Middletown patch new jersey

Catch the full coverage at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uHgCyEeB16U
On this episode of MSP Dispatch we touch on, IT employee impersonates ransomware gang to extort employer, Microsoft: BEC attackers evade 'Impossible Travel' flags with residential IP addresses, How AI is catapulting Nvidia to $1 trillion club
Time Codes:
0:00 Teaser
0:50 Intro Banter
3:34 IT Employee Impersonates Ransomware Gang To Extort Employer
8:32 How AI Is Catapulting Nvidia Toward the $1 Trillion Club
14:20 Microsoft: BEC Attackers Evade 'Impossible Travel' Flags With Residential IP Addresses
19:43 Windows 11 Getting Native Support for 7-Zip, RAR, and GZ Archives
20:30 GitLab ‘Strongly Recommends’ Patching Max Severity Flaw ASAP
21:29 OpenAI’s ChatGPT iOS App Now Available in Canada, India, Brazil and 30 More Countries
22:30 Windows 11 Finally Gets a ‘Never Combine Taskbar Buttons’ Mode
23:30 Resource of the Week
24:26 Community Events
25:52 Sign-off
29:00 Outtakes
Learn more from our sponsors:
Ultimate IT Growth Conference: https://mspsalesrevolution.com/ultimate/
Story Links:
IT Employee Impersonates Ransomware Gang To Extort Employer
https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/it-employee-impersonates-ransomware-gang-to-extort-employe
How AI Is Catapulting Nvidia Toward the $1 Trillion Club
https://www.wsj.com/amp/articles/how-ai-is-catapulting-nvidia-toward-the-1-trillion-club-14f42380
Microsoft: BEC Attackers Evade 'Impossible Travel' Flags With Residential IP Addresses
https://www.darkreading.com/endpoint/microsoft-bec-attackers-evade-impossible-travel-residential-ip-addresses
Notable Mentions:
Windows 11 Getting Native Support for 7-Zip, RAR, and GZ Archives
https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/microsoft/windows-11-getting-native-support-for-7-zip-rar-and-gz-archives/
GitLab ‘Strongly Recommends’ Patching Max Severity Flaw ASAP
https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/gitlab-strongly-recommends-patching-max-severity-flaw-asap/
OpenAI’s ChatGPT iOS App Now Available in Canada, India, Brazil and 30 More Countries
https://techcrunch.com/2023/05/25/openai-chatgpt-ios-app-india-download/?guccounter=1&guce_referrer=aHR0cHM6Ly93d3cuaW5vcmVhZGVyLmNvbS8&guce_referrer_sig=AQAAAKcGX8OBjtNffPw4QiPND29fNVV00vT1gqxZ4Mc74qLmhwNPCziwDlLmCqKtppyV3RNgGBoW7HGzqxvCLL6lZds4iyc5vd5afjfpCMN9QyqE4ggpZa3k_MmYoEFKCywFgYVACn4cAML3GLk7hUCAz0F6zaRRt2SuS2g8mTt6hpr0
Windows 11 Finally Gets a ‘Never Combine Taskbar Buttons’ Mode
https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/microsoft/windows-11-finally-gets-a-never-combine-taskbar-buttons-mode/
Resource of the week:
New Microsoft PowerToy Lets You Control 4 PCs With One Mouse, Keyboard
https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/microsoft/new-microsoft-powertoy-lets-you-control-4-pcs-with-one-mouse-keyboard/
Banter Story:
Elon Musk's Brain Implants Were Just Approved for Human Use
https://www.entrepreneur.com/business-news/elon-musks-brain-chip-company-approved-for-human-testing/452936

The amount of counselling I went through was ridiculous. I went from happy, to hurt to broken. Who gave you the permission to do that? Now that I’m alone in a new city, memories of your deceit and manipulation become ever so clear.
There are so many times when I wished you were different or hoped you were different. I thought you knew remorse and the basics of beings a respectable person. I gave you so many chances to prove what people around me think of you was wrong, to prove you weren’t acting, to prove you are good to me. However, every time you have been a huge disappointment. You say your friends are on your side, and that I have became toxic for your life because I was asking too many questions and annoying you about your “friend” let’s call her Sunny. I don’t care what you think or what your friends think. You say they are enough What you did wasn’t enough for me to trust you again, it was barely enough for you to have been a good bf. But I guess simply being a decent bf already took too much out of you.
What you did with Sunny was unforgivable. Sunny had a traumatizing childhood and perhaps found care from you that she has never received from a male figure. Even if I understand the reasons behind her actions, it was still inexcusable for her to hurt me repeatedly, and for her trying to break our relationship. You not only should have been a respectable person by not letting her get sexual with you that first night, and pushing her away. You should have been honest with me from the beginning, perhaps I could have helped you get away from her or at least I could have had the chance to help myself early on.
Every time we are going through rough patches you think of her. You unknowingly make comparisons and I knowingly make comparisons. But who is she to compare to someone like me? I’m so much better, and my mistake was letting you in my life which let Sunny and you to break me collectively.
I can’t help but think, who was I really in your life? Did you know how hurt I was when I found out you decided to go to the club gathering with her after I decided to give u space/go by yourself. Why did you even give Sunny the chance to gloat? Did your mom ever respect me as your gf when we were together. Does she know u are friends with Sunny again and I blocked you on everything? Does she know how much it hurts to know that you’d rather be with someone like Sunny rather than me? Does she know how much it hurts for me when u decided to help Sunny with classes and not me? U just assume I can deal with all that myself, but why should I? Especially for someone like you? Just so you can have the 2 of us, and have us fight over u? Why do I have to fight with someone like her?
