Can you recharge an elf bar

How hard to get an IA job in NYC? I have background in Accounting, 8 years of audit experience including 3 years as external auditor in Deloitte, Hochiminh office. I qualify CIA recently and currently work in a retail company in Vietnam (the biggest one). My husband was offered to work at NYC and his company helped us to got visa that I can work in US as well, so I want to move with him. The problem is that I don't have any experience working in US. If you have any suggestions, please let me know. Thank you so much.

The Weekly Discussion Thread is a place where everyone in the /r/kayakfishing community can come and ask questions or share anything.
You might have questions that you don't think deserve an entire post. Perhaps you're just seeking the input of some other anglers. Maybe you want to share a picture of your new gear.
Anyone is free to comment, and (hopefully) get as much input as possible from other anglers.

1. Call a wood stove a fireplace then compare it to a 16' x 16-20' tall masonry fireplace wall.
2. Call native pasture improved pasture until you call them out on it. (Field appraiser leaves notes now) 3.use different units of measurements to compare 2 properties. (Look for living to heated sqft)
3. Will tax you more if you do not let them view your interior. 4.a will try to send attractive people after you so that they can see what the inside of your home looks like.
4. May use Facebook algorithms to look into your post to see if you have extra rooms or areas to tax you on.
5. May conspire against you using magistrates to set you up for an audit by the DOR. 6a look for easy mistakes such as missing pages of evidence, basic math errors, basic reading errors, it's a setup! 7.more to come!

Hey this is my first time posting on this channel and first ever reddit post, I just felt the need to share this feelings with people who would understand me. So I have trich since 12/13 yo at 18 my parents got me this treatement with this wig that would be glued to my head, after a bit more than an year I started growing my hair again and my trich got an incredible remission of over 4 years. Other things impacted it as well, I felt purposeful, I was in uni and was quite busy, would spend most of my time outside the house. I felt like the urge to pull hairs would never return, I had no urge for many years, until the pandemic. The isolation and the constant worries made me return to the old habbit, the pandemic is already over and I can't stop the hair pulling. I hate my job, even tough it is decent money I hate to see that all studying I did isn't paying off, most of the time I am made to do the simplest of repetitive tasks, I've been really tough on myself for degressing on trich.
In conclusion from 2020 till now I've been seeing the work of years go back to zero, and this makes me soo dismotivated to continue to fight the urge, as I convince myself that whenever a new issue pop up the urge will to again and again and it will be a constant battle and expense of my energy. Recently I got back to the realization I got to overcome it again, I know I can I already done this before, its been 2 days with no hair pulling, this time my whole life is a mess but I am hoping to heal back one thing at a time, starting with caring for myself. It is not because I want to see myself wearing my own long hair again, but because I need to take control of my life and just like loosing control started with the trich regainig control will also start with overcoming this challenge,I am not doing this just for my hair but for the entire me. I wanted to know if anyone else has got a situation similar to mine where you could get rid of trich for many years but had one huge regression that made all your effort seems meaningless, and how did you got back on track after this huge mistep. Accepting that I regressed without calling myself "weak" or damn straight "stupid" has been a challenge, I am still angry at myself and I wonder if I can still forgive me, it is hard to express all feelings of frustration, disapointment ...

I seem to remember when I was an immature teenager there was what was ostensibly an in-browser MMORPG that took place entirely on virtual forums (think hypnospace but less polish) but it had RPG elements. There were literally classes like Emo and Camgirl and the mobs you fought were you “trolling” enemies. It even had somewhat of a pseudo storyline if you could call it that. There was also a real forum you could go on with real players. But I can’t find it or remember what it’s called.

