I bought a new Honda CRV 2023 and I want to keep it as new as possible

[next]
Memory transcript subject: Erim, lieutenant of the Kratotl extermination fleet Date: [standardized human time] October 18th, 2136
I woke up on the snowy ground. It was so cold it’s as if there was never any heat at all. I looked over and saw my father on the ground next to Ciran. The damn Harchen was going to freeze if we didn’t get him somewhere warm.
“Dad wake up” I shoved my dad till he opened his eyes and got up. After checking our surroundings we picked up Ciran and started walking to what we think was south?
We walked for so long and far that my legs were getting tired. I feel to the ground. I couldn’t go any further. I noticed that my father had also fallen over from exhaustion.
I looked over and saw vehicle nearing us when it stopped. A person then exited.
It was a human covered in winter clothing. It had a cane with it and walked over to me. This is it this is how I’m going to die. At the hands of these evil predators!
“Damn you look like shit, come on you bastard” the human dragged me and put me in the back seat of his vehicle. He then went and put my dad right next to me and put Ciran into the passenger seat next to him.
As he drove I started to fall asleep. I drifted off into my mind.
When I woke up I was on a couch with my dad and Ciran was near a fireplace. I looked around at the walls.
Dear Inatala there were mounted heads on the wall. Some prey some predators. They’re were even birds that looked like they were still alive but unmoving.
I looked around in fear. Was I on Earth or an Arxurs wet dream? I was looking at this tan furred creature with foward facing eyes when I heard footsteps and a cane hitting the floor from behind me.
“Ah I see you’ve met the cougar” the old human slowly walked towards a chair with his cane. His grey hair and beard glistening against the light of the fire place.
“Met the prick when I was huntin in Appalachia with an old pal of mine” the human graced his hand across the fur of the cougar head. I backed into the couch cushions ready to run at any moment. My feathers were all puffed up.
“Y-your a p-predator plea don’t e-eat me!” The human stopped at one of the big brown horned heads of a prey animal and turned towards me obviously ready to tear me apart.
“Will you shut the fuck up with the oh please don’t eat me shit it’s fucking annoying alright!” He banged his cane on the wooden floor which woke up my father.
My father backed into the couch when he saw the human. He reached over for his weapon but couldn’t find it.
“Get away from me and my son!” Dad put me behind his feathers. I shuddered as the human went towards a fridge and pulled out a brown bottle. He then took a huge sip and walked over to a soft chair and sat down.
“Alright if we can cut the bullshit my name is Sean and I found you boys stranded in the middle of nowhere” the human took another drink of the brown bottle.
“And if I have to hear anymore of the bullshit of me eating you then so help me god I will chuck you back into the snow!” The human slammed his cane against the floor making a loud noise which startled me and my dad.
“Now I called the UN and they should be able to pick you guys up in a couple days now in the meantime I’m going to need some help around the house” Sean got up slowly with the cane. He struggled with his old age.
He walked over to the tv and turned it on. Instead of the normal news he put on some weird streaming service.
“First job I have for you two is to get your lizard friend over there upstairs and into the guest bedroom bed, it’s the one with the blue door” he watched the tv while me and dad nervously went over to Ciran and picked him up. We walked towards the stairs and went up.
We walked in the hallway where we saw more animals that were dead on display and many paintings of prey animals and forests.
We found the room with the blue door and opened it. We then placed Ciran in the bed and covered him up and left the room.
“Son look at me” I turned towards my father.
“Whatever we do we must stay together. I will make sure everything is fine” we both hugged each other
I wondered to myself though.
How would we get out of here?

Once he starts to wake up he feels a comforting warmth around him. Opening his eyes his vision is still dark. Once his vision clears he realizes he's looking at a black claw.
Following the claw he finds Palinurus snuggled against his back, her face settled in a peaceful bliss.
'This feels nice,' muses Crabron, making sure not to move and wake her, 'But should it? She's my friend and this is a very intimate pose.'
'What if you became more?' asks another train of thought, 'You could be happy.'
'But what if she doesn't want anything more,' questions Crabron.
'Of course she does, think back a little bit, she wasn't looking for guards she was looking at you. Need proof? Her flustered response is all you need, or how about when you mentioned dating and she hastily backtracked?'
As he is arguing with himself Crabron notices that her smile has turned to fear and her breath quickens, as she mumbles, "No, Crabron! No, no, no!"
'She must be having a nightmare!' thinks Crabron as he shakes her awake, "Palinurus, Palinurus, wake up. I'm alright."
With a gasp she jumps awake. Wrapping his wings around her he whispers, "It's okay Palinurus. It's okay. I'm right here. I'm alright."
"Thank the moons!" Exclaims Palinurus, "I dreamt that you never woke up from Sheyleyong's attack. I was thinking about what I would do. If, if you died. I was thinking about how I could even live with you gone," she starts to panic. "I couldn't bear the thought of living without you and all the things I would never say. What I would miss out on!"
As she rambles an he carefully shuts her mouth with a gentle claw silencing her worries.
In the sudden silence he speaks, "You don't need to worry about that, ever. I'll always be here when you need me, even if it means leaving a mission. You've been at my side for as long as I can remember. Hell I don't even remember how we met, just that you've been there for me just as I have for you. Some stuck up, slaving, honey snorter, won't change that."
She looks at him with tears in her eyes, "But you nearly died. When you were out it was like you were gone, no matter what I did you never even flinched, you had two dislocated ribs and you'd lost a lot of blood."
"Looks like Clearsight hasn't decided to accept me." Comments Crabron with a smug but gentle smile, "And a couple dislocated ribs certainly won't kill me."
A look of sudden remembrance crosses her face, "Ooh, that reminds me, to fix your ribs you need to relocate them yourself."
"How am I supposed to do that?" Asks Crabron.
"According to Viceroy, the doctor who lives here, you need to take a deep breath and try to blow it out without opening your mouth and plugging your nose." Crabron tries and gasps in pain.
Palinurus places a comforting claw on his shoulder, "Keep at it until you feel them pop back into place. If you black out I have some hartshorn."
After a few painful attempts he finally feels them relocate with a relieved sigh, "Wow, I never thought it was that hard to breathe. Where are we?"
"Viceroy's house, in the Bloodworm Hive SilkWing District. I told you that." Says Palinurus with a disapproving look, "Viceroy didn't mention brain damage."
Crabron smiles as he pushes aside the entrance curtain, "That you did, but where in the district?"
"Just outside the Plaza of the Hope for Peace." Says Palinurus as Crabron lays eyes on a large, vividly painted statue depicting Monarch, Wasp, and a rather monochromatic LeafWing, each working together to hold up a crown. "How is that thing not tearing through the silk?"
In reply a voice comes from the street as Grayling steps through a line of SilkWings, "It's made from treestuff and it's hollow, as such it's a lot lighter than it looks."
"Hello again Grayling," Crabron suddenly remembers something, "Did I miss the handout?"
"No, I fact you're just in time," he motions to the line he just walked through, "These are the ones who showed up. Come with me. Palinurus, you too."
Grayling leads him to a row of tables overflowing with baskets full of various goods with yet more still in the crates behind it, "How much did y'all get?"
"Three quarters of the entire warehouse." Answers Leafcutter as she flicks her tail at a table, "You'll be there with Palinurus, your father and I will be asleep at home. However before I go," she grabs a curious scabbard off a table and hands it to him, "I do believe this is yours."
Looking at it he notices that it seems to be made out of long strands of grass. Wrapping one loop before his wings and the other just behind his wings Crabron asks, "What is it?"
"Sheyleyong's sword," answers Leafcutter, "I took the liberty to procure a new scabbard from my contact. Apparently she had to steal this one from another group that doesn't share their opinion. When her daughter was told to get it they had a big argument. I have never seen such a dysfunctional family. But I get it, she was hiding someone."
"If she's hiding it, how'd you know?" Asks Crabron.
She points to her eyes, "Her eyes, it was just for a split second, but it was there. The same look I always hid during my experimentation phase, before I met your father."
"You experimented? With who?" Asks Crabron.
"Well, I say it's time to stop wasting these family's days, and get me some sleep. Each family gets one basket and try not to vandalize anything." Dismisses Leafcutter as she rushes away calling behind her, "He's in charge guys!"
"You'd think she 'experimented' with my mother with how she rushed away," muses Palinurus, "How is the sword not slicing through those grass fibers?"
"Maybe it's lined with something?" Asks Crabron as he gives the scabbard a light squeeze, feeling something hard as steel between the wrappings and sword, "I'll have to ask my mom."
Stepping behind the table he calls out, "I can help the next family!"
A few families down the line Crabron hears a squeaky voice, "That's him! That's the Hiveing that saved me!"
As a familiar purple dragonet runs up, his mother close behind, Crabron smiles, "If it isn't Dusky, the toughest dragonet I ever met. Have you shown your friends your awesome new scar?"
"Not yet, he has construction work today," says the dragoness accompanying him, presumably his mother.
"It's Friday shouldn't he be at school?" Asks Crabron.
She gives a sad nod, "Yes, but after his father died he was expected to pick up his shifts, Thursday nights and Friday to Monday days."
A look of horror crosses Palinurus' face, "He's a dragonet! He deserves an education!"
Dusky's mother sighs, "I know, but Lady Bloodworm won't allow it."
"I'll see if I can change her mind," growls Crabron.
"How?" Asks Palinurus.
"Enough threats can change any mind." Hisses Crabron before taking on a kind look, "Say, little Dusky, what is your favorite fruit?"
"Bananas!" Chirps Dusky.
Taking an extra bushel of bananas from the crates behind him Crabron places them and an extra loaf of bread into a basket before handing it to Dusky's mother, "Have a wonderful day."
Once the line diminishes Crabron looks over the still remaining food and tells the other SilkWings that were helping him pass out baskets to help themselves to the food.
"Your parents say you killed Vinegaroon's son last night," prefaces Grayling, "Is it true?"
"Who?" Asks Crabron.
"Lord Sheyleyong is, or rather was, Vinegaroon's youngest son." Supplies Grayling.
"Oh, him." says Crabron, "I did."
"How'd you do it?" Asks Grayling.
"Nothing too hard," says Crabron with a shrug.
"Not too hard?" Exclaims Grayling, "In Vinegaroon hive every HiveWing is expected to start training in combat at five and serve for three years minimum. However, the most skilled Dragons are placed under Sheyleyong, yet you killed him!"
"I wouldn't say those soldiers were skilled," scoffs Crabron.
"What armor were they wearing?" Questions Grayling.
"Leather." Says Crabron.
"Then those were probably peasants sent along with him." Dismisses Grayling, "Vinegaroon's Midnight Sons wear plate armor coated in a black lacquer, with the exception of Sheyleyong himself."
Crabron's mind flashes back to that night as he once again hears Sheyleyong, "My son has cared for Valeriophonus, that's the dragoness you just murdered, for years. He was sure he would marry her, but now that will never happen."
'Valeriophonus must've been a peasant,' Thinks Crabron, 'By Clearsight! That might've been her first mission, and I killed her!'
"Crabron? Asks Palinurus a concerned tone in her voice, "Are you okay?"
"I killed her." Breaths Crabron, "It was probably her first mission and I killed her."
"Who? Who did you kill?" Asks Palinurus
"One of the soldiers sent on what was supposed to be a simple investigation last night was a peasant girl named Valeriophonus. She was no older than five or six, probably on her first mission, a-and I killed her," her terrified face flashes through Crabron's eyes causing an involuntary shiver to race down his spine, "I saw her face, I saw the light leave her eyes. She was terrified."
Palinurus gives his shoulder a comforting squeeze, "I'm sure you didn't have a choice."
"But did I?" Asks Crabron, "We could've tried to talk our way out of it, or escaped after they arrested us, but my mom decided to kill one of those innocent peasants in cold blood. Not to mention she feigned surrender, now whenever one of the Chrysalis actually tries to surrender the guards won't trust them!"
"Crabron," says Grayling with an understanding look, "Killing will never get any easier, but unless a HiveWing's eyes are white then that HiveWing chose to attack. That's what gets me through fights."
"And if their eyes are white?" Questions Crabron.
Grayling shrugs, "Then it's not them, it's Wasp forcing them to fight."
“Y-yes of course,” says Crabron before changing the subject, "Does Lady Bloodworm ever leave Bloodworm Place?"
"Not without, at the absolute least, a dozen guards," answers Grayling.
"Rest up, we have a night trip to make," states Crabron before nodding to Palinurus, "You too."
"Where are we going to sleep?" Asks Palinurus, "This isn't our hive."
"I have a place," says Grayling.
"What would your pare- mother say?" Asks Crabron.
"She didn't handle the death of my brother and father very well." Answers Grayling before mumbling, "Now I live alone."
"I'm so sorry," apologizes Palinurus, "It must be hard on you."
"Don't be," says the gray Silkwing with a smile. "It gives me more resolve."
Once they arrive at Grayling's house Crabron spies writing materials on a desk, "Before I sleep I'll need to write a letter to my parents, telling them my plan so they don't panic."
Taking his newly written scroll he finds Codling and passes the scroll over with a kind request to deliver it to Leafcutter.
Re-entering Grayling's house he curls up beside Palinurus quickly falling asleep.
After a brief stop to steal a pair of spears, support straps included, and basic armor for his SilkWings as well as a roundel dagger and armor for himself he leads his group to Bloodworm Place. Sneaking to the windows Crabron spies Bloodworm sitting at an overflowing table with her courtiers.
"She has that much food yet her SilkWings are starving!" Cries Palinurus, "That's perverse!"
Yanking Palinurus into the nearby bushes Crabron hisses, "Lower your voice! We are trying not to be discovered." At her meek nod he continues, "Good now we have to find all possible entrances and exits and where Bloodworm sleeps. So somebody needs to track Bloodworm through the windows while the others examine the outside."
"I'll track Bloodworm," volunteers Grayling, "However there are areas without windows so I'll have to track her from inside."
"That seems risky," says Palinurus.
"My family has always been Hive Drones." Grayling waves, "I just have to act like one if I get caught."
"As soon as things seem dicey, run," orders Crabron, "I don't need to lose anyone."
"Yes, sir!" Snaps Grayling as he removes his gambeson and kernel helm.
"You make me sound like some old, grizzled guard," muses Crabron as Grayling slips in through a window and worms his way into the serving staff.
"This is your mission," says Palinurus, "It makes sense for you to be the leader."
She picks up his chin and whispers in an attempt of a sultry tone, "Besides it leaves us alone."
"If I'm the leader, as you say, then I think you should study the bottom floor and I'll use my wings to study the upper floors. Keep track of any potential exits and remain unseen." says Crabron missing her insinuation.
If Crabron had looked behind him he would've seen Palinurus smack a fist onto the ground with a hiss, "I came on too strongly."
After searching the exterior he spies Grayling on the topmost floor balcony waving him in, swooping around to pick up Palinurus he drops her and Grayling's armor on the balcony, "Did you find her?"
"Yes, she is protected by two guards at her door." Reports Grayling.
"What about in the hallway leading to it?" Asks Palinurus.
"None," answers Grayling, "Hell I haven't seen a guard, except those two, since I came in!"
"Didn't you say she's paranoid?" Asks Palinurus.
"Maybe she feels safe in her home." Shrugs Crabron, "Though we're about to shatter that illusion."
"Something doesn't feel right about that." Says Palinurus as a visible shudder runs down her back, "Grayling, I think you should don your armor before we head in."
"Relax, it's just nerves," dismisses Crabron, a confident smile on his face, "We'll be in and out before they can spring any traps. Grayling if you will?"
"Right this way." Stopping just short of a three way intersection, Grayling motions to the intersecting hall, "Just at the end of that hallway is her room, be careful though the hall is rather empty."
Glancing around the corner he sees a long, wide hallway painted with a vivid scarlet red, the columns painted a vibrant and contrasting yellow. The floor is covered with a plush high pile, purple carpet trimmed with golden flamesilk.
At each column is a statue of various important HiveWings, including Bloodworm herself, each supporting a flame silk lantern, half of which are covered by silk darkening the hall.
The gaps between the columns are occupied with shallow pools and elaborate fountains, where there isn't a doorway. Looking to the other side of the hall the space between columns is occupied with huge and nearly invisible panes of crystal glass leading to the night outside.
Following the colors up he sees an arched glass ceiling that is completely invisible against the night sky, giving the impression of being outside without the wet of the monsoon rains that have just started up.
At the end of the hall stands two guards, just as Grayling reported, eerily staring straight ahead with empty, glowing white eyes and spears at the ready to intercept any intruders.
Dipping back around the corner, Crabron digs his talons into the tree stuff wall and climbs up to the darkened arch of glass, not willing to risk his wingbeats being heard. After examining the slick gold-plated girders supporting the glass he determines that they are too flush to utilize as claw holds. Opting to use his claws, Crabron slowly inches along the top of the wall until he is above a guard. Watching a lightning bolt in the distance he counts it out until the thunder strikes. When another strikes at a similar distance he drops, fist balled at the ready, and lands on one of the guards just as the thunder hits, overwhelming what little sound his strike made.
Hooking his arm around the other's throat he waits until he stops struggling. Motioning to his friends they run up the hall, claw taps silenced by the rug.
"What'd I tell you?" Smiles Crabron as he removes the key ring from one of the guards and starts trying them on the door. "Easy. We'll be in and out lickety split."
"We still should be quick," warns Palinurus, "Who knows when these guards will wake up."
"Of course." calls Crabron as the lock gives a quiet click and he pushes open the door revealing what could be the definition of luxury.
The color scheme and carpet match the hall with a sunken pit in the floor surrounded by various lounge cushions and squat tables, all facing a stone fire pit. Looking around the room he sees various highly detailed tapestries depicting HiveWing triumphs and SilkWing suffering hung between curtained doorways to different rooms.
"I didn't take Bloodworm as the devout type," whispers Palinurus.
Following her eyes through a slightly open curtain Crabron sees a large, regal portrait of Clearsight writing her book of prophecies while nestled within the wings of her primary husband, Sunstreak, though she is far more prominent. Below the painting is a short wooden desk cluttered with various offerings, from jewelry to food to a small statuette of Clearsight, between unlit incense lamps.
Entering the room, Palinurus picks up a finely detailed egg carved from jade from the shrine to admire it.
"Woah, woah, woah!" Calls Crabron trying to keep his voice at a whisper, "Put that back now!" Startled, she quickly puts it back. Sitting down in front of the shrine he closes his eyes, keeping his head down, "Forgive her Clearsight, for she didn't know."
"What the hell was that!" Cries Palinurus.
"Stealing from a shrine is the surest way to be denied by Clearsight's doormen. Being left to wander the void as a twisted shade," says Crabron.
"I just thought it was a pretty color," mumbles Palinurus.
"I'll see about buying you some jade knick knacks." Suggests Crabron.
"Like that one?" Asks Palinurus pointing to the egg.
"I'm sure you don't want a fertility charm," dismisses Crabron.
"A what?" Asks Palinurus.
"A fertility charm," repeats Crabron, "You keep it where eggs come from and pull it out when you're about to make eggs. Pretty common with Lady Jewel's crowd."
Her confusion turns to horror, "Ew, ew, ew! I had it in my claws! I eat with those!" She rushes towards the curtain separating the shrine from the common area, still somehow keeping her voice down, "I need a sink, now!"
“Is she alright?” asks Grayling, catching his eye through the swinging curtain.
Crabron shrugs as he leaves the shrine room, “She was holding a Jade egg and just learned what they're used for."
"She had to learn somehow," he holds out a mask of Odorata, messenger of Clearsight and a guide for lost souls, "There's a black table cloth over there."
"Brilliant!" Calls Crabron with a pat on Grayling's back, "Bloodworm is obviously devout so she'll listen if she thinks Odorata is after her! We need to turn that tablecloth into a hooded cloak, can you sew?"
He smiles, "Of course, I have been living alone after all. I think I saw sewing supplies in a side room."
By the time Palinurus re-enters the room Crabron is already wearing his makeshift costume as Grayling finishes his stitches, "There you are. Looks like we have a plan! Now I need you on standby as Clearsight if I need it, Grayling you will be a look out after you wake Bloodworm. Understood?"
With two simultaneous salutes Crabron goes through the only wooden, yes wooden, door in the suite revealing a giant bed with silky, see through curtains. Stepping up on a chest at the end of the bed he points from Grayling to Bloodworm before pointing from Palinurus to the shadows at the corner of the room where her dark scales render her nearly invisible.
Getting the message, Grayling taps her on the thigh until she starts to stir, prompting Grayling to sprint out the door.
Striking an intimidating pose he glares down at her with his wings wide. With a start Lady Bloodworm shoots up her back against the headboard, "W-who are you."
As lightning flashes lighting up his skull mask Crabron speaks with a deep projecting voice, "Madame Clearsight is hurt that you don't recognize her one and only messenger!"
Recognition spreads across her face, "You're Odorata, am I dead?"
"Not yet," hisses Crabron, "But you will be if you don't heed my mistresses warning. She told me that you must not allow dragonets to work on school days or a figure, scales dark as night, will send you to Clearsight early."
"I'll get right on that!" Says Bloodworm with a sarcastic tone.
"Are you questioning Clearsight?" Asks Crabron.
"Of course not," says Bloodworm with a shake of her head.
"I don't believe you," says Crabron before he gets an idea, "In fact Clearsight wants to give you a reminder."
Drawing his sword he slashes it across the side of her snout, digging deep enough to surly leave a scar, "Let that be a reminder of Clearsight's warning. If you do not obey, a matching gash will adorn your throat. Now I must take my leave. May you live long."
Making his escape he finds Grayling at the door to the hallway. Spotting him out of the corner of his eye, Grayling starts to walk down the ornate hall outside Bloodworms suite before speaking up, "How'd it go?"
Taking the hood off he lets the Odorata mask hang around his neck, "Optimistically it went well. Realistically I might need to pay her a visit out of costume."
Grayling rolls his eyes, "Knowing her, that's a definite revisit."
Crabron's reply dies on his tongue as a voice booms from the hallway they had just started down, "Intruders, identify yourself!"
"Shit," hisses Crabron, reversing direction just to see another group cutting them off at the other side of the intersection.
Thinking quickly, Crabron rips a painting from the wall and hurls it through the nearby window, shattering it. Without needing instruction Grayling leaps through the window and into the pool below it, however Palinurus hesitates at the window.
Avoiding a slash from a guard, Crabron calls out, "Go!"
"Not without you!" Exclaims Palinurus, her helmet narrowly deflecting a blow.
"No time to discuss this!" Hisses Crabron as he headbutts Palinurus hard enough to knock her through.
Nursing a cut claw, Palinurus surfaces to see Crabron draw both of his blades and rear up onto his back legs, his escape now blocked by a guard.