Why am I always the one you give up or let go when things get tough? You said you wished u didn’t listen to your friends and went to the conference with me, but you didn’t. Your wish to go was just more of your acting. I just hate how Sunny went through all her actions unscathed. Whereas I am here needing to heal, what did I do to deserve this?
As much as I hate you, there are moments when I wish u have loved me enough to try to convince my parents, for u to demonstrate remorse and actually try to get me to trust u again. For u to reach out to tell me u have changed, but I know that’s wishful thinking.
I hate myself for choosing to be blind, that gave u the chance to break my last line of defence for my sanity. I told u that, and told u what to do to prevent me from going crazy. But u chose to help her, u didn’t give me the last little bit of respect I needed. You thought I could forgive u because Sunny failed her exams and she will be part of a common club. Perhaps I see the need for u to talk to her initially, but I don’t see the need for u to help her and for her to have access to you. I don’t care if u guys aren’t as close as before. The fact is u chose her again and knowingly hurt me this time. Perhaps because Sunny was willing to cheat on a major exam for u, u enjoyed her fighting for u, u enjoyed her BJs or the one u truly loved was her from the start. I was a fool for believing in u at all.
I am debating about telling Sunny’s bf of 9 years about what happened between u two. Just so she gets a little consequence. U should do that in my place if u r someone who wanted to take even a small chunk of the responsibility.

Love my new work 1461s but on first day lost large patch of skin on my right lower Achilles tendon area. Left is fine and there’s no discernible visual or tactile difference between the two shoes, so I figure some anatomical asymmetry is the cause, but any suggestions on mitigating the friction/pain so I can get them broken in?

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

Hi there,
Unfortunately the AT&T situation hasn't cleared up in the past week, and a new raid tier patch dropped TODAY which means I need to figure out how to not lagg so my group can prog properly.
I am wondering if there is any gold standard VPN that is recommended for custom configuration namely setup on a consumer grade router. I have a Netgear XR500 that is currently being used in AP mode on my custom Cisco business router which is being used to bypass my AT&T gateway router.
Current topology direct connections: Device ==> Cisco Switch ==> Cisco Router ==> AT&T Gateway ==> Internet wi-fi connections: Device ==> XR500 (AP Mode) ==> Cisco Router ==> AT&T Gateway ==> Internet
VPN topology wi-fi connections: Device ==> XR500 (VPN) ==> Cisco Router ==> AT&T Gateway ==> Internet
note: Might be confusing for other network savvy humans. My Cisco router has a small built-in 4-port L2 switch. It's weird like that. I don't have a backbone L3 switch... Yet
Known concerns: I'm mostly ok with the VPN being limited to wi-fi. Only my PS5 will be connected to it, and I'm not about to run more CAT5E/CAT6 cable for what I hope to be a temporary solution. Hell I used to game on my Verizon hotspot and that did the job enough.I could in theory hook the XR500 directly to the AT&T gateway, but the added latency from the extra router is so small. I'm more concerned about not having to change too much here about my existing config. In a nutshell, all I'm doing is flipping the router back into router mode and configuring a VPN service on it. I can rely on the AT&T gateway wi-fi (I never turned it off, basically backup wi-fi) and most of my important devices (tv, consoles, pc, AVR) are all over ethernet anyway. Wi-fi at this point is only used for phones and laptops.
So far I've crossed Exitlag off the list. They do not support custom config over a router.

Going on a new date with this woman on OLD. I noticed she has this red/purple "patch" on the right side of her face but can't tell exactly what since her photo doesnt have her head "on a side". From her photos she doesnt seem to hide that fact - should I ask her about it on the date? I don't mind the patch as much as the underlying potential ailment. I mean I have a dark patch on my right side and I have had women ask me why there's a patch there and some even though I got into a fight because it looked like a bruise. I have been using some cream on getting it lighter.
Should I bother asking or just ignore it? Again, if it is just cosmetic I don't really care at all.

So, after several days of failing at Google and simultaneously learning that New Jersey, Delaware and Michigan all have state programs for this, I can't seem to find any eye doctors or clinics in our area that do home bound visits.
Does anyone know of a clinic that does them, having a family member who needs new glasses but can't make it to office. So if anyone knows who i can contact that would be great thanks. .

They didn’t tell us the name of the next kid that disappeared. They didn’t tell us another kid had disappeared at all. We could all tell by the silence what had happened. It spoke volumes. I’m sure they talked about it in great detail amongst themselves. In PTA meetings and City Councils. My parents made sure to turn off the TV at 5 o’clock before the news came on, at least in my home. They’d turn it back on for the 11 o’clock news, when were were in bed and couldn’t hear the details.
The strange thing is, they never told us to just stop going outside. They told us to go in groups, sure, but they never decided, or as far as I could tell even though, to keep us all indoors. I guess that sort of freedom wasn’t something they were willing to give up. Instead, they did the neighborhood watch thing. For those few months, I remember my folks meeting more of our neighbors than in all the time previously, or since. Retirees would spend their days out in their front lawns, watching kids and everybody else coming and going. They’d even set up lawn furniture, with umbrellas, even all through the rains of spring. Cops stopped sitting in ambushes on the highways waiting for speeders and instead started patrolling the streets, chatting with us as we’d pass by. Weekends would see all the adults out in their yards, working on cars in the driveways, fixing the gutters, and so on. They had this weird way of looking at you as you’d ride by. Not hostile stares, but it was like they were cataloging your presence. Boy, eight years old, red raincoat silver bike, about 11:30 in the morning, heading south on Sorensen. Seemed fine.
