battle.
Each of these lads has their own advantages and disadvantages; the Man at Arms can use defender to cover the second hero to get marked, making it impossible for the Hand to grab anyone. However, his damage is low, and he requires outside support for healing and stress reduction. On the flip side, the Leper has good damage, and phenomenal self healing and stress reduction, freeing up the rest of the party to deal boss damage. However, he can’t cover the other marked hero as Undertow ignores taunt, so you’ll likely need to spend some time beating the Hand down and rescuing your allies. Poet also doesn’t give an automatic +100% move resist, so you’ll need to rely on outside buffs and the bonus from Withstand to get you there. With these factors in mind, I feel the Sergeant MaA slightly edges out Poet Leper here since he completely negates the grab mechanic, but the choice is yours. Keep in mind as well, that even if you DO prevent the grab, it can still be worth it to kill the Hand periodically to keep it from hammering on marked heroes.
"Damage and Healing"
As for the rest of the party, your options are pretty open so long as you’re keeping the Hand under control. The Leviathan is susceptible to DOTs, as are most bosses, although its bleed resist is higher than the others. You will be suffering a lot of damage in this fight, so a strong healer is a must; I like the Vestal here, as she can buff the frontline tank with her consecrations, slap the hand or the boss with Judgement, and throw out big heals when needed. There also aren’t any major DOTs to worry about clearing off your party so the PD isn’t as useful for healing, tho her Blight is good for the boss. Runaway can also be a nice pick thanks to rank flexible burns and Cauterize healing when you’re made to bleed by barnacles. Jester is a good pickup thanks to his stress heals, ability to move shuffled heroes back into position if they get Battered, and Slice Off can actually inflict good bleed with Jester’s resist piercing and Vulnerability application when upgraded. Finally, the Occultist deserves a mention with his potential for big heals, and his hexes also weakening and applying Vulnerable to the boss.
I still haven't beaten this boss without my party in shambles, but something I’m going to try on my next attempt is this; Sergeant Man at Arms, Poet Leper, Virtuoso Jester and Seraph Vestal. With this, you’ll have two maxed out move resist heroes to nullify the Hand, bleed DOTs and Vulnerability to chip the boss down, plenty of healing across the whole party, buffs, stress reduction, the works. Will it work? Who knows, but it’s worth a shot.
Which Lair to Clear?
This is a tough question. While yes, I would say that The Dreaming General is by far the easiest of these bosses to take down in general, the Leviathan is by far the hardest, and the Librarian and Harvest Child lie somewhere in the middle, the real issue lies with the boss of the confession that you’re on, and what team comp you’re planning on running to get to it. A team could be great at dealing with The Leviathan but be terrible at fighting the Seething Sigh, for example. So this is a decision you’ll have to make for yourself. I'm still working on Confession 3, so my Leviathan or Harvest Child teams may be the way to go for movement, but more testing is warranted.
Thanks for reading/watching y'all. I hope my thoughts and observations are helpful to someone out there. I'm totally open to feedback as well, if there's something I'm missing about a fight or a hero that's good/bad for something that I got wrong let me know. I'm still learning myself.
Be good to each other!

Killing enemies in one hit feels amazing. Knowing that a single mistake can kill you at any moment is thrilling. But, there are two glaring issues that ruin my fun: unblockable attacks and boss fights.
Getting sniped by a super battle Droid's poorly-telegraphed unblockable blaster bolt while in the middle of a duel with 3 other melee opponents is incredibly frustrating. It feels unfair, and simply is not fun. Melee attacks and blaster bolts should never be unblockable. This should be solely relegated to explosives and heavy objects being thrown at you.
As for boss fights, they end too quickly and are extremely underwhelming. I saw someone recommend making it more like Sekiro where the boss blocks basically every attack, and the entire point is to destroy their posture and perform a finishing blow. That would be way more fun and thematically perfect for Star Wars.
It's honestly impressive how close they came to greatness with an endgame reward perk that's basically an afterthought. So few changes would be needed to perfect it.