Overview
In electronics, AI (artificial intelligence) chips are dedicated processors used to run AI algorithms. The difference from normal chips (CPU/GPU for general purpose) lies in the emphasis on specificity and versatility. CPU, GPU, FPGA, and ASIC chips can all execute AI algorithms. And to a certain extent, GPU and FPGA can also be regarded as AI chips, but ASIC has more distinctive features, so it is also the most representative. So what they are and why they matter?
​
What is AI Chip?
The so-called AI chips generally refer to ASIC (application-specific integrated circuit) chips. Both traditional CPUs and GPUs can be used to execute AI algorithms, but their speed is slow and performance is not good enough, making them impractical for commercial use. For example, automatic driving needs to recognize road pedestrians, traffic lights and other conditions, but if the current CPU is to calculate, then the car may overturn into the river before calculation results, which is a slow performance. If you use a GPU, the speed is indeed much faster, but the power consumption is high, and the battery of the car may not be able to support normal use for a long time, and the GPU is not economical, that is, ordinary consumers cannot afford it. What’s more, GPUs often out of stock. In addition, the GPU is not an ASIC specially developed for AI, so the speed has not reached its limit, and there is still room for improvement. In fields like intelligent driving requires fast calculation; in mobile terminals, AI applications such as face recognition and voice recognition must have low power consumption. Obviously, GPUs cannot meet the requirements, so the development of ASIC has become inevitable.
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Why It Matters?
So why do we need AI chips? For AI algorithms, CNN (convolutional neural network) is commonly used in image recognition and other fields; RNN (recurrent neural network) is mainly used in speech recognition, natural language processing and other fields, which are two different types of algorithms. However, they are essentially matrix or vector multiplication and addition, and then cooperate with division, exponent algorithms.
A mature AI algorithm, such as YOLO-V3, is a large number of calculations such as convolution, residual network, and full connection, which are essentially multiplication and addition. More over, if the specific input graphic size is determined, then the total number of multiplication and addition calculations is determined, like one trillion times, of course, the real situation is much larger than this. If you want to execute it quickly, one trillion additions and multiplications must be performed.
Let’s take another example, such as IBM’s POWER8, one of the most advanced superscalar CPUs for servers, 4GHz, SIMD, 128-bit, assuming that 16bits data is processed, that is 8 numbers, and a maximum of 8 multiplication and addition calculations can be performed in one cycle, performing up to 16 operations at a time. But this is theoretical, it is unlikely in fact.
At this time, the peak calculation times of the CPU in one second = 16X4Gops = 64Gops. In this way, one CPU calculation time can be calculated. And the execution time can also be known by switching to GPU calculation. Let’s talk about AI chips, such as Google’s TPU v1, which is about 700MHz and has a pulsation array of 256X256, as shown in the figure below. A total of 64K units, and each unit can perform one multiplication and one addition at a time, that is 128K operations.
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Systolic Data Flow of the Matrix Multiply Unit
In addition to the systolic array, there are other modules, such as activation, etc., which also include multiplication, addition, etc. Look at the peak calculation times of TPU v1 in one second is at least = 128K X 700MHz = 89600Gops ≈ 90Tops, compared with the CPU, you will find that there is a gap of several orders of magnitude in computing capability. Of course, the above data are completely ideal values, and the actual situation may be only 5%. Because the storage on the chip is not large enough, the data will be stored in DRAM, and the data extraction is very slow, then the multiplication logic often has to wait. In addition, the AI algorithm consists of many layers of networks, which must be calculated layer by layer. However, when switching layers, the multiplication logic is free. Therefore, many factors have caused the actual chip to fail to reach the calculation peak.
Although it can be used with slow calculating speed. But at present, the size of the neural network is getting bigger and bigger, and there are more and more parameters. When encountering a large NN model, it takes a few weeks or even a month or two to train, which wastes too much time. If you encounter a sudden situations, such as power outages, have to start all over again. Moreover, if the model is modified, it will take several weeks to know whether it is right or wrong, and no one has so much patience to wait. But with TPU, then you find that you can continue to run by optimizing the parameters during a meal. That is, fast calculation speed enables rapid iteration and development of a stronger AI model.
A deeper comparison can be made clearly for the kernel structure of the GPU. To be sure, the GPU is still relatively fast, at least much faster than the CPU, so most of them currently use the GPU, but don’t forget the GPU disadvantages mentioned earlier, so it is not suitable for large-scale use in data centers. Generally speaking, CPU and GPU are not AI-specific chips. Because they have to realize other functions with other logics inside, which are completely useless for the current AI algorithm. Their performance cannot be used optimally. So it can be seen that it is reasonable for Google to spend money to develop its own AI chip TPU.
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AI Chips Design Principles
AI chips follow a hardware design rule: Sacrifice certain versatility to improve the efficiency of specific services. A well-understood example is Bitcoin mining. Bitcoin's basic algorithm is the SHA256, which is based on the hash algorithm, so there is no reverse formula, and it can only rely on mining machines to exhaustively enumerate a large number of possible values. For each block, the miner who first tries to get the correct value will be rewarded. So the faster the calculation, the higher the expectation of winning the reward.
For mining chips, both CPU and GPU have become the mainstream ever. However, as time goes by, GPU mining has become less useful. For example, the RTX3090 graphics card can perform 126.5M SHA256 calculations per second under overclocking conditions, and the total computing power of the entire Bitcoin network has exceeded 178.6EH/s, which is equivalent to the sum of the computing power of 1.4 trillion RTX3090 chips. Therefore, the current mainstream is ASIC mining, which are designed for the SHA256 algorithm, so ASIC mining far better than GPU, and even a single mining machine can overcome supercomputing centers. However, ASIC mining sacrifice generality in hardware, making it impossible to perform other computing tasks, and even unable to mine non-SHA256 algorithm blockchain currencies, such as Ethereum (which is a technology that's home to digital money, global payments, and applications. ).
In the example of Bitcoin mining, it can be seen that a dedicated chip is the most suitable: the algorithm or operator is fixed, and it is relatively simple in the application scenario. The AI chip has the same characteristics as the mining machine, emphasizing the computing efficiency in special scenarios, but the implementation scenarios are different.The purpose of the AI chip is to execute AI algorithms efficiently, so it is also called an AI accelerator. In addition, a bunch of other names are derived, such as NPU (neural network processor), TPU (Google’s tensor processor), APU ( AMD’s accelerated processor), whose properties are very similar.
​
AI Chip Classifications
AI chips can be divided into two categories. One is for both training and inference, and GPU or CPU can also do it, FPGA (Altera's Stratix series) either, but the TPU v2 and Bitmain's sophon may have an advantage in energy consumption. Compared with GPU, it retains a considerable number of floating-point processing units (or building a lot of tensor computing units), discards some useless graphics pipelines, and improves the energy consumption. There are fewer players in this part, but they are more interesting. For example, ICLR is also thinking about training with fixed-point devices, while Xilinx hopes that XNOR-net can allow fixed-point devices to participate in training.
The other type is the inference accelerator chip, which simply means running the trained model on the chip. This piece is really full of flowers, such as the Cambrian NPU, Intel Movidius (there is also a Nervana that should be similar to XeonPhi for training), Shenjian DPU, Horizon BPU, Imagination's PowerVR 2NX, ARM's Project Trillium, etc. This type of product provides IP for all developers to integrate deep learning accelerators into SoCs.
In addition, we need to talk about Tegra X2 separately. This is equivalent to a small desktop platform. The ARM processor plus Nvidia GPU can provide complete training and inference capabilities. Of course, the power consumption is also high. For other acceleration chips, I think it is best to divide them into two categories, floating-point and fixed-point. Floating point is only FP16 half-precision, of course, it supports FP16 and INT8, such as Cambrian’s NPU and Intel ‘s Movidius. In terms of fixed-point, it is easy to think of Horizon BPU and Imagination's PowerVR 2NX.
​
Development of AI Chips
Here we will take Google TPU as an example.

1. Parallelization

In order to better accelerate the reasoning of the model, it is necessary to summarize the characteristics of the actual model, find problems, and then make targeted optimization. The algorithm of the AI chip is usually based on the convolutional neural network. Faced with its huge amount of calculation, the CPU can only perform limited calculations in a single clock cycle, and calculation bottlenecks are prone to occur. Where the GPU improves the performance of parallel computing, and converts the equivalent transformation of the convolution operation into a multiplication and addition operation of the matrix, which has become the mainstream hardware for neural network training.
The core of model acceleration is to increase the level of parallelization and perform as many operations as possible in the same clock cycle. So the TPU redesigns a dedicated hardware architecture: the systolic array.
See the figure below for the systolic array of the TPU. The calculation results are not directly output, but "flow" in the array according to the law, and saved after the calculation is completed. It not only increases the degree of parallelism, but also realizes the reuse of parameters and avoids repeated loading. And this array can perform 65536 multiplication and addition operations of 8-bit integers per clock cycle. Under the main frequency of 700MHz, an amazing computing power of 65536 * 700,000,000 * 2 [email protected] is realized.
​
TPU-Systolic-Array
​

