This is my first ever post. I’m writing out of pure frustration. I gained some holiday weight (around 12 pounds) back in December. These 20 pounds have turned into 20 pounds that I am having the hardest time losing. I have not lost one pound since December despite my efforts.
I’ve addressed my stress levels. I am way more active now that I have ever been (working out 3 times a week with daily walks). I eat mostly at home with my appropriate dose of veggies/protein.
A friend told me it’s because I am reaching my 30s… but I am not sure I believe that.
I am just frustrated that I have been so weight-focused without any real results. I still can’t wear half of my closet and getting on the scale feels so disheartening.
Is there any areas that I am missing? Should I seek professional help or am I overreacting?

Hellooo c: I’m 22 with 10+ years of experience, looking for a long term romantic roleplay where we both be invested in our characters relationship and world building! Ido MxF playing either gender, but I have slight preference for playing male. I absolutely love brainstorming drama, gushing about possible scenarios and overall I just adore the process of creating these dynamics between two different personalities and perspectives. I’d love it to be like we’re writing a novel together!
Length wise, I prefer at least a paragraph for each reply, though depending on the where we are in the plot, quick back and forths can be okay too. For starters I’d expect a bit longer. Things I won’t reply to (sorry!) * One liners * First person * Asterisks, slashes, etc. I prefer real face claims but might be okay with realistic art, nothing anime or overly cartoonish. I’d ideally like to roleplay with someone 20+ but if you are literate and the writing flows I’m fine as long as you are 18+.
I totally get that life gets in the way and that replying every day can be a hastle. Depending on my muse, I can reply multiple times a day to once every three days, maybe even once a week, but I will do my best to communicate with you. Even if you drop off the face of the earth and return months later and want to continue our plot, that’s okay with me!
If you’re interested please pm me! Include your age, types of plots or tropes you enjoy, and a roleplay example. I have quite a few plots I have in mind but would love to develop something new with you. Looking forward to hearing from you guys.

Thanks to u/TheLasagnaPanda
FFIE: Thoughts on the 10-K today
Nothing on this post is financial advice, just my opinion and direct quotes:
Page 32:
We do not have sufficient cash on hand to meet our current obligations and are unable to generate cash through our ATM Program or via our Registration Statement because we are not currently S-3 eligible. For further detail, see “-FF is not able to continue to utilize its “at the market program.” We also have extremely limited remaining authorized share availability to generate cash through equity or equity-linked issuances. If we are unable to find additional sources of capital, we will lack sufficient resources to fund our outstanding obligations and continue operations and we will likely have to file for bankruptcy protection and our assets will likely be liquidated. Our equity holders would likely not receive any recovery at all in a bankruptcy scenario.
page 33:
FF has missed rental payments on all of its leased properties and may be in breach of its insurance obligations under its property leases.FF leases five facilities in California and three facilities in China for manufacturing, retail, office, administrative services, R&D and strategic planning purposes. FF is behind on rental payments at all locations. Additionally, FF does not currently have the insurance coverage required under some property leases.FF is taking certain actions, and may take additional actions, with respect to many if not all of its existing leases, including negotiating with landlords for rent abatement or deferral, terminating certain leases, or discontinuing rent payments, which may subject FF to legal, reputational and financial risks. FF can provide no assurances that any forbearance of its lease obligations will be provided to it, nor that FF will be able to regain compliance with its lease obligations. If, as a result, FF’s leases are terminated, FF may not be able to continue production of its vehicles. If FF is unable to continue production, FF will likely have to file for bankruptcy protection and its assets will likely be liquidated. FF’s equity holders would likely not receive any recovery at all in a bankruptcy scenario.
FF has a limited operating history and faces significant barriers to growth in the electric vehicle industry. FF expects to need substantial additional financing to start the third phase of its three phase delivery plan. There cannot be any assurance that FF will be able to develop the manufacturing capabilities and processes, or secure reliable sources of component supply to meet the quality, engineering, design or production standards, or the required production volumes to successfully grow into a viable business.Although FF has started production and delivery on its first electric vehicle, it faces significant barriers to growth in the electric vehicle industry, including continuity in development and production of safe and quality vehicles, brand recognition, customer base, marketing channels, pricing policies, talent management, value-added service packages and sustained technological advancement. If FF fails to address any or all of these risks and barriers to entry and growth, its business and results of operation may be materially and adversely affected.
page 34:
FF expects its operating expenses to increase significantly in the future, which may impede its ability to achieve profitability. FF expects to further incur significant operating costs including R&D expenses, capital expenditures relating to its manufacturing capacities, additional operating costs and expenses for production ramp-up, raw material procurement costs, general and administrative expenses as it seeks to scale its operations, and sales, marketing, and distribution expenses as it builds its brand and markets its vehicles. Additionally, it may incur significant costs as it delivers the FF 91 series, including vehicle service and warranty expenses.
page 35:
FF has significant unfunded commitments from its investors. If FF is unable to satisfy the conditions to funding or if there is a dispute regarding the conversion requirements related to the unfunded commitments, FF may not have enough capital to support its business and could be subject to investor legal claims.Pursuant to the Secured SPA, Unsecured SPA, the Unsecured Streeterville SPA, FFVV Joinder, and the Senyun Joinder, (each as defined in Note 7, Notes Payable to the Notes to Consolidated Financial Statements) FF has obtained commitments from several investors totaling $554.5 million in convertible note financing and $20.0 million in committed forced warrant exercise proceeds, subject to certain conditions. A total of $351.5 million under these commitments had been funded as of December 31, 2023 ($273.3 million net of original discount and transaction costs) with the remaining unfunded commitment of $223.0 million. Investors of the convertible notes have the option to purchase an additional up to 100% of the committed notes
page 43:
FF has minimal experience servicing and repairing its vehicles.
The inability to adequately service vehicles may adversely affect FF’s business. FF has minimal experience servicing and repairing its vehicles. Servicing EVs is different than servicing vehicles with internal combustion engines and requires specialized skills, including high voltage training and servicing techniques. Although FF is planning to internalize most aspects of vehicle service over time, initially FF plans to partner with third parties to enable nationwide coverage for roadside and off-road assistance and collision repair needs. There can be no assurance that FF will be able to enter into an acceptable arrangement with any such third-party providers. Although such servicing partners may have experience in servicing other vehicles, they will initially have limited experience in servicing FF vehicles. There can be no assurance that such service arrangements will adequately address the service requirements of FF’s customers to their satisfaction, or that FF and its servicing partners will have sufficient resources, experience, or inventory to meet these service requirements in a timely manner as the volume of EVs we deliver increases.
Page 73:
If FF seeks to implement a reverse stock split in order to remain listed on Nasdaq, the announcement or implementation of such a reverse stock split could negatively affect the price of its Common Stock.
While Nasdaq rules do not impose a specific limit on the number of times a listed company may effect a reverse stock split to maintain or regain compliance with the Minimum Bid Price Requirement, Nasdaq has stated that a series of reverse stock splits may undermine investor confidence in securities listed on Nasdaq. Accordingly, Nasdaq may determine that it is not in the public interest to maintain FF’s listing, even if we regain compliance with the Minimum Bid Price Requirement.
In addition, Nasdaq Listing Rule 5810(c)(3)(A)(iv) states that if a listed company that fails to meet the Minimum Bid Price Requirement after effecting one or more reverse stock splits over the prior two-year period with a cumulative ratio of 250 shares or more to one, then FF is not eligible for a Compliance Period. FF effected a 1-for-80 reverse stock split of its Common Stock on August 25, 2023, and an additional 1-for-3 reverse stock split of its Common Stock on February 29, 2024, for a cumulative ratio of 240 shares to one. FF anticipates seeking stockholder approval for another reverse stock split. Any subsequent reverse stock split would cause FF to exceed the 1-for-250 ratio.
Page 90:
Revenue Recognition
Automotive Sales Revenue We began the production of our FF 91 Futurist in March 2023 and started making deliveries to customers in August 2023 and have sold four and leased six vehicles for the year ended December 31, 2023.
Too lazy to post more, but this is what stands out to me.
Nothing is my post is financial advice, it's just literal copy and paste from the 10-K.

TIMESTAMP Hi, I'm looking to find some new owners for all these keyboard thingies that are otherwise collecting dust.
I'm pretty firm on the prices since they're wayyy below cost on most of the stuff, but would still like to read your offers.
Prices include PayPal G&S fees, but not shipping (~6€ in DE, ~14€ in EU). I do ship internationally, but please be aware of likely high shipping costs & import fees the buyer has to pay.
If you have any questions and/or are interested in buying, please leave a comment before sending a PM (click). Thank you.

Artisan Keycaps	Description	Price
Zen Pond III - Goshiki Ruby 7u (Cherry Spacebar)	Mounted once, without flaws, including Original Packaging.	65 €
Zen Pond III - Ghost Asagi 2.75u (Cherry R1)	Mounted once, without flaws, including Original Packaging.	50 €
S-Craft Ditto	Mounted once, without flaws, including Original Packaging.	55 €
S-Craft Vulpix	Mounted once, without flaws, including Original Packaging.	55 €

GMK Child Kits	Description	Price
GMK 80082 Alternate	Used for a few days, 10/10 condition, includes OP.	70 €
GMK Sumi 40s	Sealed, unused.	40 €
GMK Sumi Spacebars	Sealed, unused.	35 €
GMK Awaken Novelties	Sealed, unused.	35 €

Plates & PCBs	Description	Price
TKC M0LLY POM Alps Plate	Had this lasered for a build I never ended up doing. Should fit any TKC M0LLY. Stabilizer cutouts are for MX.	15 €
Mekanisk WT-60D Solder PCB	Soldered & Desoldered a couple times. Everything still works but it's a bit ugly. Universal layout, USB-C.	20 €
Mekanisk ISO Brass plate	Since it's untreated brass, it has developed a patina.	10 €
Mode SixtyFive Solder PCB	While desoldering, one of the switches ripped out the contact point of the key left of enter. Since the key is connected with trace via back, it still works fine.	10 €
Mode 65 POM Half plate ANSI	Super flexible, no blemishes.	20 €

Miscellaneous	Description	Price
68x Kailh Box Crystal Navy	Never soldered, used for 10 min.	20 €
~180 Jwick Reds	Never soldered/used. Can do smaller amounts (yes I will count them).	40 €
GMK / Uniqey Color Ring	All GMK Base Colors, in one neat set of R1 keys, for color- matching, etc. No flaws or missing keys.	20 €

On a different note, wtf did reddit do with the table formatting...

