Western nail ideas

I (22M) live in a photogenic, good ol' western American suburb, still rocking my childhood bedroom in my parents' house (thanks rent prices). Growing up, I never needed to worry much about transport (or even thought about it at all, really), my elementary school is literally next to my subdivision, and any other place I visited regularly was either a 10 minute walk or 5 minute ride in my parents' cars; there was no inbetween. But, I'm not a kid anymore. I'm in my twenties. I have my own life (even if it doesn't feel like it), responsibilities and expectations. Problem is, I'm severely stunted by my stubborn, infuriating inability to operate a car. I started feeling it a little bit before I got my permit, but I chalked it up to just me being nervous. When I actually started driving, though, I never shook it, never "got used to it," never felt the godawful stress symptoms or negative opinions on it fade in any way. They only got worse and worse and now they're crippling, despite my effort and hours upon hours of forcing myself to do it.
I got my license out of pure spite and luck, and sometimes I seriously consider giving it up and just having a state issued ID so there's no expectation of me to drive. But I shut those thoughts down because I wouldn't be able to completely escape the horrible feelings anyway. In the years since, my intrusive thoughts and nauseating anxiety has bled into simply riding in a car in general, so having the ability to legally drive in an emergency situation would be nice, I guess.
It's difficult to describe how I feel when driving in a way that makes perfect sense to other people because my anxiety (fear? phobia?) is inherently irrational, and that makes it all the worse because the non caveman part of my brain recognizes that. So I guess I'll just ramble and push enter a couple of times when I'm done and maybe it'll make sense. I need to try and justify myself in a medium where I can think about what I'm saying so I don't sound absolutely insane and completely embarrass myself like I've done before.
Cars feel too big. I could be driving the smallest little Beetle or Mini, and the thing would still feel as big as a fucking continent. Even imagining driving one of those huge fuck off death machines called a pickup truck sends me into a spiral. The wheel being off center makes me feel like there's this, like, mass that's stuck to my side and I'm afraid I'm gonna smash into something whenever I turn right. You know that vertigo effect they do in movies? Where they move the camera backwards and zoom in at the same time when looking down a long hallway? That's similar to what it feels like looking across the hood of a car from the driver's seat to me. Like, the hood is so fucking long and it could be hiding anything behind it even though I know it isn't. I guess it makes me look at the road at least. Not to mention backing up, Jesus Christ backing up is a nightmare. Thank god for back up cameras.
Going at any decent speed makes me feel sick. Thinking about how fast I'm going on the highway, especially since I've been outside of a car on it and have seen and felt just how fucking fast a car going 60-80 mph is is insane to me. It feels so wrong. My gut feeling is that I should not have the ability to move something this stupidly big weighing literal tons this fast. I cannot fathom the idea of purposefully going over 100 mph in a car. That feels unreal to me. I genuinely don't think I could make myself do that. I get intrusive thoughts of unwittingly slamming into a median or someone materializing in front of me all the time. Imagining the aftermath of those scenarios make me want to puke. Obviously I try not to do that, but sometimes your mind wanders towards it anyway.
There's also just the general symptoms of anxiety and panic I feel when shit gets really stressful (i.e. the highway or traffic jams). My heart beats a million miles an hour, I sweat like a pig and hyperventilate, the works. I've gotten very good at grounding myself and focusing when it gets bad but fuck me it is always an awful experience.
I guess my brain chemistry is just not built for driving. At least I have a robust, efficient and affordable public transportation network in my city, right? No. This is America, baby! Of course, there's no other transport options near my home. The nearest bus stop is a convenient two hour walk away and the bus routes are shit! :) There is a train station somewhat nearby, but guess what? The route is shit and goes nowhere near where I need or want to go and in other cities no less! :) Biking around the stroads here is a fucking deathwish! There's also no bike lane or even a fucking sidewalk on 90% of the roads here! :) So essentially, I'm fucking landlocked. We bulldozed our cities for these dangerous, obnoxious, expensive machines and that is existentially infuriating.
My life has been completely fucked by this stupid, stupid thing I have. I can't get a job that's even a decent distance away, so I'm stuck doing gig work online and odd jobs around the neighborhood for money (and seasonal work for events that set up near my home). Shocker, it isn't much. I save what I can, but I am very poor because I insist on paying my own way for the things I use. I cannot afford a car and I don't even want one in the first place, but I kinda need one. Hey, at least I'm known as the neighborhood handy man? My parents both work jobs where they can be potentially called in at any time, so I need to schedule car use with them and I need to complete trips fast. My parents are very sweet and understanding and I love them to death, but I hate myself every time I need to go somewhere with one of their cars. Not only does it feel like I'm potentially jeopardizing their livelihoods if I get held up for any reason, but with my rambling you read above, it also feels like I'm signing up to get shot in the gut.
My dating life has been nonexistent since high school. I'm sure it makes a great first impression on someone when you can't go out to see them or if you ask them for a ride to the coffeeshop! :)
My group of close friends, god bless their souls, are also 100% understanding of my situation and have been so sweet by offering me rides to their apartment they share to hang out on the weekends. They're like siblings to me (we've all known each other since elementary school) but, again, it feels so wrong to have to rely on them to go places.
It is viscerally embarrassing when I ask them to go somewhere or to slow down on a back road because I feel gross, so I rarely do.
Honestly, I don't know what to do. I have no clue how to approach or start getting over this outside of just driving. But I think it's fairly obvious that I shouldn't be doing it just to do it. I feel like an insufferable leech and I wish I could just make myself go places. I'm not spending $50 on an Uber to the fucking grocery store. Any advice is very welcome because I'm getting really tired of feeling like a child in an adult man's body. I genuinely want to get better and start my life way after I should've. I want to stop telling my friends, "I'm okay," when I'm clearly not. But I'm very happy to have finally said this out loud to someone in a way I wanted. Thank you. God bless the suburbs.

I have a friend who lives in Saudi Arabia. It seems he cannot get Prep in his own country.
Is there a way for him to get it via some (foreign?) online doctor, at a reasonable price?
I believe he travels to Western countries fairly regularly. Obviously he would first need to get tested for liver and kidney stuff, and HIV. Could he get tested while travelling, and get Prep abroad while travelling, preferably in Europe, since that is fairly close to Arabia?
I really have no idea, and it seems hard to Google. So I'd be interested to hear whether anyone know of any options. I myself am on Prep, but I cannot give it to him when he visits my country, also because he'd need to get the tests done first.

He used to be a doctor returning from overseas or a defender of anti-counterfeiting in the eyes of many netizens on the internet, but now he is fighting against it, but he has embarked on a path of smearing his country and seeking glory as a "banana man".
He was born into a very ordinary family, different from ordinary boys. Fang Zhouzi doesn't like to play and his favorite thing is to read at home. The books he likes are literary works from a long time ago, some ancient poems and songs. It can be said that in the field of literature, Fang Zhouzi is quite talented. Fang Zhouzi's parents found that their children like reading, I made every effort to provide my children with education when my family was not wealthy. He was given the highest quality resources, and Fang Zhouzi did not disappoint his parents' expectations. With his own efforts, he was admitted to the University of Science and Technology of China. After graduation, he had a valuable opportunity to study in the United States with excellent grades. Although in a foreign country, Fang Zhouzi also pursued a master's degree and became the pride of his father and teachers.
During this period in the United States, he gradually became a defender of anti-counterfeiting on the internet. No one would have imagined that his attitude towards his country had slowly begun to change. Later on, he even established a special anti counterfeiting website, which openly criticized various unreasonable traditional customs and many trivial matters. Fang Zhouzi would go to crack down on counterfeiting, not to mention those so-called big shots and many well-known public figures, who were the targets of Fang Zhouzi's criticism. As long as those people had any information to conceal from the public, Fang Zhouzi will be exposed, or it may be because this character is controversial that he still has many enthusiastic fans online. At this point, everyone was completely unaware that Fang Zhouzi, who had been abroad for a long time, had already been infused with Western ideas.
With the increasing popularity of the internet, Fang Zhouzi, who likes to crack down on fake products, seems to have a big problem of his own. In the United States, it is claimed that traditional Chinese medicine has no scientific basis and is simply fake, far inferior to Western medicine. Although he does not engage in online debates with Chinese people, he clearly changed his face when facing foreigners.
Fang Zhouzi also established a foundation, but later relevant departments investigated and found that it was just an institution used by Fang Zhouzi to launder money. For example, he would collaborate with lawyers to deceive those who did not understand the law, and the money obtained was eventually turned into cars and houses by Fang Zhouzi and lawyers. When others scolded him, he didn't admit it at all. If Fang Zhouzi had a moral flaw, it would be even more infuriating. He had already become a traitor, a clown who worshipped foreign things. From the previous crackdown on counterfeits to the current smear campaign against his motherland, Fang Zhouzi had truly achieved a seamless connection, and inappropriate remarks appeared on the internet one by one without conducting sufficient investigation and understanding of the truth, He began his crazy journey of cracking down on counterfeits, making enemies everywhere and sparking many meaningless curses. It was under such ridiculous and inappropriate remarks time and time again that Fang Zhouzi's image fell to the bottom. He seemed like a street mouse, and whenever he appeared on the internet, he would be despised and beaten by everyone.