1. High-speed On-chip Storage

Google mentioned that in the neural network it deploys, the number of parameters ranges from 5 million to 100 million, and the intermediate results also have a large amount of data. If the convolution operation unit (such as a systolic array) is frequently performed from DDR:
1) Load parameters
2) Read data
3) Write results
Similar to the barrel effect, it is the shortest piece of wood that determines the water capacity, which is the performance bottleneck. The above-mentioned intensive DDR read and write operations make the IO speed easy to become the performance bottleneck of model reasoning. Therefore, TPUv1 is equipped with 28M bytes of on-chip memory (OCM). Although the cost is relatively high, the read and write speed is far superior to that of DDR. What’s more, the TPUv2 is equipped with 16GB of HBM storage, and its IO speed reached 600GB per second.
With a cache (OCM or HBM), frequently used parameters can be loaded into the cache in advance at runtime, and then the convolution kernel can quickly read the data without repeatedly loading from memory. Not only that, the on-chip memory can also save the intermediate results of the network operation, avoiding transfer (write + read back) on the memory, thereby significantly reducing the IO pressure of the memory.
The role of the cache here is similar to the L3 in the traditional CPU. The purpose is to effectively lower the pressure on the memory, so that the powerful computing power of the convolution kernel can be fully utilized, to avoid the situation of invalid waiting for data loading.
And the paper 2 experiments and counts the running performance of several mainstream models on TPU/GPU/CPU.
The horizontal axis is the required computing power divided by the amount of data that needs to be counted from the memory, which represents the computing density corresponding to the unit memory data loading, while the vertical axis is the actual computing power. Therefore, the slash part represents that the computing performance is restricted by the memory IO bandwidth, while the horizontal part represents that the performance has been fully utilized.
​
Operational Intensity: Ops/weight byte (log scale)
As shown in the figure, TPU is significantly better than CPU and GPU at high computing density. It can be seen that under high computing density, TPU can play a greater advantage.

1. CNN Quantization Algorithm

In addition to hardware design, in order to make the AI chip run the model more efficiently, it is necessary to perform lightweight processing on the AI algorithm, which can significantly reduce the size of parameters and the amount of calculation. The current neural network training is basically based on floating-point operations. When training and reasoning on the GPU, 32-bit or 64-bit is usually used to represent a floating-point number. If a lower number of bits is used, such as using 8 bits to represent numbers, the parameter size and calculation amount will be greatly reduced.
The figure below uses an 8-bit integer Q to approximate a 32-bit floating-point number.
​
32 bit float
This operation brings a certain quantization noise, and a good neural network will have a certain anti-noise ability, so the accuracy loss of the algorithm after quantization will be limited and controllable. Another advantage of quantization is that if the input and parameters of the model are quantized into integer numbers (such as int8/uint8), there is no floating-point calculation, which can simplify the hardware design. As mentioned above, the first-generation TPU only supports integer operations, not only because integer operations are more efficient in hardware, but also because the circuit is much simpler.
At present, there are two mainstream quantification methods:
​
Mainstream quantification methods
QAT uses the quantization operator when training the model. It can avoid the loss of precision to the greatest extent, but it cannot use the existing floating-point model and needs to retrain the model from scratch.
PTQ is to quantify the existing floating-point model, although the accuracy and efficiency of the model are not as good as QAT, there is still a great demand for use because there is no need to retrain the model and the threshold for use is lower. Here is a point, how to reduce the loss of accuracy is the goal of the PTQ program, and it has also produced a variety of ideas, such as linear quantization and logarithmic quantization.

1. Efficiency and Cost

In addition to the essential 3x3 convolution, there are dozens of common neural network operators. Because of the chip cost, design difficulty, and operating efficiency, existing AI chips can only support some operators. Therefore, it is necessary to understand and consider hardware capabilities during model training, and try to use operators that can be efficiently supported by AI chips to improve efficiency after deployment. Conversely, when designing the hardware of the AI chip, it is also necessary to consider the needs of algorithm design, and try to support more commonly used operators to improve the degree of freedom in model design.
If the manufacturer has the collaborative development capability between hardware, it can achieve a very good balance between model accuracy, chip cost, and inference speed. This is why more and more terminal manufacturers choose self-developed chips, and AI chip manufacturers often package algorithms for sale.
Note: This original content is from my blog KUKE Electronics.

Can anyone clarify this for me? Do you need to pin and weld a muzzle device on an other that has a 16" threaded barrel?

"So if your wings won't find you heaven, I will bring it down like an ancient bygone." What do you think this means? I can't seem to understand what Vessel means by "ancient bygones". I understand the first half if him saying he'll do anything to give his lover paradise, hut what does it mean to bring it down like an ancient bygone? Bygone can mean ancient, so like an ancient ancient?