TL;DR: AI Inference hardware accelerators were all the rage a few years ago. They still are, but they seem to have abandoned the hobbyist, low-power, low-size, low-mid cost, seperate board user, such that abandoned projects such as the Google edge TPU from 2019 (5 yrs ago) are still your best bet $/perf wise. The $20 - $150 range is empty or has some products that aren't worth it at all. What happened? Are there any modern hobbyist $20 - $150 accelerators you can buy right now anywhere?
Sidenote: I know TOPS isn't the end-all be-all of perf comparison, but it's all I got.[1]
Skip for history of my interest: I've long been interested in machine learning, especially artificial neural networks since I took a class on ML in college in around 2004. I've done some hobbyist projects on the CPU and even released a C#/.Net wrapper for FANN (Fast Artificial Neural Network, a fast open-source neural network run on CPUs because everything was on CPUs then): https://github.com/joelself/FannCSharp. When deep learning took off I got excited. I got into competitive password cracking and although my ML based techniques were about a dozen orders of magnitudes slower at making guesses, they were almost immediately able to find a few passwords in old leaks that had been gone over and over for years by the best crackers with the most absurd hardware and extremely specially tuned password guess generators. That made me pretty proud that I was able to do something in a few months that years of dozens of groups with $100,000s of thousands of dollars of hardware and who know how many watt-hours couldn't do. I even thought about writing a a paper on it, but I was kinda in over my head and my life got a lot worse so I had to put all of my side projects on hold unfortunately. Recently though I did a vanity search for my FANN C# wrapper and found people talking about it and some references in some papers and student projects which made me feel proud.
Skip for history of my interest: Now I really want to get into the cross section of hardware-accelerated inference (no training this time, I'm not a trillion dollar company with billion dollars of supercomputers running on specialized training hardware that took 100's of millions of dollars to develop), microcontrollers for robots, drones, other smallish tasks that can't carry around their own 100 lb diesel generator and 2 1U rackmount servers full of inference hardware that I can't even get ahold of because you can only buy that stuff if you are an Intel or GE or some other company that might make products in the 10's of thousands at least. And this is where I hit a wall.
I just started looking around and one of the first things I found was Google's TPU by Coral.ai. 4 TOPs in a package, 2 chips on a small m2 card. Only about 40 bucks for developers to try out, $60 for an easier to use, but 1 chip only USB product. But this was about 5 years ago, and they just slowly disappeared and haven't made a peep in like 3 years. They timed the market perfectly. AI stuff was right on the verge of BLOWING THE F*CK UP. They could be THE edge/robotics/iot/anything-other-than-servecloud-phone-tablet-PC-laptop company. But they just seemed to give up. They're obviously not giving up on improving edge inference hardware. They release their phones twice a year (regular version, then A version) and they always update the tensor processing unit in those and are really starting to push that as a must have feature. They could use the same hardware improvements to make somewhat bigger chips to sell for other markets. You never know, someone might take their 3rd gen 16 TOPS TPU chip and makes a product(s) that takes the world by storm. Maybe multiple people/companies will do that.
Okay, so Google, seems to have dropped the hat. Hardware inference companies are a dime a dozen these days just go with another. But that's the problem. It seems all the focus is on Cloud scale, super-computer (some overlap between those 2), embedded on finished phones/tables/laptop/PCs, powerful server accelerators, and a very few extremely tiny MCUs with accordingly tiny MPUs. I seems everybody has abandoned the lower-mid range-robotics-drone-hobbyist space with haste.
ARM introduced the Ethos U-55 and U65 with the 65 having about double the TOPS of the 55 at a max of 1 TOPS in 2020. As far as I can tell the first products to use the U-55 were in 2022 and there haven't been a lot and I don't think they ran at top speed. Noone has opted to implement even an unmodified U-65 for anything. I recently bought a Grove AI Vision Kit with a U-55 NPU and it's specced at a lowly 50 GOPS (ARM's top-end says it could hit 10 times that and until *just now* I thought it was 500 GOPS and thus offered good $/TOPS ...oops).
There's a lot of companies making hype, a lot seeming to have selling dev or reference boards, but instead producing a few thousands and distributing them via the usual (Mouser, DigiKey, Element14, SparkFun, etc), they want you to fill out extensive forms to ensure you're a big player that will definitely eventually buy at least 100,000 units a day otherwise you're a waste of time for them to consider you (even though going over every applicant individually is WAY more time consuming than just producing a couple thou and have DigiKey take care of selling 1 to 2 at a time).
Thus I've come to the point that while Google edge TPU is abandoned (even though Google is going full steam ahead on AI inference for their cellphones and tablets) and Coral.ai is seemingly doing nothing. Their TPUs still provide the best $/TOPS in the range I want. Take a look at [VOXL2](https://www.modalai.com/collections/blue-uas-framework-components/products/voxl-2?variant=39914779836467). Basically exactly what I want and would expect we should have had something like a Google Edge TPU v3 by now (but a bit smaller and a little less power consumption, yes, I know moore's law doesn't really apply anymore, but in rapidly growing and learning fields like accelerated inference, double the speed every 2 years is not unreasonable and it has been 5 years since the Google TPU @ 4 TOPS per chip). But the damn thing is over $1,2000.
So, my point finally is that even though Google and Coral.ai seem to have abandoned their TPU. At about $40 for 2 chips at 4 TOPS apiece for 8 TOPS total, they still seem to be the best middle ground. The next best might be the BeagleBone reference studio for about 8 TOPS at $187. Same TOPS (though on one chip) for more than 4.5 times the cost. The Jetson Orin Nano by NVIDIA is $259 for 20 TOPS at $51/4TOPS that a single Google edge TPU will put out at $20 (including the board and stuff). It seems everyone is abandoning the hobbyist edge inference space at lightning speed. There are a lot of companies with promising size (physical) and performance products, but they won't talk to you until you fill out a form that implies that they only want to talk to someone that has already decided to buy 100,000s of your units whereas in the past, companies would have dev/reference boards out trying to find someone that would develop that killer app and make them a lot of money.
Why is this? Am I looking in the wrong place? Should I hoard Google edge TPUs? I bought their USB version to tinker with and the Grove AI Vision Kit (now that I realize is only 50 GOPS, so might be worthless). What are my options. For example. A single quadcopter a 100 - 300m above the ground looking "things", not image classic image classification where it can identify thousands of different objects. It just needs to identify one type of thing. Doesn't even have to be very fast. In fact, don't these NNs run on single images? I could just buy multiple chips and run in parallel to get the framerate I want if it isn't fast enough (it won't improve latency, but 100 - 500 ms latency probably isn't a problem until you get real close at which time you can switch to a different, much cheaper solution that works even better at close range and wide FOV).
Maybe I can use a phone and get low level access to the NPU/TPU and use that or use their powerful graphics cards on the phone or small laptop like a caveman from 2017. Still pretty expensive and I would be paying a ton of money for hardware I don't want. Maybe I could buy broken phones "for parts" on ebay, but I'm not that hardware savvy. I need a dev board to get me going.
The next best idea is to just push video from my drone/robot/project to a central station with a super powerful 1-4U server inference accelerator (not sure how I would get one), or Jetson Orin, computer with RTX4090 and do inference there and just tolerate the latency. That won't be feasible for some applications I would like to do though.

1. I found a github repo that collects perf comparison projects and I checked their data, and it's extremely sparse. One set is dominated by NVIDIA 4090, L(s), L4(s), and QUALCOMM T100 (or something, it's a cloud only processor, so you can't buy it). Then a few rows at the bottom have Raspi 4 and like 5 other mini applications units and MCU chips. And the results were hard to interpret especially since not all entrants have run all benchmarks and they can run it in probably dozens of different ways and then the results may not matter because their accuracy might have been bad. TOPS right now is like Whetstone/Drystone or MIPS, FLOPS, etc back in the day. It's a very rough estimate, but it can get you in the ballpark, so you can narrow down hundreds of options to 15 or so and then do more research from there. If someone comes up with something better then for sure let's all use that. Or if we could get some standardized benchmarks (I found some last night, there were several, and the results were very sparse (not every entry ran all of the benchmarks in all the different ways it could), one dataset was mostly a couple hundred rows NVIDIA 4090, L4, L40, QUALCOMM AI 100 (a cloud processor, you can't buy and run it) and then the last several rows where like a few Raspi 4s and some other MPU boards with drastically lower scores. Every once in a while some announces a project to fix this, but it hasn't helped at all.

TL;DR: AI Inference hardware accelerators were all the rage a few years ago. They still are, but they seem to have abandoned the hobbyist, low-power, low-size, low-mid cost, seperate board user, such that abandoned projects such as the Google edge TPU from 2019 (5 yrs ago) are still your best bet $/perf wise. The $20 - $150 range is empty or has some products that aren't worth it at all. What happened? Are there any modern hobbyist $20 - $150 accelerators you can buy right now anywhere?
Sidenote: I know TOPS isn't the end-all be-all of perf comparison, but it's all I got.[1]
Skip for history of my interest: I've long been interested in machine learning, especially artificial neural networks since I took a class on ML in college in around 2004. I've done some hobbyist projects on the CPU and even released a C#/.Net wrapper for FANN (Fast Artificial Neural Network, a fast open-source neural network run on CPUs because everything was on CPUs then): https://github.com/joelself/FannCSharp. When deep learning took off I got excited. I got into competitive password cracking and although my ML based techniques were about a dozen orders of magnitudes slower at making guesses, they were almost immediately able to find a few passwords in old leaks that had been gone over and over for years by the best crackers with the most absurd hardware and extremely specially tuned password guess generators. That made me pretty proud that I was able to do something in a few months that years of dozens of groups with $100,000s of thousands of dollars of hardware and who know how many watt-hours couldn't do. I even thought about writing a a paper on it, but I was kinda in over my head and my life got a lot worse so I had to put all of my side projects on hold unfortunately. Recently though I did a vanity search for my FANN C# wrapper and found people talking about it and some references in some papers and student projects which made me feel proud.
Skip for history of my interest: Now I really want to get into the cross section of hardware-accelerated inference (no training this time, I'm not a trillion dollar company with billion dollars of supercomputers running on specialized training hardware that took 100's of millions of dollars to develop), microcontrollers for robots, drones, other smallish tasks that can't carry around their own 100 lb diesel generator and 2 1U rackmount servers full of inference hardware that I can't even get ahold of because you can only buy that stuff if you are an Intel or GE or some other company that might make products in the 10's of thousands at least. And this is where I hit a wall.
I just started looking around and one of the first things I found was Google's TPU by Coral.ai. 4 TOPs in a package, 2 chips on a small m2 card. Only about 40 bucks for developers to try out, $60 for an easier to use, but 1 chip only USB product. But this was about 5 years ago, and they just slowly disappeared and haven't made a peep in like 3 years. They timed the market perfectly. AI stuff was right on the verge of BLOWING THE F*CK UP. They could be THE edge/robotics/iot/anything-other-than-servecloud-phone-tablet-PC-laptop company. But they just seemed to give up. They're obviously not giving up on improving edge inference hardware. They release their phones twice a year (regular version, then A version) and they always update the tensor processing unit in those and are really starting to push that as a must have feature. They could use the same hardware improvements to make somewhat bigger chips to sell for other markets. You never know, someone might take their 3rd gen 16 TOPS TPU chip and makes a product(s) that takes the world by storm. Maybe multiple people/companies will do that.
Okay, so Google, seems to have dropped the hat. Hardware inference companies are a dime a dozen these days just go with another. But that's the problem. It seems all the focus is on Cloud scale, super-computer (some overlap between those 2), embedded on finished phones/tables/laptop/PCs, powerful server accelerators, and a very few extremely tiny MCUs with accordingly tiny MPUs. I seems everybody has abandoned the lower-mid range-robotics-drone-hobbyist space with haste.
ARM introduced the Ethos U-55 and U65 with the 65 having about double the TOPS of the 55 at a max of 1 TOPS in 2020. As far as I can tell the first products to use the U-55 were in 2022 and there haven't been a lot and I don't think they ran at top speed. Noone has opted to implement even an unmodified U-65 for anything. I recently bought a Grove AI Vision Kit with a U-55 NPU and it's specced at a lowly 50 GOPS (ARM's top-end says it could hit 10 times that and until *just now* I thought it was 500 GOPS and thus offered good $/TOPS ...oops).
There's a lot of companies making hype, a lot seeming to have selling dev or reference boards, but instead producing a few thousands and distributing them via the usual (Mouser, DigiKey, Element14, SparkFun, etc), they want you to fill out extensive forms to ensure you're a big player that will definitely eventually buy at least 100,000 units a day otherwise you're a waste of time for them to consider you (even though going over every applicant individually is WAY more time consuming than just producing a couple thou and have DigiKey take care of selling 1 to 2 at a time).
Thus I've come to the point that while Google edge TPU is abandoned (even though Google is going full steam ahead on AI inference for their cellphones and tablets) and Coral.ai is seemingly doing nothing. Their TPUs still provide the best $/TOPS in the range I want. Take a look at [VOXL2](https://www.modalai.com/collections/blue-uas-framework-components/products/voxl-2?variant=39914779836467). Basically exactly what I want and would expect we should have had something like a Google Edge TPU v3 by now (but a bit smaller and a little less power consumption, yes, I know moore's law doesn't really apply anymore, but in rapidly growing and learning fields like accelerated inference, double the speed every 2 years is not unreasonable and it has been 5 years since the Google TPU @ 4 TOPS per chip). But the damn thing is over $1,2000.
So, my point finally is that even though Google and Coral.ai seem to have abandoned their TPU. At about $40 for 2 chips at 4 TOPS apiece for 8 TOPS total, they still seem to be the best middle ground. The next best might be the BeagleBone reference studio for about 8 TOPS at $187. Same TOPS (though on one chip) for more than 4.5 times the cost. The Jetson Orin Nano by NVIDIA is $259 for 20 TOPS at $51/4TOPS that a single Google edge TPU will put out at $20 (including the board and stuff). It seems everyone is abandoning the hobbyist edge inference space at lightning speed. There are a lot of companies with promising size (physical) and performance products, but they won't talk to you until you fill out a form that implies that they only want to talk to someone that has already decided to buy 100,000s of your units whereas in the past, companies would have dev/reference boards out trying to find someone that would develop that killer app and make them a lot of money.
Why is this? Am I looking in the wrong place? Should I hoard Google edge TPUs? I bought their USB version to tinker with and the Grove AI Vision Kit (now that I realize is only 50 GOPS, so might be worthless). What are my options. For example. A single quadcopter a 100 - 300m above the ground looking "things", not image classic image classification where it can identify thousands of different objects. It just needs to identify one type of thing. Doesn't even have to be very fast. In fact, don't these NNs run on single images? I could just buy multiple chips and run in parallel to get the framerate I want if it isn't fast enough (it won't improve latency, but 100 - 500 ms latency probably isn't a problem until you get real close at which time you can switch to a different, much cheaper solution that works even better at close range and wide FOV).
Maybe I can use a phone and get low level access to the NPU/TPU and use that or use their powerful graphics cards on the phone or small laptop like a caveman from 2017. Still pretty expensive and I would be paying a ton of money for hardware I don't want. Maybe I could buy broken phones "for parts" on ebay, but I'm not that hardware savvy. I need a dev board to get me going.
The next best idea is to just push video from my drone/robot/project to a central station with a super powerful 1-4U server inference accelerator (not sure how I would get one), or Jetson Orin, computer with RTX4090 and do inference there and just tolerate the latency. That won't be feasible for some applications I would like to do though.