The next time we saw it, it wasn’t in our neighborhood, and I was the one who saw it first. We were visiting Russ, a sort of 5th semi-friend from school. We rarely hung out, mostly owing to geography. His house wasn’t far as the crow flies, but it was up a steep hill. We spent a Saturday afternoon returning a cache of comic books we’d borrowed. The distance we covered was substantial, as we had decided to take lots of extra streets as switchbacks, rather than slowly push our bikes up the too-steep hills.
The descent was going to be the highlight of the trip, up until I saw the Hidebehind. We were on a curving road, a steep forested bluff on one side. The uphill slope was mostly ivy-covered raised foundations for the neighborhood’s houses. That side of the road was lined with parked cars, and the residents of the homes had to ascend steep staircases to get to their front doors.
I was ayt the back of the pack when I caught movement out of the corner of my eye. Movement, something brown squatting between two closely parked cars. My head snapped as I zoomed past, and despite not getting a good look, I knew it was that terrible thing. “It’s behind us!” I shouted and started pedaling hard. The others looked for themselves as I quickly rushed past them, but they soon joined my pace.
Ralph’s earlier idea of directly confronting the thing was set aside. We were moving too fast, and down too narrow a street to turn around. Then we saw it again it was to our left, off-road, between the trees. Suddenly it leaped from behind one tree trunk to the next and disappeared again. That hardly made sense, the base of the trees must have been thirty feet below the deck of the street we rode down. One of us, I think it was India, let out one of those strangled screams.
There it was again, back on the right, disappearing behind a mailbox as we approached. That couldn’t have been, it must have outpaced us and crossed in front of us. Logic would suggest there was more than one, but somehow the four of us knew it was the same thing. More impossible still, the pole holding up the mailbox was too thin, maybe two inches in diameter, yet that thing had disappeared behind it, like a Warner Bros. cartoon character. It was just enough to catch a better glimpse of it though. All brown. A head seemingly too bulbous and large for its body. Its limbs were thin but far longer, like a gibbon’s. Only a gibbon had normal elbows and knees. This thing bent its joints all wrong like it wasn’t part of the natural order. We were all terrified to wit’s end.
“The trail!” Ralph shouted, and the other three of us knew exactly what he meant. The top of it was only just around the curve. It was a dirt footpath for pedestrians ascending and descending South Hill, cutting through the woods on our left. It was too steep for cars, and to be honest, too steep for bikes. We’d played on it before, challenging each other to see how high up they could go, then descend back down without using our brakes. A short paved cul-de-sac at the bottom was enough space to stop before running into a cross street.
Ralph had held the previous group record, having climbed three-quarters of the way before starting his mad drop. India’s best was just short of that, I had only dared about halfway up, Ben only a third. This time, with certain death on our heels, the trail seemed the only way out. Nothing could have outrun a kid on a bike flying down that hill.
We followed Ralph’s lead, swinging to the right gutter of the street, then hanging a fast wide left up onto the curb, over a patch of gravel, between two boulders set up as bollards, lest a car driver mistake the entrance for a driveway, and then, like a roller coaster cresting the first hill, the bottom fell out.
It was the most overwhelming sensation of motion I’ve ever had, before or since. I suppose the danger behind us was the big reason, and being absolutely certain that only our speed was keeping us alive. I remember thinking it was like the speeder bike scene from Return of the Jedi, also a recent movie from the time. Only this was real. I didn’t just see the trees flashing past it, I could hear the motion as well. Cold air attacked my eyes and long streamers of tears rushed over my cheeks and the drops flew past my ears, I didn’t dare blink. Each little stone my tires struck threatened to up-end me and end it all. Yet, and perhaps worse, half the time it felt like I wasn’t in contact with the ground at all. I was going so fast that those same small stones were sending me an inch or two into the air, and the arc of the flights so closely matched the slope that by the time I contacted the trail again, I was significantly further down the hill.
At the same time, I had never felt more relief, as the thing behind us had no way of catching us now. Somehow, maybe the seriousness of the escape gave us both the motive and the seriousness to keep ourselves under control. Looking back, I marvel that at least one of us didn’t lose control and end up splitting our skulls open.
We hit the pavement of the cul-de-sac below, and didn’t bother to slow down. We raced through the cross-street, one angry driver screeching to a halt and laying on his horn. This brought out the neighborhood watch. Just a few of them at first. Still, we didn’t slow down, our momentum carried us back up the much shallower slope of our neighborhood. Witnesses saw us depart at high speed, and this only brought out more of the watch. We heard whistles behind us, just like our P.E. teacher’s whistle. We figured that was the watch’s alarm siren. Regardless of what happened to that thing, it was behind us. We returned to our homes, shaken, but safe and sound, our inertia taking us almost all of the way there.
Another kid disappeared that Sunday, up on South Hill. We’d suspected it because we could see the lights of the police cars on a high road, surrounding the spot where it would turn out later, one of the kid’s shoes had been found. Russ confirmed it at school on Monday. It was a kid he’d known, lived down the road from his place, went to private school which is why we didn’t recognize his name.
I remember seeing Ralph’s face the next day when he arrived at school. He looked angry. Strong. Like he’d been crying really hard, and now it was over and he was resolved. He said he’d felt guilty because the thing we’d escaped from had gotten the other kid instead. He tried to tell his old man about it, then his mom, then any adult he could. He’d tell them about the monster who hides behind things. They needed to focus on finding and stopping that instead of looking for some sort of creeper or serial killer. Of course, nobody had listened to him. They hadn’t listened to the rest of us either when we’d tried to tell.
So he’d devised a plan. He was calling it the “Fight Patrol,” which we didn’t argue with. If the adults wouldn’t do something, we would. We’d patrol our neighborhood on our bikes, the four of us, maybe a couple more if we could talk others into it. We’d chase it off like that first time, maybe for good, or maybe corner it. Clearly, it could not handle being caught.