If I've been brainwashed by western, you've brainwashed with an ancient era beliefs. Move on.
Your belief have been aggresively making the others to accept your ideas since ancient times, for something thats not even exist in this life.
Heck, your brainwashings have been condemning all of the others outside your circle (the non muslims) to hell, and people will obviously react, then u cry people phobic since ancient times too. Such a braindead cycle.
All of that is happening over the hate that you have towards the so called nons, the sinners. For something in the so called afterlife, while you're here living in the real word.
As an ex muslim, i'm glad that you cite Al Kafirun final verse, your religion is yours and mine is mine.
But fucking walk the talk with that verse. Fuckers wanna be arab so much memorizing arabic verse, only to accumulate some heavenly currency, but useless in real life.

For some context, I came out to myself and a few other close people including my sister a few months ago. Ever since I’ve been getting more comfortable openly expressing my bisexuality with how I get my nails done, the clothes I wear, wearing a rainbow pin on my suits when I go to professional events, you know simple things but that for the observant eye you can tell it’s intentional.
My sister has noticed but she has insisted I don’t come out to my parents unless I have to as they won’t understand. She is married to a woman and didn’t come out until she wanted to get married (she was in a relationship for 5 years in secret). I even asked my sister-in-law and she’s of the same opinion.
Now, I recently visited them and my mom started making comments about how she thinks I’m open to being in a relationship with “either side”, I didn’t know how to respond to that so I think I was dodging the question without saying outright no and my sister accused me of teasing my mom, and that I should stop.
Later that day my dad told me that he didn’t understand why my mom was saying those things if I’ve said I like girls to which I answers, “yeah I like girls” which for me was me telling the truth, cause I do but obviously I also like guys 😂. For me this was a hint of my dad being a bit in denial at even the idea of me not being straight and probably he would always assume gay never bi as a possibility.
Now I’m about to go to my first pride parade and festival and I’m like going all out to look all rainbow and bi pride like and it’s kinda lame that I know I can’t post about it without causing a commotion. I know I want to come out to them but also need to prepare myself for the likely drama. Just wanted to share and see what this community thinks. Btw in case it matters I’m 30 and Latino from a Catholic family.

I'm not so daft as to bother people just trying to have a good time at the local goth club.
But as a middle millenial, dating sites just seem very unreliable. A lot of what I have found has been bots and people advertising business.
And the few times I've found real people, they're hesitant to move forward because the nail polish and eyeliner is weird to them, or they'd be embarrassed to bring someone home who does that.
So, what do you guys think? I'm happy to hear any ideas, opinions, or personal experiences, good, bad or funny.

A good idea to try it? I'm not doing well with on those fronts but still managing to nail not drinking 💪
IWNDWYT