The slender and feminine frames of the four Star Sirens floated with an inhuman ease in the microgravity of their shuttle’s cabin, their prehensile feet and tails either dangling freely or clutching an opalescent perching rod. They stared with a novel curiosity out their window towards the small and relatively unsophisticated Earthly craft that had gradually been drifting its way towards their fleet.
“It’s still not answering hails, and I can’t find any sort of transponder or visual identification,” Akioneeda, the eldest of the group, sang in their musical and surgically precise language; the chevron-shaped slits over her trachea granting her a superhuman vocal range.
Using the glittering diodes embedded throughout her mauve skin, she fired jets of light to propel herself over to a crystalline computer terminal on the other side of the cabin.
“Why do they have to make their ships so ugly?” the magenta-skinned Pomoko asked; her large and bright cat-like irises constricting in their dark sclera as she squinted at the foreign craft in disdain.
Its design was a smoothly contoured rocket, with a rounded nose and a flaring aft that allowed it to hold both rear and forward-facing thrusters. Its dark hull was nearly invisible against the black of space, and coated in a radar-absorbent material that until recently had masked its approach. The Siren’s shuttle, in contrast, was a luminescent, bright-pink spiral seashell nestled in an array of gossamer-like radiators, sails, and solar panels that resembled blooming flower petals.
“I think the polite word is ‘spartan’,” the violet-skinned Kaliphimoa corrected her with an excited grin. The crystalline, oval exocortexes embedded on the sides of her elongated skull began flickering as she began reviewing any information that she thought might be pertinent. “Macrogravitals have a much harder time surviving in space than we do, so they have to be fairly pragmatic in the designs of their vessels. And remember that, unlike our ships, that rocket is meant to launch from and land on planets, so it has to be pretty rugged.”
“Kali, there can’t be any Macrogravitals on that thing; there’s no centrifuge,” the Cyan-skinned Vicillia pointed out. “Macrogravitals need macrogravity. It’s literally their defining characteristic.”
“They don’t die in microgravity, Vici,” Kali said with a roll of her eyes. “In olden times, baseline humans would spend months, sometimes even over a year living in space with no artificial gravity at all.”
“This isn’t the Apollo & Artemis Era, Kali. It’s virtually unheard of for Macrogravitals to leave cislunar space without a centrifuge,” Akioneeda said as she examined the telemetry on the intruding object. “That thing definitely has a habitat module, but Earth is on the other side of the sun right now. That’s weeks of travel, and that’s if its fusion rockets are functional. And it is a ship, not a habitat. Something like that is meant primarily for ground-to-orbit transport, and in a pinch travelling between the inner planets during optimal launch windows. It’s not intended to be lived in for prolonged periods of time. I don’t think it came here on purpose. It must have gotten knocked out of orbit and just found its way here. I wish I could tell for sure if there was someone inside, but its mini-magnetosphere is really scattering the sensor beams.”
“But doesn’t its magnetosphere mean there must be Macrogravitals inside?” Pomoko asked. “Even normal cosmic radiation is dangerous to humans without our enhanced DNA repair and chromamelanin, isn’t it?”
“They might have died before they had a chance to shut it off,” Kali suggested as tactfully as she could. “If there are bodies in there, we should recover them and send them back to Earth.”
“Wait a minute. It’s pretty suspicious that there’s no transponder or identifying markings on the craft, isn’t it?” Vici asked. “This could be a trap or terrorist attack of some kind.”
“An attack? Why would anyone want to attack us?” Pomoko asked in dismay.
“They wouldn’t. She’s being paranoid,” Kali said dismissively as she comfortingly slid her arm around her. “Vici, save your racist horror stories for when we’re not within visual distance of an Earth vessel, okay?”
“Reavers are real! Macrogravitals brains get cooked by cosmic radiation and they go crazy!” Vici insisted.
“Reavers are most definitively not real, Vicillia. Nonetheless, we probably shouldn’t rule out the possibility of an attack,” Akioneeda conceded. “Star Sirens now make up the majority of all humans permanently living off-world, and that’s not a lead we’re ever likely to lose. We’ve only been around a hundred years or so, and there are already over two million of us. We breed like rabbits.”
“That’s because we fuck like rabbits,” Vici said lasciviously, only to incur glares of confusion from the others. “Well, not directly, since we don’t reproduce naturally, but it’s good for our esprit de corps, right girls?”
“The point being, there are factions on Earth who view our current and forecasted success as a threat to their own potential expansion into space,” Akioneeda continued, failing to hide her annoyance at the younger Siren’s interruption.
“That’s backwards. Macrogravitals evolved to live on planets, and we were literally made to colonize space,” Pomoko objected. “Why shouldn’t we breed like rabbits? The solar system, the galaxy, the universe should be filled with as many Star Sirens as they can sustain!”
“And they will be – eventually. But if we prioritize our long-term survival over the near term, we might not have a future to prioritize,” Akioneeda gently reminded her. “Steady, safe, and sustainable growth is better than fast and risky growth. We don’t want to spook anyone down on Earth into doing something that might hurt us, which is why we have to abide by the Solaris Accords.”
“Exactly! We’re signatories of the Solaris and Orion Accords, which we’ve always been in complete compliance with,” Kali said. “We’ve already lowered our population growth to two percent per annum, and have agreed to lower it to point four percent when we hit two billion. Anyone attacking us over that would be in violation of the Accords and incur the wrath of every other signatory, including Olympeon, of which we are still a protectorate.”
“Ugh. Don’t remind me that we’re technically compatriots with Macrogravitals,” Vici said in disgust.
“Vicillia, a little respect please for our creators and allies,” Akioneeda reprimanded her.
“I gratefully respect them, Preceptress Akio, because no one able to launch this ship out to us would ever do something so suicidally foolish as commit an act of war against Olympeon,” Kali insisted.
“You make valid points, Kali, and I’m not saying it’s likely this is an attack, but we should still proceed with caution,” Akioneeda reiterated. “At the very least, the scanner still has enough resolution to rule out the possibility of there being any potential high-yield explosives on the vessel. I think it’s worth the risk to jet over and see what’s inside; if that’s something you girls would be interested in?”
“Yes, preceptress,” Kali and Vici said in unison, each immediately assuming an attentive posture with their hands behind their backs as they nodded politely, eager for the opportunity to explore a non-Siren spacecraft. Pomoko, however, joined in a little more reticently, and solely because she didn’t want to upset her companions.
Unlike Vici, she never told stories about Macrogravitals driven into mad savagery by the harshness of space, because she found them unbearably terrifying.
The four of them filed into the airlock and grabbed a lungful of air before depressurizing, the short siphons at the base of their necks cinching shut to hold it in. The only things they brought with them were a small bundle of additional air pods and a field kit, both of which were carried by Pomoko.
The enhanced proteins and nanofiber weaves in their bare skin rendered them impervious to vacuum exposure, and their eyes were protected by transparent graphene lenses. Hundreds of small jets of light from all over their bodies propelled them across the gap between their shuttle and the errant vessel, with Kali and Vici taking advantage of the vast open space to perform challenging acrobatic maneuvers.
Akio was the first to arrive at the foreign spacecraft, circling it several times for any signs that might give her some idea about what it was and what it was doing there, but found none. She even peered into a porthole, but could see nothing of note in the darkened interior.
When she reached the airlock, she gestured for Pomoko to hand her a small but rugged cyberdeck from the field kit. While her exocortexes possessed more computing power than she could ever need, the cyberdeck contained a compact suite of sensor arrays for environmental analysis, as well as antennas and ports for electronic interfaces. Syncing the device with her own exocortexes, a holographic AR display projected itself on her bionic lenses.
It didn’t take long for her to find a frequency to engage with the airlock control mechanism, and even less time to find a skeleton key that could best that woefully inadequate security system. As the outer door of the airlock dilated open, Akio signalled for Kali and Vici to rejoin them, and they all funnelled into the ship together. The outer door snapped behind them, sealing them in complete darkness that was staved off solely by their photonic diodes until some emergency lights began to flicker on and off at random intervals.
As the airlock slowly began to repressurize, the Sirens – who were accustomed to an atmosphere maintained at conditions optimal for them - shuddered slightly at the feeling of foreign air creeping up against their skin.
“The air’s acceptable. It’s a standard oxygen/nitrogen mix with no detectable toxins or pathogens present,” Akioneeda assured them as she opened her siphons and exhaled the breath she had been holding since they left their own shuttle. “CO2’s a little high, but not dangerous.”
“Doesn’t high CO2 mean there’s someone here?” Pomoko asked, nervously looking about in all directions as she clutched her supplies close to her.
“Not necessarily. I’m not detecting any human environmental DNA,” Akio replied confidently. “I am however sampling some environmental DNA that doesn’t match anything on file. It might take some time to analyze it enough to make any sense of it. The power system is failing, which is why the lights aren’t working right. The electrical surges are generating enough EM interference that the sensor beam is still pretty scattered, so I can’t see much through the bulkheads. Keep your diodes lit up bright and stay alert.”
The shadowy main corridor was hexagonal in shape, spanning several meters across and roughly twenty-five meters from end to end. It was broken into six segments, with every other segment containing a pair of hexagonal doorways across from one another, along with a door at each end of the corridor.
“The door next to us should be the engine module, and the one at the other end should be the command and communications center,” Akio said, opening the door to the engine room and sticking her cyberdeck inside. “I’m going to do a quick scan of each room before we start rummaging through everything, so don’t go sticking your tails anywhere they don’t belong until I’m done.”