My wife and I took a trip to Portugal early December of 2022, and we had a really solid time. The food experiences were amazing and getting to take in so much old-world architecture was awe-inspiring.
Focus: Our main focus was lazy tourism and fine dining between Porto and Lisbon. We ended the trip with a 9 hour layover in Toronto, which we used to visit friends and some of our favorite Toronto spots.
Weather: The week was mostly sunny with some rain interspersed, and average temperatures seeming to be mid-teens. Toronto at the time was cold and snow-covered.
Accomodations: We ended up doing hotels as they were rather cheap.
Some photos below, along with some detailed notes of the packing list. Photos may be missing some things due to last minute substitutions, tried to note that.
Bag of choice:

• Peak Design 30L Travel Bag - This thing felt like a black hole, and seemed to hold more than the size would indicate. This is heads above my old Bellroy Transit and I'm happy I made the switch.

Worn clothing:

• Ministry of Supply Atlas Sweater - Not pictured, pictured is a Heattech Ultrawarm sweater I didn't take. Merino blend, soft, warm. All I could ask for. I surprisingly didn't use it much more than just the flight there, but I'm happy I had it on me.
• Ministry of Supply Composite Merino tee - The cut fits me well, anti-wrinkle, and surprising resistance to smells even with only being 15% merino. I got a good 2-3 wears out of this.
• Saxx Quest 2.0 Boxer Briefs - GOAT for travel, these things wear well, hand wash well, and dry overnight.
• Smartwool full cushion crew socks - Merino socks! They were warm and wore well! Smartwool tends to be realtively affordable when on sale, and they've held up very well.
• Lululemon ABC pants skinny - Warpstreme fabric is lovely and in black looks like a pretty standard pair of pants. This is actually the only pants I wore the whole trip.
• Pontos The Pacific shoe - These have been awesome. Very comfortable to walk in, and they dress up or down really nicely. These did cobblestone, grass, rocks, sand, snow, rain, etc, and they looked great doing it. I found I needed to pull the insoles end of the day, but by morning they were dry and fresh again.
• Arcade Midnighter belt - Not pictured. Stretchy black belt!

Packed clothing:

• Seagale Action Merino Tee (2) - black tees, easy care, love the fit. They hand wash really well if necessary, but I got 3 wears out of these easily. Having this tee on for the 24+ hours of travel on the leg home was a godsend, great moisture management and incredibly soft.
• Ministry of Supply Composite Merino tee - Grey. The cut fits me well, anti-wrinkle, and surprising resistance to smells even with only being 15% merino. I got a good 2-3 wears out of this.
• Ministry of Supply Apollo Raglan Sleeve Sport Shirt - Basically a button down. This thing fits awesome and doesn’t wrinkle. Standard sleeves would be better but this dresses up well enough - I wore this out to 6 different restaurants in Portugal, and even gave it a whole day as a layer over a tee, and it was very comfortable and performant. No need to wash between wears with a tee under it.
• Ministry of Supply Pace Chinos - I didn't actually wear these, the ABCs were plenty enough for the trip.
• Lululemon T.H.E. Shorts 7” - We didn’t have access to any pools or spas while there, so these were dead weight. Considering they weigh almost nothing though, not a big loss.
  
• Saxx Quest 2.0 Boxer Briefs (3) - 1 black, 2 grey. I’ve had these for a while and they’re probably still my favorite style from Saxx. They hand wash and dry well, and they’re comfortable. All I can ask for. I washed each pair once over the trip, and they dried overnight.
  
• Uniqlo Airism Boxers (2) - Sleep shorts. Hand washed once each, and they dried overnight.
  
• Smartwool Full Cushion Crew Socks (2) - Merino socks! What’s more to say. Smartwool is affordable while on sale and has some great durability. I’ve been happy with my pairs so far. I washed each pair once over the trip, and they really just needed a one day dry. I think the number of socks packed was pretty ideal.
  