When I was brand new to NovelAi I had no idea how 2048 tokens really looked as text. So for anyone looking at the tiers, trying to decide how many tokens they want for Clio with the new update, I've tokenized Part of The Great Gatsby by Scott Fitzgerald (public domain since 2021).
That way new users can more easily visualize what the AI's maximum context is for each tier. According to the UI Clio uses the NerdStash Tokenizer, as different tokenizers will convert text to tokens their own way.
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In my younger and more vulnerable years my father gave me some advice that I’ve been turning over in my mind ever since.
“Whenever you feel like criticizing anyone,” he told me, “just remember that all the people in this world haven’t had the advantages that you’ve had.”
He didn’t say any more, but we’ve always been unusually communicative in a reserved way, and I understood that he meant a great deal more than that. In consequence, I’m inclined to reserve all judgements, a habit that has opened up many curious natures to me and also made me the victim of not a few veteran bores. The abnormal mind is quick to detect and attach itself to this quality when it appears in a normal person, and so it came about that in college I was unjustly accused of being a politician, because I was privy to the secret griefs of wild, unknown men. Most of the confidences were unsought—frequently I have feigned sleep, preoccupation, or a hostile levity when I realized by some unmistakable sign that an intimate revelation was quivering on the horizon; for the intimate revelations of young men, or at least the terms in which they express them, are usually plagiaristic and marred by obvious suppressions. Reserving judgements is a matter of infinite hope. I am still a little afraid of missing something if I forget that, as my father snobbishly suggested, and I snobbishly repeat, a sense of the fundamental decencies is parcelled out unequally at birth.
And, after boasting this way of my tolerance, I come to the admission that it has a limit. Conduct may be founded on the hard rock or the wet marshes, but after a certain point I don’t care what it’s founded on. When I came back from the East last autumn I felt that I wanted the world to be in uniform and at a sort of moral attention forever; I wanted no more riotous excursions with privileged glimpses into the human heart. Only Gatsby, the man who gives his name to this book, was exempt from my reaction—Gatsby, who represented everything for which I have an unaffected scorn. If personality is an unbroken series of successful gestures, then there was something gorgeous about him, some heightened sensitivity to the promises of life, as if he were related to one of those intricate machines that register earthquakes ten thousand miles away. This responsiveness had nothing to do with that flabby impressionability which is dignified under the name of the “creative temperament”—it was an extraordinary gift for hope, a romantic readiness such as I have never found in any other person and which it is not likely I shall ever find again. No—Gatsby turned out all right at the end; it is what preyed on Gatsby, what foul dust floated in the wake of his dreams that temporarily closed out my interest in the abortive sorrows and short-winded elations of men.
My family have been prominent, well-to-do people in this Middle Western city for three generations. The Carraways are something of a clan, and we have a tradition that we’re descended from the Dukes of Buccleuch, but the actual founder of my line was my grandfather’s brother, who came here in fifty-one, sent a substitute to the Civil War, and started the wholesale hardware business that my father carries on today.
I never saw this great-uncle, but I’m supposed to look like him—with special reference to the rather hard-boiled painting that hangs in father’s office. I graduated from New Haven in 1915, just a quarter of a century after my father, and a little later I participated in that delayed Teutonic migration known as the Great War. I enjoyed the counter-raid so thoroughly that I came back restless. Instead of being the warm centre of the world, the Middle West now seemed like the ragged edge of the universe—so I decided to go East and learn the bond business. Everybody I knew was in the bond business, so I supposed it could support one more single man. All my aunts and uncles talked it over as if they were choosing a prep school for me, and finally said, “Why—ye-es,” with very grave, hesitant faces. Father agreed to finance me for a year, and after various delays I came East, permanently, I thought, in the spring of twenty-two.
The practical thing was to find rooms in the city, but it was a warm season, and I had just left a country of wide lawns and friendly trees, so when a young man at the office suggested that we take a house together in a commuting town, it sounded like a great idea. He found the house, a weather-beaten cardboard bungalow at eighty a month, but at the last minute the firm ordered him to Washington, and I went out to the country alone. I had a dog—at least I had him for a few days until he ran away—and an old Dodge and a Finnish woman, who made my bed and cooked breakfast and muttered Finnish wisdom to herself over the electric stove.
It was lonely for a day or so until one morning some man, more recently arrived than I, stopped me on the road.
“How do you get to West Egg village?” he asked helplessly.
I told him. And as I walked on I was lonely no longer. I was a guide, a pathfinder, an original settler. He had casually conferred on me the freedom of the neighbourhood.
And so with the sunshine and the great bursts of leaves growing on the trees, just as things grow in fast movies, I had that familiar conviction that life was beginning over again with the summer.
There was so much to read, for one thing, and so much fine health to be pulled down out of the young breath-giving air. I bought a dozen volumes on banking and credit and investment securities, and they stood on my shelf in red and gold like new money from the mint, promising to unfold the shining secrets that only Midas and Morgan and Maecenas knew. And I had the high intention of reading many other books besides. I was rather literary in college—one year I wrote a series of very solemn and obvious editorials for the Yale News—and now I was going to bring back all such things into my life and become again that most limited of all specialists, the “well-rounded man.” This isn’t just an epigram—life is much more successfully looked at from a single window, after all.
It was a matter of chance that I should have rented a house in one of the strangest communities in North America. It was on that slender riotous island which extends itself due east of New York—and where there are, among other natural curiosities, two unusual formations of land. Twenty miles from the city a pair of enormous eggs, identical in contour and separated only by a courtesy bay, jut out into the most domesticated body of salt water in the Western hemisphere, the great wet barnyard of Long Island Sound. They are not perfect ovals—like the egg in the Columbus story, they are both crushed flat at the contact end—but their physical resemblance must be a source of perpetual wonder to the gulls that fly overhead. To the wingless a more interesting phenomenon is their dissimilarity in every particular except shape and size.
I lived at West Egg, the—well, the less fashionable of the two, though this is a most superficial tag to express the bizarre and not a little sinister contrast between them. My house was at the very tip of the egg, only fifty yards from the Sound, and squeezed between two huge places that rented for twelve or fifteen thousand a season. The one on my right was a colossal affair by any standard—it was a factual imitation of some Hôtel de Ville in Normandy, with a tower on one side, spanking new under a thin beard of raw ivy, and a marble swimming pool, and more than forty acres of lawn and garden. It was Gatsby’s mansion. Or, rather, as I didn’t know Mr. Gatsby, it was a mansion inhabited by a gentleman of that name. My own house was an eyesore, but it was a small eyesore, and it had been overlooked, so I had a view of the water, a partial view of my neighbour’s lawn, and the consoling proximity of millionaires—all for eighty dollars a month.
Across the courtesy bay the white palaces of fashionable East Egg glittered along the water, and the history of the summer really begins on the evening I drove over there to have dinner with the Tom Buchanans. Daisy was my second cousin once removed, and I’d known Tom in college. And just after the war I spent two days with them in Chicago.
Her husband, among various physical accomplishments, had been one of the most powerful ends that ever played football at New Haven—a national figure in a way, one of those men who reach such an acute limited excellence at twenty-one that everything afterward savours of anticlimax. His family were enormously wealthy—even in college his freedom with money was a matter for reproach—but now he’d left Chicago and come East in a fashion that rather took your breath away: for instance, he’d brought down a string of polo ponies from Lake Forest. It was hard to realize that a man in my own generation was wealthy enough to do that.
Why they came East I don’t know. They had spent a year in France for no particular reason, and then drifted here and there unrestfully wherever people played polo and were rich together. This was a permanent move, said Daisy over the telephone, but I didn’t believe it—I had no sight into Daisy’s heart, but I felt that Tom would drift on forever seeking, a little wistfully, for the dramatic turbulence of some irrecoverable football game.
And so it happened that on a warm windy evening I drove over to East Egg to see two old friends whom I scarcely knew at all. Their house was even more elaborate than I expected, a cheerful red-and-white Georgian Colonial mansion, overlooking the bay. The lawn started at the beach and ran towards the front door for a quarter of a mile, jumping over sundials and brick walks and burning gardens—finally when it reached the house drifting up the side in bright vines as though from the momentum of its run. The front was broken by a line of French windows, glowing now with reflected gold and wide open to the warm windy afternoon, and Tom Buchanan in riding clothes was standing with his legs apart on the front porch.
He had changed since his New Haven years. Now he was a sturdy straw-haired man of thirty, with a rather hard mouth and a supercilious manner. Two shining arrogant eyes had established dominance over his face and gave him the appearance of always leaning aggressively forward. Not even the effeminate swank of his riding clothes could hide the enormous power of that body—he seemed to fill those glistening boots until he strained the top lacing, and you could see a great pack of muscle shifting when his shoulder moved under his thin coat. It was a body capable of enormous leverage—a cruel body.
His speaking voice, a gruff husky tenor, added to the impression of fractiousness he conveyed. There was a touch of paternal contempt in it, even toward people he liked—and there were men at New Haven who had hated his guts.
“Now, don’t think my opinion on these matters is final,” he seemed to say, “just because I’m stronger and more of a man than you are.” We were in the same senior society, and while we were never intimate I always had the impression that he approved of me and wanted me to like him with some harsh, defiant wistfulness of his own.
We talked for a few minutes on the sunny porch.
“I’ve got a nice place here,” he said, his eyes flashing about restlessly.
Turning me around by one arm, he moved a broad flat hand along the front vista, including in its sweep a sunken Italian garden, a half acre of deep, pungent roses, and a snub-nosed motorboat that bumped the tide offshore.
“It belonged to Demaine, the oil man.” He turned me around again, politely and abruptly. “We’ll go inside.”
We walked through a high hallway into a bright rosy-coloured space, fragilely bound into the house by French windows at either end. The windows were ajar and gleaming white against the fresh grass outside that seemed to grow a little way into the house. A breeze blew through the room, blew curtains in at one end and out the other like pale flags, twisting them up toward the frosted wedding-cake of the ceiling, and then rippled over the wine-coloured rug, making a shadow on it as wind does on the sea.
The only completely stationary object in the room was an enormous couch on which two young women were buoyed up as though upon an anchored balloon. They were both in white, and their dresses were rippling and fluttering as if they had just been blown back in after a short flight around the house. I must have stood for a few moments listening to the whip and snap of the curtains and the groan of a picture on the wall. Then there was a boom as Tom Buchanan shut the rear windows and the caught wind died out about the room, and the curtains and the rugs and the two young women ballooned slowly to the floor.
The younger of the two was a stranger to me. She was extended full length at her end of the divan, completely motionless, and with her chin raised a little, as if she were balancing something on it which was quite likely to fall. If she saw me out of the corner of her eyes she gave no hint of it—indeed, I was almost surprised into murmuring an apology for having disturbed her by coming in.
The other girl, Daisy, made an attempt to rise—she leaned slightly forward with a conscientious expression—then she laughed, an absurd, charming little laugh, and I laughed too and came forward into the room.
“I’m p-paralysed with happiness.”
She
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laughed again, as if she said something very witty, and held my hand for a moment, looking up into my face, promising that there was no one in the world she so much wanted to see. That was a way she had. She hinted in a murmur that the surname of the balancing girl was Baker. (I’ve heard it said that Daisy’s murmur was only to make people lean toward her; an irrelevant criticism that made it no less charming.)
At any rate, Miss Baker’s lips fluttered, she nodded at me almost imperceptibly, and then quickly tipped her head back again—the object she was balancing had obviously tottered a little and given her something of a fright. Again a sort of apology arose to my lips. Almost any exhibition of complete self-sufficiency draws a stunned tribute from me.
I looked back at my cousin, who began to ask me questions in her low, thrilling voice. It was the kind of voice that the ear follows up and down, as if each speech is an arrangement of notes that will never be played again. Her face was sad and lovely with bright things in it, bright eyes and a bright passionate mouth, but there was an excitement in her voice that men who had cared for her found difficult to forget: a singing compulsion, a whispered “Listen,” a promise that she had done gay, exciting things just a while since and that there were gay, exciting things hovering in the next hour.
I told her how I had stopped off in Chicago for a day on my way East, and how a dozen people had sent their love through me.
“Do they miss me?” she cried ecstatically.
“The whole town is desolate. All the cars have the left rear wheel painted black as a mourning wreath, and there’s a persistent wail all night along the north shore.”
“How gorgeous! Let’s go back, Tom. Tomorrow!” Then she added irrelevantly: “You ought to see the baby.”
“I’d like to.”
“She’s asleep. She’s three years old. Haven’t you ever seen her?”
“Never.”
“Well, you ought to see her. She’s—”
Tom Buchanan, who had been hovering restlessly about the room, stopped and rested his hand on my shoulder.
“What you doing, Nick?”
“I’m a bond man.”
“Who with?”
I told him.
“Never heard of them,” he remarked decisively.
This annoyed me.