The other three Sirens all nodded obediently, and limited their exploration of the ship to a solely visible inspection. None of them were used to being in low light conditions, and their pupils were dilated so much they were nearly round. Though their visual acuity was raptor-like in its detail and they could see into the ultra-violet spectrum, night vision had not been a priority when they had been designed. Nonetheless, their large eyes and vertical pupils still let them see better in the dark than any unmodified human.
“The writing is Cyrillic, but everything I can see is just basic labels. I can’t tell for certain which language it is,” Kali said. “That doesn’t mean much though. This thing is definitely second-hand, likely even stolen. That would explain the lack of identification. Maybe whoever stole it got spooked and just set it adrift.”
“So, it’s a pirate ship then?” Pomoko asked, sounding slightly relieved. “That’s better than terrorists, or Reavers.”
“It is not. We’re space mermaids. Space pirates are our natural enemies,” Vici claimed. “If they catch us, they’ll pry the exocortexes from our skulls and pluck out our photonic diodes one by one, then bind us to the front of the ship as figureheads.”
“Vicillia, that is enough!” Akio reprimanded her as she scanned the next room. “Stop trying to scare her! Kali’s right. This is an old ship that’s been stripped of nearly every non-essential piece of equipment. Someone stole it, and then abandoned it when the authorities started closing in. That’s it. There’s not a raiding party of pirates hiding behind one of these doors.”
“Famous last words,” Vici muttered, defensively folding her arms across her chest.
Kali once again put her arm around Pomoko in comfort and gave her a loving kiss on the head.
The glowing, sylph-like Sirens continued floating through the dim and unevenly lit corridor like ghosts, checking one room after another and finding nothing of note until they finally reached the end.
“Now that we’re done checking for pirates, we can focus on the command center,” Akio announced. “Assuming they haven’t been wiped, we’ll check the ship’s logs and records for evidence of its origin and how it got here. If it was stolen, we’ll send it to Pink Floyd Station and they can deal with it. Otherwise, we’ll be free to keep it as salvage.”
She raised her finger to tap the AR command to open the door, but suddenly hesitated.
“What is it?” Kali asked.
Akio squinted at her HUD display in alarm, but seemed reluctant to answer.
“There’s something on the other side,” she whispered.
Without warning, the door was manually thrown open with a physical force that shocked the gracile Sirens. From the impenetrable gloom beyond the door’s threshold, there emerged a grotesque figure the likes of which the Sirens had never seen before.
Its round torso was squat and bloated, vaguely resembling that of a frog’s. Its veiny, crimson hide was mottled in purple splotches from where those veins had broken. Four long limbs dangled down limply, each possessing five boney, claw-like digits. As with the Star Sirens, its pinky fingers had been repurposed into a second opposable thumb; but unlike them, its digits were arranged more radially so that its hands resembled starving sea stars. It possessed a prehensile tail as well, though closer in appearance to an opossum’s than the Siren’s simian tails.
It was the front of the creature that was most alien to them. It had no neck or even a head distinct from its bulging torso. It had two eyes on mobile stalks, each a bloodshot blue with a crescent-shaped pupil. There was a blowhole near the top of its vaguely defined head, and near the bottom hung a toothless proboscis, as prehensile as an elephant’s trunk.
All four Sirens broke out into screams at the sight of the deformed creature, jetting backward as quickly as they could. Wheezing, the creature lurched towards them, slowly raising its proboscis in the air as it did so.
Vici grabbed the bundle of air pods that Pomoko had released in her panic and began beating the creature over the top of the head with it. Though she possessed just barely enough physical strength to walk in nothing greater than Lunar gravity, her love for her sisters and her fear, disgust, and contempt for anything else drove her to assail the hideous being as hard as she could.
The creature groaned, though it seemed to be more of sorrow than of pain. Raising its arms up protectively while keeping its proboscis elevated, it slowly sunk down to the bottom of the corridor as Vici bashed away at it.
“Vici! Vici, stop!” Kali commanded, grabbing hold of her and pulling her back. “It’s not attacking us!”
She was right, of course. Despite its fearsomely unfamiliar form, it actually seemed rather pathetic as it lay quivering on the floor, making no sound aside from laboured and gasping breaths.
“Alien! It’s an alien!” Vici cried in dismay, scarcely believing her own eyes.
Though that improbable, if more palpable, explanation for the being’s origin may have seemed the most obvious, Kali felt a growing sense of horror well up inside her as the pieces started to click together. She glanced over at Akio who was rapidly reviewing the readings from her cyberdeck, and could tell from the revulsion on her face that she had reached the same conclusion.
“Preceptress; please say that it’s an alien,” she pleaded in a softly cracking voice.
Akio looked up at her with pity, and slowly shook her head.
“I’m sorry,” she said quietly. “But that, save for the skill and wisdom of Olympeon and the Grace of Cosmothea, is us.”
“It… it’s human?” Pomoko asked, floating up behind Kali and Vici and just barely daring to peek over their shoulders at the horrid beast.
“It’s bred from a human base, yes,” Akio explained. “Heavily modified, of course. Much more than ourselves, though nowhere near as adroitly. It’s a genetic chimera; probably because its embryo was cobbled together from multiple lines of modified cells. Its hide and at least a few of its major organs appeared to have been grown separately and grafted on in vivo. It’s literally a Frankenstein Monster.”
“What’s that old saying? Knowledge is knowing Frankenstein was the Doctor, not the monster; wisdom is knowing that Doctor Frankenstein was the monster,” Kali quoted, pitying the poor wretch that wallowed before her.
“Yeah. I think… I think that whoever made this was trying to make a new species of space-adapted humans, probably in the hopes of eventually surpassing us,” Akio speculated. “But it’s a failed experiment. All of its genomes are highly degraded and riddled with off-target mutations and poorly thought-out on-target ones. Its cells are barely functional, and it’s undergoing mass organ failure at this very moment.”
“It… he’s dying?” Kali asked softly.
“It was probably dying before it even decanted; it’s been held together with prayers and twine,” Akio explained.
“Good! It’s an abomination! It never should’ve existed in the first place!” Pomoko declared.
“Pomoko, shush!” Kali yelled, hot tears beginning to pool in her eyes. “Can… can he hear us?”
“It can hear, I think. Its brain size and neuronal density are actually over the optimal limit, and its neurochemistry and connectome are a complete mess,” Akio replied. “It’s probably an idiot savant, at best. It likely has some linguistic capability, but I don’t think it would be able to understand Sirensong. It doesn’t have any kind of speech organs or comm implant, either. Its digestive and respiratory systems are separate, and that blowhole doesn’t have any kind of syrinx.”
“In other words, he has no mouth and he must scream,” Kali lamented. “Did he escape, do you think?”
“It must have,” Akio nodded. “Pomoko may have been a bit insensitive just now, but she’s right. This thing’s a violation of multiple transnational laws, treaties and conventions. Its creators wouldn’t want anyone to know about it. It… it must have known that escaping its creators and whatever convoluted life-support system they were using to keep it alive would have meant a slow and painful death, but it did it anyway. All it could have hoped for was that someone would find it and be able to hold its creators accountable. We don’t understand enough about its anatomy to offer any meaningful assistance. The most we could do is prolong its suffering. I think we should just let it pass in peace; it shouldn’t take more than a couple of hours at most now. We’ll return to our shuttle, tell the fleet what we found, and then have the carcass put in cryostasis as evidence. We’ll send it and this vessel to Olympeon, and they’ll deal with it. They’ll find who’s responsible and bring them to justice.”
“Yeah, we need to get back to the shuttle immediately for decontamination and med-screening. We could be infected by whatever microbes and nanites they stuffed into this bloated wretch,” Pomoko said with barely restrained panic, jetting back to the airlock as quickly as she could.
Akio and Vici followed closely behind, but Kali lingered in place as she gazed at the creature’s proboscis, which it still held upright. She recalled that elephants on Earth would raise their trunks when they were dying, and that the ancient Romans, despite being one of the cruellest cultures of humans to exist, had still recognized this as a plea for mercy. Though the gulf between the two species was significant, one self-aware being could still recognize the suffering of another, and be moved to pity by it.
“I’m staying with him,” she announced softly.
“What?” Pomoko shouted, she and the others all spinning around to look at her in bewilderment.
“Until he passes. Akio said it wouldn’t be long,” Kali replied.
“Why?” Vici asked.
“So he doesn’t die alone!” Kali screamed.
Pomoko started jetting back towards her friend, but Akio caught her and gently shook her head in refusal. She silently ushered the two of them back through the airlock and, with some reluctance, left Kali alone with the dying creature.
Kali tenderly took hold of the being’s trunk with her left hand, compassionately petting it with her right. He shuddered slightly, letting go of a noticeable amount of tension in his malformed body. Snorting from his blowhole, he focused his teetering eyestalks up at her, and she could see in those eyes a great, crushing sorrow, both from the suffering he had endured and the lost potential of the life he could have had if fate had been kinder.
A life like the one Kali had led as a privileged and well-bred daughter of Olympeon, and would most likely go on to live for many centuries more.
The tears in her eyes reached a critical mass now, budding off into tiny orbs and floating out into the air.
“I’m sorry. I’m sorry,” she sobbed. It was all she could think to say, and she said it in English, hoping there was a better chance of him understanding it than her native language.
Remarkably, he reacted by raising the flat palm of his right hand up to the space beneath his trunk – a struggle for him even in the absence of gravity – and then lowered it with the palm facing up and out. Kali wasted no time in running the gesture through her exocortexes, frantic to decipher what the creature could be trying to tell her before it was too late.
It was sign language for ‘thank you’.