• Smartwool No Show Socks - I didn’t need or use these, but having the emergency socks was a nice include. They’re small and didn’t really add any weight.
  

Outer Layers:

• Patagonia Nano Puff Jacket - Wind proof, water resistant, very insulating. Packs down rather small. I’ve moved to synthetic insulation as it keeps warm when wet unlike down jackets. This held up well to a bit of rain while we were there and kept me warm enough most days.
• Patagonia Torrentshell 3L - Water proof. Wind proof. A bit crinkly, and didn’t really get a lot of use in Portugal due to the lack of heavy rain. Also being waterproof it tends to keep heat in just as well as it keeps water out, so combined with the nano puff it offered pretty good insulation for Toronto.
• Smartwool Glove Liners - Just some basic gloves. They work with touch screens, that’s cool I guess! Solid for Toronto.
• Merino Buff - Part neck gaiter, part sleep mask for the flight. It was awesome to have. On tour buses with an open roof it was very nice to have a bit of insulation I could throw into a sling.

Electronics:

• Tom Bihn Ghost Whale Small - This contains my charging and camera connectivity kit, and it’s a tight squeeze but everything fits.
• Mophie 6000mah universal PD battery - Not the smallest or lightest battery, but it supports lightning input, and also does passthrough charging, which makes it the centerpiece for my tiny charging empire.
• Apple SD card readers - These just work, and they work well. Both Lightning and USB-C. Once the iPhone goes to USB-C I can drop the Lightning one. Let’s me ingest RAW files onto any of my devices. I didn’t need the Lightning one, but it’s just a standard in the bag now, so along it came.
• Anker Powerport III Nano 30W - Super slim, 30w charging. It’s been a standard for me for a while.
• Anker Cables - 3ft USB-C to Lightning and 3ft USB-C to USB-C. Covers all my device charging needs.
• Fujifilm X100V - Killer camera, compact, fun to shoot with.
• Tom Bihn Utility Cloth - It’s a wool square! It’s moonlighting as a camera wrap here, but it can be anything! Neck gaiter? Check. Very small blanket? Check. Table cloth? You bet. The options are limitless for the wool square! This was actually an MVP - The tiny blanket feature came in handy on tour buses, and it worked great for wiping down wet seats on a boat tour.
• Keys - Featuring an Airtag, and the final member of the charging gang, an InchargeX. I’ve also got a Nite Ize Doohickey on there for bottles and boxes. The Doohickey is awesome as it passes through airport security without issues and does a good enough job of what it’s designed to do.
• Airpods Pro - Basically perfect headphones for short stints. Reasonable battery life, great noise cancelling, agreeable sound quality. Overall solid.
• Destination Specific adapters (2) - Two is one and one is none, or something like that.
• iPad Mini 6 - Used for editing photos, reading on the plane, larger view for maps, etc.
• iPhone 12 - Works well with everything else I own. I grabbed an eSIM from Airalo on MEO, giving me 30gb of data for 15 days.
• Sony WH-1000XM4 - Not pictured. These were great for the 6-8 hour transatlantic flights. A last minute pick but I’m glad they made it into the bag.

A quick note on my charging setup: The whole setup for charging with my InchargeX allows me to charge two devices overnight AND my battery off a single 30w slim wall adapter. This is about as close as I can get to a perfect tiny charging setup. The iPhone plus the battery is plenty enough to get me through even the heaviest of days, into a second day.
Toiletries:

• Exfoliating cloth - Nylon textured cloth that’s basically an unravelled loofah. So easy to get a lather and you feel a lot cleaner after a good exfoliating scrub. I use one of these at home now too. I’d like to find a face cloth sized one for travel.
• Unscented Company Shampoo bar and soap bar - Stored in Matador soap cases. These lather really well, clean great, and support my “all solids” agenda for travel. They work great for cleaning clothes too. I’ve been using these at home instead of liquids, and can’t complain. We were never without toiletries due to the hotels, but I prefer these.
• Philips One Toothbrush - Next time I’d probably just get a cover for the head as I think the case was a bit large. I liked having the electric function though.
• Various OTC meds - Stored in Nalgene containers, these little things are waterproof and well built.
• Lush Dirty Toothy Tabs - Toothpaste replacement and my go-to for a while. Enough for both myself and my wife.
• Hair Bands - Two is one and one is none, or something like that.
• Xiaomi Mijia S100 shaver - New to me, picked it over a Philips OneBlade. Dual rotary shaver, compact, USB-C charging. I don’t get a lot of facial hair growth but I get enough that I like touching up every couple days. This did the trick. Might try to go back to a manual razor like a mach 3.
• Native Deodorant - Been my go-to for a while. I can’t seem to find a travel size in Canada, but this would be a huge space saver if I could. I may consider melting it down and re-packing it as some enterprising individuals on the internet have before me.
• Folding brush - I’ve had this for ages, and it’s been awesome.

Everything else:

• Bellroy Lite Sling - Very flexible in load out, the 7L size made for a very good holding capacity to size ratio. This functioned as my camera bag and held essentials when transiting through airports or while on trains.
• Tom Bihn Ghost Whale Super Mini - Bag of holding for…
• Ray-Ban Folding Wayfarers - Matte black, high quality, compact. Non-polarized. Perfect fit in the ghost whale and always with me for sunny days. These were great for the trip as we had a lot of sunny days.
• Apple Magsafe Wallet - Not much to say here, standard 3 card carry - ID, debit card, credit card.
• Vapur Eclipse bottle - Didn’t actually use this, but fit in one of the mesh side pouches in my Peak Design bag handily.
• PackTowl Large - Came in handy when we were short a few towels in the hotel the first day in Porto.
• KN95 Masks (3) - Black, used on the airplanes. We didn’t get sick on the trip!
• Matador Packable Tote - Was useful for day excursions, shopping, etc. 18L packs down into a very compact size and it’s a robust bag.
• Passport - Well this is kinda needed for international travel. I also had my Presto (Toronto transit payment card) and alternate credit card in here as a just in case.

What Worked: Overall I think my packing list is cohesive enough and walked the line between casual and nice enough for a good restaurant. I've been working with a lot of this clothing for a while so it's been tested heavily through the rigors of daily wear, and I was very confident in my choices going in. The massive standout was the wool utility cloth - I think more people need these!
What could have been improved: I overpacked on a few things like pants and shorts, which really are just small things. The Pontos were awesome for the trip, but I feel like I would have done better with a pair of Blundstones or a similar Chelsea style boot. I also wish I could find a more casual looking "technical" jacket for daily wear, but the options are limited from what I can find. I think I could have dropped the iPad too, although it didn't take up a whole lot of space and was great for editing photos in downtime or reading on the plane. The Mijia shaver was okay but not amazing.

Hi all,
Whether you've participated in our previous studies or not, we would love to have you join us at UMTRI for a Family Open House on June 1 from 4-6.
We've got activities for kids, and experts for grown ups to talk with. Car seat questions? We've got you covered. Want to get a selfie with a crash test dummy? This is your chance!
Check out our Kid Art Gallery, make some of your own art, pick up some fancy stickers, meet an engineer and a scientist, take a kid lab tour, eat some snacks, spin a wheel for prizes, and get more info about an upcoming study where we need to get a bunch of kids!

Timestamp: https://imgur.com/a/hiYFjwH
Hi there,
I am looking to sell three spare slides I have sitting around. I bought them to keep my factory slides untouched and have these milled for optics but realized I could just sell these and cover the cost of optics for two of them.
Pics: https://imgur.com/a/hiYFjwH
Glock 19X - $315 Shipped -Low round count - sub 250, minor wear on the slide
Glock 17 Gen 5 (No Front Serrations) - $315 Shipped -unknown round count, would guess around 1k, brand new oem barrel, brand new oem slide parts kit. Bought as a stripped slide and assembled with factory glock parts.
CZ P10C - $225 Shipped -very low round count and almost no signs of wear at all, I'd guess sub 200 rounds
Dibs here, then PM me. I take PayPal FF, Venmo, or Zelle.
Chats will be ignored.
Tracking will be sent within 24 hours of payment received.

Basically what the title says. Did a 200 mile day yesterday in preparation for a 2k+ trip next month. Finding that I need a bit more support from the seat as a heavier guy. So I'm looking for some recommendations. 2018 tiger XCA, probably looking more for covers than a full seat replacement. I tried one of the airflow covers that were "made specific" for the bike and it didn't fit so I returned it. Thanks!

Hi all,
Whether you've participated in our previous studies or not, we would love to have you join us at UMTRI for a Family Open House on June 1 from 4-6.
We've got activities for kids, and experts for grown ups to talk with. Car seat questions? We've got you covered. Want to get a selfie with a crash test dummy? This is your chance!
Check out our Kid Art Gallery, make some of your own art, pick up some fancy stickers, meet an engineer and a scientist, take a kid lab tour, get some free snacks, spin a wheel for prizes, and get more info about an upcoming study where we need to get a bunch of kids!

Hi everyone! I posted earlier about my decision to buy a Toyota Tacoma to replace my S (I have not traded the S in, I got the Tacoma yesterday and I'm currently waiting on repairs from Tesla before I sell the S).
I suggested in the comment thread that I'd do a post about EVERYTHING that went wrong with that car. So let's buckle up because here we go.
I bought the car CPO from Tesla in June of 2019, it is a 2016 75D/"Standard Range" S. The car is a relatively rare build because Tesla upgraded to Autopilot 2 hardware in October of '16 and removed the free unlimited supercharging perk in January of '17 (or roughly around that time). My car came down the line in November of '16 so it's one of very few Ses that has both these features. The first time I took it into the Service Center I was told by a technician (who does not drive a Tesla as his personal vehicle) that this particular run of Ses was one of the best batch he'd ever seen. Oh boy let's see how great this batch is.

Heated steering wheel

The first thing that went wrong with the car was actually broken from the time I bought it, but I didn't notice for a few months because it was the heated steering wheel. Winter '19/'20 set in and I realized the steering wheel wasn't warming up. I took it in for warranty repair and they found it was simply unplugged, this was free.

Trunk latch

In the summer of 2020, amid the COVID lockdowns, one day the trunk failed to latch and was stuck open. I tried pulling the emergency release but that did nothing. I scheduled a mobile appointment (which I will give Tesla credit for, very few car companies make housecalls), and the technician was also unable to get the trunk to latch. So I scheduled a service center appointment and had to drive with the trunk open for a couple weeks, this made an annoying beeping noise and prevented me from using ANY cruise control, let alone "Autopilot" (or "Full-Self Driving", I actually got grandfathered into the offer to upgrade from EAP to FSD for $3000 so I pulled the trigger on that, I have not requested the FSD Beta because it looks like a death machine to me).
Amazingly during my drive to the service center the trunk magically fixed itself. I wasn't about to turn around and go home since I figured the part could still be faulty, so I asked them to look at it anyway. Since they didn't see anything wrong they charged me over $500 to replace the components. This was my first repair bill.

First collision repair

A couple months later I was rear-ended by a teenager and she did a bunch of damage to the back of the car, this was one of my most seamless issues with the car, I took it to a local collision repair shop and they had it back to me within 3 days, all of these costs were paid by insurance.

MCU2 Upgrade

At some point I took the car in for them to replace the MCU (the 17" touchscreen) with the newer one so I could get Netflix and YouTube on my center screen. This was an optional service center visit, though the original MCU was REALLY starting to chug on newer Tesla software. The replacement cost $1600 and they did not put in a new AM/FM radio (that would have been an additional $500 and I don't listen to the radio much anyway). I was actually kind of happy that I could have the option to upgrade this tech, but if MCU2 winds up being as sluggish as MCU1 was when it was just 4-5 years old this seems like an extra non-optional cost.

12V Battery Replacement

In the summer of 2021 I got the error "12V BATTERY LOW SCHEDULE SERVICE NOW". That seemed really urgent, so I went on YouTube and searched for this error and found out that James May got the same issue. TL;DW the 12V system is powered primarily by a DC-to-DC converter from the main battery, but when the main battery disconnects there's a small 12V (like one you'd use in a motorcycle) that is needed to power on the actuators that connect the main battery. If the 12V goes flat the car is bricked and, because the 12V is under the frunk and the frunk is electronically actuated, the only way to get to the 12V to trickle charge it is to partially dismantle the car.
In fact, I was lucky to get a warning at all some Teslas have had this happen with no warning and in fact it was a software update that even added the warning. And in fact a lot of early Teslas failed within a year because for some reason they charge and discharge the 12V like mad. I hope they've improved this since this blog post, but anyway this is a serious design defect.
Tesla did the right thing here and got me into service the next day AND I got the car back within 90 minutes. This is the fastest turnaround time I've ever seen from them, however I'm fairly certain that if my car was no longer under warranty (meaning they would not be responsible for paying to tow it to the service center) I would not have gotten such white glove treatment.

Suspension issue

In 2022 I read the book Ludicrous: The Unvarnished Story of Tesla Motors by Ed Niedermeyer. From this book I learned about whompy wheels and learned a rumor that many Teslas were built with cheap aluminum suspensions that tend to fail. China forced Tesla to do a recall on cars built in the US and exported to China.
I frantically drove to my local tire shop and asked them to look at the suspension, they reported that it looked to be in good condition but that there was a leak in the hydraulic fluid that Tesla should repair under warranty. I took the car to Tesla and they had it for SIX DAYS during which I had to rely on their Uber vouchers (Tesla only recently started doing loaners in my area, it might be because I live in a very obscure remote place called New York City /s). They reported to me that nothing was wrong with the suspension and returned the car, completely filthy since they'd left it parked under a tree.