1. I found a github repo that collects perf comparison projects and I checked their data, and it's extremely sparse. One set is dominated by NVIDIA 4090, L(s), L4(s), and QUALCOMM T100 (or something, it's a cloud only processor, so you can't buy it). Then a few rows at the bottom have Raspi 4 and like 5 other mini applications units and MCU chips. And the results were hard to interpret especially since not all entrants have run all benchmarks and they can run it in probably dozens of different ways and then the results may not matter because their accuracy might have been bad. TOPS right now is like Whetstone/Drystone or MIPS, FLOPS, etc back in the day. It's a very rough estimate, but it can get you in the ballpark, so you can narrow down hundreds of options to 15 or so and then do more research from there. If someone comes up with something better then for sure let's all use that. Or if we could get some standardized benchmarks (I found some last night, there were several, and the results were very sparse (not every entry ran all of the benchmarks in all the different ways it could), one dataset was mostly a couple hundred rows NVIDIA 4090, L4, L40, QUALCOMM AI 100 (a cloud processor, you can't buy and run it) and then the last several rows where like a few Raspi 4s and some other MPU boards with drastically lower scores. Every once in a while some announces a project to fix this, but it hasn't helped at all.

Sorry this is quite long, i just feel so hopeless.
So I first got my period when I was 11, the month before my 12th birthday in 2016. And going throughout school I had a somewhat normal cycle until 2018. I noticed that I’d be up to 2 weeks late, and sometimes my period would be super short and only last for 3 days. My typical period lasted about 7 days. Then in 2019, I started to get super insecure with my body. I hated how big my chest was getting and I didn’t like where I was holding my weight. So I developed an eating disorder where I had toast for breakfast, played video games until midnight, then I would eat more toast or sometimes soup for dinner. I went from 185lbs to 169lbs. And that’s when I stopped having my period. I went to the hospital for severe stomach pain and was told that my stomach acid was eating my stomach lining, and that I had to start eating a normal diet. After eating more regularly my weight went back to 185lbs.
From June 2019 until November of 2020, I had no period. In June 2020 my mom passed away and it was super hard on me. My dad made me see a therapist and she advised that I get my hormones in balance to see if that was why my depression was so bad. Before seeing a gyno, on Halloween 2020 I was getting ready to go out when before I left I used the bathroom and saw that I was bleeding. I begged my dad to go get me tampons and by the time he got back, the bleeding had stopped. So I finally got to see a Gyno and started birth control in November 2020. I got my period while taking the placebo pills like normal. Until about two months into taking birth control, I started getting my period the week before my placebo pills and when I took the placebo pills, my period would stop. My gyno told me that my period would be irregular for the first few months, but then my periods become so heavy, I would use Super+ tampons and would have to put in a new one because I would start leaking after two hours of having it in. My cramps became unbearable, the bleeding was horrible, and the last period on that birth control lasted almost a month. While taking the birth control, my chest went up two cup sizes and I had gained 15lbs. I stopped that bc. My last period in 2021, I weighed 200lbs.
From February 2021 to June 2023, I had no period. I moved across the country and saw a new gyno, I started eating more frequently and gained 30lbs. The gyno had me try maybe 5 different birth controls, and all of them either made me bleed for months straight with no break, made me constipated, or made my cramps so bad that I almost had to go to the ER. The last birth control I was on, around September 2023, made my cramps so bad that I couldn’t stand up straight, I was nauseous, hot flashes, and I almost passed out from the pain. I lasted maybe 3 days on my period on that birth control, when I couldn’t take the cramps anymore.
I stopped the bc and stopped getting my period, with no more debilitating cramps. i had a non-invasive ultrasound done to check for PCOS and my doctor told me that “i have no cysts, or at least big enough to cause the pain I felt.” So my gyno had no idea what was wrong with me. I felt so hopeless.
I started my first job and walked almost 10k steps a day, 4 days a week. I lost 17lbs and had more energy, but still no period. My job stressed me out to all hell, so I quit and immediately gained those 17lbs back.
So now it’s May 2024, I’m 20 years old, and I haven’t had a normal period since I was 14. I’m so frustrated with my health and I try every single day to eat right, I eat more protein, I do small workouts throughout the day, and I stopped snacking on so much processed food. I feel so hopeless, I have no idea what’s wrong with me, I stopped seeing my gyno because it felt like she wasn’t listening to me. I wanna give up, but I’m so insecure in my body, I feel like a man and I feel like I look like one too. I have so many questions: Why was my period more regular from 11-14 than it is now? Why was my period manageable as a 14 year old but now is debilitating? Now I’m just lost. Does anyone know what could be wrong with me? Hyperthyroidism? Insulin resistance? PCOS? Endometriosis? Something else? Or does anyone relate? If so, what could I do start feeling better with more energy, lose weight, start my period again?

TL;DR: AI Inference hardware accelerators were all the rage a few years ago. They still are, but they seem to have abandoned the hobbyist, low-power, low-size, low-mid cost, seperate board user, such that abandoned projects such as the Google edge TPU from 2019 (5 yrs ago) are still your best bet $/perf wise. The $20 - $150 range is empty or has some products that aren't worth it at all. What happened? Are there any modern hobbyist $20 - $150 accelerators you can buy right now anywhere?
Sidenote: I know TOPS isn't the end-all be-all of perf comparison, but it's all I got.[1]
Skip for history of my interest: I've long been interested in machine learning, especially artificial neural networks since I took a class on ML in college in around 2004. I've done some hobbyist projects on the CPU and even released a C#/.Net wrapper for FANN (Fast Artificial Neural Network, a fast open-source neural network run on CPUs because everything was on CPUs then): https://github.com/joelself/FannCSharp. When deep learning took off I got excited. I got into competitive password cracking and although my ML based techniques were about a dozen orders of magnitudes slower at making guesses, they were almost immediately able to find a few passwords in old leaks that had been gone over and over for years by the best crackers with the most absurd hardware and extremely specially tuned password guess generators. That made me pretty proud that I was able to do something in a few months that years of dozens of groups with $100,000s of thousands of dollars of hardware and who know how many watt-hours couldn't do. I even thought about writing a a paper on it, but I was kinda in over my head and my life got a lot worse so I had to put all of my side projects on hold unfortunately. Recently though I did a vanity search for my FANN C# wrapper and found people talking about it and some references in some papers and student projects which made me feel proud.
Skip for history of my interest: Now I really want to get into the cross section of hardware-accelerated inference (no training this time, I'm not a trillion dollar company with billion dollars of supercomputers running on specialized training hardware that took 100's of millions of dollars to develop), microcontrollers for robots, drones, other smallish tasks that can't carry around their own 100 lb diesel generator and 2 1U rackmount servers full of inference hardware that I can't even get ahold of because you can only buy that stuff if you are an Intel or GE or some other company that might make products in the 10's of thousands at least. And this is where I hit a wall.
I just started looking around and one of the first things I found was Google's TPU by Coral.ai. 4 TOPs in a package, 2 chips on a small m2 card. Only about 40 bucks for developers to try out, $60 for an easier to use, but 1 chip only USB product. But this was about 5 years ago, and they just slowly disappeared and haven't made a peep in like 3 years. They timed the market perfectly. AI stuff was right on the verge of BLOWING THE F*CK UP. They could be THE edge/robotics/iot/anything-other-than-servecloud-phone-tablet-PC-laptop company. But they just seemed to give up. They're obviously not giving up on improving edge inference hardware. They release their phones twice a year (regular version, then A version) and they always update the tensor processing unit in those and are really starting to push that as a must have feature. They could use the same hardware improvements to make somewhat bigger chips to sell for other markets. You never know, someone might take their 3rd gen 16 TOPS TPU chip and makes a product(s) that takes the world by storm. Maybe multiple people/companies will do that.
Okay, so Google, seems to have dropped the hat. Hardware inference companies are a dime a dozen these days just go with another. But that's the problem. It seems all the focus is on Cloud scale, super-computer (some overlap between those 2), embedded on finished phones/tables/laptop/PCs, powerful server accelerators, and a very few extremely tiny MCUs with accordingly tiny MPUs. I seems everybody has abandoned the lower-mid range-robotics-drone-hobbyist space with haste.
ARM introduced the Ethos U-55 and U65 with the 65 having about double the TOPS of the 55 at a max of 1 TOPS in 2020. As far as I can tell the first products to use the U-55 were in 2022 and there haven't been a lot and I don't think they ran at top speed. Noone has opted to implement even an unmodified U-65 for anything. I recently bought a Grove AI Vision Kit with a U-55 NPU and it's specced at a lowly 50 GOPS (ARM's top-end says it could hit 10 times that and until *just now* I thought it was 500 GOPS and thus offered good $/TOPS ...oops).
There's a lot of companies making hype, a lot seeming to have selling dev or reference boards, but instead producing a few thousands and distributing them via the usual (Mouser, DigiKey, Element14, SparkFun, etc), they want you to fill out extensive forms to ensure you're a big player that will definitely eventually buy at least 100,000 units a day otherwise you're a waste of time for them to consider you (even though going over every applicant individually is WAY more time consuming than just producing a couple thou and have DigiKey take care of selling 1 to 2 at a time).
Thus I've come to the point that while Google edge TPU is abandoned (even though Google is going full steam ahead on AI inference for their cellphones and tablets) and Coral.ai is seemingly doing nothing. Their TPUs still provide the best $/TOPS in the range I want. Take a look at [VOXL2](https://www.modalai.com/collections/blue-uas-framework-components/products/voxl-2?variant=39914779836467). Basically exactly what I want and would expect we should have had something like a Google Edge TPU v3 by now (but a bit smaller and a little less power consumption, yes, I know moore's law doesn't really apply anymore, but in rapidly growing and learning fields like accelerated inference, double the speed every 2 years is not unreasonable and it has been 5 years since the Google TPU @ 4 TOPS per chip). But the damn thing is over $1,2000.
So, my point finally is that even though Google and Coral.ai seem to have abandoned their TPU. At about $40 for 2 chips at 4 TOPS apiece for 8 TOPS total, they still seem to be the best middle ground. The next best might be the BeagleBone reference studio for about 8 TOPS at $187. Same TOPS (though on one chip) for more than 4.5 times the cost. The Jetson Orin Nano by NVIDIA is $259 for 20 TOPS at $51/4TOPS that a single Google edge TPU will put out at $20 (including the board and stuff). It seems everyone is abandoning the hobbyist edge inference space at lightning speed. There are a lot of companies with promising size (physical) and performance products, but they won't talk to you until you fill out a form that implies that they only want to talk to someone that has already decided to buy 100,000s of your units whereas in the past, companies would have dev/reference boards out trying to find someone that would develop that killer app and make them a lot of money.
Why is this? Am I looking in the wrong place? Should I hoard Google edge TPUs? I bought their USB version to tinker with and the Grove AI Vision Kit (now that I realize is only 50 GOPS, so might be worthless). What are my options. For example. A single quadcopter a 100 - 300m above the ground looking "things", not image classic image classification where it can identify thousands of different objects. It just needs to identify one type of thing. Doesn't even have to be very fast. In fact, don't these NNs run on single images? I could just buy multiple chips and run in parallel to get the framerate I want if it isn't fast enough (it won't improve latency, but 100 - 500 ms latency probably isn't a problem until you get real close at which time you can switch to a different, much cheaper solution that works even better at close range and wide FOV).
Maybe I can use a phone and get low level access to the NPU/TPU and use that or use their powerful graphics cards on the phone or small laptop like a caveman from 2017. Still pretty expensive and I would be paying a ton of money for hardware I don't want. Maybe I could buy broken phones "for parts" on ebay, but I'm not that hardware savvy. I need a dev board to get me going.
The next best idea is to just push video from my drone/robot/project to a central station with a super powerful 1-4U server inference accelerator (not sure how I would get one), or Jetson Orin, computer with RTX4090 and do inference there and just tolerate the latency. That won't be feasible for some applications I would like to do though.