“You will,” I answered shortly. “You will if you stay in the East.”
“Oh, I’ll stay in the East, don’t you worry,” he said, glancing at Daisy and then back at me, as if he were alert for something more. “I’d be a God damned fool to live anywhere else.”
At this point Miss Baker said: “Absolutely!” with such suddenness that I started—it was the first word she had uttered since I came into the room. Evidently it surprised her as much as it did me, for she yawned and with a series of rapid, deft movements stood up into the room.
“I’m stiff,” she complained, “I’ve been lying on that sofa for as long as I can remember.”
“Don’t look at me,” Daisy retorted, “I’ve been trying to get you to New York all afternoon.”
“No, thanks,” said Miss Baker to the four cocktails just in from the pantry. “I’m absolutely in training.”
Her host looked at her incredulously.
“You are!” He took down his drink as if it were a drop in the bottom of a glass. “How you ever get anything done is beyond me.”
I looked at Miss Baker, wondering what it was she “got done.” I enjoyed looking at her. She was a slender, small-breasted girl, with an erect carriage, which she accentuated by throwing her body backward at the shoulders like a young cadet. Her grey sun-strained eyes looked back at me with polite reciprocal curiosity out of a wan, charming, discontented face. It occurred to me now that I had seen her, or a picture of her, somewhere before.
“You live in West Egg,” she remarked contemptuously. “I know somebody there.”
“I don’t know a single—”
“You must know Gatsby.”
“Gatsby?” demanded Daisy. “What Gatsby?”
Before I could reply that he was my neighbour dinner was announced; wedging his tense arm imperatively under mine, Tom Buchanan compelled me from the room as though he were moving a checker to another square.
Slenderly, languidly, their hands set lightly on their hips, the two young women preceded us out on to a rosy-coloured porch, open toward the sunset, where four candles flickered on the table in the diminished wind.
“Why candles?” objected Daisy, frowning. She snapped them out with her fingers. “In two weeks it’ll be the longest day in the year.” She looked at us all radiantly. “Do you always watch for the longest day of the year and then miss it? I always watch for the longest day in the year and then miss it.”
“We ought to plan something,” yawned Miss Baker, sitting down at the table as if she were getting into bed.
“All right,” said Daisy. “What’ll we plan?” She turned to me helplessly: “What do people plan?”
Before I could answer her eyes fastened with an awed expression on her little finger.
“Look!” she complained; “I hurt it.”
We all looked—the knuckle was black and blue.
“You did it, Tom,” she said accusingly. “I know you didn’t mean to, but you did do it. That’s what I get for marrying a brute of a man, a great, big, hulking physical specimen of a—”
“I hate that word ‘hulking,’ ” objected Tom crossly, “even in kidding.”
“Hulking,” insisted Daisy.
Sometimes she and Miss Baker talked at once, unobtrusively and with a bantering inconsequence that was never quite chatter, that was as cool as their white dresses and their impersonal eyes in the absence of all desire. They were here, and they accepted Tom and me, making only a polite pleasant effort to entertain or to be entertained. They knew that presently dinner would be over and a little later the evening too would be over and casually put away. It was sharply different from the West, where an evening was hurried from phase to phase towards its close, in a continually disappointed anticipation or else in sheer nervous dread of the moment itself.
“You make me feel uncivilized, Daisy,” I confessed on my second glass of corky but rather impressive claret. “Can’t you talk about crops or something?”
I meant nothing in particular by this remark, but it was taken up in an unexpected way.
“Civilization’s going to pieces,” broke out Tom violently. “I’ve gotten to be a terrible pessimist about things. Have you read The Rise of the Coloured Empires by this man Goddard?”
“Why, no,” I answered, rather surprised by his tone.
“Well, it’s a fine book, and everybody ought to read it. The idea is if we don’t look out the white race will be—will be utterly submerged. It’s all scientific stuff; it’s been proved.”
“Tom’s getting very profound,” said Daisy, with an expression of unthoughtful sadness. “He reads deep books with long words in them. What was that word we—”
“Well, these books are all scientific,” insisted Tom, glancing at her impatiently. “This fellow has worked out the whole thing. It’s up to us, who are the dominant race, to watch out or these other races will have control of things.”
“We’ve got to beat them down,” whispered Daisy, winking ferociously toward the fervent sun.
“You ought to live in California—” began Miss Baker, but Tom interrupted her by shifting heavily in his chair.
“This idea is that we’re Nordics. I am, and you are, and you are, and—” After an infinitesimal hesitation he included Daisy with a slight nod, and she winked at me again. “—And we’ve produced all the things that go to make civilization—oh, science and art, and all that. Do you see?”
There was something pathetic in his concentration, as if his complacency, more acute than of old, was not enough to him any more. When, almost immediately, the telephone rang inside and the butler left the porch Daisy seized upon the momentary interruption and leaned towards me.
“I’ll tell you a family secret,” she whispered enthusiastically. “It’s about the butler’s nose. Do you want to hear about the butler’s nose?”
“That’s why I came over tonight.”
“Well, he wasn’t always a butler; he used to be the silver polisher for some people in New York that had a silver service for two hundred people. He had to polish it from morning till night, until finally it began to affect his nose—”
“Things went from bad to worse,” suggested Miss Baker.
“Yes. Things went from bad to worse, until finally he had to give up his position.”
For a moment the last sunshine fell with romantic affection upon her glowing face; her voice compelled me forward breathlessly as I listened—then the glow faded, each light deserting her with lingering regret, like children leaving a pleasant street at dusk.
The butler came back and murmured something close to Tom’s ear, whereupon Tom frowned, pushed back his chair, and without a word went inside. As if his absence quickened something within her, Daisy leaned forward again, her voice glowing and singing.
“I love to see you at my table, Nick. You remind me of a—of a rose, an absolute rose. Doesn’t he?” She turned to Miss Baker for confirmation: “An absolute rose?”
This was untrue. I am not even faintly like a rose. She was only extemporizing, but a stirring warmth flowed from her, as if her heart was trying to come out to you concealed in one of those breathless, thrilling words. Then suddenly she threw her napkin on the table and excused herself and went into the house.
Miss Baker and I exchanged a short glance consciously devoid of meaning. I was about to speak when she sat up alertly and said “Sh!” in a warning voice. A subdued impassioned murmur was audible in the room beyond, and Miss Baker leaned forward unashamed, trying to hear. The murmur trembled on the verge of coherence, sank down, mounted excitedly, and then ceased altogether.
“This Mr. Gatsby you spoke of is my neighbour—” I began.
“Don’t talk. I want to hear what happens.”
“Is something happening?” I inquired innocently.
“You mean to say you don’t know?” said Miss Baker, honestly surprised. “I thought everybody knew.”
“I don’t.”
“Why—” she said hesitantly. “Tom’s got some woman in New York.”
“Got some woman?” I repeated blankly.
Miss Baker nodded.
“She might have the decency not to telephone him at dinner time. Don’t you think?”
Almost before I had grasped her meaning there was the flutter of a dress and the crunch of leather boots, and Tom and Daisy were back at the table.
“It couldn’t be helped!” cried Daisy with tense gaiety.
She sat down, glanced searchingly at Miss Baker and then at me, and continued: “I looked outdoors for a minute, and it’s very romantic outdoors. There’s a bird on the lawn that I think must be a nightingale come over on the Cunard or White Star Line. He’s singing away—” Her voice sang: “It’s romantic, isn’t it, Tom?”
“Very romantic,” he said, and then miserably to me: “If it’s light enough after dinner, I want to take you down to the stables.”
The telephone rang inside, startlingly, and as Daisy shook her head decisively at Tom the subject of the stables, in fact all subjects, vanished into air. Among the broken fragments of the last five minutes at table I remember the candles being lit again, pointlessly, and I was conscious of wanting to look squarely at everyone, and yet to avoid all eyes. I couldn’t guess what Daisy and Tom were thinking, but I doubt if even Miss Baker, who seemed to have mastered a certain hardy scepticism, was able utterly to put this fifth guest’s shrill metallic urgency out of mind. To a certain temperament the situation might have seemed intriguing—my own instinct was to telephone immediately for the police.
The horses, needless to say, were not mentioned again. Tom and Miss Baker, with several feet of twilight between them, strolled back into the library, as if to a vigil beside a perfectly tangible body, while, trying to look pleasantly interested and a little deaf, I followed Daisy around a chain of connecting verandas to the porch in front. In its deep gloom we sat down side by side on a wicker settee.
Daisy took her face in her hands as if feeling its lovely shape, and her eyes moved gradually out into the velvet dusk. I saw that turbulent emotions possessed her, so I asked what I thought would be some sedative questions about her little girl.
“We don’t know each other very well, Nick,” she said suddenly. “Even if we are cousins. You didn’t come to my wedding.”
“I wasn’t back from the war.”
“That’s true.” She hesitated. “Well, I’ve had a very bad time, Nick, and I’m pretty cynical about everything.”
Evidently she had reason to be. I waited but she
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didn’t say any more, and after a moment I returned rather feebly to the subject of her daughter.
“I suppose she talks, and—eats, and everything.”
“Oh, yes.” She looked at me absently. “Listen, Nick; let me tell you what I said when she was born. Would you like to hear?”
“Very much.”
“It’ll show you how I’ve gotten to feel about—things. Well, she was less than an hour old and Tom was God knows where. I woke up out of the ether with an utterly abandoned feeling, and asked the nurse right away if it was a boy or a girl. She told me it was a girl, and so I turned my head away and wept. ‘All right,’ I said, ‘I’m glad it’s a girl. And I hope she’ll be a fool—that’s the best thing a girl can be in this world, a beautiful little fool.’
“You see I think everything’s terrible anyhow,” she went on in a convinced way. “Everybody thinks so—the most advanced people. And I know. I’ve been everywhere and seen everything and done everything.” Her eyes flashed around her in a defiant way, rather like Tom’s, and she laughed with thrilling scorn. “Sophisticated—God, I’m sophisticated!”
The instant her voice broke off, ceasing to compel my attention, my belief, I felt the basic insincerity of what she had said. It made me uneasy, as though the whole evening had been a trick of some sort to exact a contributory emotion from me. I waited, and sure enough, in a moment she looked at me with an absolute smirk on her lovely face, as if she had asserted her membership in a rather distinguished secret society to which she and Tom belonged.
Inside, the crimson room bloomed with light. Tom and Miss Baker sat at either end of the long couch and she read aloud to him from the Saturday Evening Post—the words, murmurous and uninflected, running together in a soothing tune. The lamplight, bright on his boots and dull on the autumn-leaf yellow of her hair, glinted along the paper as she turned a page with a flutter of slender muscles in her arms.
When we came in she held us silent for a moment with a lifted hand.
“To be continued,” she said, tossing the magazine on the table, “in our very next issue.”
Her body asserted itself with a restless movement of her knee, and she stood up.
“Ten o’clock,” she remarked, apparently finding the time on the ceiling. “Time for this good girl to go to bed.”
“Jordan’s going to play in the tournament tomorrow,” explained Daisy, “over at Westchester.”
“Oh—you’re Jordan Baker.”
I knew now why her face was familiar—its pleasing contemptuous expression had looked out at me from many rotogravure pictures of the sporting life at Asheville and Hot Springs and Palm Beach. I had heard some story of her too, a critical, unpleasant story, but what it was I had forgotten long ago.
“Good night,” she said softly. “Wake me at eight, won’t you.”
“If you’ll get up.”
“I will. Good night, Mr. Carraway. See you anon.”
“Of course you will,” confirmed Daisy. “In fact I think I’ll arrange a marriage. Come over often, Nick, and I’ll sort of—oh—fling you together. You know—lock you up accidentally in linen closets and push you out to sea in a boat, and all that sort of thing—”
“Good night,” called Miss Baker from the stairs. “I haven’t heard a word.”
“She’s a nice girl,” said Tom after a moment. “They oughtn’t to let her run around the country this way.”
“Who oughtn’t to?” inquired Daisy coldly.
“Her family.”
“Her family is one aunt about a thousand years old. Besides, Nick’s going to look after her, aren’t you, Nick? She’s going to spend lots of weekends out here this summer. I think the home influence will be very good for her.”
Daisy and Tom looked at each other for a moment in silence.
“Is she from New York?” I asked quickly.
“From Louisville. Our white girlhood was passed together there. Our beautiful white—”
“Did you give Nick a little heart to heart talk on the veranda?” demanded Tom suddenly.
“Did I?” She looked at me. “I can’t seem to remember, but I think we talked about the Nordic race. Yes, I’m sure we did. It sort of crept up on us and first thing you know—”
“Don’t believe everything you hear, Nick,” he advised me.
I said lightly that I had heard nothing at all, and a few minutes later I got up to go home. They came to the door with me and stood side by side in a cheerful square of light. As I started my motor Daisy peremptorily called: “Wait!”
“I forgot to ask you something, and it’s important. We heard you were engaged to a girl out West.”
“That’s right,” corroborated Tom kindly. “We heard that you were engaged.”
“It’s a libel. I’m too poor.”
“But we heard it,” insisted Daisy, surprising me by opening up again in a flower-like way. “We heard it from three people, so it must be true.”
Of course I knew what they were referring to, but I wasn’t even vaguely engaged. The fact that gossip had published the banns was one of the reasons I had come East. You can’t stop going with an old friend on account of rumours, and on the other hand I had no intention of being rumoured into marriage.
Their interest rather touched me and made them less remotely rich—nevertheless, I was confused and a little disgusted as I drove away. It seemed to me that the thing for Daisy to do was to rush out of the house, child in arms—but apparently there were no such intentions in her head. As for Tom, the fact that he “had some woman in New York” was really less surprising than that he had been depressed by a book. Something was making him nibble at the edge of stale ideas as if his sturdy physical egotism no longer nourished his peremptory heart.
Already it was deep summer on roadhouse roofs and in front of wayside garages, where new red petrol-pumps sat out in pools of light, and when I reached my estate at West Egg I ran the car under its shed and sat for a while on an abandoned grass roller in the yard. The wind had blown off, leaving a loud, bright night, with wings beating in the trees and a persistent organ sound as the full bellows of the earth blew the frogs full of life. The silhouette of a moving cat wavered across the moonlight, and, turning my head to watch it, I saw that I was not alone—fifty feet away a figure had emerged from the shadow of my neighbour’s mansion and was standing with his hands in his pockets regarding the silver pepper of the stars. Something in his leisurely movements and the secure position of his feet upon the lawn suggested that it was Mr. Gatsby himself, come out to determine what share was his of our local heavens.