Windshield replacement

In late 2022 I decided to save some money by replacing my wiper blades myself. While the blade arms were out one of the springs came loose and smashed into the windshield. It took me about a week to get the wiper back on, I tried every tool in my toolbox and eventually just took it to the tire shop where they put in a vice and got it to reconnect. They did this for free. Over the winter of '22/'23 however the damage to the windshield escalated into a crack. This is mostly my own stupid fault, I probably could have prevented this crack from growing with a cheapo Amazon glass repair kit, but none of the other cars I've ever driven have had something this nuts happen.
I took the car to a local glass repair shop and the owner told me I needed a full new windshield. He called Tesla to confirm the part number and order it, they did not pick up the phone. I was out of the country for about a month so I left this to pick up when I returned. I just went to SafeLite since I assumed they had more staff to pester Tesla to send them the windshield. Dropped off my car, they called me and said they had to wait a couple weeks for the windshield to ship. About a week later I dropped off the car AGAIN and they replaced the windshield.
This cost me another $500 out of pocket and the rest (about $700) was covered by insurance.

Door replacement collision repair

On March 7th 2023 a kid jumped a stop sign and crashed into my driver's side door, he put a huge dent in it and the door handle got stuck in the presenting position. Because he was not the policyholder* his insurance could not establish that he had permission to drive the vehicle and said they would not pay for the repair, so I again had to go through my insurance meaning I couldn't get a loaner.
It took Tesla TWO WEEKS to ship a new door to the only local Tesla-certified collision repair center in my area (this was about a 30 minute drive and I had to Uber both ways since there was no nearby public transit). When I got the car back there was an obnoxious amount of wind noise, I found they had misaligned the new window with the weather stripping. I brought the car back to them and they tooled around enough to get the wind noise down to a lower level, but it is still not gone. I did find I could jam some paper into the weather stripping and shim it up to prevent a little bit of noise.
This was a $500 out of pocket cost (which I may get back through insurance arbitration) and the cost to the insurance was a whopping $4700!

The HVAC filter, radars, and AC

Now we come to the straw that broke the camel's back. I noticed in the manual recently that my car is due for a replacement of the HVAC filter. They're fairly cheap on Amazon, so I figured I'd try doing it myself again. My wife talked me out of this due to what happened with the wiper blades. Additionally the HVAC system has a desicant bag that needs to be replaced periodically (like one of those sillica gel packets), and that requires a special machine.
So I scheduled a service center visit, they informed me my car was also eligible for a free upgrade to the autopilot cameras. I dropped off the car and for the first time in FOUR YEARS they gave me a loaner, a lease-return Model Y that presumably they couldn't find a buyer for (this car was a complete shitbox but that's a whole other story).
They said they would take FIVE DAYS to do this quick 30 minute job of replacing the HVAC filters. I also tried phoning them to ask if they could take a look at the wind noise from the previous repair, there was a message on the phone that told me I need to do all communication with them through the app. I messaged in the app, they did not respond.
Amazingly I got the car back after just FOUR days, but I was informed they did not look at the wind noise because it wasn't on the original list of things, and I would need to book ANOTHER appointment and wait ANOTHER two weeks for that. Replacing a $30 HVAC filter and a dessicant bag cost me a whopping $460!
After I got the car back, however, I realized that they did not merely "upgrade" the Autopilot cameras. They removed the Autopilot radar. I know they did it because now my follow distance bottoms out at 2 and I now have an 85mi/hr Autosteer speed limit. By the way, unlike the 3 and Y the Autopilot follow distance control in the S is a physical click-knob. So I can click it to 7,6,5,4,3,2 and 2. Like they replaced the bottom position with a second "2".
BUT WAIT THERE'S MORE!
The HVAC is now blowing hot air. Every time I turn on the AC the car blasts me in the face with hot air and the compressor goes nuts. I assume this means the coolant is low (since it seems to have some ability to cool but is struggling a LOT).
So that's the end of our story. That's everything that's happened to this car so far. And where are we now? I have an appointment with service to fix the remaining problems and YESTERDAY I bought a 2020 Toyota Tacoma which GET THIS has a radar adaptive cruise control! No fancy "Autopilot" or "Autosteer", but it has lane departure warning which is enough to keep me awake on a long nighttime drive.
The biggest open secret about "Autopilot" and "FSD" is that they're mostly off-the-shelf components. Rather than building a self-driving car what Tesla actually did was take standard driver-assistance cruise control features and mash them together pretending they're something magical.
*This was a frankly ridiculous claim on the part of his insurance since his mother was the policyholder and the police report documents that she was sitting in the passenger's seat at the time of the collision. So I guess their position is that she was in the process of being kidnapped.
If you ever get into a crash like this make sure to take out your phone, take a video, and say "Do you have his/her permission to drive this vehicle?" If they say no just turn to the police and say it's a stolen vehicle and it needs to be impounded.

First Previous
Memory Transcription Subject: Vani, Venlil Surgeon
Date [Standard Human Reckoning]: 2136-10-22
Secluded in the comfort of our cabin, I found myself savoring the rare moments of peace with Johan. The bustling camp did not afford us the luxury of privacy, and this precious pocket of calmness felt like a gift. Lying on the bed together, we did not feel the need to fill the silence with words or engage in any couple of activities. I felt an inherent satisfaction in just lying there together.
"Vani," Johan's voice filled the quiet cabin.
"Johan."
"I'm... I'm afraid of going back," he confessed.
I considered his words before asking, "Do you have many friends back in Jakarta?"
His gaze stayed on the ceiling as he replied, "Other than Snop... not. I guess, in a twisted way, that's a kind of luck?"
I watched as he rolled onto his side to face me, his eyes searching mine. "I count myself beyond fortunate to have met you." His fingers stroked my mane. His light touch felt heavy and comforting. "Even if we were in Jakarta when they implemented the quota they would have let me evacuate with you."
For a while, we just lay there, appreciating each other, our silent exchanges speaking volumes.
When we arrived at the ship, it was still the second or third hour of the day. I forgot when I fell asleep, but Johan's alarm woke us up the same. When we stepped out of our cabin, we found Tresn and the siblings lounging in the common area. Tresn now had the prostheses in his paws. The device twitched every now and there. Meanwhile, the siblings were engrossed in their thoughts or busy with their pads.
In the common area, we had our first meal aboard the vessel. We sat near the window, our portal to the world outside. Through the clear pane, the black water merged with the black sky, and I felt like being suspended in a void. Yet, despite this sense of absolute stillness, the ship flew above the water at a speed above fifty meters per second. Sometime after we had cleared our plates, our surrounding transformed. The sun, breaking the confines of the horizon, began its ascent. Although we were facing away from this bright ball in the sky, its effect was no less mesmerizing. Dawn overtook the black sky. First, the once pitch-black sky took on a shade of deep purple. A transition to an intense, deep red followed it soon after.
Perhaps two or three hours after the sunrise, the coastline of Cirebon began to emerge, peeking out from the edge of the horizon. Its unblemished skyline shone in stark contrast to the devastation reported in Jakarta.
Elangkasa joined us in the common area before we landed.
"Hi folks." They greeted me. "So, I might have forgotten to tell you all that you'll go to Purwakarta Sector 12 as volunteers."
"We don't mind." Said Johan. "I'm glad if I can be of help."
Elangkasa then briefed us on our job in Purwakarta Sector 12, Bolad and I would join the health workers. Johan and Cynthio had put aside their differences, nodding in agreement when Elangkasa assigned them to service and maintain the drones for rescue. Snop agreed when they asked her for help in construction with her skills in operating machining tools.
The armed forces had commandeered this once bustling commercial hub and had transformed it into a temporary base and staging area just like in Banjarmasin. Once we disembarked, Bolad and I joined Johan in his van again. A map of the region appeared on the dashboard. A red pinpoint marked the ovation where the bomb fell and a circle around it, the area of effect.
My classes both in Venlil Prime and Earth did not teach me about orbital bombardment and here I learned that one needs to get into a bunker in times like this. Because, for tens of kilometers, the bomb would heat the air to the point of causing tissue damage. The map showed a region where you will face severe burn injury if you stayed outside when the explosion happened. Amid the circle depicting the zones of devastation, one stark red marker pulsated with disconcerting energy. It lay within the severe heat zone. Its constant glow commanded my immediate attention.
"Johan," I ventured, pointing at the glaring red marker that almost seemed to taunt us, "That red marker there is your home, is it not?"
His eyes shifted from the barren road to the display, taking in the red beacon that represented his home. "Yeah…" He let out a sigh, heavy with desolation within the confines of the vehicle. "I wonder what's left of that house now."
As we drew nearer to the affected area, I steeled myself for the scenes of destruction. However, the buildings seemed to have withstood the assault better than I expected. Of course, we could see the scars of the attack, the shockwave shattered windows and some structures had superficial cracks. A general sense of disarray permeated our surroundings, but the core structures stood against the odds.
Cities and towns dotting the outskirts of the Greater Jakarta Province had been retrofitted with camps to accommodate the droves of displaced people emerging from the ruins of the once-thriving metropolis. In recent days, the tide has started to turn. Able-bodied survivors moved back towards their shattered homes, driven by the urge to reclaim and restore what they could salvage from the debris.
Our journey led us to the city of Purwakarta, a place I remembered from a past excursion with Johan. We had once visited the city's reservoir, taking in the tranquil beauty of the idyllic landscape. The city has changed now. A bustling hive of activity transformed the city as it took refuge for those fleeing the destruction.
Because of the scale of the destruction, we didn't have a single "camp" as we had for the gojids. The refugee districts were divided into Sectors. We pulled into sector twelve as the midday sun reached its zenith, casting almost no shadow on the ground. Prefabricated buildings of varying sizes formed an ordered chaos across the city's outskirts.
Everywhere we looked, people occupied themselves in a frenzy of activity. Here, soldiers oversaw the transport of food and materials. There, health workers moved to check from the habitation unit to the habitation unit. Engineers collaborate with helper and builder drones to perform maintenance and construction. All around, people took on roles they never imagined they would, united by the common goal of survival and restoration.
Despite the dire circumstances, the humans put on determined faces. Humans made the majority of camp inhabitants, but I spotted two arxurs here, their imposing presence always accompanied by a human minder. Both of them shot a look in disgust at Tresn, while humans looked at the defector with an equal part of concern and curiosity.
Elangkasa led us through the camp. First, we passed the engineering quarter where my human and the siblings parted from us. Another trip led us to the medical complex, where we saw medical personnel moving with well-practiced efficiency to care for the injured. A conglomeration of tents and prefabricated buildings all bearing the red crystal symbol made up the hospital. The bustle here felt different, it had an undercurrent of urgency threaded through the ordered chaos.
At the entrance of the hospital's administration building a zurulian had waited for us. Her short stature did not deter us. Upon noticing us, however, her expression turned sour.
"I have a feeling I'm not supposed to be here." Said Tresn. "Maybe... I can get to the habitation unit?"
"You need some help with physiotherapy. Can you bring him there, Elangkasa?" said Bolad.
"Yeah, take that to a human health worker. I'm not going to treat it." The zurulian said with a huff.
"I am Bolad, and this is Vani." The gojid introduced ourselves.
"I'm Rawan, the medical Coordinator for Sector Twelve, Shift Two."
My stomach rumbled, a reminder that it was midday, mealtime according to Earth's cycle.
Sensing my discomfort, Rawan commented. "Hungry already? Well, we are on a lunch break right now. Follow me," leading us away from the hospital administration.
According to the map, there exist two dining areas, located far from each other. The one Rawan brought us to, served plant-based meals for species with a herbivorous diet, the other was where arxurs and their human minders feast.
Stepping into the hall felt comforting. It felt as if an invisible barrier dampened the harsh sounds of the bustling camp outside, replaced by the familiar din of a busy dining hall. Members of Federation species, like us, gathered here. I saw zurulians, colleagues of Dr. Rawan, along with several gojids who had responded to the call for assistance in the rescue, relief, and rebuilding efforts.
The dining procedure here was not like what we had at the camp. Instead of autonomous carts coming around to deliver our meals, we had to stand in line. Humans manned the serving counters, dishing out meals onto trays as we moved along. The menu today consists of a stir-fried noodle and rice combination, named "Nasi Mawut".
After getting our portions, we selected an empty table, the tantalizing taste in the air from our tray deepened my hunger and anticipation. We set down our trays, and with a collective eagerness, took our seats.
"To be honest," Rawan began, her gaze sweeping over the crowded dining hall before returning to her meal, "This is often the highlight of my day here." She gestured towards her plate and scoffed, "Imagine that, I, a zurulian, looking forward to a predator's meal."
"To be fair," I retorted, "this meal is not prepared from ingredients they acquired from hunting."
Rawan chuckled a high-keening sound that made her sound like she was in distress. "Sometimes," she mused, her eyes thoughtful as she poked at her food, "I do wonder why they feel the need to consume flesh when they can subsist on meals such as these."
Not wanting to engage in a sensitive debate with a superior officer we had just met, I opted for silence, focusing instead on the pleasant taste of the Nasi Mawut before us.
A voice broke the quiet chatter around us. A gojid, appearing youthful by their standards, made his way toward our table with a casual gait. A broad smile adorned his face as he acknowledged us. "Hey, doctors! Fancy seeing you here again."
"Greetings," Bolad replied with a courteous nod. "I hope the presence of arxurs has not caused you undue distress?"
I looked at the gojid's hip and saw a familiar scar. I recognized him as the one gored by the sheep back at the camp.
A robust laugh escaped from the gojid, his face brightening up. He waved off Bolad's concerns, "No worries, Doc. We've got a human minder assigned to us to keep those predators in check. And we also have a buddy system, safety in numbers, you know."
"That is good to hear," Bolad responded. Although my facial annotator had learned a lot about gojids' gestures and expressions, it kept interpreting Bolad's emotion as a blank.
A small device strapped to the gojid's wrist chirped. The gojid glanced at it before looking back up to us with a swift nod. "Ah, duty calls. Well, it was nice chatting with you, Doc!" With that, he swung around, his round figure merging with the crowd as he strode towards the exit.
Once the gojid departed, Rawan, Bolad, and I continued to sit and chat over the remains of our meal. Bolad and I shared stories about our experiences in the gojid camp in Kalimantan. The pervasive sound of a resounding announcement filled the hall, halting our exchange. An impersonal voice echoed from the overhead speakers.
"Shift Two! Your break time will be over in ten minutes. I repeat. Shift Two! Your break time will be over in ten minutes." The forceful announcement marked the conclusion of our pause, a reminder of the tasks that awaited us.
"Well, that's our cue," the medical coordinator announced, getting up from her seat. Her hands reached for her tray but having to maneuver in bipedal mode made the action seem awkward.
"Allow me," I offered, reaching for her tray to assist. "I'll carry it to the collection point."
"Thank you," she responded.
As I made my way to the collection point, Bolad engaged Rawan in a conversation. "How many shifts are there in a day?" he queried.
Rawan turned to Bolad. "We work with a four-shift rotation. The humans initially wanted three, due to their unusual stamina," she explained.
Once we discarded the tray Rawan led us back to the medical complex of Sector Twelve.
"Our main goal here is to offer immediate care to the injured and aid in their recovery." She started when we passed the gate of the medical complex.
Rawan gestured towards a cluster of tents assembled off to the side. A perpetual flurry of activity surrounded them as people carried patients in and out on stretchers. "These are our triage tents," Rawan explained. "New patients are first brought here for evaluation. Depending on the severity of their injuries, they are then dispatched to the appropriate sections for treatment. Bolad, you'll be stationed here. Your expertise in general medicine will be invaluable in assessing patients."
Our tour continued, taking us through the maze of the field hospital. We walked past prefabricated structures, erected with solid synthetic materials.
"These," Rawan proclaimed, her paw sweeping towards the buildings, "are our operating theaters. We haven't been able to install remote surgical facilities. Though, given your preference, that shouldn't be an issue..."
"I do favor direct surgery," I confessed, revealing a bit of my past.
Rawan halted, her sharp gaze taking both of us in. Her snout was positioned between Bolad and me looking at us from her peripheral vision. "I've reviewed both of your files," she said, focusing her attention on me. "I've worked with your kind before. You have your use in times and places like this."
Neither Bolad nor I questioned her use of the term "your kind", but we all know what she implied here.
"Now, it's time for you to report to your stations," Rawan instructed us, her tone leaving no room for debate. "The human health workers already in the field will brief you on the specific protocols we've established here."
The moment I crossed the threshold into the operating theater, I was confronted with an open fracture. The sterile operating rooms of the past, where I donned a vacuum suit to prevent my fur from contaminating the environment, seemed a world away. Here, a disposable robe was all that separated me from my patient. I plunged into hours of repairing human bodies, and I feel more useful than I had ever felt before. As valuable as my previous role of determining causes of death was, I feel a satisfying gratification in saving lives.
As I immersed myself in the demanding tasks of the medical field, my mind sometimes drifted toward Bolad. While my duties were straightforward, applying proven techniques and procedures, Bolad grappled with the daunting responsibility of determining the course of our patient's treatment. His role dictated the trajectory of their recovery or, in the worst cases, their demise. The magnitude of such a responsibility could be soul-crushing, and I wished that it did not burden him.
Before I knew it, a new team arrived ready for me to hand over my job to them. The end of our shift brought us to a prefabricated habitation unit, a space similar to our quarters in the camp. Due to spatial constraints, the unit contained three bunk beds instead of the usual row of mattresses.
When Bolad and I arrived at our living quarters, we found Johan, the siblings, and Tresn already present. They all gathered around a table, engrossed in a spirited card game.
"Vani! Bolad!" Johan looked up from his hand of cards, a warm smile spreading across his face. "How was your day?"
Bolad answered before I could. "I had to watch people die."
A stark silence filled the air. Johan's smile faltered as he bit his lip.
"Bolad was assigned to the triage area," I clarified, stepping in to defuse the tension.
"But you can request a rotation if the stress becomes too much," I offered, directing my words at Bolad as I hoisted myself onto an unoccupied chair. "What about you two?" I inquired, shifting the focus onto Johan and his siblings.
"We had to program the drones and-" Johan began, but Cynthio interrupted his explanation.
"They removed all the restrictions," Cynthio said. "We got to work with unrestricted synthetic intelligence! What we had to do felt less like programming and more like... talking with them." The joy and excitement on Cynthio's face were obvious even without my facial annotator.
Tresn placed a card onto the pile in the middle of the table, interjecting a question that caught us off guard. "By the way… how difficult is it to get to Sector Ten?"
"You could walk there if you wanted. Why do you ask?" Johan responded, curious about the sudden interest in another sector.
"There's someone I want to meet," Tresn admitted, a hint of hesitation in his voice.
"Hmm…" Snop considered, tilting her head. "We have about two or three hours before the breaking of the fast. How did you come to know this person?"
"The Internet," Tresn replied.
"Oh…" Snop replied, her face attempting to maintain neutrality and almost failing.
Intrigued by Tresn's unexpected online connection, we decided to accompany him on the short journey to Sector Ten. Leaving our habitation unit, we found ourselves navigating the ad hoc alleyways of Camp Sectors. Humans of all ages hustled past us, their faces a mosaic of determination and sorrow, each one bearing the weight of rebuilding amidst the ruins.
The further we ventured towards Sector Ten, the more conspicuous the increase in the arxurs' presence became. Given their nocturnal tendencies, I surmised that most Arxurs preferred anything but the second shifts.
Upon reaching the main plaza of Sector Ten, Tresn pulled out his pad, fingers dancing over the screen to access a social media site. I saw intensity in his actions, as he engaged in a private chat with a rapid succession of texts. He scanned his surrounding and his instinctive predatory gaze locked onto a specific figure in the bustling crowd, a human who was also looking around. An arxur shadowed him, their movements synchronized as if orchestrated by a shared rhythm.
Tresn wheeled first and we followed him toward the pair, our formation taking on a semi-circular shape around them. The human had close-cropped curly hair and his upper revealed his arm. A band covered his right arm and there was something off about the rest of that limb. The skin looked too smooth.
"Wait…" Snop, ever the observant one, pointed a finger toward the human, her voice laced with recognition. "I think… I know you."
The human responded by pointing back at Snop. "Aren't you Snowpaws?"
She nodded in affirmation. "Yeah, and you're… Jagomerah?"
A smile of confirmation danced on the human's lips. "Yeah."
Johan, who had been watching the interaction unfold, broke into a musing grin, "Jagomerah… that has to be a screen name," he remarked, shifting his gaze toward Tresn.
"Tresn," Johan began, an amused undertone in his voice, "You have been chatting with furries haven't you?"
"Scallies." Both Snop and Jagomerah corrected.