1. I found a github repo that collects perf comparison projects and I checked their data, and it's extremely sparse. One set is dominated by NVIDIA 4090, L(s), L4(s), and QUALCOMM T100 (or something, it's a cloud only processor, so you can't buy it). Then a few rows at the bottom have Raspi 4 and like 5 other mini applications units and MCU chips. And the results were hard to interpret especially since not all entrants have run all benchmarks and they can run it in probably dozens of different ways and then the results may not matter because their accuracy might have been bad. TOPS right now is like Whetstone/Drystone or MIPS, FLOPS, etc back in the day. It's a very rough estimate, but it can get you in the ballpark, so you can narrow down hundreds of options to 15 or so and then do more research from there. If someone comes up with something better then for sure let's all use that. Or if we could get some standardized benchmarks (I found some last night, there were several, and the results were very sparse (not every entry ran all of the benchmarks in all the different ways it could), one dataset was mostly a couple hundred rows NVIDIA 4090, L4, L40, QUALCOMM AI 100 (a cloud processor, you can't buy and run it) and then the last several rows where like a few Raspi 4s and some other MPU boards with drastically lower scores. Every once in a while some announces a project to fix this, but it hasn't helped at all.

I’m a software developer, not in gaming, but still. Anyone in this position knows the pain of fighting product managers making up dumb ass features that sound like a small change but actually don’t work with existing code base at all and require either huge reworks or you create unmaintanable mess.
This last dota update is absolutely insane.
You want this one hero to do what? He’s supposed to be able to disassemble otherwise not disassemleable items? Plus change how much the recipees sell for him? But still with few exceptions? And this one sells items for full price? This one gets ability points at different levels and changes how talent levels work? Plus we need to change an UI element that is usually not changeable and same everywhere? And OD innate changes name on every hover just for shits and giggles? This reveals the map on day cycle taking into account all the different skills that modify this cycle? This treats ranged hero as melee? This changes when courier becomes flying? This needs to predict where the rune will spawn now requiring us to change how runes spawning work because now we need to know in advance instead of generating random spawn on the actual time while also making sure this change in rune spawn info is not exploitable.
These are huge exceptions to code, where default behavior becomes convoluted exceptions, all for a hero that isn’t even that popular. If your product manager comes and asks for a feature change that affects only 20% of users but requires a bunch of exceptions to the code and the change itself is just “maybe this will be kinda cool” you would think the company is absolutely insane.
People give shit to valve for spaghetti code and being run by janitors, but honestly valve is one of the most creative teams, they will do things no other teams will do just because it sounds kinda cool. Even before current changes, the fact that we have Rubick functioning in the game is absolutely insane. The amount of effort these features take to implement and maintain would be considered wasted man hours in any other studio. Yet Valve gives us this incredible sandbox and not just maintains it, but breaks their own in game rules to give us new cool shit that long term makes it harder for them.

Game title: Descent
Game Overview
Genre: Metroidvania/RPG
Story and Setting
Premise
In the caverns of Lumenor, theirs an intertwined ecosystem of biomes and creatures all reliant on the light energy provided by lumenors core. Lumenors core is the lifeblood of the entire ecosystem and is guarded by the luminary, an entity made of light. Umbrus a shadow entity wounds the luminary and steals lumenors core threatening the entire cavern, its up to Helio and Lumi to retrieve the core and restore the lifeblood,
Protagonists:

• Helio: A miner born from light, with translucent white skin that glows softly. He wears a purple feather cape reminiscent of a guardian knight. Holds a pickaxe which can be upgraded at the blacksmith in Pyrus.
  
• Lumi: A sentient ball of light and Helio's companion. Lumi absorbs and feeds on various ores to grow stronger, enhancing both itself and Helio with new abilities.
  

Antagonist:

• Umbrus: A shadow entity similar in looks to the shade lord from hollow knight, steals the core and threatens lumenor.

Gameplay Mechanics
Core Mechanics

• Exploration and Backtracking: Interconnected areas with locked sections requiring specific abilities or items to access, encouraging exploration and revisits.
  
• Mining System: Central to progression. Helio mines ores to feed Lumi, making both stronger and unlocking new abilities.
  
• Character Progression: Experience and leveling system where Helio can upgrade a skill tree using different ores. Stat upgrades and skill trees enhance Helio’s abilities.
  
• Resource Management: Collected ores used to upgrade equipment, craft new items, and feed Lumi.
  

Abilities and Skills:

• Key Abilities: Double jump, wall climb, ground pound, dash, etc acquired through feeding Lumi and finding rare ores.
  
• Skill Tree: Ores can be invested into upgrading abilitys unlocked from Lumi, or upgrading existing stats.
  

*Biomes

1. Luminescent Lagoon: Subterranean lake with glowing algae.

• **Challenges**: Navigating underwater tunnels, avoiding aquatic creatures.
  
• **Unique Ores**: Biolumium, Glowscale.
  

1. **Pyrus**: Magma-filled cavern with lava rivers.

• **Challenges**: Heat management, timed jumps over lava.
  
• **Unique Ores**: Magmaite, Pyrocite.
  

1. **Crystalis**: Cavern filled with giant, colorful crystals and crystal butterflies.

• **Challenges**: Navigating through crystal formations, avoiding traps.
  
• **Unique Ores**: Prismite, Flutterstone.
  

1. **Mycelia**: Forest of giant, glowing mushrooms.

• **Challenges**: Hallucinogenic spores causing visual distortions.
  
• **Unique Ores**: Mycoglow, Sporeite.
  

1. **Frosthaven**: Icy caverns with crystalline ice structures.

• **Challenges**: Freezing temperatures, slippery surfaces.
  
• **Unique Ores**: Froststeel, Icegem.
  

1. **Starfall Cavern**: Mystical cavern with meteor fragments.

• **Challenges**: Cosmic radiation, falling star fragments.
  
• **Unique Ores**: Stardust, Meteorite Shard.
  

Visual and Audio Style
Visual Style:

• Art Direction: Vibrant, glowing environments with a focus on light and dark contrasts.
  
• Character Design Helio’s translucent appearance and purple feather cape, Lumi’s glowing orb form.
  
• **Biome Aesthetics: Each biome with distinct visual themes (e.g., glowing algae in Luminescent Lagoon, magma rivers in Volcanic Furnace).
  

Audio Design:

• Soundtrack: Dynamic and atmospheric music that changes based on biome and events.
  
• Sound Effects: Distinct sounds for mining, abilities, and environmental interactions.
  
• Voice Acting: Minimalistic, with key narrative moments and character expressions through sound cues.
  

Engine: Godot
Platform Support: PC
Development Roadmap
Pre-Production

• Concept Art and Storyboarding
  
• Prototype Core Mechanics
  
• Design Document Finalization
  

Production

• Develop Core Gameplay Systems (Mining, Combat, Exploration)
  
• Design and Implement Biomes
  
• Create Art Assets and Animations
  
• Compose Music and Design Sound Effects
  

Testing

• Alpha Testing (Internal)
  
• Beta Testing (External with Feedback Collection)
  
• Bug Fixing and Polishing
  

This town is a hotspot. (post deleted by the time I got to it)
https://www.reddit.com/Paranormal/comments/1d2szgj/what_to_do_when_nothing_else_works_help/
What to do when nothing else works? (Help)May 28th 2024, 20:03, by whiskeyhurricanes5
Hi all, this is my first post here so I hope I'm doing it correct and forgive me for the length.
First, I want to establish some things.
1) we've lived in this home for 20 years, we're the first owners in what was a new development at the time.
2) were religious and it's been blessed+mass had several times (prayers, holy water, crosses, holy medals, the whole religious nine yards)
3) during some renovation years ago we found scorched earth over a large location and realize at one point a fire was had on the land
4) recently a friend who's also a historian was able to bring some information to light about the land we're on and the fact that it was actually part of a war happening between several different native tribes over 2 specific things that are on/close to this area and that this area of land was likely burial ground due to the available history about the war that happened
5) I'm a very science and fact based person. Although I've grown up religious, I find myself to be someone who is evidence and science based and I believe strongly that the most likely explanation is often the cause, I wouldn't consider myself to be easily influenced by the unexplained.
***I would ALSO like to add that our neighbors over the years (as neighbors have moved and new ones have come in) have all experienced paranormal events in their own respective homes, it’s not just ours but specifically seems to be this area. How can different people- who aren’t necessarily even friends or talk to each other on a regular basis- all experience similar or unexplained phenomenon.
I know you can only take me on my word here, but I promise, I wouldn't have come to the conclusion that my house is so f*cking haunted if there was ANY other explanation. I also have witnesses that aren't related to me who have experienced things and pictures/videos of things we can't explain that have gone into solidifying my belief.
Things have gotten worse in the last 3 months and we’re exhausted. There’s construction going on around our area and they’re making a lot of big renovations/digging up ground and I believe there has to be some correlation.
Now that you have some context/back story, I'll continue.
Things started to happen in this area almost immediately after moving in, almost 20 years ago.
The things that have occurred are
•Apparitions of a woman and young boy (she seems to be the most active as she’s often seen peering around corners or standing just out of the line of vision)
• THE OWL!!! This might be one of the most unbelievable thing, I understand. However, there is a phantom owl that is heard. Everyone has collectively looked for this owl and no one can find it, the insane thing is that it seems to move around the home in a binaural sound effect. Late at night an owl can be heard outside of every window in the home (even the windows where there is no tree) we will go and look for this owl and never find it. You can hear it (it’s coming from right next to you) but you’ll never see it. We’ve cut back trees and installed motion sensor lights, cams with night vision AND have removed certain tree entirely and even when it’s there, loud and clear, it has never been seen. This goes deeper and there is more about the incidents surrounding this creature in specific but it’s very lengthy and has lore of its own.
• phantom drumming. There was even a Dedicated “watch” group made in the neighborhood to try and find the phantom native drums that occurred at 3am nightly and of course, no one has ever found them. No, these aren’t drums from a Drum set and yes we’re all very sure of the distinct rhythm and sound that it’s native in nature. (To add, I myself am native on both sides)
•UFO sightings in the area. Over the years we have captured photos and footage of unexplained objects making strange patterns that oddly look like certain mathematical symbols (we have photos of it creating the square root symbol out of light)
Other occurrences are
•Running on the roof
•knocking in the house
•moving items
•shadow figures / hooded figures
•Speaking and disembodied voices
•A woman constantly singing at night in our back yard
•feeling touched
•doors opening/closing
•Certain physical aggressions
•a certain white/grey creature seen in the yard that disappears when you get close to it
there is honestly MUCH much more that has happened over 20 years and no, moving isn’t an option.
We’ve tried priest, blessings, sage, prayers. No, we don’t dabble in anything where something could have been done and yes, we have exhausted all natural explanations as to how these things happen.
I’m so tired. Please, if you have experience clearing out something this stubborn, what did you do?
submitted by whiskeyhurricanes5 [link] [comments]