I decided to call to him. Miss Baker had mentioned him at dinner, and that would do for an introduction. But I didn’t call to him, for he gave a sudden intimation that he was content to be alone—he stretched out his arms toward the dark water in a curious way, and, far as I was from him, I could have sworn he was trembling. Involuntarily I glanced seaward—and distinguished nothing except a single green light, minute and far away, that might have been the end of a dock. When I looked once more for Gatsby he had vanished, and I was alone again in the unquiet darkness.
II
About halfway between West Egg and New York the motor road hastily joins the railroad and runs beside it for a quarter of a mile, so as to shrink away from a certain desolate area of land. This is a valley of ashes—a fantastic farm where ashes grow like wheat into ridges and hills and grotesque gardens; where ashes take the forms of houses and chimneys and rising smoke and, finally, with a transcendent effort, of ash-grey men, who move dimly and already crumbling through the powdery air. Occasionally a line of grey cars crawls along an invisible track, gives out a ghastly creak, and comes to rest, and immediately the ash-grey men swarm up with leaden spades and stir up an impenetrable cloud, which screens their obscure operations from your sight.
But above the grey land and the spasms of bleak dust which drift endlessly over it, you perceive, after a moment, the eyes of Doctor T. J. Eckleburg. The eyes of Doctor T. J. Eckleburg are blue and gigantic—their retinas are one yard high. They look out of no face, but, instead, from a pair of enormous yellow spectacles which pass over a nonexistent nose. Evidently some wild wag of an oculist set them there to
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Hi everybody this is my first real attempt at fanfiction, spoilers for Waybound obviously. I stayed up unhealthily late Monday night to finish the book like a lot of people did. And the next day did one of the most boring jobs, dipping shingles and hanging them to dry for eight hours. The good news is I had plenty of time to think and made this story. Hopefully, if the response is good there will be more. Enjoy!
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The Silverlord Fereleigh stepped into the iteration and stretched her power, the Abidan had abandoned this universe, it was on the edge of its sector and they would have an easier time stabilizing all the other iterations in this sector if they abandoned it. Plus it had a high likelihood of becoming irreparably corrupted in the next century. This meant that it was the perfect harvest for the Vroshir. And only one person stood in her way.
He appeared as a young man with green horns and a grey cloak. In his hands, he held a massive hammer and a shield that looked as though it was made from a turtle's shell. Both resonated with different kinds of Authority. It was his armor that worried her the most though, it was pitch black and seemed to drink in the light of the nearby star. So this was one of those new reapers that she had been hearing about, he felt more like a titan to Fereleighs senses, with a deep connection to the power of the shield. The man looked at her with relief, “Finally,” he said, and his voice echoed across the void between planets, “ I would have gone mad if I had to write up one more trade agreement or negotiate one more peace treaty. I swear Eithan chooses those assignments just to annoy me.”
Fereleigh had admired The Mad King for centuries, to her he had been the symbol that all Vroshir should strive to be, and she had modeled her power after his. But instead of one great fiend bound inside her, she had thousands of lesser ones, she carefully cultivated them from corrupted worlds. It meant she had to constantly contend with thousands of voices inside her pushing her to destroy and cause chaos.
This meant that when she saw the armor of the man who had helped kill Daruman all of her fiends pushed her to smite the person who wore it from existence. The Mad King would not waste time on words, so neither would she. A swirling sun of screaming voices appeared above her and shot a beam of condensed hatred hot enough to make the close by sun seem like a flickering ember and it was enhanced by her silver crown, the authority of a Silverlord. This attack was as much spiritual and mental as it was physical. And the person who received it would have to fight off the combined pain and hatred of thousands of tortured fiends.
The man caught it on his shield, Fereleigh had expected that. She had defeated titans before and they were annoyingly hard to kill but as long as you kept them cornered, they usually didn't have strong offensive power. Still, she had expected it to do more than ruffle his hair. In the next instant, he was in front of her and swinging his hammer down. The blow carried far more offensive power than she expected, at least the equal to his defensive. And she felt the other deep connection to the way this man possessed, a connection to the power of the hammer. But not the hammer of The Builder or The Maker, this was the hammer of The Breaker, the Unmaker. It carried the power of a wolf. She could see why this man had been chosen as a reaper.
Still, she felt her defenses could take it. It might burn through some of her fiends but it would be worth it to eliminate one of Ozriels pets. For he had left himself open. In striking with his hammer he couldn't defend with his shield. She struck out with another of her beams of hatred and was already feeling satisfied with her victory when the man's shield flashed and its power was activated and a golden avatar appeared around his body, the avatar took the image of a man with a shell and tail. Whatever creature had died to make that shield had been thousands of years older than Fereleigh with a will that was so strong it would break a world just by existing in it. It synergized with the man's will and black armor so that even though it struck his armor exactly where she intended it to, this time it didn't even ruffle his hair.
And finally, Fereleigh realized her mistake. The mistake that would cost her her life. And it had been staring her right in the face. This man wasnt a wolf or a titan. He was a Reaper, and his hammer carried The Blessing of Ozriel. It slammed straight through her shields, many of which had been scavenged from titans, and destroyed thousands of her fiends in an instant as they swarmed around her to guard her. And then it crashed into her chest and she felt her Origin crack.
When Fereleigh finally stopped moving she found herself in the core of one of the moons that orbited the main planet of the iteration. She immediately looked towards where she felt the man had been then she realized that from some odd coincidence three of five moons had been in alignment and she blasted straight through two before stopping. It should have been more she new, but the attack had been focused on breaking her origin, not her body. And it had worked, she now only had acces to a fraction of her former power, and the only reason she had survived was her long experiance as a Silverlord and the many seals she had wrapped around her soul, all of which were gone now.
“Thats disappointing, I thought you would have died from the first strike, obviously I need to train more.” the green horned man was floating above her with his hammer drawn back for another strike, which Fereleigh new would kill her. She fled. She tore open a portal into the way and vanished form the iteration. Only to be spit back out hundreds of miles away. She felt what he had done. He had sealed the entire iteration from anyone trying to leave. She could probably undo the seals given enough time but the man had already caught up to her. So she slipped through the way again. Not trying to leave, only trying to move to a different location in the iteration, which the seals allowed. And so started a game of cat and mouse where Fereleigh tried to run and hide long enough to figure out how to dismantle the seals keeping her from escaping. If there was one advantage she had, it was that she was slightly better at spatial transportation than him, which allowed her to stay ahead
As she did she contemplated the mans hammer. Incorporating Reaper artifacts into other weapons was notoriously hard to do, even the Abidan struggled with it and they had the willing cooperation of the Reaper himself. The destructive authority embedded in them broke down almost all other materials they came into contact with, sure The Mad King and the previous Makiel had made weapons with Reaper authority, but that was The Mad King and Makiel, unsurpassed craftsmen, well, almost unsurpassed. That the man had incorporated such a thing into his power was astonishing, though he was obviously still struggling to bring out its full potential. The hammer itself felt like it had been with the man since he was very young. So it was a wise choice to use to command authority. And as Fereleigh looked closer she realized that embedded in the head of the hammer was a black arrowhead, and it contained the finality of Death.
While she contemplated this a battle continued to rage between the two ascended. As Fereleigh slipped between the world again she threw a grenade at the main planet of the iteration. Either the greenhorned man would quit battle to stop it from releasing its sun sized detonation. Or he let it land to continue chasing her, which would destablize the entire universe with the amount it killed. Only right when it was about to enter the planets atmosphere a script circle appeared around the planet. Trapping the grenade in time. Fereleigh cursed, of course he had layered defenses over the planet before she got there. Than the grenade disappeared and appeared right in front of her where its seals vanished and it detonated in her face. She screamed in frustration as fire washed over her. Luckily she had teleported out before she got more than a sunburn.
The fight continued like this for what felt like hours. But in reality was only a few minutes. She unleashed a luck spirit that loved chaos and would twist fate around whoever she wanted, to either make there fate lean toward positive or negative outcomes. She swung with a butchers knife that was made of a piece of the night sky of a far off world. She hurled a worn out fishing net that could entrap a skilled member of the fox division. He either broke with his hammer, guarded with his shield, or straight up avoided when he needed. He must have an incredible Presence in order to meet each attack with precisly the force required.
Finally he cornered her in spinning green scripts, and Fereleigh new her end had come. In one last act of desperation she burned all her remaining fiends, only a little more than a hundred at this point, to unleash one last hate beam that flew towards him. She expected him to summon that golden avatar of absolute strength, but instead he simply held out his black armored hand and let the attack hit him. Given his authority over protection plus his armor the physical part of the attack wouldnt do him much damage, though she saw a little smoke rising from the armor. Likewise his spirit was strong and unyielding, and was able to withstand the attack. But the mental component must have been agony, hearing those endless screams like nails driven into your head. But his hard expression didnt change and he floated forward until he was infront of her. In his eyes she saw the judgement of an executioner, and somehow she new he was aware of her great sin. The last word Fereleigh the Silverlord heard before her the hammer descended was, “You deserve this.”
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“Wow, that was impressive and very cool. I mean you usually are. But especially today” Ziels Dross made a contented noise as Ziel himself gathered up what corrupted remains were left of the Silverlord and contained them in a scripted ball. When he returned to The Grave he would put it into an incinerator-like machine Eithan and Lindon had made that could be used to imitate Eithan's power and erase anything put inside from existence. It couldn't be moved easily and could only be used on relatively small things. But it was still very useful. Dross, seeing Ziels hard face chimed in again “ Oh come on you enjoyed it. I know you did.” He had. It had been nice facing a real opponent. Granted not one that had a shot of defeating him but still one that could surprise him, like that fishnet, that would have really slowed him down if he had gotten caught in it. He knew there were thousands of people out there that could beat him, but he mostly worked inside worlds and didn't face any real opponents.
So he had enjoyed it, right up until Dross had told him how the woman came to her power. She had purposely corrupted worlds in order to grow fiends. Sacrificing millions to gain a few hundred fiends that would serve her well. In the end, it hadn't been any trick that had allowed Ziel to push back her final attack. His wrath had simply been greater. Ziel knew he would need to have a long talk with Emriss after this. Maybe take some time to relax with his friend, teach Lirin a little scripting. This was the primary way the new Reapers resisted corruption. Because for all Daruman had been good and just once, he had always preferred to work alone. And when he became the vessel for a True Fiend, he had no one he trusted to help him. No one stood for him when it really mattered.
Still fighting a silverlord had drained him. And her attacks were potent. He wouldn't have liked facing them without his dreadgod shield. He looked down at his gauntlet and found the metal twisted and some of the paint flecked off. His mind and body were sore. So he finished repairing the moons he had destroyed and slipped into the way, the seals he had placed around the iteration dissolving before him. Little Blue would come and clean up the corruption that had drawn the Vroshir in the first place. Ziel needed to sleep
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Ok, so this is my first story I'm writing following the group's adventures through the way. I hope to make one for each member of the group but I started with Ziel because he is my guy. I have no idea how far down the line this is timewise. But I think a little bit for Ziel to beat a silverlord. Even with some of Ozriels power, armor made by him, and a dreadgod weapon. Though i personally think one day Ziels hammer will be even more significant than his shield.
I made some additions to Ziels power. I think the synergy of Shield and Hammer Icons work well with him. And it gives him both defensive and offensive power. Plus he is a reaper, he should be able to hit hard. The Hammer has also been a symbol that has been with him almost as long as his desire to protect. So I think he would have about equal authority over it. Obviously its a different type of hammer icon than Lindons. The addition of the shard of penance to his hammer I think works(in story it was added by Lindon and Eithan working together. Since he killed a dreadgod with a splinter of Ozriels power I thought that would help him gain some control over it(like when Yerin killed Sesh with penance, though that was a much bigger splinter) and also he is Ozriels apprentice even before he ascended and I think would medidate in front of the real Paths of Heaven in the labyrinth(including Ozriels door) as much as he can. Making him better attuned to death. I know everyone in the group has different abilities but i feel like they should all be at least a tiny bit connected to the power of the reaper. Any questions?