World of Warcraft’s latest Race to World First has ended, which means it’s time for another Hobbydrama post! Watching this season’s race, I was really worried that nothing truly drama-worthy would happen, things were pretty smooth for most of it. The gods of WoW must have heard my prayers, however, because right at the race’s end an incident, long-feared but never realized, finally came to pass.
If you’ve read any of my three previous posts on World of Warcraft’s Race to World First, then you’ve seen something mentioned about North America’s “Head Start”. I always put off talking about it because it never really mattered. Well strap in folks, because it finally mattered. Big time.
This is a story of timing, about what happens when two competitors aren’t playing under quite the same rules, and about what “fair” really means in a competition that was never really meant to be a competition.
Background
Released in 2004, the MMORPG World of Warcraft (WoW) is one of the most successful videogames of all time. Players create characters to do battle in the fictional world of Azeroth, a kitchen-sink fantasy setting where players fight dragons, gods, lovecraftian horrors, and each other. The game is heavily multiplayer focused, with pretty much all of the most difficult content in the game requiring a coordinated group of players to participate in. One of the most popular things to do in World of Warcraft is raiding.
Raiding and the Race to World First
A raid, in simplest terms, is a mega-dungeon consisting of a series of bosses that are designed to be tackled by groups of ~20 players. They are generally completed over weeks or months by organized guilds of players, who get together at scheduled times 2-3 days per week to try and work their way through them.
Raids are designed as a cooperative activity, but as with all things, some players got into enough to turn it into a competition. For WoW’s most elite players, it has become a race, the race to beat the Raid first.
While the Race for World First (RWF) has been around since WoW began, it really exploded in popularity in 2019 when top guilds started streaming their attempts. Whenever a new Raid is released, top guilds take time off work and play 12+ hours a day, 7 days a week, desperately pushing to become the very first ones to defeat the final boss of the Raid on the highest difficulty, called Mythic. Hundreds of thousands of viewers tune in to watch them stream their attempts on Twitch. While a number of teams compete, for years the top two teams have been Liquid (based in the US and led by Max) and Echo (based in the EU and led by Scripe).
Abberus, the Shadow Crucible
The newest raid, Abberus the Shadow Crucible, unlocked on May 9th of this year. Like the raid before it, they released every difficulty of raid simultaneously (as opposed to previous years where there was a week delay for the hardest difficulty). This once again meant that the top guilds spent most of first three days grinding gear through a nightmarishly boring process known as “split raiding”, something I covered exhaustively (and exhaustingly) in my last post.
What was more interesting, however, was that a few less competitive guilds went straight into Mythic and actually did pretty well, downing the first three or four bosses before the top guilds even set foot inside.
This wasn’t an anomaly, either - as Liquid and Echo would soon discover, Abberus was a surprisingly easy raid, the easiest in living memory. Bosses were falling over quickly, really quickly.
Now, this isn’t hugely surprising - the last race ended in disaster because it has been too hard from the start, so an overcorrection on the developer’s part seemed almost inevitable. Easy bosses also doesn’t equal an easy race - you’re competing against others, so what really matters is beating them fast.
A Rivalry Renewed
The top two guilds in the RWF for years have been Echo and Liquid. Liquid won their first race back in early 2020, the first time a team from North America had ever won a modern race. This was, at the time, chalked up by many European fans as a fluke owing to their ‘21st man’ strategy that other guilds soon copied. However, Liquid then won the next race as well, Castle Nathria, cementing their place as a RWF powerhouse.
That would be their last win for a while, however - Echo, inheritors to the European RWF dynasty, went on to beat them in all of the next three races - Sanctum of Domination, Sepulcher of the First Ones, and Vault of the Incarnates all went to Echo. It was starting to look like maybe Liquid’s success would be short lived.
Then, in Abberus, Liquid won.
(What, you thought I was going to do some long buildup? Really tease it out, have you on the edge of your seat about what the outcome will be? Sorry to disappoint, but like I said, the raid was pretty easy and drama free, not a ton to talk about before the last boss.)
Liquid were the first to reach Scalecommander Sarkareth and the first to kill him, downing the boss around 18:00 UTC on Monday, May 15th. Echo would kill kim the same day, just before midnight, about six hours after Echo.
And that’s when the RWF community exploded.
What do you mean Liquid got a Head Start?
To understand what I’m about to discuss, we need to make one thing really clear: the Race for World First isn’t an official in-game event. The developer, Blizzard, does not (officially) sanction it or (officially) make any allowances for it. Unofficially, they pay extra attention during the race and try to fix any bugs or balance issues that crop up more quickly than usual, and they absolutely benefit from the free publicity, but unlike things like Dungeon or PVP tournaments that are run by Blizzard and held on a tournament realm, the Race for World first is an entirely grassroots event.
The reason this matters has to do with patch timings. See, Blizzard is a US-based company. While they directly control their North American (NA) servers, servers in other regions like the Europe (EU) and Oceania have their own subsidiaries and partners that maintain them.
When new content is added to the game, it is done so via a patch, an update. During patches the servers go offline for maintenance. As such, you generally want patches to happen when the fewest players are online. In North America, that means patches are usually done on a weekday morning, while most of your players are at work/school; it’s also timed such that, if problems arise, the developers have all day to fix them without having to stay at work late.
Thanks to timezones, however, the best time to patch varies based on where in the world you are. In North America, patches happen on Tuesday at 10:00 am eastern. That’s 4:00 pm in Germany, however, right when everyone is logging on for the evening. As such, rather than rolling out patches at the same time as the NA and inconveniencing players and developers alike, the EU servers instead wait until the following morning to patch.
For most content patches, that isn’t a big deal, it’s a minor delay that affects nothing. For the RWF, however, in effect it gives North America a ~12 hour head start on the race.
If you’re like most new fans of the RWF, you’re probably thinking “okay, North America gets a 12 hour head start, so just give European guilds a 12 hour handicap, problem solved, right?” Unfortunately for everyone involved (except for degenerates like you and I who enjoy fandom drama), it’s not that simple.
How Useful is the Head Start, Really?
So the thing is, having a head start…it’s not a bad thing, per se, it doesn’t actively hurt you, but it doesn’t help nearly as much as you think it would. There’s a couple reasons for this:

1. One of the most challenging and skilltesting part of the Race for World First is strategizing, coming up with clever ways to defeat bosses. However, this is really only that hard for the first guild to kill a boss - once someone figures out a strategy that works, everyone who comes after can simply copy the first guild’s strategy, maybe even improve on it. As a result, whoever gets there first has to spend a lot of time doing trial and error to figure out a winning strategy, time no one else has to spend.
2. Bugs and balance issues are both extremely common in the Race for World First (as anyone who followed either of the last two races is well aware). More often than not, a race will have at least one boss who is pretty much unkillable when you reach him, either because the developers tuned him to be too difficult or because one of his mechanics is glitched and doesn’t work correctly. Blizzard doesn’t generally figure this out until a guild actually attempts the boss and discovers the issue, however, so whoever is in the lead has to waste even more time basically doing glorified QA for the developers.