Naturally, we brought up the scare on South Hill. He argued that was a bad place. Too isolated, couldn’t turn around easily. We needed to stay on our home turf, lots of visibility, and plenty of the Neighborhood Watch within earshot. Maybe we and the adults working together was the key, even if the adults didn’t understand the problem.
Well, that convinced us. Our first patrol was that afternoon, after school. We watched everybody’s back like hawks. Nothing had a chance to sneak up on us. Nothing could step out from behind a bush without getting spotted. By Friday afternoon there were eight of us. The next week we split up to extend our territory to the next neighborhoods over.
Nothing happened. We never saw anything. Ben thought it was because we were scaring it away. Ralph just thought we were failing, and took it personally. I myself thought the thing had just moved to different parts of town, where the new disappearances were taking place. I told him we should keep it up until the thing was caught.
It was all for naught.
One day, India didn’t show up for school. I asked everybody, the teachers, the office staff, the custodian, my parents. All of them said they didn’t know, and it was so easy to tell that they were lying. That would mark the end of the Fight Patrol.
Ben didn’t show up a couple of days after that. When I got home and collapsed into bed, my mother came in to tell me that Ben’s mother had called. She’d taken him out of school and they were moving elsewhere. I called up Ralph to let him know the news, and he was relieved too.
My last day was Friday, and then I was taken out. Again, I called Ralph so he wouldn’t worry. I guess when there were only two weeks left of school, and it was just grade school, a couple missed weeks don’t amount to much. So I ended up spending the bulk of the summer out in the country, with my grandparents, which was why I brought up my grandpa in the first place.
I suppose I did fine out on their farmhouse. I was safe. There was certainly no shortage of things for a kid to do. I think my mom felt a strong sense of relief too. Things slipped through the cracks.
My grandparents didn’t have cable, too far out of town. They just had an old-school antenna and got a couple of TV stations transmitting out of Canada, Vancouver specifically. I remember one July day, sitting in their living room. My grandmother had just fixed lunch for me and my grandfather and had gone out to do some gardening as we watched the news at noon.
My grandfather was already being ravaged by his illnesses. He was able to get around, but couldn’t do any real labor anymore. He’d lounge in front of the TV in a special lounge chair. He hardly talked, and when he did he’d just mumble some discomfort or complaint to my grandma.
The lead story on the news was the current situation in Farmingham, despite being in the neighboring country, it was still big news in Vancouver, and the whole rest of the region. It seemed the disappearances were declining, but the police were still frantically searching for a supposed serial killer. I didn’t pick up much about what they were talking about, I was a kid after all, but my grandfather was watching intently, despite his infirmity.
He mumbled something, I didn’t catch. I asked him was he said, and as I approached I heard him say “fearsome critters.”
He turned his eyes to me and said again, distinct and in a normal tone of voice, “fearsome critters,” then returned his attention to the screen. “I don’t know why they call them that. Fearsome, sure. But ‘critters?” Makes it sound silly. Like it's some sort of fairy tale that it ain’t. Guess it’s like whistling past the graveyard. Well, they don’t have to worry about them no more, guess they can call them what they like.”
Then he turned to me. “Do you know what it is?” he asked. “Squonk? Hodag? Gouger? Hidebehind?”
“Hidebehind,” I whispered, and he turned back to the TV with a sneer. I had no idea what on earth he was talking about. Remember, this would be years before I learned he spent his youth as a lumberjack. And yet, somehow, I knew exactly what we were talking about.
“Hidebehind,” he repeated. “That will do it. They give them such stupid names. The folk back East, that is. Wisconsin. Minnesota. Ohio. Way back in the old days, before my grandfather would have been your age. Back when those places were covered by forests. They didn’t give them silly names back then, no. Back then they were something to worry about. Then they moved on, though. They all went out West, to here, followed the loggers. So as once they didn’t have to worry about them anymore, they started making up silly stories, silly names. “Fearsome critters,” they’d call them. Just tall tales to tell the greenhorns and scare them out of their britches. Then they’d make them even sillier, and tell the stories to little kids to spook them.”
“Not out here they didn’t tell no stories nor make up any names. It was bad enough they followed us out. I had no clue they even existed until I saw one for myself. Bout your age, I suppose. Maybe a little older. Nobody ever talks about them. Not even when they take apart a work crew, one by one. They just pull the crews back. Wait till mid-summer when the land is dry but not too dry. Then they move the crews in, a lot of them. Do some burning, make a lot of smoke. Drives them deeper into the woods, you know. Then you can cut the whole damn place down. But nobody asks why, nobody tells why. The people who know just take care of it.”
“I guess that’s why they’re coming to us now. All the old woods are almost gone. So they’ve got to. Like mountain lions. I supposed it’s going to happen sooner or later.”
We heard my grandma come into the back door to the utility room, and stomp the dirt off her boots. My grandfather turned to me one last time and said, “Whichever way you look at it, somebody’s just got to take care of it.” Then my grandmother came in from the utility room and asked us how our lunch had been.
Now that I look back at it, that might have been the last time my grandfather and I really had a meaningful talk.
We moved back home in late August. I had been having a fantastic summer. Though looking back, I suppose it could be rough for a still-young woman to be living in her aging parents' house when she’s got a perfectly good husband and house of her own in town.
First thing I did was visit Ralph. He’d been busy. He’d fortified his treehouse into a proper, well, tree fort. He’d nailed a lot of reinforcing plywood over everything. He hadn’t gone out on patrols by himself, of course, but the height of the tree fort afforded him a view of the nearest streets. He’d also made some makeshift weapons out of old baseball bats, a hockey stick, and a garden rake. The sharp rocks he’d attached to them with masking tape didn’t look very secure, but it’d only take one or two good blows with that kind of firepower. He also explained he’d been teaching himself kung fu, by copying all the movies he saw on kung fu movies late at night on the unpopular cable channels. That was classic Ralph.