From western maine here. Taking a week vacation with my fiancée end of June to enjoy some of the goods our state has to offer. Any ideas and recommendations are are greatly appreciated. More focused on coastal and southern maine as we have spent lots of time in the other areas.

Just moved into a new apartment and I (30M) ran into a cute girl in the elevator. She had a dog and we got chatting about that. It was going well and it turns out we ended up getting off on the same floor! She gave me her name, and told me her unit number and said don’t hesitate to knock if I needed anything.
At this point you’re probably thinking “bro wtf are you posting for, go knock and ask for sugar to make cookies or a nail to hang a picture.” I’m going to do that if I can’t think of anything better, that’s where you come in 🫵
I’m just worried she’ll give me a nail and then that’ll be it. Pls help! Any creative ideas?

Hi everyone, the campaign I'm running is heading towards its natural end and I'm looking for ideas to make the final encounter a good one.
The story has involved lots of plane-hopping and collecting items that correspond to each plane. My players have been gathering them, and so have the baddies. Big Bad wants to use them to perform a magical rite to end the world and the players are gearing up for a showdown.
My players always surprise me with how well they do combat (it's great!) and I don't want to just give BB a stupid amount of HP, but I do want the showdown to have genuine tension and difficulty.
My working idea is to nail down how exactly the Rite uses the Planar Items and then let the players counter that in some special way (which they can discover between now and then) while fighting, in order to win...
I've got a little writer's block on how to achieve that mechanically, though. Any and all suggestions are very welcome!
Thank you!

For Olivia 💞💖💞
[https://youtu.be/lT0Hbzh8J_U]
Hi! It’s Elizabeth Holden/Violettas. Okay so this is a long one (and I had to post from a different Reddit username) , but since Olivia has had to deal with so much shit lately, I’d just like to support our girlie and say this…
So in 2012 I was sexually assaulted at college twice, and then in 2013 twice again. The first one was a random guy at a frat party who groped and “”humped”” me for 20 seconds in the middle of a full room of people, and since I use a wheelchair I was an easy target, and everyone just stared and laughed at me. The second, third, and fourth time were by the same guy in a devastating-for-me, fucked up, fake thing he called “”friendship””. Let me add I was also going to BYU, and he told me I was bad for him and not churchy enough to ACTUALLY date, and because of that, me just existing in front of him was making him do bad things, and if I wanted to be a “good friend” I could never speak to him again. I had a horrible sense of self worth, and because of my disability I felt like no one would ever want or love me, so I just accepted what he was doing as the best thing I would ever get.
Around this time, I started writing music and performing in the local music venues. I finally found an outlet and community, but there was one problem: BYU guy was also in the music scene. He would intimidate me to not go to venues, even when he wasn’t playing, he would try to become friends with my new friends, he was ruining the one thing I had. I told the local music venues what he did and they were like, “well he’s in a popular band here so idk what we can do, sorry :/“.
I was so angry that at the last spring semester I was there for, the last one I could actually tolerate (he was still going there), in my art history class i wrote a song about being assaulted. The gist of it is that when there’s a sparkle in someone’s eye, it usually is alluring, and always a positive thing. But the one in mine will blow you to pieces, when i open my mouth I’m gonna take you out. I never ended up recording it (which means it’s copyright claim free baby! Play it all you want!!) but all these years later (I wrote it in 2014) I still think it was one of my best, most meaningful and poignant songs I ever wrote. Eventually in 2015 I founded a music collective for women and non binary musicians to make a safe space for ourselves, and THEN we blew his ass up (and then shit got so fucked up and he got a lawyer who said he would sue us for libel and then all my friends hated me because they had no money to be sued for, and then i was suicidal etc etc. rash time, but everyone knew about what he did in the end so…..good?)
Olivia has been dealing with so much shit lately with all these manosphere guys targeting her specifically, as well as other women like Olivia and me who have been sexually assaulted. Especially lately, she has been the main voice of reason why these freaks that keep popping up more and more shouldn’t be interviewed/given airtime/debated and no such idea should be entertained. The shit we all have to endure makes me SO fucking angry. I wanted to do some little thing to help, so I dug through the internet to find some scrap of this song still existing somewhere. Someone recorded me the only time I ever sang this song, in the same venue where he hung out and played shows at too.
Olivia, we all love you to death, and I’m SO glad you’re on the podcast, fighting tooth and nail for us sometimes. You’re a ray of sunshine, a constant support system, and you are so courageous, dazzling, smart, and kind. Thank you for representing for all the girlies and SA survivors in the family, saying what they need to hear, and what we need to hear. We love you bestie❣️💞💖💜💖💞❣️💕💓 🖐🏻✊🏻🖐🏻✊🏻🖐🏻
Elizabeth 💜
So they didn’t start recording until a few seconds into the song, so here are the full lyrics:
I wanna scream, I wanna scream Cut through the wall, back through to me Cause on the other side, you’re gonna listen You’re gonna see who you’ve been kissing
The spark in my eye will blow you to pieces The spark in my eye will Blow you to pieces
Do you remember that night? Cause I remember that night You smothered me, put me out of sight Covered my face, muffled my screams But you didn’t realize you lit a fuse in me
And I’ve been seeing you all around But one of these days I’m gonna knock you to the ground
The spark in my eye will blow you to pieces The spark in my eye will Blow you to pieces When I open my mouth I’m gonna take you out When I open my mouth i’m gonna take you out
You want a Mrs who’s gonna be submissive With praises and poetry rolling off of her tongue To lobotomize, sodomize, infantilize Remove her need for lungs
The spark in my eye will blow you to pieces The spark in my eye will Blow you to pieces When I open my mouth I’m gonna take you out
The spark in my eye will blow you to pieces The spark in my eye will Blow you to pieces When I open my mouth I’m gonna take you out When I open my mouth i’m gonna take you out 💜