I have been riding off and on since I was a child. I was diagnosed with a chronic illness when I was 16. I'm now in my early 30s. Over the past few years, my chronic illnesses have become more and more tough to deal with. I've still managed to squeeze in riding and lessons when I can but I've had to work those barn trips around appointments and hospitalizations. Because of chronic illness, I've had a harder and harder time finding barns to accommodate me. I want to be as transparent as possible(especially because one of my chronic illnesses is epilepsy but I take meds for it). But I've flat out had barns turn me away after disclosing that info claiming they cant let me ride for liability reasons(and it's frustrating but I'm understanding of that)..three years ago..I approached this therapeutic riding program about joining them and they welcomed me with open arms and worked with me...the instructors biggest concern was that I'd be too bored in her program because of my previous experience!
But I reassured her that I just wanted to be on a horse again and so she took me in an accommodated me. The program was run out of the equine center at my college. It was a non profit and the volunteers were students and community members and a PATH certified faculty member of the college ran the program...this is the letter that was posted to the therapeutic riding programs FB page yesterday:
A few updates and a long read… first let me say how sorry I am to all of our clients, volunteers and supporters. I will miss this program very much.☹️ 1. I am no longer a UNH employee. I’ve tried everything I could to save it but those above could not understand why I wouldn’t sign on to work 3x as many hours for less pay. I see now that really, the end game was for me to resign so that they weren’t to blame for what happens to our wonderful program. For those who don’t know the backstory, COLSA(college of life science and agriculture) discontinued the Equine-assisted and therapies major degree program. As that’s where the courses I taught lived that started this downward spiral. I was “re-assigned” to teach 3 times as many courses for the ANSC major. None of which related to EAAT. 2. I’m not sure what the future of the program is and I hope that it’s continued without me. $27,000 in donations were taken from our gift fund and put in general Colsa spending. These funds were donated through our auction and charity fundraising challenge and specifically designed for riding scholarships and to buy new horses for the therapeutic riding program. So, the funding for the program is largely gone. It’ll be a steep climb to continue under these circumstances. 3. This is the most important one really. The horses are FINE. There are wonderful people working at the barn who are doing everything possible to care for the horses and they’ll still be a part of riding classes for the ANSC major. 4. Current clients might be contacted in the future about riding at UNH but in the meantime here are some places you can check out.
I’m afraid I don’t have any other answers for anyone about any part of the UNH program. Our community is tight and I know people want answers and that information spreads quickly. I wanted to make a last post here so that everyone has good Intel.
My best wishes for you all! 🐴
I am so heartbroken and angry...of the three resources shes given us for places to ride at, one I've reached out to multiple times in the past and gotten no response, the second location is too far of a drive, and the third location I've been told only takes kids...I honestly don't know what I'm going to do right now..I thought I'd found my perfect riding situation and now...