As a result, while the start may look like it’s 12 hours long, in reality a lot, if not most, of that time gets eaten away over the course of the week(s).
On top of this, there’s a lot of other stuff in the RWF that’s not really “fair”, stuff you wouldn’t include if you were trying to design the competition from scratch to ensure the most skilled team always won. To name a few:

1. Variability in gear drops
2. Fluctuating server stability
3. Fans who donate money, time, and gear to their favorite guild
4. Hotfix timing (like the one that decided the last race)

Basically, the head start is just one issue among many, and far from the most impactful. What’s more, there’s no way to objectively quantify what impact it does have in a way that would be fair to everyone.
The thing is, up to this point, it had never actually been an issue. In theory, even if you think North America benefits fully from the 12 hour head start, it only matters if they win by less than 12 hours. Before Abberus, that had never happened before - both of North America’s wins were by at least a day.
In this latest race, however, their margin of victory was, for the first time, smaller, just over 6 hours.
Now, the general agreement between the top Guilds is that World First is World First; whoever kills the last boss first wins, period. When Liquid killed the final boss, Echo immediately pinned a “Congrats on the win Liquid” in their Twitch chat, acknowledging their win and conceding the race.
Thanks to this, all of Echo’s fans agreed that Liquid had won fair and square and congratulated them on a race well won.
Just kidding, they lost their fucking minds.
The Response
From what I could tell, most Echo fans were actually very sportsmanlike and reasonable, as was Echo itself (mostly - more on that later). However, thanks to the magic of algorithms, the most angry and controversial posts get the most visibility so there was no shortage of outraged Echo fans crying foul, saying Liquid only won because of their head start.
Here’s a few examples from the World First megathread over on /wow:

EU better as usual but NA gets the free early start pass because they're worse.
calling neck in neck with the massive headstart lmao. cope harder
Gratz Echo world first, killed within the NA headstart

Part of the drama was fueled by the fact that, the night before their kill, Liquid stopped streaming. See, most of the race is streamed on Twitch, for clout and those sweet, sweet advertising dollars, but Liquid, just as they were reaching the last phase of the last boss, turned their stream off for a few hours. During this time Echo also began the last phase, which they, unlike Liquid, streamed.
The reason Liquid went dark became clear the next morning when they started pulling again on stream. They had developed a really unique and clever strategy for managing the last phase of the boss, involving using careful timing and certain classes having immunity ability to basically skip a huge damage section and make the entire thing much safer and faster. They stopped streaming while they practiced the strategy because they were worried that, if Echo saw it, they would copy it and then kill the boss while Liquid slept.
Their fears weren’t unfounded. Upon seeing Liquid’s strategy, Echo tried to incorporate it, but by then it was too late, and Liquid killed the boss first. Some Echo fans saw this as fuel for the narrative that the head start does in fact matter.
The funny thing is that Liquid actually borrowed the “turning off the stream to protect a clever strategy” move from Echo, who had done the exact same thing against Sire Denathrius back in 2020 in a (failed) attempt to win that race.
As for Echo’s response to the whole debacle, it was congratulatory and respectful of Liquid but still pretty salty about the whole thing. After the race, Scripe, the Echo raidleader, said on his stream:

What a shit tier man…this was a good global release tilt for sure. It was fucking bad…the game is just not good, that’s what it is. Well played Liquid, but bad game Blizzard. That’s the TLDR of this whole tier… it really is a bad game in terms of competitiveness. It’s all about who gets first, and it’s not great to start late, it sucks.

Speaking personally as a Liquid fan, I have to agree with Scripe. Liquid played great and deserved the win, but it’s still frustrating for Echo, and for fans of the race in general, to have this clear issue of start times muddying the waters. It’s not an easy fix, however; Blizzard could open the raid simultaneously for everyone, but, due to how gearing and weekly resets works, that would only solve the problem if every race finished in the first week (unless they permanently moved to a global reset and patch time, which then complicates things for everyone else). The other option would be to move the race onto a tournament realm and make it an official event, but that would fundamentally change the event in a way a lot of people aren’t on board with.
Other Drama
While the head start was by far the most glaring and discussed bit of drama in this race, there’s a few other juicy tidbits that bear mentioning.
First, this race saw the best performance from a non-Liquid/Echo guild in years, with Method making a really strong showing and only being a few hours behind Echo. If you’ve read my previous post about Method, then you, like me, probably have pretty complicated feelings about this. (TL;DR from that post is that Method used to be the top Guild in the world until a MeToo scandal fractured the organization - Echo was formed mostly out of the raiders that left Method following the scandal). On one hand, it’s a great comeback story, and honestly it would be nice if the RWF was a bit more competitive, rather than always being the same two teams. On the other hand, Method fell from grace because one of their members was a sexual predator, something that there’s strong evidence Method leadership was at least somewhat aware of and did nothing about until it started giving them bad press. As far as I know several of the people who were in charge at that time are still there in leadership positions, so I’m not exactly rooting for them.
Another major complaint about this race was the tuning - as I mentioned before, this raid was the easiest in a long time. Blizzard once again released Mythic alongside Heroic and Normal, which meant the first three days of the race were in miserable splits. Once Echo and Liquid started Mythic, it only took them another three days to clear the race, so they spent as much time grinding gear as they did actually progressing. The total pulls for the entire raid were actually less than the number of pulls it took to kill just Halondrus, a single mid-raid boss from two raids ago. RogerBrown, Echo’s co-GM, tweeted:

Very weird race this time. This raid was probably the worst tuned one since Emerald Nightmare [note: Emerald Nightmare was a raid from 2016 that took less than 24 hours start to finish]. 3 days of splits, for just 3 days of progress aint fun. I would take Sepulcher over these 'bosses' any day. [note: Sepulcher is that race that took 3 weeks and broke a lot of world first racers’ will to live]

A much funnier bit of drama involved another one of Echo’s players, Gingi. Before the race, he shittalked Liquid’s raidleader via tweet, saying “I hope you beat Method this time!” (basically saying “good luck getting second place”). After their loss, Gingi tweeted:

Still amazes me how people can’t have a civil discussion and see things from both sides. Actually got so much brain rot reading the most stupid takes. People saying perfect tuning for this tier is one of them. 2.5 days of mythic progress. Same amount of time on splits.

Many fans were quick to point out the hypocrisy of complaining about a lack of civility in discussions, then in the very next sentence referring to those you don’t agree with as having ‘brain rot’. There’s a whole reddit thread about the tweet exchange that’s pretty entertaining.
Takeaways
Overall this was a pretty fun race. It was nice to see Liquid take a race off Echo; even if you’re not a Liquid fan, competition is always more fun when it feels like there’s multiple parties that could win. While the tuning wasn’t great, the bosses themselves were still fairly interesting, and there weren’t any serious bugs that made everything grind to a halt like in several previous races.
At the same time, however, this race has added fuel to the fire for fans demanding a global release for the raid, to fix North America’s head start. I don’t think I’ve properly explained just how annoying the whole thing is for fans of the race - the head start itself is frustrating, but even more so the fact that it dominates the conversation. Every single race people complain about it, talk about how it’s not really fair. It can feel like the only thing anyone ever talks about… and that was before a race had ever been (theoretically) decided by it. Now that NA has won by less than the head start, the complaining is only going to get worse.
We’ll see what, if anything, Blizzard does about this moving forward (my money is on ‘nothing’ but I’m prepared to be surprised).
Thanks for reading, and huge shoutout to Starym, his coverage of the race was really helpful in finding quotes and timings for everything

2005 BMW M3 with cinnamon colored leather interior. I want to moisturize the seats. I was planning to use Lexol. Good choice? Should I have any concern about darkening the leather?

This is my first time dealing with a Karen (well a Male Karen) (I will call the male Karen ‘Kevin’)
Characters. Harry - Me
ER (Entitled Roommate) Kevin
(Disclaimer this story and the situation what this male Karen did may shock you,).
Let’s begin. I had just moved into a new share house back in February of this year, I had quite a lot of stuff to move in for example I had a lot of university books, a tv, my bed and a bar fridge), I am a university student (Estoy estudiando Español para la universidad) my major is Spanish. I also have a ocd disorder and depression which can trigger due to trauma.
Upon meeting my new house mates they were such a delight a few even helped me moved in also helping me to get a very heavy bar fridge through the front door. Now this is where Kevin enters the scene it was around 6pm and I was still moving stuff in (mostly the large furniture) so I had to prop the front door open so I could get my desk in. After I got my desk in through my room I see this man standing in the hall way looking at me, he said to me “why is this the front door opened” so I explained to him “oh, Hi I am just getting a few more things to move in it shouldn’t be much longer…” but before I could finish Kevin just kicked the door stop out and said “I Don’t Care! Keep the F**king door closed” and then he stormed off. I am in shock I had just moved in and this guy just had a go at me for no reason so I said something under my breath (Spanish Swear Word) so he couldn’t hear or understand it and I carried on moving my stuff in. Here is where Kevin really shines it was around 3am and I could hear someone coughing, loudly. It was Kevin now I know coughing can’t be helped so I let it go despite it was self inflicted because he smoked like a chimney there was even a whole jar of cigarette ashes on the outside table filled to the top of the jar. This went on for every morning at 3am, I would hear his coughing but what pissed me off the most he would also have his phone on (without headphones) at 3 to 4am playing YouTube videos and they were loud, the people upstairs could hear them but no one said anything and neither did I.
So around about 8am I am getting ready for university and I am tired from lack of sleep, then Lo and behold Kevin is at my door again, he looks at me and says “You there!, stop banging the front door, I work” and then he left. (I have to mention the doors tend to stick to the door frames due to a storms we had recently in February, the doors are made out of wood, you had to force them open and force them closed unfortunately) So he had the audacity to lecture me about noise while he kept everyone else awake at 3am. I didn’t keep quiet I said “Well don’t be up so late at 3am keeping everyone else awake” at this point he called me a (homophobic slur) and walked off. Now I am gay and I have zero tolerance for homophobia so I just shouted out “eff you” and then I left.
Plus Kevin was a total pig, every morning I would wake up and go to the bathroom and the sink reeked with vomit and the toilet was covered in piss and it was not flushed, I knew it was Kevin because I could hear him coughing in there an hour ago. Annoyed I had to wait for the building cleaners clean it up.
At 4pm I needed to shave my face, and after I cleaned the hair from the sink and made sure there was nothing in the sink but suddenly Kevin approached me and said “You dirty pig, the sink is dirty” now I looked at the sink there was no hair at all in the sink, nothing but Kevin just wanted to complain even more to cause trouble but I said to him and stood my ground “Okay dude, You left the bathroom sink reeking with vomit and you didn’t flush or aim from for that matter, you’re the pig” and I went back into my room not before flipping Kevin off and said to him a few curse words in Spanish.
Here is where Kevin really crossed the line with me. Because it’s a share house we had to share the same bathroom just like a hotel and motel and after I was done using the bathroom I opened the door and there he was, he was waiting other side of the bathroom door and he said to me “you need to lift lid up when you use the toilet, I heard you in…” now I was shocked to hear this, Kevin was listening in on me when I went to the bathroom and he openly admitted it. I said to him “First of I am not your slave, second you sick pervert listen in on me again when I am using the toilet and I will have you reported to the landlords and the police, got it” now this is where Kevin backed off but it didn’t last long.
During three weeks I couldn’t leave my room because I didn’t want to deal with him, he even tried to prevent me from going to university and he succeeded because he wouldn’t let me leave my own room because he was standing outside my door. This went on until March 29th and I finally moved out but I wanted revenge because when I was trapped like that where I couldn’t go to the bathroom or go out to buy food from the supermarket and because of him my academic performance at uni also suffered due to my anxiety issues.
I finally managed to find a new place and my mum even offered to help me move. So once everything was out of my old room into a new one at a new share house. I went into the backyard of my old place and grabbed the jar of cigarette ashes and threw it all over Kevin’s nice clean laundry and I also left the toilet seat down as I left. To add insult to injury, I also filled up his work boots with the cigarette ashes and pour water in them.
Am I the jerk for wrecking his work boots?