As for the monster, it seemed to be going away. Its last victim had disappeared weeks previously, part of the reason my mom felt it was time to go back. This had been at night too. What’s more, the victim had been a college student, a very petite lady, barely five feet tall, under a hundred pounds. The news had speculated that their presumptive serial killer had assumed she was a child. I remember thinking the Hidebehind didn’t care. Maybe it just thought she couldn’t run fast enough to get away or put up a fight when he caught her. Like a predator.
At any rate, the college students were incensed. Of course, they’d been hyper-alert and concerned when it was just local kids going missing. Now that it was one of their own the camel’s back had broken. They really went hard on the protests, blaming the local police for not doing enough.
They started setting up their own patrols, and at night too. Marches with sometimes dozens of students at a time. They called it “Take Back the Night.” They’d walk the streets, making sure they’d be heard. Some cared drums or tambourines. They’d help escort people home, and sometimes they’d unintentionally stop random crimes they’d happen across. I felt like this was what the Fight Patrol could have been, if we’d just been old enough, or had been listened to. This would be the endgame for the Hidebehind, one way or another.
I stayed indoors the rest of the summer, and really there wasn’t much left. It doesn’t get too hot in the Pacific Northwest, nobody has air conditioners, or at least we didn’t back then. It will get stuffy though, in August, and I liked to sleep with my window open. I could hear the chants and challenges from the student patrols on their various routes. Sometimes I could hear them coming from far away, and every now and then they’d pass down my street. It felt like a wonderful security blanket.
I also liked the honeysuckle my mother had planted around the perimeter of the house. Late at night, if I was struggling to fall asleep, the air in my bedroom would start to circulate. Cold air would start pouring in over my windowsill, bringing the sweet scent of that creepervine with it, and I’d the sensation before finally passing out.
This one night, and I have no knowledge if I was awake, asleep, or drifting off, but the air in the room changed, and cooler air poured over the windowsill and swept over my bed, but it didn’t carry the sweet smell of honeysuckle. Regardless of my initial state, I was alert pretty quickly. It was a singularly unpleasant smell. A bit like death, which at that age I was mostly unfamiliar with, except a time some animal had died underneath the crawlspace of our house. There was more to it, though. The forest, the deep forest. I don’t know and still don’t know, what that meant. Most smells I associate with the forest are pleasant. Cedar, pine needles, thick loam of the forest floor, campfires, even the creosote and turpentine of those old timey-logging camps. This was none of those smells. Maybe… rotting granite, and the spores of slime molds. Mummified hemlocks and beds of needles compressed into something different than soil. It disturbed me.
So I sat up in bed. I hadn’t noticed before, but I’d been sweating, just lightly in the stuffy summer night heat. Now it was turning cold. Before me was my bedroom window. A lit rectangle in a pitch-dark room. To either side were my white, opened curtains, the one on the right, by the open half of the window, stirred just slightly in the barely perceptible breeze.
Most of the rectangle was the black form of the protective cypress tree. Only the slight conical nature of the tree distinguished it from a perfectly vertical column. To either side was a dim soft orange glow coming from the sodium lamps of the street passing by our house. It was perhaps a bit diffuse from the screen set in my window to keep out mosquitos. In the distance was the sound of an approaching troupe of the Take Back the Night patrol. They were neither drumming nor chanting, but still making plenty of noise. They were, perhaps, three or four blocks away, and heading my way.
For some reason that I didn’t understand, I got up, off of the foot of the bed. The window, being closer, appeared bigger. I took a silent step further. The patrol approached closer. Another step. I leaned to my right, just a bit, getting a slightly wider view to the left of the cypress tree. That was the direction the patrol was coming from.
That was when it resolved. The deeper black silhouette within the black silhouette of the cypress tree. A small lithe frame with a too-bulbous head. It too leaned, in its case, to the left, to see around the cypress tree as the patrol approached. They reached our block,on the other side of the street. A dozen rowdy college students, not trying to be quiet. None of them fearing the night. Each feeling safe and determined, and absorbed in their own night out rather than being overtly sensitive to their surroundings. They were distracted, unfocused If they had been peering into the shadows, if just one of them had looked towards my house, behind the cypress tree, they might have seen the Hidebehind, poking its face out and watching them transit past. But they didn’t notice.
It hid behind the cypress tree, and I hid behind it, hoping that the blackness of my bedroom would protect me. I stood absolutely still, as I had done once when a hornet had once landed on the back of my neck. Totally assure that if I made the slightest movement or made the slightest sound that I’d be stung. I hardly even breathed.
The patrol passed, from my perspective, behind the cypress tree and temporarily out of view. The Hidebehind straightened, ready to lean to the right and watch the patrol pass, only it didn’t lean. Even as I watched the patrol pass on to the right, it stood there, stock still, just as I was doing.
It was then I became aware that my room had become stuffy again. The scent was gone. The air had shifted and was now flowing out through the screen again, carrying my own scent with it. I knew what this meant, and yet I was too paralyzed to react. The thing started to turn, very slowly. It was a predator understanding that it might have become victim to its own game. It turned as if it was thinking the same thing I had been thinking, that the slightest movement might give it away.