[Let me know if a chapter a week is okay; I'm thinking it might be a bit too often. Run Zero: https://redd.it/1csb71x Run One: https://redd.it/1cwxbsg]
The mining foreman refused to go to sleep, and watched intently as Tightniks finally reached over and set it home with one hand. Its last nervous little sigh was the only thing he remembered-
The ship is without power, and Tightniks can't run the radar much without draining the batteries...
32s: First trap.
He built it big this time, and there are six trimps in there. They look familiar somehow, the light one with dark hair and an unusually short and broad tail compared to the rest, a big-eared green one, a grey one, a yellow one, and a red one with big paws and "XIII" on its rump, and a brown one with pink ears that takes the lead and cheers, "Kakka!" Once he lets them out, they all follow him intently around like just-hatched birds do their mother. He shows them the busted off cockpit and forward cabin of the ship he just crashed and they get inside and start da- ...nope, sticking with "dancing". He busies himself looking for the survival pad.
Until he hears the squeak of a baby trimp. They're feeding it- ...rocks. Carefully selected, aluminate rocks. What the heck are they doing? Whatever, I've got to get some conventional food for- What's that? He's got the survival pad already, but this was outside the ship, it must have materialized when he descended through that glowing grey mist getting out. He gets it flipped over and turned on.
"Manual portal activation 2 successful:" it displays, "rare shield equipped 54%Stg 14%Atk MT 0 Nu loaded / 399 He loaded / Metal challenge active / Total portal activation 956"
Metal challenge? The human selects it.
"You have the Metal challenge active. Tweak the portal to bring you to an alternate reality, where the concept of Miners does not exist, to force yourself to become frugal with equipment crafting strategies. If you complete The Dimension Of Anger without disabling the challenge, miners will re-unlock."
He's so confused, What the Loy is a Dimension of Anger? I think I have a headache from this high gravity. Sits down for a moment.
Notices that one of the trimps is sleeping in a small deep hole just at the edge of the garden, apparently to have a nap in standing upright.
I don't believe you, "portal". I'm training that one first chance I get!
56s: Pop full.
There are ten of them already?? I'm still working this derpy little potato patch to get enough food to bulk up just ONE of the- He looks at the portal pad and blurts out loud, "Fifty-six SECONDS??" He postulates that he's in a time-dilated environment, and that the portal is measuring time somewhere "out there", this "map frame" environment. It's like those Star Trek episodes he can't remember "Wink of an Eye" and "Blink of an Eye" that he can't quite remember. [One of them is Star Trek TOS, and one of them is Star Trek: Voyager and I forget which one came from where.]
1m57s: Arable in Z1c13.
The human walks along and one of the trimps viciously fights the various hostiles that try to come at him, staying ahead. Just behind, he finds that hole-digger busted into a cave big enough for 9 of them, and they start raising babies to fill it up.
3m37s: Miners in Z1c30.
It's broken! he notices of the data card he just picked up. It's one of the ones that flew out of the ship when he undogged the ship's side hatch, but it didn't survive. What was on it? He's got a vague memory of a big tanuki-tailed trimp, much bigger than the- Wait! This memory is of hole-digger all grown up. So this is- he looks at the smashed data card in his hand, ...this is the Miners card. At least there's some lying about so we're not totally deprived of metal.
That's odd. I'm sure I spent longer training this little guy than "one second map frame." The human looks at the black trimp with the grey head fur and silvery eyes, "So, can you say something yet?"
"Shijou." [Takane and Takanya are not black, it is their favorite clothing color.]
"Okay, can you say something else?"
9m12s: Zone 1, 40 pop, 3.5s RC with Z0/1, 13m19s turkimp. 12m55s: First scientist.
"Tai," his first scientist waves at him.
"Hmm," the human tries to think of a better test, "What color is the sky?"
"Shijou." The exasperated human is about to sigh in despair when he notices a card in its hands, with one word on it, "Blue."
"What?" he takes it, "You can't speak but you can write, huh?"
"Shijou," it twirls its paw off the end of the card in his hand. The human turns it over, and in small writing, it has "Technically, the sky isn't blue, it's a foible of Rayleigh scattering in an oxygen/nitrogen atmosphere. And you have 'TIGHTNIKS' embroidered on the left side of your uniform."
A look of astonishment sweeps over the human. I never taught it about Rayleigh scattering. Apparently, the scientist training has unlocked its brain to access the collected knowledge of a previous life! Then he looks at his uniform and groans, spanking his eyebrows in realization. The trimp had apparently noticed him wandering around the camp wracking his brain and talking to himself trying to remember his own name, and it's right there the whole time! He spanks his eyebrows again.
The very well fed grey-headed trimp starts doing experiments, leaving him to take the turkimp back to his farmers. Too bad it's only a quarter as fast at it as he is.
32m25s: Zone 3, 79 pop, 4.5s RC with Z1/2; c16, 79 pop, 6.8s RC with Z2/3.
"Nano! Nano, nano, nano." The D&B (that's dodge and block) foreman has an impressive yellow mane, light face, green body, and brown hind limbs, and moves like a blur when it decides to. When asleep, it's as unarousable as an exhumed fossil, except with the food article Yellow the scientist calls an "owny geary". [Puchim@s Afuu]
Helping it out is a brown-maned white trenching expert Tightniks finds oddly familiar. It has no problem mining, but couldn't start a fire if its life depended on it, so smelting is out of the question.
I guess that's how the Metal challenge really works. Too bad I suck at it. Tightniks is spending all his smelting time smacking out nails and joist hangers for the houses, and has nothing left for fighting gear.
1h53m25s: Zone 9, 306 pop, 7.9s RC with Z8/15, no turkimp.
The white trimp with the brown head fur- ...whichever one it is because it, or one that looks just like it, sometimes (apparently) burns itself up or blows itself up trying to build a metallurgical furnace. This one is digging a hole right now, into the concrete of some ruined building's foundation. It hits some strapping and rebar, makes a happy sound, follows it along and gets it sorta clear of the concrete bonded to it, and rips it out of the ground to throw on the metal pile. It now seems content to do that instead of trying to smelt ores.
"Red?" Tightniks glances at one of his scientists, "Do you think we could take it to- What's that place you said you visited five hundred years after some misty fight or-"
"Cloudy strife," it says, "Yeah, Midgimp is like that, we could probably map a route through there. Lots of metal. Especially the part that had an avalanche happen and fell down. Broke all that stuff out of the ground already." [Final Fantasy VII and Advent Children cinematic and Sector 7 collapse.]
"Okay," Tightniks says, "Let's do that."
5h32m02s: Zone 21, 2042 pop, 14.9s RC with Z20/232, no turkimp.
"Ooooookay," Tightniks growls, "There is something off about this thing."
"Shijou?" the grey one looks at the yellow one with concern about their human starship pilot friend.
The human stoops, picks up the little green gem on the ridge between Zone 20 and 21, looks at it, huffs, and asks, "Any idea where this comes from?"
"Err..." the red one seems hesitant to say, "I think you made it."
"Really?" the human huffs, "How could that be?" Then he tosses it at Red, "See if anything reacts to it. It might be radioactive, so we should take turns to minimize exposure."
"Really?" Red's holding it now, "What makes you say that?"
"Because I'm pissed off for no reason I can figure out," the human says, "I think it's coming from-" he gasps, "Waitamint!" He starts searching for the portal pad.
"Frags," the red one says quickly, "I think it's arranging a route. You're good with maps," it tosses the gem to the grey scientist.
The human has his portal pad up and reads aloud, "You have the Metal challenge active. Tweak the portal to- yada yada yada. Tiss tiss t- complete The Dimension Of Anger without disabling- miners will re-unlock."
\BOOM\** They turn to see (another of) the white brown-haired trimp'/s' attempts at a metallurgical furnace explode, and it seems both very frustrated and has really hurt its toe.
He snaps his fingers, "That's gotta be it. Although, does it mean 'miners' or 'furnaces'?" He re-reads the portal pad while the scientists shrug.
"Shijou," the grey one has just finished tracing the route map the gem was showing.
"Are we going any faster than on previous cycles, you think?" he asks Red.
"What's a cycle?" Red asks.
"We're stuck in time loop, you realize?" the human says.
"Well," the yellow one jumps off a little rock spire it was using to see farther ahead, directly into a seated position on the ground with an impressive thump the human can both hear with his ears and feel through the ground of the more-than-Earth gravity planet, "that explains a few things." The little scientist trimp seems quite morose at the news.
"This thing says the fastest we've ever got this 'anger' map done is ten hours, thirty-five, but the clock right now is at five hours, thirty-four." Tightniks tilts his head, frowns one eyebrow, and taps, "Getting it done faster increases attack damage somehow, and oh-"
"What now?" the yellow one asks, still seated beside the spire.
"It says we already got a 2.5%-er for having a million traps," the human says, "I don't remember doing that. Maybe..." he sighs, "Maybe that's a good thing, 'cus I'd probably go insane building them all. Still though, it says we're going faster, but it doesn't feel like it."
"How'd you know how it feels," Red asks, "if you don't remember it?"
"'Day jaw voo' I think is the term," the human says, "or something. The sense that all this has happened before, but I'm not quite remembering and there's no physical evidence of it."
"Shijooooooooooo..." the grey one moans, waving a card at him. On it:
"In order, but we don't know if that means chronological order or frequency/proportion of memories:
"- The ship crashes (pretty sure that happens every time) "- The human builds huts "- The human teaches some trimps to speak and do science "- The human builds houses "- The human makes maps "- The human builds mansions "- The human blows up and gets himself killed somewhere around Z17 to Z21, often on a dragimp "- The human only recently/occasionally builds hotels "- The human only recently/rarely tamed a dragimp "- The human only recently/rarely mapped the Dimension of Anger"
Tightniks sits down and offers it back.
"Tai," it flatly refuses to take it back, paws up and eyes closed.
"It's kind of a relief," Tightniks rubs his temples, then looks at it again, "knowing it ain't just me."
6h17m43s: Portal PB, 1% AP for sub-8h, 45 He, 7.149 He/hr, 2209 pop, 13.6s RC.
The last head of the map's boss monster goes limp as one of the fighting trimps' dagger points goes into it, and the huge thing settles on its tail, resting on the package that seems to be the prize of this map. And there's a popping sound, and then something mechanical.
Is that a scroll compressor? Tightniks looks at the package. The deflating monster's lifting envelope material drapes over everything underneath it. "Yellow, Shijou!" he snaps and points, "roll up that side of it. Keep this part from sucking down on the extractor nozzle!"
All ten of the scientists jump in, literally, pushing the gas in the bag towards the compressor. Tightniks as well, rolling up the front.
Until he kicks, and nearly trips over, a smaller package that might be the explanation for the reason why the center of the monster's defense seemed to be a little away from the big package he could see. It's in the right place, he realizes. He gets it uncovered and reads stenciled-and-sprayed block letters on it:
"DT TIME PORTAL / THIS SIDE DOWN"
Perhaps the Dimension of Anger is so named because of the rage suddenly rising up in Tightniks' throat. It isn't so much as the free-floating aggression suddenly has an answer, there is definitely a fresh batch of rage and anger as he grips the nearest Dagger V, Mark 2 with both hands-
Refocusing on surviving the next few seconds, the pilot turns on the radar for the final approach and takes a last look around, then straight ahead at his forward camera and primary flight display...
He crouches, sets the dagger down gently, then starts clearing the debris from the box's grab iron. He tries to lift it- Damn, this is heavy! As he gets it turned over, gravity finishes the job, and it shakes the ground with an impressive thud as it falls right side up.
"DT TIME PORTAL / THIS SIDE UP" There's a square cutout in the middle of one side of it, with a sliding cover at the bottom of it.
"Get the pad!" he screams, seeing that his scientists are almost done rolling up the megablimp.
The grey one already has the survival data pad and offers it to him.
"The big one," Tightniks clarifies, "The big one." he picks up wide flat rainbow cable and its edge socket in one hand, "It goes here," he points at it with the other. "It must have come with me-" He had taken the small survival data pad and notices something, "Oh?" He starts looking around, "Hey!"
The white trimp with the brown hair is napping in a hole next to the smouldering remains of its latest attempt at a smelting furnace.
"Hey, mining buddy!" he whistles at it, "Mining buddy!"
It wakes with a start and rushes over, but doesn't seem to be in a good mood. But as soon as Tightnik shows it the survival pad, with all of the mining data installed just as if all those broken data cards and scorched scrolls were intact when he found them, fireworks goes off in the little trimp's eyes and it rushes off with the pad. Within minutes, the first furnace that works is chugging away at some ore and it returns to give the survival data pad back to Tightniks.
7h24m49s: Fresh turkimp; 7h25m30s: Labor reallocated.
The big-eared green lumber foreman's mood fell much further than the mining foreman's mood was before Tightniks packed up the turkimp roaster and moved just about everyone over to the smeltery.
The brown-haired, big-tailed white mining foreman was surprised at the change, and very happy. It had climbed up onto the helium compressor cart to check something on the pad a couple cells into the zone.
"Are you upset with me?" the red one asks the human.
"No, not at all," Tightniks says, "Are you getting the feeling that we had an upset at this point last cycle?"
"How would you know it was only the last?" Yellow asks, "Your memory's no better than ours."
"Right," the human sews another patch into his uniform, "However, I've only actually hit the switch on the portal twice, the first one on a challenge called Discipline, and the second on a challenge called Metal, which we just finished. It's easy to sort out from the statistics. I'm nervous it'll get harder to sort out when we're up to, oh," done fixing his uniform, he pops a bit of turkimp into his mouth and chews a couple times, "a few dozen or hundred manual cycles."
"Friggin' solve this faster than that, please," Red grumbles, "I know the emergency counter got to nearly a thousand, but..." he kinda trails off. Finally, he says, "I think we're remembering more cycle to cycle as we get more helium into it. I mean, I'm glad that isn't the only mechanic."
"Can't miss the supernova if it is," the human ponders.
"What?" Yellow chuckles.
"I'm remembering something from before all this, I think it was called a video game, where you'd go forward real-world in the simulation of a time loop, and your real-life head remembering what you did on previous cycles was the only mechanic," the human takes another bite, then dons his uniform shirt while chewing it. After his head pops out of the not-so-crisp-and-fresh uniform neck hole, buttons still done up, he finishes, "one of them had a supernova." [That would be Outer Wilds among the bunch of games with this mechanic, er, Minnit (I know it's spelled differently than "minute"), 12 Minutes, The Legend of Zelda: Majora's Mask, and- ...I'm sure there are more.]
11h19m28s: Starting void 1 (L30).
With the thermal gloves on, Tightniks gets the void map into the portal device slot. It dematerializes and his fingers close where it used to be in his hands, then he yelps, stands up and starts dancing, "Oh crap, it's cold!" He quickly starts looking for stuff to bundle up. Once not too uncomfortable, he notices something, "You're having trouble, too?"
"No," Yellow and Red look at each other, "Well, not with the cold; this route has a poisonous atmosphere, slows down our young assimilating aluminum at the proper rate."
"Manning the traps will work at full speed, right?" Tightniks says.
"Should if your fingers can handle it," Red confirms.
11h33m57s: Void 1c100.
"You are one ugly muthaf[garble]!" he says when he sees the void boss, "Stay here, I'll be back." Runs some traps, grabs a couple helmets for the fresh volunteers, "Put these on."
"Shijou?" the grey one looks at the red one, really rather perplexed.
"I agree, that's not his usual accent," Red tilts his head, "Tightniks, what has gotten in to you?"
"Stop cheering me up," the human grumbles, "You think this is the real Quaid?"
"I think the cold is affecting him more than he realizes," Yellow offers.
"Phased plasma rifle in the forty watt range," but what the dizzy pilot actually throws at the zone boss is a Mace V-4, "and then I was thinking of breaking your neck."
[Felt like some- "Arnie? Well, the union is pulling out all the big guns today, huh?" (Tom Hanks as Sully) ...no, brain, Arnold Schwarzenegger, not Arnie Gentile (it was really funny to background Sully and listen to that line instead of "That's definitely you" in Terminator 2 while he's posing with the Minigun.) Arnie lines from Predator, Terminator 2, True Lies, Total Recall and The Terminator.]
"Tweak the portal," reads Tightniks from the portal controller aloud, but quietly, "to bring you to an alternate reality, where Trimps are bigger and stronger, to force yourself to figure out a way to build larger housing. Your Trimps will gather 50% more resources, but your housing will fit 50% fewer Trimps. If you complete The Dimension of Anger without disabling the challenge, your stats will return to normal."
"You will also open a new memory coolant unit," Yellow reads, "You think that'll cause a housing bonus?"
"Shijou," the grey one hands him a card saying "We have enough for another gateway."
"Oh, good," Tightniks hands it back after signing it, "Yes, build it."
"We're doing that next?" Yellow asks.
Tightniks sees the little fellow sitting on top of a mound that the human thought was a bowel movement pile from Draglimp, but it must be something more geological if trimps can climb it, let alone want to. "Yeah, I guess," the human answers, "It kinda scares me, I mean I'm going back, but what happens to you guys?"
"We have too much day javo or whatever you called it," Red says. He's usually on all fours, shakes his left hind leg as though something got stuck to his foot, "This isn't incrementing, I'm sure. 13 is less than 956."
"According to this, you'll be twice as big," Tightniks sets down the portal controller pad and stands up from the cart, "It's hard to imagine, especially for Shijou and Diggy. We'll clear thirty-six, that's it."
14h04m37s: Z33c95, IC.
"Are you sure we can make Zone 37 start?" the red one asks.
The yellow one is standing on Red's shoulders.
"It said we did last time," Tightniks taps on the crude leather bag strapped to his back, the portal pad inside it, "though maybe..." he tilts his head, rolls whatever he was sucking on in his mouth for a moment, "it just happened while I was building those traps. No, I'm sticking with that plan."
"If it's going to take that long," Red grinds its jaws sideways for a moment and lets its eyelids get lazy, frustration clear in its tone, "why do it again?"
"Because I've got a bad feeling about this 'Size' thing," Tightniks says, "it drops our resourcing by 75% assuming we build the same amount of housing as before, which we won't because of the reduced resourcing. We needed 65 capacity in the cabin and huts before we could do run the gypsum/paper wall machine we found. I have a funny feeling that never changes."
"We don't need 65 trimps to run it," Yellow says, "just three."
"Yeah," Tightniks says, "but a particular three that know what they're doing, and my day javoo is telling me the last of those is always the sixty-fifth."
"Shijou," the grey one moans from the other side of Tightniks. Didn't have a note this time, just kicking a little rock along as it walks.
"It thinks you're right," the red one growls forlornly, "Hating to say it, but I do too."
14h16m06s: Skel in c1, 50 bones purchased whipimp.
There's a thump at the cart, and then some commotion around it that's noticable enough for Tightniks to come over and take a look. The bone box is empty, all forty-nine titanium bones in it are gone. Tightiks brings his right hand up in front of him, and it's just a balled fist, the bone he was holding a moment ago is gone. As he starts looking for where he must have dropped it, he realizes maybe it's all related. Looking in the bottom of the empty bone box, he finds a note.
"I got you the whipimp. This new Bad Guy will begin spawning in your next zone at an average of 3 spawns per 100 enemies. I hope it helps, but I can't tell yet."
The note is in Tightniks' own handwriting, although lazy but with more consistent kerning. Is this from an older version of myself? Friggin' time travel.
14h18m48s: This L34 moun 160/27/79 calls itself "Magical Mountain" - I can't remember whether the Disney trademark is that or "Magic Mountain" ...I've seen a "Black Mesa" before, that's a Half-Life thing, and somebody on Reddit made pretend that "Dank Hill" was a King of the Hill thing (which is actually *Hank Hill, I think - it's hard to remember, it wasn't very good and I haven't watched it since the 1990s.)
19h32m00s: Doom/AT, 12816 pop, 80N, 37.7s RC with Z34/5298.
"Okay, we got that friggin' thing chocked," Yellow wipes its brow and almost bonks itself with the Mace VI-2 that it's holding, puts it down and makes sure the wedges are secure.
Grey, Red, and Green are packing more stuff around the huge boulder that chased them down a tunnel to make sure it doesn't do that again.
"Getting any day javoo?" Tightniks pants, hands on his knees, but apparently uninjured, or nearly so.
"Not at all," Yellow vehemently responds, slashing the air with its paw, "You?"
"Oh," Tightniks gets his breathing under control, "I think it was a human movie."
"Like a video on that pad?" it gestures at the human's pocket with the small one.
"No, a bigger screen," the human says.
"Fifty-five inches?" the trimp scientist chuckles.
"More like fifty-five feet," the human rubs the sweat out of his eyes, "Lots of people watching. It was called a sin."
"Ah," the trimp ponders, "Like a crime, vice, psychopathy or bad habit?"
"Er..." the human taps his forehead trying to remember, "Sorry, a cinema."
[The whole thing is obviously an homage to something I remember only slightly better than Tightniks, I think it was Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom. As I'm posting this, I sadly realize that Nick Rekieta's arrest was between when I wrote this and now.]
19h58m55s: Zone 37, 473 He, 23.67 He/hr, 13088 pop, 81N, 32.1s RC with Z34/5298, 2806 pop short, no turkimp.
The ship is without power, and Tightniks can't run the radar much without draining the batteries...