I am a single 40yo guy in the US that is 6'0 and about 230 lbs. I have mostly had sedans for cars but now that I am shopping for a new vehicle I want to try a CUV or SUV as I like how they look. I want leather seats and like a comfortable ride with creature comforts but I want something fun to drive. I only drive about 5000 miles a year and most of that is city with maybe a few rare longer road trips for vacations. I do not want a Kia or Hyundai. I've read about too many theft/damage/insurance and other issues.
What new SUV or CUV under $35k would you recommend that is comfortable and fun to drive?

(owing to the reddit character limit, I'm posting this in two parts, but it's one contiguous story)
There are instincts that you develop when you’re a parent. If you don’t have any children it might be a little hard to understand. If you have a toddler, for example, and they’re in the other room and silent for more than a few seconds, there’s a good chance they’re up to no good. I take that back, most of the time they’re doing nothing, but you still have to check. You feel a compulsion to check. I don’t think it’s a learned skill, I think it’s an actual instinct.
Paleolithic parents who didn’t check on their toddlers every few minutes, just to double check that they weren’t being stalked by smilodons were unlikely to have grandchildren and pass on their genes. You just feel you need to check, like getting goosebumps, a compulsion. I suppose it’s the same reason little kids are always demanding you look at them and what they’re doing.
I think that instinct starts to atrophy as your kids grow. They start learning to do things for themselves, and before you know it, they’re after their own privacy, not your attention. I don’t think it ever goes away though. I expect, decades from now, my own grown kids will visit and bring my grandkids with them. And the second I hear a baby crying in the earliest morning hours, I’ll be alert and ready for anything, sure as any old soldier who hears his name whispered in the dark of night.
I felt that alarm just the other day. First time in years. My boy came home from riding bikes with a couple of his friends. I’m pretty sure they worked out a scam where they asked each of their parents for a different new console for Christmas, and now they spend their weekends traveling between the three houses so they can play on all of them.
We all live in a nice neighborhood. A newer development than the one I grew up in, same town though. It’s the kind of place where kids are always playing in the streets, and the cars all routinely do under 20. My wife and I make sure the kids have helmets and pads, and we’re fine with the boy going out biking with his friends, as long as they stay in the neighborhood.
You know, a lot of people in my generation take some weird sort of pride in how irresponsible we used to be when we were young. I never wore a helmet. Rode to places, without telling any adults, that we never should have ridden to. Me and my friends would make impromptu jumps off of makeshift ramps and try to do stupid tricks, based loosely on stunts we’d seen on TV. Other people my age seem to wax nostalgic for that stuff and pretend it makes them somehow better people. I don’t get it. Sometimes I look back and shudder. We were lucky we escaped with only occasional bruises and road burns. It could have gone so much worse.
My son and his buddies came bustling in the front door at about 2 PM on a Saturday. They did the usual thing of raiding the kitchen for juice and his mother’s brownies, and I took that as my cue to abandon the television in the living room for my office. I was hardly noticing the chaos, by this point, it was becoming a regular weekend occurrence. But as I was just leaving, I caught something in the chatter. My boy said something about, “... that guy who was following us.”
He hadn’t said it any louder or more clearly than anything else they’d been talking about, all that stuff I’d been filtering out. Yet some deeper core process in my brain stem heard it, interpreted it, then hit the red alert button. My blood ran cold and every hair on my skin stood at attention.
I turned around and asked “Somebody followed you? What are you talking about?” I wasn’t consciously aware of how strict and stern my voice came out, yet when the jovial smiles dropped off of their faces it was apparent that it had been so.
“Huh?” my son said, his voice high-pitched and talking fast, like when he thinks he’s in trouble and needs to explain. “We thought we saw somebody following us. There wasn’t though. We didn’t really see anybody and we’d just spooked ourselves.”
“What did he look like?” I asked.
“Nothing? We really didn’t see anybody! Honest! I just saw something out of the corner of my eye! But there wasn’t really nobody there!”
“Yeah!,” said one of his buds. “Peripheral! Peripheral vision! I thought maybe I saw something too, but when I looked I didn’t see anything. I don’t have my glasses with me, but when I really looked I got a good look and there was nothing.”
The three boys had that semi-smiling but still concerned look that this was only a bizarre misunderstanding, but they were still being very sincere. “Were they in a car?”
“No, Dad, you don’t get it,” my boy continued, “They were small. We thought it was a kid.”
“Yeah,” said the third boy. “We thought maybe it was Tony Taylor’s stupid kid sister shadowing us. Getting close to throwing water balloons. Just cause she did that before.”
“If you didn’t get a good look how did you know it was a kid?”
“Because it was small!” my kid explained, though that wasn’t helping much. “What I mean is, at first I thought it was behind a little bush. It was way too small a bush to hide a grown-up. That’s why we thought it was probably Tony’s sister.”
“But you didn’t actually see Tony’s sister?” I asked.
“Nah,” said one of his buds. “And now that I think about it, that bush was probably too small for his sister too. It would have been silly. Like when a cartoon character hides behind a tiny object.”
“That’s why we think it was just in our heads,” explained the other boy, “That and the pole.”
“Yeah,” my son said. “The park on 14th and Taylor?” That was just a little community park, a single city block. Had a playground, lawn, a few trees, and some benches. “Anyway, we were riding past that, took a right on Taylor. And we were talking about how weird it would be if somebody really were following us. That’s when Brian thought he saw something. Behind a telephone pole.”
“I didn’t get a good look at it either,” the friend, Brian, “explained. Just thought I did. Know how you get up late at night to use the bathroom or whatever and you look down the hallway and you see a jacket or an office chair or something and because your eyes haven’t adjusted you think you see a ghost or burglar or something? Anyway, I thought I saw something out of the corner of my eye, but when I turned there wasn’t anything there.”
“Yeah, it was just like sometimes that happens, except this time it happened twice on the same bike ride, is all,” the other friend explained.
“And you’re sure there was nothing there?”
“Sure we’re sure,” my boy said. “We know because that time we checked. We each rode our bikes around the pole and there was nothing. Honest!”
“Hmmm,” I said. The whole thing seemed reasonable and nothing to be concerned about, you’d think.. The boys seemed to relax at my supposed acceptance. “Alright, sounds good. Hey, just let me know before you leave the house again, alright?” They all rushed to seem agreeable as I left the room, then quickly resumed their snacking and preceded to play their games.
I kept my ear out, just in case. My boy, at least this time, dutifully told me his friends were about to leave. He wasn’t very happy with me when I said they wouldn’t be riding home on their bikes, I was going to drive them home. The other boys didn’t complain, but I suppose it wasn’t their place, so my boy did the advocating for them, which I promptly ignored. I hate doing that, ignoring my kid’s talkback. My dad was the same way. It didn’t help that I struggled to get both of their bikes in the trunk, and it was a pain to get them back out again. My boy sulked in the front seat on the short ride back home. Arms folded on chest, eyes staring straight ahead, that lip thing they do. He seemed embarrassed for having what he thought was an over-protective parent. I suppose he was angry at me as well for acting, as far as he knew, irrationally. Maybe he thought he was being punished for some infraction he didn’t understand.
Well, it only got worse when we got home. I told him he wasn’t allowed to go out alone on his bike anymore. I’d only had to do that once before, when he was grounded, and back then he’d known exactly what he’d done wrong and he had it coming. Now? Well, he was confused, furious, maybe betrayed, probably a little brokenhearted? I can’t blame him. He tramped upstairs to his room to await the return of his mother, who was certain to give a sympathetic ear. I can’t imagine how upset he’ll be if he checks the garage tomorrow and finds I’ve removed his tires, just in case.
I wish I could explain it to him. I don’t even know how.
Where should I even begin? The town?
When I was about my son’s age I had just seen that movie, The Goonies. It had just come out in theaters. I really liked that movie, felt a strong connection. A lot of people do, can’t blame them, sort of a timeless classic. Except I wasn’t really into pirate’s treasure or the Fratellis, what really made me connect was a simple single shot, still in the first act. It’s right after they cross the threshold, and leave the house on their adventure. It was a shot of the boys, from above, maybe a crane shot or a helicopter shot, as they’re riding their bikes down a narrow forested lane, great big evergreen trees densely growing on the side of the road, they’re all wearing raincoats and the road is still wet from recent rain.
That was my childhood. I’ve spent my whole life in the Pacific Northwest. People talk to outsiders about the rain, and they might picture a lot of rainfall, but it’s not the volume, it’s the duration. We don’t get so much rain, it just drizzles slowly, on and on, for maybe eight or nine months out of the year. It doesn’t matter where I am, inside a house, traveling far abroad, anywhere I am I can close my eyes and still smell the air on a chilly afternoon, playing outdoors with my friends.
It’s not petrichor, that sudden intense smell you get when it first starts to rain after a long dry spell. No, this was almost the opposite, a clean smell, almost the opposite of a scent, since the rain seemed to scrub the air clean. The strongest scent and I mean that in the loosest sense possible, must have been the evergreen needles. Not pine needles, those were too strong, and there weren’t that many pines anyway. Douglas fir and red cedar predominated, again the root ‘domination’ seems hyperbole. Yet those scents were there, ephemeral as it is. Also, there was a sort of pleasant dirtiness to the smell, at least when you rode bikes. It wasn’t dirt, or mud, or dust. Dust couldn’t have existed except perhaps for a few fleeting weeks in August. I think, looking back, it was the mud puddles. All the potholes in all the asphalt suburban roads would fill up after rain with water the color of chocolate milk. We’d swerve our BMX bikes, or the knock-off brands, all the way across the street just to splash through those puddles and test our “suspensions.,” meaning our ankles and knees. The smell was always stronger after that. It had an earthiness to it. Perhaps it was petrichor’s lesser-known watery cousin.
There were other sensations too, permanently seared into my brain like grill marks. A constant chilliness that was easy to ignore, until you started working up a good heart rate on your bike, then you noticed your lungs were so cold it felt like burning. The sound of your tires on the wet pavement, particularly when careening downhill at high speed. For some reason, people in the mid-80s used to like to decorate their front porches with cheap, polyester windsocks. They were often vividly colored, usually rainbow, like prototype pride flags. When an occasional wind stirred up enough to gust, the windsocks would flap, and owning to the water-soaked polyester, make a wet slapping sound. It was loud, it was distinct, but you learned to ignore it as part of the background, along with the cawing of crows and distant passing cars.
That was my perception of Farmingham as a kid. The town itself? Just a typical Pacific Northwest town. That might not mean much for younger people or modern visitors, but there was a time when such towns were all the same. They were logging towns. It was the greatest resource of the area from the late 19th century, right up until about the 80s, when the whole thing collapsed. Portland, Seattle, they had a few things going on beyond just the timber industry, but all the hundreds of little towns and small cities revolved around logging, and my town was no exception.
I remember going to the museum. It had free admission, and it was a popular field trip destination for the local school system. It used to be the City Hall, a weird Queen Anne-style construction. Imagine a big Victorian house, but blown up to absurd proportions, and with all sorts of superfluous decorations. Made out of local timber, of course. They had a hall for art, I can’t even remember why, now. Maybe they were local artists. I only remember paintings of sailboats and topless women, which was a rare sight for a kid at the time. There was a hall filled with 19th-century household artifacts. Chamber pots and weird children's toys.
Then there was the logging section, which was the bulk of the museum. It’s strange how different things seemed to be in the early days of the logging industry, despite being only about a hundred years old, from my perspective in the 1980s. If you look back a hundred years from today, in the 1920s, you had automobiles, airplanes, electrical appliances, jazz music, radio programs, flappers, it doesn’t feel that far removed, does it? No TV, no internet, but it wouldn’t be that strange. 1880s? Different world.
Imagine red cedars, so big you could have a full logging crew, arms stretched out, just barely manage to encircle one for a photographer. Felling a single tree was the work of days. Men could rest and eat their lunches in the shelter of a cut made into a trunk, and not worry for safety or room. They had to cut their own little platforms into the trees many feet off the ground, just so the trunk was a little bit thinner, and thus hours of labor saved. They used those long, flexible two-man saws. And double-bit axes. They worked in the gloom of the shade with old gas lanterns. Once cut down from massive logs thirty feet in diameter, they’d float the logs downhill in sluices, like primitive wooden make-shift water slides. Or they’d haul them down to the nearest river, the logs pulled by donkeys on corduroy roads. They’d lay large amounts of grease on the roads, so the logs would slide easily. You could still smell the grease on the old tools on display in the museum. The bigger towns had streets where the loggers would slide the logs down greased skids all the way down to the sea, where they’d float in big logjams until the mills were ready for processing. They’d call such roads “skid-rows.” Because of all the activity, they’d end up being the worst parts of town. Local citizens wouldn’t want to live there, due to all the stink and noise. They’d be on the other side of the brothels and the opium dens. It would be the sort of place where the destitute and the insane would find themselves when they’d finally lost anything. To this day, “skidrow” remains a euphemism for the part of a city where the homeless encamp.
That was the lore I’d learned as a child. That was my “ancestry” I was supposed to respect and admire, which I did, wholeheartedly. There were things they left out, though. Things that you might have suspected, from a naive perspective, would be perfect for kids, all the folklore that came with the logging industry. The ghost stories, and the tall tales. I would have eaten that up. They do talk about that kind of thing in places far removed from the Pacific Northwest. But I had never heard about any of it. Things like the Hidebehind. No, that I’d have to discover for myself.
There were four of us on those bike adventures. Myself. Ralph, my best friend. A tough guy, the bad boy, the most worldly of us, which is a strange thing to say about an eight-year-old kid. India, an archetypal ‘80s tomboy. She was the coolest person I knew at the time. Looking back, I wonder what her home life was like. I think I remember problematic warning signs that I couldn’t have recognized when I was so young, but now raise flags. Then there was Ben. A goofy kid, a wild mop of hair, coke bottle glasses, type 1 diabetic which seemed to make him both a bit pampered by his mother, who was in charge of all his insulin, diet, and schedule, and conversely a real risk taker when she wasn’t around.
When we first saw it…
No, wait. This was the problem with starting the story. Where does it all begin? I’ll need to talk about my Grandfather as well. I’ve had two different perspectives on my Grandfather, on the man that he was. The first was the healthy able-bodied grandparent I’d known as a young child. Then there was the man, as I learned about him after he had passed.
There was a middle period, from when I was 6 to when I was 16, when I hardly understood him at all, as he was hit with a double whammy of both Parkinson’s and Alzheimer's. His decline into an invalid was both steep and long drawn out. That part didn’t reflect who he was as a person.
What did I know of him when I was little? Well I knew he and my grandmother had a nice big house and some farmland, out in the broad flat valley north of Farmingham. Dairy country. It had been settled by Dutch immigrants back in the homesteading days. His family had been among the first pioneers in the county too. It didn’t register to me then that his surname was Norwegian, not Dutch. I knew he had served in the Navy in World War II, which I was immensely proud of for reasons I didn’t know why. I knew he had a job as a butcher in a nearby rural supermarket. He was a bit of a farmer too, more as a hobby and a side gig. He had a few cattle, but mostly grew and harvested hay to sell to the local dairies. I knew he had turned his garage into a machine shop, and could fix damn near anything. From the flat tires on my bicycle to the old flat-bed truck he’d haul hay with, to an old 1950s riding lawnmower he somehow managed to keep in working order. I knew he could draw a really cool cartoon cowboy, I knew he loved to watch football, and I knew the whiskers on his chin were very pokey, and they’d tickle you when he kissed you on the cheek, and that when you tried to rub the sensation away he’d laugh and laugh and laugh.
Then there were the parts of his life that I’d learn much later. Mostly from odd passing comments from relatives, or things I’d find in the public records. Like how he’d been a better grandfather than a father. Or how his life as I knew it had been a second, better life. He’d been born among the Norwegian settler community, way up in the deep, dark, forest-shrouded hills that rimmed the valley. He’d been a logger in his youth. Technologically he was only a generation or two from the ones I’d learned about in the museum. They’d replaced donkeys with diesel engines and corduroy roads with narrow gauge rail. It was still the same job, though. Dirty, dangerous, dark. Way back into those woods, living in little logging camps, civilization was always a several-day hike out. It became a vulgar sort of profession, filled with violent men, reprobates, and thieves. When my grandfather’s father was murdered on his front porch by a lunatic claiming he’d been wronged somehow, my grandfather hiked out of there, got into town, and joined the Navy. He vowed never to go back. The things he’d seen out in those woods were no good. He’d kept that existence away from me. Anyways…
Tommy Barker was the first of us to go missing. I say ‘us’ as if I knew him personally. I didn’t. He went to Farmingham Middle School, other side of town, and several grades above us. From our perspective, he may as well have been an adult living overseas.
Yet it felt like we got to know him. His face was everywhere, on TV, all over telephone poles. Everybody was talking about him. After he didn’t return from a friend’s house, everybody just sort of assumed, or maybe hoped, that he’d just gotten lost, or was trapped somewhere. They searched all the parks. Backyards, junkyards, refrigerators, trunks. Old-fashioned refrigerators, back before suction seals, had a simple handle with a latch that opened when you pulled on it. It wasn’t a problem when the fridges were in use and filled with food. But by the 80s old broke-down refrigerators started filling up backyards and junkyards, and they became deathtraps for kids playing hide-and-seek. The only opened from the outside. I remember thinking Tommy Barker was a little old to have likely been playing hide-and-seek, but people checked everywhere anyway. They never found him.
That was about the first time we saw the Hidebehind. Ben said he thought he saw somebody following us, looked like, maybe, a kid. We’d just slowly huffed our way up a moderately steep hill, Farmingham is full of them, and when we paused for a breather at the top, Ben said he saw it down the hill, closer to the base. Yet when we turned to look there was nothing there. Ben said he’d just seen it duck behind a car. That wasn’t the sort of behavior of a random kid minding his own business. Yet the slope afforded us a view under the car’s carriage, and except for the four tires, there were no signs of any feet hiding behind the body. At first, we thought he was pulling our leg. When he insisted he wasn’t, we started to tease him a little. He must have been seeing things, on account of his poor vision and thick glasses. The fact that those glasses afforded him vision as good as or better than any of us wasn’t something we considered.
The next person to disappear was Amy Brooks. Fifth-grader. Next elementary school over. I remember it feeling like when you’re traveling down the freeway, and there’s a big thunderstorm way down the road, but it keeps getting closer, and closer. I don’t remember what she looked like. Her face wasn’t plastered everywhere like Tommy’s had been. She was mentioned on the regional news, out of Seattle, her and Tommy together. Two missing kids from the same town in a short amount of time. The implication was as obvious as it was depraved. They didn’t think the kids were getting lost anymore. They didn’t do very much searching of backyards. The narratives changed too. Teachers started talking a lot about stranger danger. Local TV channels started recycling old After School Specials and public service announcements about the subject.
I’m not sure who saw it next. I think it was Ben again. We took him seriously this time though. I think. The one I’m sure I remember was soon after, and that time it was India who first saw it. It’s still crystal clear in my memory, almost forty years later, because that was the time I first saw it too. We were riding through a four-way stop, an Idaho Stop before they called it that, when India slammed to a stop, locking up her coaster brakes and leaving a long black streak of rubber on a dry patch of pavement. We stopped quickly after and asked what the problem was. We could tell by her face she’d seen it. She was still looking at it.
“I see it,” she whispered, unnecessarily. We all followed her gaze. We were looking, I don’t know, ten seconds? Twenty? We believed everything she said, we just couldn’t see it.
“Where?” Ralph asked.
“Four blocks down,” she whispered. “On the left. See the red car? Kinda rusty?” There was indeed a big old Lincoln Continental, looking pretty ratty and worn. I focused on that, still seeing nothing. “Past that, just to its right. See the street light pole? It’s just behind that.”
We also saw the pole she was talking about. Metal. Aluminum, I’d have guessed. It had different color patches, like metallic flakeboard. Like it’d had been melted together out of scrap.
I could see that clearly even from that distance. I saw nothing behind it. I could see plenty of other things in the background, cars, houses, bushes, front lawns, beauty bark landscape.. There was no indication of anything behind that pole.
And then it moved. It had been right there where she said it had been, yet it had somehow perfectly blended into the landscape, a trick of perspective. We didn’t see it at all until it moved, and almost as fast it had disappeared behind that light pole. We only got a hint. Brown in color, about our height in size.
We screamed. Short little startled screams, the involuntary sort that just burst out of you. Then we turned and started to pedal like mad, thoroughly spooked. We made it to the intersection of the next block when it was Ralph who screeched to a halt and shouted, “Wait!”
We slowed down and stopped, perhaps not as eagerly as we’d done when India yelled. Ralph was looking back over his shoulder, looking at that metal pole. “Did anybody see it move again?’ he asked. We all shook our heads in the negative. Ralph didn’t notice, but of course, he didn’t really need an answer, of course we hadn’t been watching.
“If it didn’t move, then it’s still there!” Ralph explained the obvious. It took a second to sink in, despite the obvious. “C’mon!” he shouted, and to our surprise, before we could react, he turned and took off, straight down the road, straight to where that thing had been lurking.
We were incredulous, but something about his order made us all follow hot on his heels. He was a sort of natural leader. I thought it was total foolishness, but I wasn’t going to let him go alone. I think I got out, “Are you crazy?!”
The wind was blowing hard past our faces as we raced as fast as we could, it made it hard to hear. Ralph shouted his response. “If it’s hiding that means its afraid!” That seemed reasonable, if not totally accurate. Lions hide from their prey before they attack. Then again, they don’t wait around when the whole herd charges. Really, the pole was coming up so fast there wasn’t a whole lot of time to argue. “Just blast past and look!” Ralph added. “We’re too fast! It won’t catch us.”
Sure, I thought to myself. Except maybe Ben, who always lagged behind the rest of us in a race. The lion would get Ben if any of us.
We rushed past that pole and all turned our heads to look. “See!” Ralph shouted in triumph. There was simply nothing there. A metal streetlight pole and nothing more. We stopped pedaling yet still sped on. “Hang on,” Ralph said, and at the next intersection he took a fast looping curve that threatened to crash us all, but we managed and curved behind him. We all came to the pole again where we stopped to see up close that there was nothing there, despite what we had seen moments before.
“Maybe it bilocated,” Ben offered. We groaned. We were all thinking it, but I think we were dismissive because it wasn’t as cool a word as ‘teleport.”
“Maybe it just moved when we weren’t looking,” I offered. That hadn’t been long, but that didn’t mean anything if it moved fast. The four of us slowly looked up from the base of the pole to our immediate surroundings. There were bushes. A car in a carport covered by a tarpaulin. The carport itself. Garbage cans. Stumps. Of course the ever-present trees. Whatever it was it could have been hiding behind anything. Maybe it was. We looked. Maybe it would make itself seen. None of us wanted that. “OK, let’s get going,” Ralph said, and we did so.
I got home feeling pretty shaken that afternoon. I felt safe at home. Except for the front room, which had a big bay window looking out onto the street, and the people who lived across it. There were plenty of garbage cans and telephone poles and stumps that a small, fast thing might hide behind. No, I felt more comfortable in my bedroom. There was a window, but a great thick conical cypress tree grew right in front of it, reaching way up over the roof of the house. If anything, it offered ME a place to hide, and peer out onto the street to either side of the tree. It was protective, as good as any heavy blanket.