It turned, and I saw its face. Like some kind of rotting desiccated, shriveling fruit, it was covered in wrinkles. Circles within concentric circles surrounded its two great eyes, eyes which took up so much of its face. I couldn’t, and still struggle, to think of words to describe it. Instead, I still think in terms of analogies. At the time I thought of the creature from the film E.T., only twisted and distorted into a thing of nightmares. Almost all eyelids, and a little drooping sucker mouth. Now that I’m more worldly, it reminds of creatures of ancient artworks. The key defining feature were the long horizontal slits it had for eyes. You see that in old masks carved in West Africa, or by the Inuit long ago. You see it in what’s called the “slit-eyed dogu” of ancient Japan.
As I watched the wrinkles on the face seemed to multiply. Then I realized this was the result of its eyes slowly widening. It’s mouth, too, slowly dilated, revealing innumerable small razor-sharp teeth. A person, standing in its location, shouldn’t have been able to see in. Light from the sodium streetlamps lit the window’s screen, obscuring the interior. It was no person. It could see me, and it was reacting to my presence. Its eyes grew huge, black.
My own eyes would have been just as wide if not for my own anatomical limitations. I was still watching when it disappeared. It didn’t see it move to the right. I didn’t see it move to the left, nor did I see it drop down out of view. It simply disappeared. One fraction of a second it was there, and then it decided to leave, and so it did. It was not a thing of this world.
There were no more disappearances after that poor woman from the university. I don’t think it had anything to do with me. The media and police all speculated their “serial killer” had gone into a “dormant phase”. There was no shortage of people who tried to take credit. Maybe they deserve it. The thing’s hunting had been on the decline. All the neighborhood watches and student patrols, I think that maybe all that commotion was making it too hard for the Hidebehind to go about its business. Maybe it had gone back to the woods.
Then again, maybe Ralph had been right the whole time. Maybe it really, really, really didn’t like to be seen.
So.
Now I’ve got some decisions to make. I think the first thing I should do is look at social media and dig up Ralph. It’s been a good thirty years since I last talked to him. He ought to know the Hidebehind is back. He’s probably made plans.
Then, there’s the issue of my son. He’s up in his bedroom now, probably still mad at me. Probably confused about why I’d be so strict. Maybe he’s inventing explanations as to why.
I’m not sure, but I’m leaning toward telling him everything. He deserves to know. It’d probably be safer if he knows. I think people have this instinct where, when they see or know something that they’re not supposed to know, they just bottle it up. I think that was the problem with grown-ups when I was a kid. It was the issue with my grandfather, telling me so little when it was almost too late. I think people do it because we’re social animals, and we’re afraid of being ostracized. Go along to get along.
Hell, my son is probably going to think I’m crazy. It might even make him more mad at me. And even more confused. He knows about the disappearances. “The Farmingham Fiend” the media would end up dubbing the serial killer that didn’t really exist. It’s become local “true crime” history. Kids tell rumors about it. It was almost forty years ago, so it probably feels safe to wonder about.
So yeah, I suppose when I say I know who the real killer was, a magical monster from the woods that stalks its prey by hiding behind objects, then impossibly disappears- that I’m going to look like a total nut. I’d think that if I were in his shoes.
Except… people are going to start disappearing again, it’s only a matter of time. The media will say that the Farmingham Fiend is back in the game. Will my son buy that? He’ll start thinking about what I told him, and how I predicted it. Then he’ll remember that he saw the thing himself, he and his friends, even if it was just out of the corner of his eye.
I hope, sooner or later, he’ll believe me. I could use his help. Maybe Ralph is way ahead of me, but I’m thinking we should get the Fight Patrol back together. Father and son, this time. Multigenerational, get the retirees involved too.
Old farts of my generation, for reasons I don’t understand, like to wax nostalgic over their own false sense of superiority. We rode our bikes without helmets and had distant if not irresponsible parents. Yeah, yeah, what a load. I think every new generation is better than the last, because every generation is a progression from the last, Kids these days? They’ve got cell phones, with cameras. And helmet cams. GoPros you can attach to bikes. Doorbell cameras.
It seems the Hidebehind loathes being seen. This time around, with my grandfather’s spirit, my own memories, and my boy’s energy? I think this time we’re finally going to beat it.

Pls Anet, don't abandon them anymore <3 The new adventures were very good - possibly the best part of the last EoD patch. Regardless, it's unfortunate we did not get any new griffon adventures from the patch.
These wouldn't even be visible to players without a griffon, just like the other griffon adventures. Furthermore, if EoD-only accounts must have access to them, a properly implemented rental would solve the issue.
Maybe worth considering in the future, or for future maps!

(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.

This, with a Letality Mythic Passive, the Dash & the 15% DMGs Amp for 2 seconds
Let's face it, next Patch, Youmuu's will be in the gutter. Same for Drakthar. AD Assassins will probably have to go either Youmuu, that will be trash, or Eclipse, which is a FigheDefensive Item
Ofc Youmuu's needed a nerf, it was overpowered. But with its concept, Youmuu will never be balanced. Either Broken, or Trash. And this applies to Drakthar too.
On the other hand, Prowler always have been balanced. Except for a few champions that should not be buying it. But I believe the problem was not the Old Prowler, but the Champions/Interractions (BORK, Udyr, GP, Renek, Yorick)
It really astonishes me how Riot is reluctant to Truly nerf these champions (or Buff Renekton), and just prefer to remove an Healthy Item (Old Prowler) and replace it with an Unhealthy one (New Youmuu)

- Why do we die?
- The dead are never truly dead. Maybe they’re not here, now. But everything that once lived, lives on forever. In the eternity of time.
​
https://preview.redd.it/it4z1ilj703b1.jpg?width=720&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=d664bf9674f6810a3fd7273ec44ed7a8c59947f6
If there is something that matters in Dark, it is time. But not only because of the trips made through it... There is an aspect related to time that has gone unnoticed and is more important in the story than we might think at first: The time frame in which events take place.