My best friend for 7 years and I got in a fight. I didn’t text him for 2 days, bcs he usually needs time to process the problem, but I couldn’t wait for more and texted him a couple of times. He was answering annoyingly, but at least he was answering. A week after the fight (we hadn’t seen each other and we hadn’t discussed anything) I got mad bcs nothing had changed. I told him that I’m done and he immediately showed interest. However I stopped texting him for another 4 days. Then I texted him a week ago and offended him. Right then he blocked me on social media, except on WhatsApp. I spammed him there and 3 days later he replied but said he’s not sure he wants to still be friends with me. I begged him to unblock me so that I can show him that I will change my bad habits (I understand I made mistakes and apologised many times) but he only said - I’ll see if I’ll unblock you. That was a week ago and nothing has changed. I don’t know what to do, I’m starting to lose it because I feel like he won’t talk to me ever again and I don’t want that to happen. What do you guys think about the situation - will he text me or is it a lost cause?
Tl; dr - my best friend isn’t talking to me, what should I do

The just-announced polymorph change is fixing the wrong thing. No-acc champions landing Polymorph on high-res champions isn't the problem. Madame and Ramantu will still get wrecked because they don't have room to stack much resist, and now Taras and Siphi have even fewer weaknesses.
Generally, the effect of a blessing is comparable to or weaker than skills or set bonuses, especially in PvP. At 6*, Crushing Rend is slightly stronger than a Cruel set. 6* Intimidating Presence is equivalent to a couple speed glyphs. 6* Iron Will is like a Stalwart set except restricted to far fewer attacks. 6* Lightning Cage is a Protection set that only protects one buff. 6* Phantom Touch is still weaker than Warmaster. Even in PvE, Brimstone brings less damage to a team than any actual damage dealer.
The issue is that the effect of Polymorph is just wildly overpowered. Imagine if Brimstone got the following changes:

• Damage is doubled from 25% to 50%.
• No internal cooldown.
• No limit to 1 debuff at a time.
• Has a minimum 3% chance to go off on your turn even if you try to avoid the trigger by not using an active skill.
• The damage goes off before the skill, instead of after. If it kills you, the skill is cancelled and has no effect.
• When Brimstone lands, it removes all buffs, including protected buffs, and this buff removal cannot be blocked.
• It also removes any ally protect buffs or provoke debuffs on other champions, again including even protected buffs.
• It also applies an unblockable protected 2-turn stun.
• And just for good measure, it applies an unblockable protected 2-turn Block Passive Skills debuff.

Does this sound unreasonable? It should, and yet what I've just described is Polymorph. The problem isn't that this should need accuracy, it's that this is wildly far above the power curve for what almost anything should ever be able to do, much less a blessing which is supposed to merely supplement a champion's kit without overshadowing it. Ramantu, the game's capstone legendary champion whose specialty and claim to fame is removing buffs and blocking passives, does so less effectively than a blessing.
Remove the buff strip, the passive skill block, have champions come out of Polymorph at full health, and make low-rank Polymorph cleansable, and it would still be an insanely powerful blessing that is very effective against strippers and debuffers, it just wouldn't swing entire matches on a single proc and make half the skills in the game into a liability.

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) 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 ); 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 (thank you to Powman_7 for the link).
• 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.

my partner broke up with her ex of 3 years last 2021 and 3 months after that, we started talking. in that span of 3 months, she still has contact w her bec on the 1st month after they broke up, that ex visited her for days and slept together in the same room. i just know that something else happened there since they were both alone in the same room, even though they've already broken up.
her ex kept on sending her emails and texts telling her that that ex misses her after they've broken up. it didn't really matter to me that time bec we were still just casually talking tho im already developing some sort of fondness on my partner that time.
few months after that, we became together and that ex still messages her. my RJ started to develop when my partner and I are together for a couple of months and her ex messaged her a "happy 4th anniversary" then few hours after that, that ex found out that my partner and I are together and messaged her bestfriend and family confirming if she rly has a new one, she also kept telling them that "good for her she found a new one already and has moved on that quick." and personally dmed her if she's been talking to me before they even broke up. (painting me like a third party but the truth is they've already broken up months before we started talking)
my RJ got worse when that ex still messaged my partner knowing that we're already together telling her to unblock each other on their socials although my partner refused to do so bec there's no point in doing that and she wanted to burn bridges. i got provoked bec my partner told me that that ex is disrespecting her boundaries so i messaged that ex telling them to back off.
now, my partner and i are almost in a one year relationship and i just can't help but ruminate on that moment where she slept with that ex after they've already broken up, thats why she kept on telling me before that she felt guilty bec she's the reason why that ex kept on reaching out to her.
i also saw that ex's ig acc and they have their former endearment with my partner on their bio and im just so pissed, irritated, and annoyed idk what to do w all the annoyance that i feel, i just wish they move on and let go, it's already been almost 2 yrs that they've broken up and my RJ keeps on coming back maybe bec that ex is still in love w my partner. even tho my partner's always giving me assurance and i feel that she is deeply in love w me and she told me im gonna be her last. my partner also never replied to that ex and blocked them on all socials and has nothing to do w that ex.
im just so pissed to her ex idk what to do. it also triggers my RJ and mental movies. any advice pls?
tldr: my partner broke up w her ex of 3 yrs and had sex w that ex when that ex visited her to win her back and that ex kept on sending her emails and texts telling her how much that ex misses her and that ex didn't stop reaching out to her even tho they know we're already together. my partner's over with that ex and loves me deeply and always assures me but im just pissed that the ex can't move on with her and kept on annoying her, that ex triggers my RJ and mental movies. need words of advice or anything pls :<