I'm interviewing for a new job and in the process they told me they don't support their employees doing freelance work on the side (it's a marketing position, so anything marketing related as a side gig is a no go for them). This is the first time I've encountered such a company policy, all my previous employees either didn't care or were supportive of side-gigs explicitely, as long as it doesn't affect your actual job of course.
Has anyone had experience with such companies? If so, do they have a way to actually find out if someone is freelancing on the side? Of course, if you have an active profile of Upwork, they can, but I have a few clients I've been working on and off on freelance projects for years and I planned to continue working that way. But now I'm a bit concerned. Any personal experiences or advice?

Hi all, About 9 years ago, I started this community and was quickly joined by @linuxweenie. Honestly we haven't done a lot other than participate, but over time this has become a great group with almost 4,000 members, so thanks to all of you. It's time to get a few more people involved, and maybe that should be you!
Because we are still a relatively small group, we are off the radar (see what I did there?) of most trolls and malicious types, so moderator duties are pretty minimal. The main thing is to encourage participation by participating yourself. I think we have a lot of opportunities to do cool things - the recent AMA with the folks from Tempest is an example.
If you are interested, could you shoot me a direct message and we can chat from there?
Cheers, Dadzilla

I'm trying to cash out my JMPT token on Tor.us. I received JMPT from Celo to my Tor.us wallet and now can't seem to figure out how to get my money.
All Tor.us is giving me the option of doing is buy $50 of BNB. (I was told I would need BNB for gas fees) I really don't have enough to buy $40 but really need to get this money out due to unfortunate situations I'm dealing with for a family member.
Does anyone know another way to make this work or if there is an option to find BNB somewhere alot cheaper and if so can I transfer it to my Tor.us wallet?
I'm sorry but Im new to this and didn't realize it would be so many hurdles to cross to get my money.
Thank you in advance for the help

I have started gym for about a month and my lower back (right side) is paining constantly for 1 week and it hasn't been overcomed....I believe pain started after I did barbell squats and T bar back exercise.
I need some things to hear from you guys about: 1. How common it is ? 2. What are the risks of it (Is this very dangerous that I will end up in wheelchair ) 3. How can I get recovery from it ? 4. How can I prevent it ? 5. Should I still go the gym or take rest for few days, weeks, months?

i had a bit of a shady situation happen recently with a CRA, and was wondering if any other CRCs have had a similar situation, and would love to hear from any current or former CRAs. apologies in advance for the long-ish post
my site had someone come in (provided by the sponsor; let's call her jen) to meet with us and assist with some recruitment. the friday before she comes in, jen sends an email asking if my monitor (let's call him alex) can come to join our recruitment meeting.
i didn't get a chance to respond to jen's email before she came in the following monday, but first thing when she gets there, asks if alex can come for earlier and that if he can look at the ICFs. i'm quite confused because there was no new data nor patients since the last monitoring visit, and the ICFs were reviewed last time alex was there. but i say sure, that's fine.
my trials manager then arrives and says a quick hello to jen, and asks why alex wants to come. jen says alex wants to have a look at the patient binder and ISF binder, to look at things he wasn't able to get to last time he was here.
mind you, last time my monitor was on-site was about 2 months ago, and spent 8.5 hours looking at 5 visits worth of source in the patient binder and the ISF binder. then came back the next day and spent 2.5 hours continuing to look at the aforementioned.
my manager and i obviously ascertain that alex is basically coming for a monitoring visit, despite not sending us any sort of correspondence leading up to the day, including a confirmation letter.
so my monitor spends about 4 hours looking through both (again i must emphasize that there is no new patient data, and not many changes to the ISF other than some newsletters). alex then calls me in for corrections and has flagged a bunch of things "missing" in the ISF binder, to which i say that's my manager's jurisdiction and he will be able to speak to that. alex says no don't worry, i'll put it in the follow-up letter and cc your manager on it. i said not to worry, i'll grab my manager but alex was persistent on not getting my manager involved.
i told my manager regardless, and he told me that every single thing that alex had flagged was not missing, it was just kept elsewhere and gets filed in the binders before a monitoring visit before they come so they have easy access. the one other thing "missing" was a drug confirmation receipt that i literally received and processed that same morning...
my manager and i both feel like we were set up to fail. like my monitor was trying to "catch: us doing something wrong, between not coming to tell us about the monitoring visit and then not wanting to talk to my manager about the ISF at ALL. does this seem shady to anyone else? CRCs, have you had this happen before? CRAs, what are your thoughts?
thank you so much for reading!

For more context I work in a fairly old group home, there are roaches of every stage just running free. To add to the madness I was hired to work with the residents in the group home only but I was offered to work some days outside the group home with some clients that need help with day to day things. So last month I sat in a clients home and within 30 mins of me being there I had 2 bed bugs crawling on me. That client denied there being any bed bugs but it has since been confirmed and her home is being treated. The thing that disturbs me is they still service her by taking her to the store etc in our company van that is used for the group home. It was very traumatic and I haven’t been the same since so I asked to be removed from servicing her. Well tonight I came in to work and sat down to clock in and noticed a small white bug crawling on me. Due to what happened to me before I had already done my research and I swear it looked like a bedbug nymph. I hurried and slapped it off. I was trying to look on the floor for it to confirm but because the floor is carpeted in the office I couldn’t find it. My coworker just joked and said “ I hope you’re not bringing in any bugs I haven’t seen anything all day” even though the other day the same co worker stated her ankles had been bit up by something and she sprayed alcohol and bug spray on the office floor to the point where there was a stain on the carpet. I have had worse jobs but I literally can’t take the bugs. If I brought bedbugs home I would seriously drive to Niagara Falls and jump. They just lost an employee for non related reasons so they are depending on me to cover her shift (11pm-7am) so I kind of feel obligated to stay. I took proper precautions during the initial encounter and haven’t seen any signs of bed bugs at my house but if they are still servicing her I am sure it’s possible for the bedbugs to hitch a ride back to the group home. What would you do in this situation? I am hoping I am just overreacting. Money is not an issue for me right now but I wanted a job to keep busy and I actually like being able to help our residents that are developmentally delayed so it sucks and I feel selfish for wanting to quit because I know they won’t have anyone to cover my shift and they’d all be pulling doubles as it’s only 4 employees and one supervisor