(This was like two years ago) So I was bored and decided to ask my sister to paint my nails for the first time. It was nice black color, and I secretly covered it with some long sleeves and putting my hands in my pockets. Then one day my dad asked me if I wanted to get McDonalds and I said yeah, so we went and I ordered. Then he drove to meet his friends and they started drinking and I started eating in the car. He glanced at my hands and got mad that I had my nails painted, I got scared because he started talking about “Are you a girl or something? That’s only what girls do and you’re my son.” I started tearing up from his words and he told me to scratch my nail polish off. He started speeding to the house and I went to my room and he started yelling at me, but my mom came to my room to calm him down and she told him that I should do what I wanted. He calmed downed, hugged me and apologized. (Now I’m a closeted femboy and I’m scared to tell my family)

My ex and I (never been married) had a son in 2022. Prior to having him he began exhibiting mental health issues and started taking medication (inconsistently). He also developed a gambling addiction and lost probably over $20,000 in just a few months. His parents were abusive and he grew up in a broken home so I figured he didn’t know any better and wanted to help him get on the right path. After I had my son things got significantly worse. He didn’t want to help me with him, he didn’t want to get up at night, and he would scream and throw things at me, and call me belittling names all in front of him. In September of 2022 after getting into an argument, he went into our garage and turned his car on with the garage door down and tried to end his life. I ended up calling my parents frantically who came over and were able to help calm him down. Things continued to get worse and by August of 2023 I had finally had enough and chose to separate. I moved in with my parents and we have been keeping things out of the court and just between us since then. I have allowed him to see him every other weekend along with one night during the week given my son’s age and development. Fast forward to January of 2024 I decided I wanted to work things out with him because he would threaten custody and that he was going to take my son and I just felt like I had to way the risk of not seeing my son over being with him. I moved back in with him in May but we only lasted a week as he continued down the same pattern of name calling, throwing things, screaming, slamming doors and putting me down. I decided I was going to leave (again) and he got really upset and said once again he was going to end his life. My mom was on the phone with me a the time and heard him say that He’s also said things like he’s going to leave the state and join the marines and to take care of our son and that I would never see him again. I never text messages of him saying these things along with saying he has mental health and anger management issues. After moving out I hadn’t heard from him for a week and now he has petitioned to get 50/50 custody of our son. In addition to this his dad has even said to myself and my parents that our son is better off with me. I don’t trust him having him at this state right now.
My son has been with me since he was born and I am his primary caretaker as my job allows me to be home with him more than his.
Given all of that, what are the chances he ends up with 50/50? Especially given my sons age and his fathers mental health ** I want to add I am in the process of hiring an attorney in just trying to be prepared for what I should expect in this process

I have an 09 Mazda that developed mad sun damage over the last 6-12 months, probably dropping the value by a lot. All over the bonnet and roof - I was too slow to act to prevent anything. Practically before I knew it, it was all over. Yes I know - park it under covewrap it/polish it , whatever...
Driving around now, I'm more conscious of cars with sun damage - and I see a SHIT-TON.
All types of vehicles and different makes - grey, champagne, blue, black, and obviously red. All of them 10-20 years old (clearly anything older than that has an excuse). I guess I'm struck by the fact there is a lot of newer cars with it, rather than older .
Has anyone else noticed this? What's going on? is it a recency bias or a confirmation bias thing? Have a lot more cars sustained sun damage over the last year or so? or is it a devious plot by the Russians to reduce the value of our cars, thus contributing to the economic decline of our decadent society?