Obviously spoilers lie ahead for those who have not yet had a chance to listen to LIBAD.

1. Game Over: the album starts out almost as a classic A7X album - much in the vein of Critical Acclaim - but obviously from here it only spirals deeper into chaos and madness. To be honest I didn't think much of this song, but that's okay as it serves its purpose as an intentionally misleading opener.
   
2. Mattel: This song is stylistically similar to the first in that it has elements of the more classic A7X sound, though I personally preferred this one. It has a nice mix of heaviness and harmonic interest, in some ways reminding me of old Opeth but with a modern twist on it. Once again not the greatest track, though it does a good job of setting up the expectation for the remainder of the album, which will be absolutely knocked down and shattered (trashed, perchance?)
   
3. Nobody: I had heard this song already in March, but it still holds up as a very fine piece of music. The rondo-like form of it carries interest with it and I much appreciate the little episodes between the otherwise repetitive main theme. The outro section is absolutely beautiful, featuring arguably the band's best guitar solo to date.
   
4. We Love You: This is potentially my least favourite song on the album, and that's saying a lot. There's nothing inherently wrong with it but I think it will just take a few more listens to grow on me. I first heard it a few weeks ago and didn't really enjoy it that much then, either. However the album only gets better from here.
   
5. Cosmic: Absolutely wonderful - I understand now why the band had previously said that they were influenced by Kanye West, and while the influence is fairly subtle, it definitely shows in the last section of this song which is fairly reminiscent of songs from My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy, like Runaway for example.
   
6. Beautiful Morning: This was quite a fun one I thought. The musical material was interesting and the development of ideas was nice. I believe it was this song in which I remembered hearing a quotation from a much earlier song by the band, but I would need to give it another listen to verify this.
   
7. Easier: Initially this one felt like a continuation of Cosmic, which I am certainly in favour of, although quickly it grew heavier and heavier while still making evident that Kanye West influence. I rather enjoyed this one and can understand why many stated it as their favourite of the album.
   
8. G: This was my favourite. Presumably the first of some kind of 'GOD Trilogy,' it did a fantastic job at absolutely everything it tried. In some ways it reminded me of Dream Theater, but also Rush and Frank Zappa besides many simpler pop artists while still retaining the signature A7X flair. Truly a wonderful piece of music and I can see myself coming back to this many times.
   
9. (O)rdinary: This one caught me completely off guard but once I had regained my footing I was very pleasantly surprised by this track. Initially it reminded me most of Red Hot Chilli Peppers, but once the vocals entered I was reminded more of Daft Punk and Kanye West. This is the first song that I sent to my sister, who first introduced me to this band many years ago, stating that nothing could prepare anyone for what they're about to hear in this song.
   
10. (D)eath: In a way this felt like a perfect complement to the previous two songs in the 'GOD Trilogy;' while the first was eclectic and the second was very rigid, this one is a loose, free and beautifully lyrical exploration of melody to its innermost depths. The way that this followed from the abrupt ending of (O)rdinary was a most wonderful resolution to the contrast that we had just experienced, uniting these three songs into one piece where just one or two movements would be incomplete without the other. Only Avenged Sevenfold could ever take me, in a second, from a club in the city to a musical theatre production and I salute that.
    