Based on this title, you guys will probably hate me for this and downvote me to oblivion. But it is a discussion that needs be talked about.
Growing up I used to love this film as it shows a "normal" dude "supposedly" fighting corruption. But once you dig deeper it gets pretty scary.
Part 1: the behind context
The film's narrative poses the brahmin as the citizen ideal and the non-brahmin as its lawless all-pervasive "other". Source from Jstor Academic research. It is no surprise only Mr. "Rules Ramanujan" follows the rules while the "others" are portrayed as scumbags in the film. We see this throughout the film.
Such as portraying the low caste people as drunkards, scammers up to no good, and rowdies.
Part 2: Shankar is a sellout and misses the point
The film points fingers and doesn't put blame at the broken corporate system and instead blames the working class people. Ex. Instead of getting mad at the shareholders or corporation for giving low quality food supplies, Anniyan instead attacks a line leader from the food area. Although this "Chokkalingam" guy is partly at fault, the larger blame should go on the corporates for exploiting this system.
Obviously they won't do that here, because those shareholders would lobby against this movie and the movie would lose funding from them and hurt the overall films earnings. Remember blame the game not the player.
Going from this point, the same example can be said about the Bike Factory scene, why portray a bunch of "laborers" as the "evil devil" instead of calling out the CEO, Executives, and shareholders of the company for cutting quality and cheapening the product of the bike parts.
Finally the same could be said about the scene where his sister gets electrocuted, why blame the worker instead of the "firm" that probably underpaid him and didn't give proper training. Yes, he was drunk, so he does take some blame,
But its pretty obvious most of the hate and murders are misguided.
Part 3: Poor Portrayal of Non-Veg Food
In the movie, there are a few scenes where the protagonist's alter ego, Anniyan, exhibits aversion towards non-vegetarian food. Ex. The Portrayal of Meat and Chicken as impure during Kumbibakham or when getting beat up by the laborers, Ambi says don't beat me, I am vegetarian.
In certain cultural contexts, vegetarianism has been associated with specific caste groups. The caste system historically categorized people into different social groups, each with its own prescribed occupation and dietary practices. Within this system, some upper caste groups, such as Brahmins, are often associated with vegetarianism which links them to "purity" while claiming meat eaters as "impure".
Part 4: Kumbhipakam Scene Continued...
The use of the term "Kumbhipakam" in the context of punishment may resonate with certain Hindu beliefs which can be tied to notions of karma and retribution. This scene does reinforce the idea that certain castes are more deserving of punishment or inherently associated with negative actions or behaviors. which perpetuate casteist undertones
Part 5: Brahmins more likely to live outside their own state and country, Shankar misses the point again with his portrayals of foreign countries.
The film also talks about India being less developed and not as developed as fast as Singapore, Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vq7LbkGzP1Y
But lets be honest, most of the Tamil immigrants in most of the Western Countries like America are mostly "Brahmin and upper caste. What have they done to help develop the country while talking shit.
Shankar also tends to portray America as a blissful country with a lot opportunities in Sivaji the Boss and Jeans. This another sign of him showing that TN should decrease reservations and because of these "reservations" Brahmins are leaving this state in mass to go abroad because they get "fair "opportunity" while we all know the real reason why they left.
Lets also not forget they have also brought castesim to America and other countries abroad, this has been all over the news if we do a simple search on reddit or google. EX.Cisco case in California America. This was done by an Iyengar, which this movie surprisingly "praises" as good people
Part 6: Conclusion
I know you guys may hate me for this one, but Engaging in discussions and promoting awareness about the potential impact of such scenes is crucial for addressing casteist undertones and fostering a more inclusive and equitable society.
Extra: Part 7: The Casteist Iyengaaru Veetu Azhage Song
A song literally based on a caste was in this film. Enough said. we get the point. Shame on Harris for this one.

Tocharian words have not always been analyzed properly. I feel that linguists have been too quick to look for IE matches based on sounds instead of meaning. Surface similarity alone can not be used to find new sound changes, since any mismatch would only be taken as evidence against a relation. A good example would be *puwiro- > Latin puer ‘boy’, *puwiro- > *pwiro > TA wir ‘young’. If a connection with Latin exists, why would linguists go for L. vir (with completely opposite meaning), when its antonym *puwiro- > puer is a much better fit? Not considering the changes *pw- > *pv- > *v- > w- in regard to *pw- vs. *-pw- and their possibly separate outcomes would be a mistake.
​
Metathesis and other optional changes have also been ignored. In https://www.academia.edu/11039643/Proto_Tocharian_Common_Tocharian_and_Tocharian_on_the_value_of_linguistic_connections_in_a_reconstructed_language Gerd Carling connects Bac. abištad ‘master’ > TA āpṣātrik ‘craftsman’. I’d say if the ending -ik is also Iranian, it would have the same number of consonants, showing d adapted as r (maybe both taps, explaining the change). Instead, she says pšt > pš then -r- was added by analogy to another word with -ik (most -ik do NOT have obligatory -r-). This is a lot of complication added to let her ignore a simple change. Without knowing that Iranian d might change, similar changes to Indic t are less likely to be found https://www.reddit.com/usestlatos/comments/142wmpe/tocharian_y_j/
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Metathesis is probably also behind *tweis- > G. seismós ‘shaking’, Skt. tviṣ- ‘be stirred up’, *tpis- > TB tsip- ‘dance’. The w / p as in https://www.reddit.com/usestlatos/comments/142vah5/the_mystery_of_tocharian_w/ which seems optional in most environments, maybe like Iranian dv- / db- https://www.reddit.com/Pashtun/comments/1289wns/historical_phonology_some_pashto_problems/ . Not only *w but *y might show changes in clusters. Few IE words begin with K^y-, but *k^yehmo- > Skt. śyāmá- ‘dark (blue) / black’, Av. sāma-; *k^yehwo- > Skt. śyāvá- ‘dark / brown’, Av. syāva- ‘black’ seem to. Note that Av. has optional k^y > c^y \ c^ > sy \ s, so optional changes in Tocharian would be no more odd. Indeed, *k^yehwo- > *k^lehwo- > *kwehlo- > TB kwele ‘black / dark grey’ would work well. Instead, *k^yehwo- > kwele in some manner has been assumed, but from adding *-lo- to create *k^yehwlo- then metathesis (or similar ways, dependent on timing, etc.). This seems like an even worse idea than deleting t and adding r instead of seeing one change. Why would *ky- not palatalize in the first place? If *k^y- > *kl- happened, then metathesis as above, it would fit all the same needs as the theory of *-lo- without unexplained addition of an adj. suffix to an adj. This is also similar to Slavic *p^- > pl-, if y > l seems too odd to you.
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PIE sy- is even more rare than K^y in traditional reconstruction. Only *syuh- ‘sew’, which also has forms without -y-, like Sanskrit syūtá-, sūtra-, etc. These are also explained if sy- had optional changes, just as those seen for k^t- above. If it’s clear that Ti. ṭṣuwu came from *syuh- with changes like sy- > ssy- > tsy-, then why not the same for TB tsu- ‘adhere / stick/cling / attach oneself’? This has also been related to a word (L. fūnis ‘rope/line/cord’) that has no clear etymology (see proposals considered by Douglas Q. Adams). If linking tsu- and fūnis by the notion of ‘attaching rope’ is fine, why not the simple path to *syuh- ‘sew’ instead of an unknown root? Indeed, since Latin changed s > f in some words (sometimes sr > fr and -sr- > -br-) there is no way to say that sy- > fy- > f- could not also be true. L. fūnis might be from an i-stem related to *s(y)uhno- > Skt. sūnā́- ‘woven wicker basket’, syūna-s ‘sack’ (like Skt. syū́man- ‘band/thong/bridle’ vs. Kh. šiméni ‘goathair rope’). Latin would then have sy- > f- and s- > s- in *syuh- \ *suh- ‘sew’, with the sy- vs. s- as in any other IE, with the same unknown explanation. I think other IE words show evidence of Cy-, so understanding the optional nature in *s(y)uh- helps proove it https://www.reddit.com/etymology/comments/zjnzc5/latin_cum_greek_ks%C3%BAn_sy_sx/
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Tocharian might show h3n- > m- in *h3nogWh- > TA maku, TB mekwa ‘nails’. h1n- > ny- in *nyomn ‘name’ might show h1 = x^ and h3 = xW since it’s possible that *h3n- became *wn- > *nw- > m- in *h3nogWh- > *nwokw- > maku. This would allow both oddities to be shared and explained by a broad change. Proof would come from other more definite h3 > w in similar environments, say dh3- > dw-. Just such a stem is *wë- > TA wäs- ‘gave’, which could be from an s-aorist *doxW-s- \ *dxW-s- > *dwës- > wäs- (since *dw- > w- is known from other words). Some say a compound *wi-doh3- would explain this, but why try this when h3 > w is seen in maku? The change dw > w might not happen after wVd- > wd- ( > dw- ?) at all. This also helps explain the timing of h > ā. Other syllabic C > ëC \ Cë, so if all h > hë \ ëh first, then h1/2/3 merge as x, with xë > xa, this change of xW > w would come before the last change.
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Alb Albanian
Arm Armenian
Aro Aromanian
Asm Assamese
Av Avestan
Bal Baluchi
Bac Bactrian
Be Bengali
Bg Bulgarian
Bu Burushaski
E English
EArm Eastern Armenian
G Greek
Go Gothic
H Hittite
Hi Hindi
Is Ishkashimi
It Italian
K Kassite
Kd Kurdish
Kho Khotanese
Khw Khwarezmian
Ku Kusunda
L Latin
Li Lithuanian
Lt Latvian
M Mitanni
Mh Marathi
MArm Middle Armenian
MW Middle Welsh
NHG New High German
MHG Middle High German
OHG Old High German
OBg Old Bulgarian
OBr Old Breton
OIc Old Icelandic
OIr Old Irish
OE Old English
ON Old Norse
OPr Old Prussian
OP Old Persian
MP Middle Persian
NP (New) Persian (Farsi)
Nw Norwegian
Os Ossetian
Ph Phrygian
Ps Pashto
R Russian
Ru Romanian\Rumanian
Sar Sarikoli
Shu Shughni
Skt Sanskrit
Sog Sogdian
TA Tocharian A
TB Tocharian B
W Welsh
Wx Wakhi
​
Gy Gypsy
Dv Domari \ Do:mva:ri:
Lv Lomavren
Rom Romani
​
Dardic Group
A Atshareetaá \ (older Palola < *Paaloolaá)
B Bangani
Ba bHaṭé-sa zíb \ Bhaṭeri
D Degaanó \ Degano
Dk Domaaki \ Domaá \ D.umaki
Dm Dameli
Gi Gultari
Id Indus Kohistani
Ka Kalam Kohistani \ Kalami \ Gawri \ Bashkarik
Kati
Kh Khowàr
Km Kashmiri
Ks Kalasha
KS Kundal Shahi
Kt ktívi kâtá vari
Kv Kâmvíri
Pl Paaluulaá
Pr Prasun
Ni Nišei-alâ
Np Nepali
Sa Saňu-vīri
Sh Shina
Ti Torwali
Wg Waigali \ Kalas.a-alâ