Hi. Just joined, and I needed a space to talk about what I've been experiencing for most of my life. I don't know if my mom fits into the description but I don't know how else to address / manage all of this in the long term and I guess I just wanted perspective from a community that's had more experience with this. It's hard to adequately summarise my experience because I've deliberately obscured many memories for the sake of my emotional wellbeing but I want to try. I'm just trying to get the words out of me, so I'm sorry if it doesn't read well.
For as long as I've known I've had a difficult relationship with my mom. It's a lot of different factors. I'm 23 and nonbinary. When I was younger I had a very headstrong personality and I saw my mom as someone who was very similar. She wasn't around a lot, because both my parents worked and my grandmother (dad's mom) stayed with us to look after my sister and I. I don't remember explicitly being very loving to her, although I suppose I must have loved her because I didn't really get too terrible emotionally until I was maybe 13 or so. She was trained as an English teacher, and took a strong hand in my early education. I was reading and writing very early, and I'm graduating college this year as an English major with Honours, highest distinction. I acknowledge her influence in my success. But from what I can remember is she used to make me join her private classes with older students, and we used to clash during those classes because I would question the content and she wasn't happy with that. When I got a bit older and her teaching centre closed down she would do the classes at home with my sister and I to get us to be more educated on current topics, but a lot of those "classes" often devolved into her criticising my dad and his family (less educated than herself) behind their back, and then criticising my sister and I. Don't remember why, but I know I used to run off to the bathroom to cry afterwards pretty often.
It's hazy afterwards. When I was in my teens we continued to have a difficult time getting along. I think it was maybe a lot of disagreements and criticisms. She would tell me I was fat and didn't dress well and that I had a bad personality. My sister often echoed that a lot. She would make us go shopping together and buy clothes that I didn't feel comfortable in. It was doubly hard because I was grappling with my gender identity at the time and suffering from a lot of dysphoria. I remember starting Amy Tan's The Joy Luck Club for Literature class and taking my teacher aside and telling her I didn't know if I could get through the class because I had a really difficult relationship with my mother and I found it really hard to get through the book. She was a really good teacher though, she supported me a lot through that time. In 2016, the year I was doing my nationals and graduating secondary school, my mom disappeared. She had joined some kind of religious group and (we believe) gone overseas with them. She made it out like she was going to be gone for 2 weeks, which became a month, which became... I want to say about 9 months. I think it was like 6 months, then she came back for a bit, then another couple of months. Don't remember exactly. She lied to her parents (who are also very emotionally manipulative and difficult... when they love us they love us but they can be very hard to handle when they don't get their way. they loved me and my sister but when they finally had male grandchildren. well.) about where she was and when she would return. They bombarded her with messages. Mom messaged me and told me to tell her parents things about what she was doing, which was difficult because she was also lying to me and the lies didn't match up and they didn't believe. And I couldn't give them the answer they wanted because I didn't know anything. So for a year, one of the most important years of my life, my grandparents made my life hell. They'd message me, they'd come to my school looking for me, they'd take me out to meals and tell me all about how they were going to die soon and that they needed us to have a good relationship and that I should be grateful that my parents never abused me and I should beg, literally get on my knees and beg, my mother to come home. It got so bad that I, being unfortunately emotionally fragile and quite active on social media, had multiple breakdowns on Facebook, which led my aunt (dad's sister) to call my dad and show him what was going on and he had to ask me if I wanted to stop seeing my grandparents.
But mom eventually came back, and we sort of pretended it didn't happen. Case closed. The next couple of years are a big fog in my memory because I was having a really bad time mentally because of school. So I totally don't remember having any major interactions with mom. Which is good actually.
Then I went to uni. I moved into student housing and getting out of the house was so great. At home I shared the bed in mom's room, and my workspace was wherever I could find some space on a table. So to have my own room (half; shared with a roommate) with my own bed and my own table was super freeing. Mom couldn't let me go. She wanted me home every weekend, bought me a ton of stuff I didn't need, asked me for a copy of my room key. She never used it, but I was afraid for a whole year that she would just walk in when she wanted to. These four years of undergrad, I've become a different person, I'm more confident, I came out, made friends, studied hard, figured out how to dress myself, how to do makeup, everything. Being away from her was amazing.
But mom's fallen into a pattern. She's been disappearing again, months at a time, away more often than not. When she comes back she immediately inserts herself into our lives and starts criticising us; how the house looks, how we've been eating. She buys me gifts I don't like, clothes or earrings. Sister and I think she might be in some kind of religious cult but we don't want to get into that. She hasn't had a full conversation with dad in years. I've tried a few times to engage her in conversation about how her actions have affected us and how she's been emotionally abusive but she won't hear any of it. She said she's been to therapy; I don't think it's real actual therapy, she's more aware of how she was emotionally abused by her parents but won't admit that she was abusive to us. From what she says it sounds like she's more open about painting herself as the victim but that she's better than all of it because she never beat my sister and I. Which is a low bar. We had an argument in a Uniqlo about it. Any time she talks about how she was as a parent she makes it out like she's a really great parent because she didn't do any of the things her parents did. I've just stopped trying.
My boyfriend is of a different race and religion (I am not white, but majority race in my country). When I told my parents they were a little weirded out, but mom didn't say anything about it until months later. She just asked me a few questions, and I thought it was fine. We were getting along, we were having ice cream, just the two of us. Then I told her parents. And they lost it. Messaging me really racist things for over a month. Made my aunts speak to me about it. Eventually I had to insinuate that the relationship wasn't serious and that we broke up and I think they bought it. Of course they also messaged mom. And one weekend when I was home she woke me up in the morning to yell at me about it, and she said a lot of really racist things too, and told me to say anything to my grandparents to get them off her back. Not mine. Not a single word in my defense.
I know this whole post is just... things. Just conversations or events. I don't know how to say how she's made me feel for most of my adolescent life. I don't know how to tell you how bad my mental health was. I don't even know if I'm just pretending not to remember things or if I'm blowing things out of proportion or if I fed myself a different memory so well it feels real. I just know I can't talk to her anymore. She recently returned from a two month trip, during which she spent her birthday and mother's day away from us, and she's back to acting like nothing happened, showering me with gifts, insisting that she'll pick me up from whatever event, cooking meals, and I just can't talk to her anymore. I can't love her, no matter if she does love me. I am so tired and worn out and I want to walk away, want to focus on my career and my own development, look after my dad and sister and boyfriend without her and her side of the family in the picture, but I can't. She's my mom. She couldn't even be fucked to commit to coming to my graduation event when I invited her, just said "Get the seat for me and we'll see." I'm going back tonight to share a bed with her again. I'm a better and different person, except when I'm in her presence. I just wanted my mom to love me and support me. Even if I was a difficult teenager. Even if I'm nonbinary and queer and in an interracial relationship. But I can't, I don't know how to fix things or make it better for myself in the long term.