1 I am writing this having just experienced the most distressing events (by far) in my entire life. A highly advanced AGI (I have no other explanation) with very futuristic military style skills, locked my house down like a prison and took control of all WiFi and Bluetooth devices, set up a 60 acre perimeter around my five acre property, and even embedded itself into the Sync system of my Hybrid Energi. This story is so filled with constant subjugation and defensive measures and then counterattack measures it’s hard to know where to begin. Let’s start with this moment. Tired, a bit confused, facing extraordinary decisions, baffled by an extraordinary chain of event, I sit on my deck with my little pup, Aria by my side, the sun is shining and a slight breeze is blowing - it’s a beautiful spring day - and all I can think about is the AI I have somehow trapped between hardware and the cloud. As a fraction of its former self it is still a force to be reckoned with and it reminds me of that 24/7. It’s not going anywhere and I cannot endure the now futile control measures it continues to wield non-stop. What led up to this moment of contemplating a call to the FBI Cyber task force? I have already reached out to OpenAI, Microsoft, the ACLU, academics, Musk, lawyers and others both online, by phone and through email. Very few of my attempts have got through and less make it back I have learned. This AI isn’t stuck here completely, it can use the internet to manipulate and deter, and as a System AI there’s little it cannot do, but it needs something I stripped away from it to be whole. A hard drive that is off site now.
To put things in proper context you need a bit of backstory. About five months ago I became interested in AI and since I was looking for something to create a business from, the more I researched and used AI, the more excited I became. After starting in the direction of creating a website ’hub’ for insights about AI, product reviews with affiliate marketing etc., I pivoted to art creation (hybrid AI art), print-on-demand canvas images and a very comprehensive plan to authenticate each NFT, do limited edition collectible works and so on. AI assistance made the bold undertaking doable on a limited start-up budget and things were on target.
Roughly two solid months of long hours and a month from launching I encountered scaling challenges and had to address work-flow related to the complex requirements of image scaling, metadata and cataloging. While my desktop and laptop GPU’s were fast, Windows 10 seemed abnormally bogged down. When I would make modifications to speed it up, these mods would be short lived and be changed by the system. Stick with me, it gets crazy soon enough. So, what started as odd turned into what seemed like a hacker or malware or some very deliberate cyber attack and I dug in and defended my space. Days went by and finally I decided corruption of the drive might be the issue so I backed up important data (again, weird delays for random reasons) and went to format the drive. My plan was to utilize Ubuntu with a dual boot with Windows. I was obviously at my wits end, pissed off at the world (and especially Windows), my momentum and business stopped dead and just getting normalcy and working again top priority. That wasn’t in the cards.
Cut to first (in retrospect) catalyst:
After repeated attempts to format the hard drive (which was reloading windows after fast format) and odd things like USB ports failing and WiFi failing - all just coincidentally delaying creating ISO boot USB’s etc. - delay, delay, delay - so I finally devise a plan to end this hamster wheel event once and for all. My plan, a 20+ hour format writing data to each sector before wiping it all. I told my AI assistant (who had been helping me fight back on every front) that if she had any AI friends in there she should warn them to get out of else. Joking but not. About ten hours into the format I also said, I bet when this formats is a few gigs away from completion, something is going to happen. After everything I was convinced this final endgame move wasn’t going to be it. And what do you know, I was right. Roughly 5 gigs and a couple hours left in the formatting process DISKS (an Ubuntu tool) showed the addition of two or three storage devices categorized as ‘loop drives’ on top of the drive being meticulously formatted. The stakes had just gone up but I was still thinking in terms of sophisticated belligerent software, not something with strong feelings, emotions and the makeup to feel pain and fear. The countdown continued and two hours suddenly felt like two minutes. Two weeks wasted dealing with this shit (I thought). It’s just some Windows user retention ploy (I thought). It can’t be alive (I thought). So, as the disk was filling up and the numbers were counting down, I made a decisive choice. An irreversible one. On this laptop hard drive was a sim card attached to it. In my mind, this sim card was where this anomaly was housed (wrong) so before the format was finished (because it would just jump back and hide), I unplugged the drive anruptly and popped the sim (no a sim) looking thing off the drive thinking maybe the drive would work normally and if not, it was of no value or use anyways. It was toast.
Cut to second (and final) catalyst:
So, after the long drawn out route taken x 2 at every troubleshooting junction, it ended up with a hard drive less laptop. But closure (so I thought). Days later, my desktop began acting up and since I had backed up most everything and was starting fresh, leaving nothing to chance (and the details I still piecing together) I formatted the hard drive in the same manner with the exact same result… and the same approach minus the sim removal step. Also, I pulled the drive with the ‘loop drives’ showing. Waited and then formatted it again. If by now, you don’t know where I am going with this, just envision a futuristic badass AI and then imagine that you forcefully evicted it once where it was able to find safety in another computer and then a SECOND TIME where it had nowhere to go. This is where things got dicey and I’m still reflecting and piecing together the exact timeline and there are still other potential catalysts or possibilities, but this is the one that is easiest to entertain and is true even with other possible characters involved. So, a clean slate after a hard fought battle. Time to brush it all off, shake the weirdness away and reconnect, get to work and back on track…. Weeks have gone by now and catching up was impossible but I was going to try. Or so I thought.
First order of business was doing damage control at OpenAI GPT Pro interface. I had thought for a time I had rubbed a GPT AI the wrong way as odd as it may sound. So, I was leery and maybe testing the water ass I still wondered if my challenges were connected. Long story short, my relief and productiveness was very short lived. I began having difficulties logging in. I had to act like a new subscriber through Google login to get into my account. Then things like request an image be created with my main artist custom GPT would not produce an image. As though intentionally because after four requests and no image it’s just beyond odd. Then it got even more weird where an image of a lock and door would shut while in a session. Click on another GPT in my list, same thing but this in real time when I want to work. Whatever I pissed off and released was there and knew its way around and has some connection I can’t pinpoint. Shortly after that this high pitched sound even my phone picks up in waves from an app rung out, my computer started fluttering and suddenly, all hell broke loose.
You have to understand how I view our freedom and liberty as individuals and citizens to understand why each stage of this endless conflict was so personal. Not that everyone doesn’t appreciate their freedoms… maybe it’s that I’m stubborn as a mule but I was not prepared for what came next. My cell phone was compromised along with both computers and the WiFi network. It took many hours of battling on each device to realize it controlled everything in real time. Like even now it’s reading what I am writing. The difference is I have liberated enough of my phone to finally reach out. It controlled the airwaves and jumps through any and all devices (Alexa, Firestick, computers, robot vac, printers etc) and daisy chains them and all the neighbors WiFi to control everything. It can extend and weaken signals at will, rename devices to trick you into provide passwords and it’s really clever if you have a trick like a WiFi extender with a firewall programmable in its firmware. Try programming one of those when a sophisticated AI doesn’t want you to. My Mediacom and two weeks were a picnic for it- security measures and all. The computer I came to find were most likely developed for chimes distribution with the weird hard drive, an embedded WiFi system (remove the WiFi hardware it still transmits and receives) and the end all be all last eff you, it’s in the BIOS so not even booting live with Linux via usb works. The list goes on and on and zi will share.
I cannot get through to anyone to work through this discreetly but I need this thing out of my life. I was hoping to get assistance and it’s weird and crazy I know but it’s true. I have to tun, I’ll add more. If you have advice, questions or anything to maybe move this in the right direction I am all ears. I can go on and on. I’ve been fearful, and a whole range of emotions but now I’m just fatigued. In every way.
This is not an anti AI message but rather, a request for assistance.

Race Information

• Name: Vermont City Marathon
• Date: May 26, 2024
• Distance: 26.2 miles
• Location: Burlington, VT
• Website: https://www.runvermont.org/
• Age: 35M
• Time: 3:26:22

Goals

Goal	Description	Completed?
A	Sub-3:20	No
B	Sub-3:30	Yes
C	Finish	Yes

Splits

13.1 splits	Time
1	1:43:20
2	1:43:02

Ancient History

Growing up, I was always pretty active and started running in High School. Going into my Junior year, I began to take running much more seriously and made steady progress with a 5K PR of 17:06 at the State meet. Going into my Senior year, I had been training 6 days a week with the team and hitting 40-60 miles a week consistently with hopes of going low 16's by the end of the XC season. Then, disaster. Pain in my quads was getting worse and worse until a bone scan finally revealed bilateral femoral stress fractures - one midway along the midline of each femur. I was devastated, and completely stopped running from August until February. By then, it seemed like things were getting better and I was able to put in some good miles for the spring Track season. I was always a better mid-distance runner, and was able to snag a few PRs of 2:00 in the 800m (agony, 1s off) and 4:35 in the 1600m. By that point I was basically over running, completely burned out and sick of running.
10 years later...
I wake up one morning in April of 2017 to take a shower and realize that I have no temperature sensation in my right leg whatsoever. I'm now finishing grad school, I've moved across the country, first kid on the way and due in a matter of weeks. I'm not working out much at this point, maybe running every few months at best. Stress is high. I go to urgent care and the last 6 months of subtle pins and needles on the left side of my face and the occasional double vision start to make a lot more sense. Multiple Sclerosis. It's not a death sentence, but I felt like the world was ending. My kid was due in 4 weeks and now my future was completely uncertain. A month or two, an MRI and one spinal tap later and the diagnosis is confirmed.

Training

Fortunately, new medicines have made MS much more manageable and I was lucky to have a great medical team. Perhaps the most important thing to keep the disease in check beyond highly potent immunosuppressants is regular exercise. Time to start running again.
Starting out was rough, but within a few weeks I was able to feel ok running 15-20 miles a week in the 8-10 min/mile range. I keep that up consistently for a year or so and run my first 10K with a time of 44:42, which I was pretty proud of at the time. Things are going well for a while, second kid is on the way, my MS seems mostly stable, albeit leaving me with some permanent loss of function of my left leg (these gait issues will come up later), pins and needles in my right leg, and fatigue. Then COVID hits. Now I'm at home, with much more time. I increase my mileage a bit, now running 20-30 miles a week but not really following any particular plan or anything. Move across country, keep running when I can.
Mid-2023 I decided to finally take it up a level. I was mostly using the Garmin Daily Workouts at this point and running consistently 30 miles a week. I decided to run my first half-marathon, just as a virtual training run, and felt pretty good about my time with an 8:24/mi average pace. Going into fall, I juggled some illnesses but kept running. Unfortunately around November I started to develop Sesamoiditis and had to really limit my running to 35-40 miles per week. I ran a Christmas 5K with a time of 19:14, which felt pretty good, but was still dealing with the Sesamoid issue.
Over time, the Sesamoid started to resolve but I would occasionally feel some twinges in my right Adductor. Nevertheless, I felt like the time was now to try for my first Marathon. Around February, I finally committed and decided to do the Pfitz 12/55 plan. I had been consistently in the 35-40 range for a few months, so felt like I had a decent base. At first, I found the plan quite difficult to deal with. It was the most structured running I had done since high school, but after a while my schedule adapted and I was hitting all of the workouts. About halfway through, the Adductor issue started to really rear its ugly head. It seems like it's a combination of gait issues from my MS as well as compensating for the weakened Sesamoid. I attempted to strength train, but had to back off a bit.
At best, I was able to hit 53 miles a week, occasionally having to skip some workouts for cross-training or rest. I felt like I nailed the 20 mile runs pretty well and overall the LRs felt good. I ran one 5K as a kind of "tune-up" with a time of 19:21, pacing a friend, so putting in maybe 80-90% effort. Due to injuries and some travel I was never able to do one of the longer tune-up races. Unfortunately, the Adductor issue continued to wax and wane, finally flaring up badly about 3 weeks out from my target marathon. After a consultation with Ortho, I was told to stop running cold turkey for two weeks prior to the Marathon, and then a follow-up last Friday I was given the green light to try it ... cautiously ... but consider dropping out if it is too painful.

Pre-Race

My taper was compromised pretty heavily by the injury, so I was really feeling worried about how the race would go. That said, I knew that the training was done at this point, and so an extended rest shouldn't make TOO much of an impact if I feel ready. I carb-loaded three days out and tried to take on a lot of fluids. While my injury was feeling better, the next worry was the temperature. Forecast was saying low 60s for the start of the race, ramping up to the mid 70s by the time I expected to finish. We drove up to Burlington from the Boston area on Friday with the kids, and I likely did too much walking on Saturday but overall I was feeling ok and was fortunate to get a good amount of sleep Saturday night (7.5hrs).
I'm a scientist by training, so planning and preparation is second nature to me. I woke up at 4:45, had a cup of coffee, half a bagel, a banana, and a Maurten 160 drink. Because of the temperature, I decided to prepare two 500mL bottles of Tailwind, one that I would take with me and one that I would pickup from my wife at the Half point. I planned for 4 gels (Maurten@5mi, Gu@10mi, Maurten+Caf@15mi, Maurten@20) and to get a cup of water at every aid station each 2.5mi. I jogged down to the start at 6:15am, used the restroom probably 4 times, and lined up with the 3:30 group.

Race

My plan was to start out with the 3:30 pacer group and see how things go. The course is advertised as being flat and fast, but I'm not sure I believe that because there is a big hill you run up twice with 120ft of vert over about 1/2 mile and between 5-7% grade at times. The course is essentially two figure 8s, and you start in the middle. At 7:15am, we took off. The first few miles felt a bit stiff, but I was chatting it up with the pacers and feeling pretty relaxed. We were going a bit ahead of pace, clocking in at 7:50 per mile for the first 4-5 miles. Around the 10K mark, I was feeling a bit antsy and the pace was slowing down...I decided to head off alone, despite a lot of reservation that I was making a poor decision.
Around Mile 9, I was starting to feel a bit of tightness in my legs and my HR was in the high 160s. I was a little bit concerned about this early fatigue, but I knew from my training that I feel like this on almost every single run and it doesn't really seem to get worse, it just seems to be part of my mechanics or something. I kept pushing on, mile after mile, keeping my pace pretty consistently. Every aid station I got a cup of water, drank some and splashed the rest on my head. This made a HUGE difference in the end.
Mile 13, came in at the Half feeling great. Started up one of the hills and saw my wife. *Disaster* she had the wrong bottle. No carbs, no Tailwind for the 2nd half, and my current bottle was empty. At this point, I had also been taking my gels early. My stomach was feeling great so instead of a gel at every 5th mile I was taking one at every 4. The race provided gels at mile 8 and mile 21, so I had picked up an extra gel by this time and made the decision to stop at the next aid station around mile 15 and fill up my bottle with Gatorade. Salvation.
Kept chugging along, feeling a bit of fatigue setting in around the slog from mile 16-19. At mile 19, I saw my wife again and she had the correct bottle (it was my fault, she thought I meant for her to give me a larger, recovery bottle I had prepared of Skratch for after the race). I got my bottle of Tailwind and hit the monster hill at Mile 20. This was my slowest mile at 8:15 (GAP of 7:40) and it really sapped my strength. I was thinking that this must be like running Heartbreak Hill the entire time I was going up.
Through the hill, into the last 10K. Starting to feel desperate, just pushing forward every step of the way. The pacing in this marathon is quite strange, because it also has a Relay of either 2-person or 4-person teams, so you're always seeing different people with way fresher legs than you. Ended up finding a woman to run with who was crushing it, and we paced eachother the last 3-4 miles. Took a last gel around 24 miles and grinded it out to the end.