11. Life is but a Dream: The finale of this album is truly something special, about as far away stylistically as we could possibly get from the first couple of tracks. The evolution in the sound throughout the album takes us on an existential journey through what feels like hundreds of lifetimes, from the human to the ethereal. The composition is this wondrous blend of classical with jazz, and the piece sits perfectly at the end of this long but fruitful journey. Reaching this point makes you feel a changed man, like you've learned something deep about yourself while in reality you've just spent about 50 minutes listening to a 'heavy metal' album. Or whatever kind of genre you want to incorrectly apply to this experience. That is the power of the band, and of the album.
    

Obviously this is entirely my opinion and no one is going to totally relate. I'd be really interested to hear all of your thoughts though, so please do comment with anything you want to add!

Hello to anyone reading this, me and this guy have a far past, to keep it short and simple, he and I met last year. We’ve never met in person, but I feel as if i will one day marry him, (it sounds crazy, I know) but I practically fell in love with him. The only problem is that he is a major red flag. The following are: 1. He will not follow me on social media whatsoever, I know his social media accounts and he knows mine, I’ve brought this topic up before and he just says he doesn’t want to, yet he follows other people, keep in mind his social media accounts are ALL private and he uses his family as an excuse not to follow me and before anyone says that he probably follows other girls, then it wouldn’t make sense why I couldn’t be one of them, and I know he ain’t the type of person to do that, it’s really strange.

1. He is inconsistent, one day he will say he loves me and the next he will take hours to respond or even days, then he will act like as if nothing happened and he won’t even give me and explanation as to why he did that.
   
2. It’s so difficult to explain, because he says things that sound so true. (it’s either he’s a great manipulator or he’s actually telling the truth) but either way it’s just so difficult to believe him because I lost trust in him, I also mentioned that to him before, and he started victimizing himself because I said I didn’t trust him and that I’d have to regain my trust. ^ the reason why I find it difficult to believe him is because I’ve catfished him before, and it sounds dumb, I know, but I just wanted to see if you would talk to other girls ! ( the point is that he would text the catfish account daily, but when he would text me he would say he was sleeping, or he wouldn’t give me an excuse at all)
   
3. He doesn’t like opening up about his past, I think that there is definitely a certain point where people open up to each other, and it’s been so long, he doesn’t like talking about his past, he is very closed in, and I’ve expressed to him that it’s fine with me if he doesn’t want to talk about his past, but it hurts me knowing that he isn’t willing to confide with me, especially because he says I’m the person he loves. ( his feelings are like this too, he won’t open up and he never will, I’ve talked to him about it before, but he always pushes the conversation away because he thinks I’m trying to “ change him “ when I’m really not. )
   

There’s so much more things I could say, and I don’t want to type a lot lol. But idk what to do, I really, truly love him, I’ve never felt like this about anyone before, and me and him have known each other for a while, but I should mention that out relationship is an on and off thing. I am mostly the one that always ends up texting me, but occasionally he will try contact me, he doesn’t say anything though, he just sends me random videos and songs out of the blue. So, idk what to do, I’ve tried forgetting about him, I’ve tried blocking him, eventually I unblock him and then I text him, I really don’t want to love him because he isn’t a good person to be in. A relationship with, but I really like him, is he my soulmate ? Idk!
Do you think me and him are meant to be together ? And what should I do about the whole situation ? Btw- please give honest opinions and responses( no need to sugar coat btw ) lol

Tl;dr Married ex [30M] unblocked me and called me [27F] several times in the middle of the night years later? It’s long distance, I’m in Europe he’s in America so there’s no way he’s calling for anything physical.
Ex-boyfriend [30M] and I [27F] were once engaged and had a bad break up in 2019. He cheated and told me I deserved it when I found out.
He went on to marry the girl he cheated on me with. It’s been four years since our break up, absolutely no contact and all of a sudden he’s rung me several times in the middle of the night and early hours of the morning, and followed me on Instagram.
From what I believe he is still married, so I am really confused as to what all of this is. I thought maybe him and his wife had a fall out or argument and he’s doing this to be petty towards her because that is the same thing he used to do to me. He would contact other woman every time me and him had a argument. Is this what he’s trying to do right now? Open to hearing your thoughts, please be kind <3