In the narrative, two main periods can be distinguished (without taking into account the years): the week from June 20 to 27 and the week from November 4 to 12. We also have a period of three days in September (21, 22 and 23) and several individual days (it is not possible to determine exactly when some of them happen)
Of these periods, there is one that is special because of the symbology it hides and that can be key in the narrative. We refer to the time in which the first season takes place: November…
​
https://preview.redd.it/sz2zbe1m703b1.jpg?width=720&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=f0b4d78b4fd0710a64f42ed5556c0a2837f931f8
MIKKEL'S OUTFIT
One of the things that really attracts attention in the first episodes is the skeleton suit that Mikkel is wearing. Taking the dates into account, it is inevitable to associate it with a festivity that has been gaining importance in Germany since the 1990s: Halloween.
In addition, in southern Germany (also in Austria), Catholics extend the celebration from October 30 to November 8. They call it “Seleenwoche”, which means “Week of all souls”. These days serve to remember deceased relatives and attend religious services in honor of the saints.
However, in Dark these celebrations are not explicitly alluded to, despite there being subtle indications, such as: Mikkel's costume, Jana's visit to Mads' grave, or various details throughout the series refering to "ghosts" or the "beyond" (see link)
reddit.com/DarK/comments/13td7r3/spoilers_s3_ghosts_and_beyond_in_dark/
This omission may not be accidental, but Jantje is using it as a narrative resource called "paralepsis" with which, offering half information, as a clue, she intends to call attention to precisely what is omitted. It is a “relevant omission” with which she subtracts details from the work that are apparently uninteresting and, nevertheless, they constitute indications hiding and revealing at the same time the story to which they refer, configuring the work as an enigma.
To understand the importance of this "relevant omission" regarding the moment in which the first season of Dark takes place, we have to immerse ourselves in the culture from which the symbol of the triqueta comes from, since Halloween has its origins in a Celtic holiday: the Samhain.
​
https://preview.redd.it/ds1tipyn703b1.jpg?width=720&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=1e5149e58d1f8010914ec7bb7a7f292fefe52343
THE CELTIC EIGHT-FOLD YEAR
Celts did not understand time as a finite line. On the contrary, in their understanding of the Universe, it was considered as an infinite cyclical process. Celtic time is conceived as a circular path that always returns to the same position.
In the past, Celtic communities only observed two seasons: winter and summer (light and dark, life and death). Their year was divided around four lunar festivities that celebrated agricultural and livestock cycles: "Imbolc", "Bealtaine", "Samhain" and “Lughnasa”. There were also four solar festivities corresponding to the equinoxes (spring - "Ostara" and autumn - "Mabon") and the solstices (summer - "Litah" and winter - "Yule"), although these were of lesser importance.
The lunar festivities are also known as "cross-quarter day" as they are located at the midpoint between the equinoxes and the solstices. In this way, the eight festivities mentioned above (known as "Sabbats") mark the astronomical milestones of the Earth's orbit around the Sun.
​
https://preview.redd.it/yc2ejyeu703b1.jpg?width=720&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=247c31b97c12c4287f0c9cfb1ebcf91b4661d186
SAMHAIN
Samhain is a Gaelic festival marking the end of the harvest season and the descent of the herds to winter pastures. It marks the start of the "Celtic New Year", separating the "light half" from the "dark half" of the year.
Currently, it is usually celebrated on November 1, although, according to some sources, formerly it lasted nine days, grouped into three blocks of three days each and in the center of all of them the day of Samhain. In addition, it would not coincide with a specific date because it was celebrated on the new moon closest to the astronomical midpoint between the autumnal equinox and the winter solstice. Earth reaches this midpoint on November 8.
Samhain is believed to have been the pagan Celtic festival of the dead, and over time Samhain and All Saints' Day influenced each other and eventually syncretized into the modern Halloween.
The origins of the celebration date back to the Celtic peoples who inhabited pre-Christian Ireland over 2,000 years ago, and it is associated with many important events in Irish mythology. In the earliest literary records of the holiday, Samhain was characterized by large gatherings and parties and was the time when the ancient burial mounds, which were considered portals to the “Otherworld”, were opened. Some accounts suggest that on Samhain bonfires were made and offerings or sacrifices were made.
Samhain was a liminal or threshold festival, in which, according to Irish mythology, the border between this world and the other was diluted, which meant that supernatural beings such as spirits or fairies, called "Aes Side" (considered by scholars, remnants of pagan gods and nature spirits) could more easily enter our world through portals opened to the "Otherworld".
But also the souls of the dead relatives returned to visit their homes, just as those of the deceased during that year traveled to the "Otherworld" during that night when the veil between the present, the past and the future disappeared.
​
THE “OTHERWORLD"
With the name of "Otherworld" ("Orbis Alia") reference is made in Celtic mythology to the fairy world that coexists with that of human beings. It has been interpreted as an expansive world with numerous domains and kingdoms within it, and is home to many beings (gods, fairies and spirits of all kinds, along with the souls of the dead)
In the Irish mind-set, the "Otherworld" is neither Hell nor Heaven in the sense in which we now consider it. Rather this "Paradise" is a land of eternal youth and bounty, and a place accessible, with difficulty, to the living.
Many of the ancient tales tell of humans gaining access to the "Otherworld". Sometimes they were invited or summoned there by some god or spirit, sometimes they were kidnapped by one of the Otherworlders, and some people entered the "Otherworld" of their own accord during those times of the year when the walls between their world and "Otherworld" were lowered (as during Samhain and Beltane)
The portals to the "Other World" were found in nature and they used to be in caves or at the base of hills, on cliffs... It is also believed that the patches of mist could have some opening to the "Otherworld" within them.