Hey, fellow Redditors! I wanted to share a bizarre experience that happened to me earlier today. I'm still trying to wrap my head around it, and I thought this community might enjoy hearing about it and maybe even offer some insights.
So, here's what went down: I was minding my own business, going about my day, when the doorbell rang. I wasn't expecting any deliveries, so I was a bit surprised. When I opened the door, there it was—a package. It was a plain, brown box with no return address or any indication of where it came from. Curiosity got the best of me, and I brought it inside.
As I carefully opened the box, I couldn't help but feel a sense of anticipation mixed with a tinge of unease. Inside, nestled in layers of packing material, was an ancient-looking book. The leather cover was weathered and adorned with intricate symbols and patterns. It had an aura of mystery that I couldn't ignore.
Now, here's where it gets even stranger. As I flipped through the pages, I noticed that they were filled with writings in a language I'd never seen before. It looked like some sort of ancient script, almost mystical in nature. I couldn't decipher a single word, but the illustrations accompanying the text were captivating and seemed to depict fantastical creatures and realms.
The more I delved into the book, the more a strange energy seemed to fill the room. It was as if the air crackled with magic, though I couldn't quite put my finger on it. And that's when things took an even more unexpected turn—faint whispers echoed in my ears. I couldn't make out what they were saying, but they seemed to be calling me, beckoning me to explore further.
Naturally, I turned to you, dear Redditors, for advice. Has anyone encountered something similar? Do you have any insights into the origins of this book or the meaning behind the enigmatic text? Could it be a long-lost grimoire of some ancient magic? Or perhaps a prank? I'm open to any theories or suggestions you might have.
I'll keep you all updated as I continue my investigation. In the meantime, I'll be trying to decipher these mysterious pages, diving into the unknown. Wish me luck!
A mysterious package arrived at my doorstep containing an ancient book filled with unintelligible text and magical illustrations. Strange whispers and an eerie energy accompanied its presence. Looking for help from the Reddit community to unravel its secrets.
Thank you all for your overwhelming responses and support! I've received some intriguing suggestions and leads that I'll be exploring further. Keep the theories coming!

Timestamp: https://imgur.com/a/OZNQk0v
Pics: https://imgur.com/a/hNxVWtX
OEM P365 Barrel with Nitride removed and polished - $50

• I wanted a mirror polish look but nobody sells one so I decided to make on from an oem barrel. It's not done perfectly, but was good enough for what I was looking for.

FDEZ P365 Flush and Crown Non-LCI Barrel - $110

• 100rds through the barrel

Holosun 507k ACSS Green - $270

• No box or accessories included, but still covered under warranty

Wilson Combat P320 Compact Grip Module - $55

• For 3.9" Slides and 15rd length mags
• All three weights from armorycraft are installed and included

Payment, Shipping, & Transaction Info: NO G&S due to tax changes with paypal.

1 - Payment Methods: Paypal F&F, Venmo F&F, and Cashapp with NO NOTES IN DESCRIPTIONS. Use an emoji for Venmo.
2 - I use Pirate Ship to create labels and will provide tracking as soon as possible. Lower 48 only, no HI or AK.
3 - NO TRANSACTION NOTES OF ANY KIND.
4 - Call "dibs" to secure what you want. "Dibs" will have priority over "Interested" or "PM sent".
5 - Unless something is marked as SOLD, it is still available. Call 2nd Dibs, 3rd Dibs, etc. in a comment below.
6 - Buyer will have 1 hour to send funds. Item(s) will be passed to next in line if no funds are received within an hour. If you need more time just let me know.