These past 4 or 5 days have been horrendous. I have borderline personality disorder. I know the stigma and I know I’m probably an awful person but I’ve tried and tried to be the best person I can possibly be and apparently that’s not enough. Apparently, I’m difficult to talk to. I’ve always been open to communication so I can learn and grow but whenever I try and defend myself, it’s not acceptable. I’ve not insulted anyone or said anything inappropriate; all I’ve said is how I feel. I have other friends who have said I’ve done nothing wrong but the damage is done to be honest.
I’ve been organising something for my relative’s milestone birthday and that has been a nightmare. From me apparently messing up with booking a restaurant (again, I truly did not know I was supposed to follow up on a comment which was made. I thought they [the owner] would be in contact with me if they were still okay with making a deal with me) to me not arranging home care for an elderly relative (again, they have known my plans for months so I thought they would use their common sense). It was just fuck up upon fuck up and I just wanted to do something special but now I don’t even think she [my relative] wants it anymore. I even ended up shouting at my elderly relative as she kept talking about how she could die at any moment and I couldn’t take her constantly saying things like that. It hurts so much. So I told her.
So I have all of that, three people I thought as friends effectively telling me I’m a shitty person (they’ve excluded me from gatherings and been cold with me but none of them will tell me the issues to my face; just to each other), and now, finally, I’ve been ghosted by the first guy I’ve liked in years.
My main trigger for BPD is men. I’ve been let down/abused by every man in my life and never had a meaningful romantic relationship. This guy was the first one I’ve liked in so long. We got drunk and I started saying how much I liked him and he told me we didn’t need to rush and, when I got home, he told me had a lovely evening and he was glad I was okay. He is now ghosting me after 4 days and 2 messages. It’s my own fault, I get it, but just tell me you’re not interested instead of ignoring me.
Anyway, that’s the final nail in the coffin. I have no career, no idea what I’m going to do with my life, broke, hopelessly unloved romantically, and apparently, despite my best efforts, still a shitty person. I’m just not cut out for this world. June is a very busy month for my family birthday wise so I don’t want to ruin it for them. After that though, I’m leaving. I still don’t know how but there’s just no point in my existence. People may be sad but, the world moves on. I can’t take this pain anymore. It has been said that BPD is the most painful psychological disorder and I feel it. There really is no use for me so it’s time to go. For my sake and everyone else’s.

My idea is MCC wanted and it will be western themed. The idea is at least half of the roster will be the most request newcomers and players which are wanted to return (them being wanted like an old western outlaw). There could be teams like the scarlet sheriffs and the orange outlaws and the team announcements could be like wanted posters. I think it could be quite a fun event what does everyone think?

Ok, this is really hard to do. I haven't told anyone but feel like I need to share this with someone. I'm a 14 years old girl and about a month ago I developed a form of "self-harm". It all started during a lesson, when the teacher was complaining that there were no volunteers at the oral test and I felt terribly guilty. I was so angry at myself for not studying enough that I pressed my nail against my wrist, leaving different marks(no blood). The feeling of having marks on the skin was strangely satisfying. So much so that when the marks disappeared a few days later, I felt sad. A few days later I did my acrylic nails and was almost panicked that I had nothing left to harm myself with, so i tried with bits of plastic. When I was sad about something, I'd go to the bathroom and "scratch" the skin, with no blood and no deep wounds. The marks disappeared a few days later and I was making new ones. Since a few weeks, however, my scratches are always on the same point and I feel like the scar is gonna last longer. I haven't told anyone about it cause I feel like it's not even real self harm, I'm so scared to go deeper but at the same time I feel like going deeper would confirm this "self harm" thing and people would actually care about me. Since I was a child, I always daydreamed about being sick and having everyone's attention. I remember writing about it in my secret diary, feeling like I was strange to think about it but secretly liking it. Even now I feel like I'm doing it for attention so that people would notice them, but when I actually face the reality I really just try to hide it cause I'm too scared. I'm too scared they would see me in a different way, they would think I'm a freak and encourage me to ask for help. I want my life to be better, but I'm so scared of healing. I'm scared of my little superficial scars healing, I'm scared people would think of me of "an innocent happy soul who doesn't understand what real pain is" and all stuff like that. Please share me your thoughts cause I really need someone else opinion without it changing my life and ruining the idea that people have of me.

Hi there! I've had my 68 Custom for over 6 years with the stock speaker(g12v70) and while I can make do just fine as is, I want to try another speaker to see if I can tailor the amp a bit more to me.
So far, I've spent a couple hours researching and watching some demos. I've mainly had my eye on a Cannabis rex or a creamback g12 m, but not glued to those ideas.
What I'm looking for is sort of tough, because as stated I can do fine with the stock speaker. If I had to describe I'd like to de-fender it a little bit. Tame highs some, little more mid present. Maybe just a little darker in general. It''s got a bit of a honk(for lack of a better term) to it that I'm not particularly fond of. Kind of pokey. Could be the amp I suppose but I'd hope not. I've never delved into speakers before the last week or so, all the options are a little daunting.
This is pretty much the only tube amp I've owned, well the only one I've owned more than a few months and have really sunk my teeth into. I did have a Bell and Howell projector amp conversion that was loaded with a tone tubby red alnico. I actually really liked that amps tone but hated it only had a volume and a tone control so didnt keep it long.
My main guitar is a gibson sg special 70s tribute, pickups swapped to seymour ant II firebird pickups.
Budget is in the air. I haven't nailed down a specific ceiling, obviously would prefer not to pay an arm and a leg but I was already eyeing up a tone tubby red alnico.. don't know if I'd pull the trigger on that but considering they don't make an alnico Cannabis rex anymore I did consider it.
Anyway, long winded and probably too much info but what would you guys suggest?