One of the best-known portals is the Oweynagat cave (known as the "Gate to Hell"), near Rathcroghan (Cruachan), the oldest Celtic archaeological complex where the first legends related to Samhain are located. What's more, many people believe that this "Gate to Hell" could be the place where Samhain originated.
The entrance to the Oweynagat cave
The "Otherworld" is sometimes located under the burial mounds, dolmens and other megalithic monuments. Thus, we have the "Sídhe": underground worlds located under mounds of earth or ruins that serve as a refuge for fairies. In this way, stories circulate throughout Ireland about Knocks (from the Irish "Cnoc", meaning "hollow hill") inside which live extensive fairy communities ruled by a king or queen.
In many Old Irish manuscripts, the "Otherworld" is located beyond the Western Sea.
One of the great treasures of the Irish "Otherworld" was a ship that moved across the sea under the power of its pilot's thoughts. This mythological object was called "Ocean Sweeper" (Aigean Scuabadoir) and was brought from the "Otherworld" by the heroic Lugh, later becoming the property of the ocean god Manannan Mac Lir (first ancestor of the human race and god of the dead). He was responsible for transporting the dead heroes to "Tir Tairnigiri" (The Promised Land), where they would find their final resting place in the "Otherworld" located somewhere in the West.
Likewise, according to Gallic myths, once the souls had left their bodies, they went to the northwestern coast of Gaul and there they embarked towards ancient Britain. When they wanted to cross the sea, the souls went to the houses of the sailors, at whose doors they knocked insistently and desperately. The sailors then left their homes and took the dead to their destination in ghostly ships.
​
https://preview.redd.it/mjoxf845803b1.jpg?width=720&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=ec5c147212dbb26a75dcdf93de3dcbecfdd90a4e
APPLES...
Apples and hazelnuts played an especially important role for the first Celts, which is why they were considered foods from the "Other World". The apple symbolized life and immortality, it was the talisman that allowed access to the "Otherworld" and gave the power to predict the future.
In Celtic mythology, the apple tree is the quintessential "Otherworld" tree. It is believed that an apple tree grows in its center whose fruit has magical properties.
Additionally, apples serve as a graceful food offering that helps spirits travel safely as they pass through the veil between the mundane realms.
​
https://preview.redd.it/p7wxdsp8803b1.jpg?width=720&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=d4034bcc356bff5f15ee34e50eafa11b6aa633d0
ACORNS....
For the Celts, trees were of great importance, but the most sacred of all was the oak, which represented the "Axis Mundi". The oak was a symbol of connection to the spiritual world, its roots piercing the subterranean realms of the "Otherworld" while its branches reached the heavens.
The oaks also provided an important food: Acorns. The acorn, being a seed, contains both the memory of those that have passed and the promise of those to come, symbolizing the cycle of life and the seasons. They were considered a symbol of growth related to life, representing longevity, immortality, rebirth...
​
https://preview.redd.it/h4djcpn9803b1.jpg?width=720&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=80acfe70585a47d2da3da7a81626787bd7882802
...AND BIRDS
Birds are a powerful force in Celtic mythology, often symbolizing the flight of spirits or the guiding for souls in their transit to the "Otherworld."
The Celts thought that birds were the reincarnation of the souls of the dead, so they could be messengers from the "Other World".
The female characters, especially the witches, are very often associated with birds.
​
THE SYMBOLS IN “DARK”
Next we are going to detail the existing analogies between this Celtic mythology and the story of Dark:
- The title of the series is related to the moment in which it begins: Samhain, the entry into the "dark time" of the year.
- Characters travel to "another world" through a cave.
-When Mikkel enters the cave, he does so guided by a Jonas who comes from another time.
- Mads, Erik and Yasin are kidnapped by a Helge who comes from another time.
- The members of “Sic Mundus” live underground, under the orders of Adam. After, their lair is in the ruins of the nuclear power plant (Remembering the "Cnocs")
- The "sacrifice" is mentioned by several characters.
- We can see apples in many places: it appears in the intro of the series, on the wallpaper in the bunker, with Noah on several occasions, in various fruit bowls (at Ines Kahnwald's 1986 house, at Egon's 1953 house, at Bernard Doppler's house, at Adam's lair, at Alt-Martha's house, at the attic room of the Tannhaus factory…)
- Acorns and birds are also very present elements in the narrative.
​
EPILOGUE - Death and astronomical events
Curiously, although it is not mentioned in the series, three astronomical events take place during the story: the summer solstice (June 21), the autumnal equinox (September 23) and the last "quarter-crossing" (November 8)... Three of the " Sabbat” of the Celtic year…
June 27 is also a special date as it is the day the sun sets the latest.
All these dates are important in Dark: Mikkel's death takes place on June 21 and Katharina's death on September 23. The Apocalypse happens on June 27 in Adam's world and on November 8 in Eva's world.
Finally, all the characters in both worlds “vanish” on November 8, the day Sonja, Marek and Charlotte should have died. Exactly the "quarter-crossing" day of Samhain...
https://preview.redd.it/tijpcsnc903b1.jpg?width=720&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=59ee9fa2f719d4c298ca4667dec6a77d71ce79d9
​
THE QUESTION...
So, it is inevitable to reach this point without asking the question... Could we understand the story of Dark from a supernatural perspective? Are the worlds of Adam and Eve the "Otherworld" of the origin world? Would Jonas and Martha be "angels" as Marek says?
"Why do we die?..."

Middle Aged daddy dom looking for his LG if you want to help me spend a couple nights in the mile high city since my return to NJ was messed up I would love to show my appreciation.
Looking for a nerdy goth girl to test a hypothesis STEM background preferred but not required.
5’10 Fit Inked and Nerdy