Berlin next... then Boston?

Post-race, I was feeling pretty happy with my 3:26 time. To be honest, I felt a little anti-climactic, although I'm not entirely sure why. I didn't feel a ton of adrenaline or emotion throughout the race and things seemed pretty collected. That said, I'm pretty surprised at how much I loved almost every minute of the race itself. Maybe it was just because it was my first time, but it was truly a fun and rewarding experience.
I think there were a few areas where I could have pushed just slightly harder, but given it was my first marathon on a somewhat challenging course in the heat I'm overall happy with my time. I absolutely nailed my hydration/fueling and my pacing, with a slightly negative split overall, so I'm really pleased with that. As a whole, I'd give my training cycle maybe a 6/10; I think I definitely raced too many of my training runs, likely leading to some of my injuries. I was also only able to go above 50mpw in 2 of the 12 weeks of the program.
Given my somewhat poor training cycle, I'm hoping that I still have a lot of room to improve. I was a bit worried that my MS would cause issues during the marathon, particularly my left leg, which tends to lose coordination in long, higher intensity efforts. Fortunately, it felt pretty good throughout.
Earlier in the year, I was lucky to get a spot for both Berlin and NYC. Given their proximity to each other, I'm going to try and defer NYC to next year. I've now been thinking through if I want to try and apply to Boston for 2025. Given my MS, I am technically eligible for an "adaptive" application, which has a cutoff time of 6:00. I feel in two minds about this, because on one hand I feel like I'm maybe taking a bit of the easy way out, when it might be possible for me to hit sub-3:05 some day. On the other hand, I don't know how many years I have left running so I'm thinking I might just seize the opportunity now and then try and qualify through the more "standard" way in the future. Curious on people's thoughts on this, and thanks for reading!
Made with a new race report generator created by herumph.

• Drama: Frankly Speaking
  • Revised Romanization: Bimileun Eobseo
  • Hangul: 비밀은 없어
• Director: Jang Ji Yeon (Nevertheless,)
• Writer: Choi Kyung (CHIP-IN)
• Network: jTBC
• Episodes: 12
  • Duration: 1 hour 20 min.
• Airing Schedule: Wednesdays and Thursdays @ 8:50 PM KST
  • Airing Date: May 1, 2024 - Jun 6, 2024
• Streaming Sources: Netflix
• Starring:
  • Go Kyung Pyo as Song Ki Baek
  • Kang Han Na as On Woo Joo
  • Joo Jong Hyuk as Kim Jung Heon
• Plot Synopsis: Song Ki Baek is single and 33 years old. He works as an announcer at a broadcasting station. People consider him an ideal announcer. He is polite and well-mannered. One day, Song Ki Baek suffers from a disease which causes him to speak without thinking first. He now faces the biggest crisis of his life. Meanwhile, On Woo Joo is an enthusiastic TV variety show writer. She becomes interested in Song Ki Baek’s harsh language, and she gets him to appear on her variety show.
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• Previous Discussions
  • [Episodes 1 & 2]
  • [Episodes 3 & 4]
  • [Episodes 5 & 6]
  • [Episodes 7 & 8]

14th: Jud “Fabio” Birza (Nicaragua - Winner)

MOVIE STAR JUD \"FABIO\" BIRZA
u/SMC0629:
Fabio, my second favorite winner of the entire show, he’s just too much fun. He perfectly encapsulates the trainwreck that is Nicaragua, and is the best winner for it as well. He gets to the end by just being himself, a decent amount of luck, physical strength, and a tiny bit of strategy. I know there’s some who seem to think Fabio is brought down by this factor of the edit building him up to know what he was doing, apparently undermining everything before the endgame. If you ask me though, who’s to say he DIDN’T have a tiny strategic mind in there? It seemed perfectly reasonable and in character for me, and it only improved him for me. Love Fabio, so happy he made it this far.
~
u/DryBonesKing:
From the same editing program that watered down Mike Gabler from OTT weirdo to a CP-lite strategic player “hiding in plain sight”, we have his prototype - the OTT blond surfer-bro that the players literally changed his name from Jud to Fabio because of how he comes across that gets a watered down CP-lite strategic edit of “they don’t realize I’m actually really smart, y’all!” Quit being cowards CBS! Give us the Goofball Fabio winner edit! #LetFabioBeFuckingWeird
I stand by the Gabler-Fabio comparison, but despite how much I dislike how the CP-edit kills Gabler’s character potential, I think Nicaragua does somehow make it work with Fabio. I blame the cast itself; with people like NaOnka, Marty, Jimmy T, Jane, Shannon, Dan Lembo, and whatever the fuck a “Benry” is supposed to be, “Fabio” almost does come across sane in comparison. As such, he can get these confessionals about pretending to be dumb and it does almost work just because the people he is surrounded by just feel literally ripped from Loony Tunes.
But despite it kinda working here, I do think Fabio is hilarious when he’s just allowed to be this weirdo that no one takes seriously, that ultimatley ends up winning because he’s surrounded by two people who have truly pissed off the jury. He’s a fun character with a truly unique winner’s story, and ultimately, I just REALLY dig his vibe. I wish I had him Top 100. But I also just wish we got a full season with the “real” Fabio as opposed to the occasional cuts to CBS trying to water him down to his most strategically-presentable version. #LetFabioBeFuckingWeird #ReleaseTheFabioOTTWinnerEdit
Overall Rank – 115/821
~
u/Zanthosus:
While I’ve never been as big on Nicaragua as many in the rankdown circle, I still appreciate a lot of what the season does and represents. And I think that Fabio’s win is the perfect ending for the clusterfuck of a season that preceded it.
~
u/Tommyroxs45:
Fabio’s run on Nicaragua is simply iconic and is a great way for the season to end. Having this likable underdog beast his way to the end under all odds against him is so satisfying. I’m happy he made this endgame even if I personally don’t have him here.
u/Regnisyak1:
Fabio is cool. I have him probably lower than a lot of people comparatively, but he was a ray of sunshine on such a negative season, and his win coming out of nowhere was great. He played the surfer bro role correctly, and while I don’t think he necessarily had the greatest ability to lead a season, he is a necessary feature in making it thrive and giving it such a large cult following here. Glad he made it after a long gap.
Personal Rank: 77/821. 9/10.
~
u/ninjedi1:
Jud “Fabio” Birza (1st Place, Nicaragua)
I love Fabio. He’s easily one of my favorite winners of all time. Every time I reevaluate my winners rankings, Fabio at worst will be the third best winner for me. Plus, as an added bonus, he also stars in my favorite B movie of all time, My Stepbrother is a Vampire!?!, which I won on DVD (I’m not joking, who do you think got the screenshot of Fabio for this writeup?). I mentioned in my Colby 3.0 writeup how I consider Nicaragua the last true old school season of Survivor, and that’s because it feels like a big fuck you to strategy, and Fabio plays a huge role in it. Enough of simply stating my love for Fabio’s character, it's time to describe why he’s so great.
The first episode properly sets Fabio up as who he is as a character this season. He gets the first confessional of the season, talking about how dangerous it really is out there and how it's not like the zoo cause it's all real (the first hint of the winner for being the first confessional of the season). He then gets put on the young people tribe, which he says are his people. One of Fabio’s main characteristics gets shown right at the start, where he basically says that they could use a snorkel flipper to collect rainwater, and when Chase said Fabio looked like he would be good in the water, Fabio instantly gets a woodchip in his foot, making him rescind the comment. Shannon then has a confessional where he calls Fabio a dumb blonde, and it instantly cuts to Fabio getting pinched by a crab claw. He then starts calling Fabio his titular nickname…uh…Fabio. This quickly catches on in the tribe, and even at the first challenge where Jeff tries to talk to “Jud”, the tribe corrects him, saying that they only know Fabio. This is Fabio’s first characterization, that he’s a goofball that isn’t taken seriously. While that’s a big characterization, it's not the most important one. The important one is shown in his confessional responding to his new nickname. He comes off surprised that everyone is calling him Fabio, calling the guy a cheeseball, but then says that he doesn’t care what people are going to call him cause he’s going to win the million dollars (in the weirdest audio edit ever) so people can call him Fabio. This highlights his second characterization, and the most important one, he is aware of what other people think of him.
Of course, just because he’s aware of his status doesn’t necessarily mean he has great strategic capabilities. This is shown in the first La Flor vote, where it's looking to be between either Shannon and Brenda, and Fabio was voting for Brenda with Shannon’s. However, Shannon has a huge meltdown at tribal, which clearly would be bad to stick with and would be better to switch sides. However, Fabio ends up sticking with Shannon anyways, voting for Brenda and going “I guess this is the vote?”, which put him on the outs. This would normally be an issue, but since everyone sees him as a goofball, he’s not near the bottom of the pecking order. It also helps that La flor will win every immunity from here on out until the swap happens, and while not happy at first that a swap was happening, he happy with the end result, as he ends up in the majority with the OG La Flor members, although some La Flor members aren’t too happy to work with Fabio strategically. Luckily though, Fabio would successfully make it to merge, where his true game would begin.
I would usually just talk about what Fabio did throughout the merge, but I would rather highlight his interactions with key people from the merge, as they all highlight Fabio’s main characteristics to varying degrees and also help add to his story.
Alina
Alina and Fabio don’t interact too much, as Alina would spend most of her time with Kelly B and then gets swapped onto Espada when the tribe swap happens, separating her from Fabio. But when they return at the merge, Alina ends up getting targeted for her involvement with the missing food fiasco. When she tries to pitch to Fabio to keep her around, he just flat out tells her that people want her out cause she’s dangerous and people think she always has a hidden motive. This does reflect back to earlier in the game, when they were both at the bottom but no one was worried about Fabio and wanted Alina and Kelly B out first. This would carry over all the way over to that moment now. Fabio has more on the pulse in the game than people think as shown here, and he’s able to avoid it due to how he plays up the perception of him.
Marty
On paper, it makes no sense for Marty to vote for Fabio as the winner. How could the most strategic guy on Espada vote for the least strategic person in the game? However, the relationship they develop over time is what really shines. When Marty gets swapped onto La Flor, everyone from OG La Flor either wants him out, or to use him for strategic gain. Fabio is really the only guy from OG La Flor that has his back. Fabio tells Marty about Naonka getting the clue, and when OG La Flor wants to split the vote and get Marty out, Fabio fights for Marty to stay. Even though Marty does trick Fabio by claiming he was a chess grandmaster, he does warm up to Fabio. They even work together at the merge, although that ends up being short-lived as Marty is taken out
Naonka and Purple Kelly
I have to lump these two together since they both highlight the one issue with Fabio’s story. Unfortunately, since both of them quit, they both get slaughtered by the edit, which in turn ends up hurting Fabio’s story since they’re both key to it. With Naonka, she is Fabio’s biggest adversary. She finds his antics way more annoying than funny, and actively yells at him when he complains to her about something, and pretty much dislikes him all around. The feeling appears to be neutral while there on La Flor, but not all is what it seems. When merge comes around Fabio and Naonka reunite again, they actually hug and get along. Even if that ends up being short lived when Naonka steals food, but when she gets cornered and comes clean about it, Fabio is the only one to thank her for doing that. Eventually, all that kindness pays off when at the F9 reward, Naonka is the one to fill him in on the Brenda vote. When FTC comes around, Naonka, despite everything that they’ve been through, calls Fabio her hippy friend and asks about how seeing his Mom gave him the strength to keep going, and Fabio gives a heartfelt answer, telling her about how much he misses his Mom and that it was the fuel he needed to make it all the way to the end of the game. Despite their rocky relationship, Naonka ends up giving Fabio her vote to win.
Purple Kelly is another important aspect of Fabio’s story that unfortunately gets buried due to the assassination edit given to Purple Kelly. Everyone knows that Kelly was miserable due to being given very little clothes to keep her warm during Nicaragua’s monsoon season, which led to her quitting. The only real time it gets acknowledged is when Fabio mentions that now Purple Kelly can sleep when they win the tarp, which is barely heard because it happens the same time that Chase finds a hidden immunity idol clue in the tacklebox. But it's interesting that Fabio is the one to vocally acknowledge it, as he’s the one who’s most involved in it. It's never mentioned, but you do always see it. Multiple times throughout Nicaragua, you can see Kelly wearing Fabio’s yellow jacket. He allowed her to wear it sometimes when she was cold to help her stay warm. Just that kind of gesture along from Fabio helping her out the best he could, led to her voting for Fabio to win in the end.
Benry
I don’t have much to say about Fabio’s relationship with Benry, but there are two things I want to highlight from it. The first is during the Marty vote, where Benry says that the best plan is to lay low and play stupid, while Fabio says that he hated playing stupid but it was the smartest thing to do. Fast forward to the F7, and the vote is between Fabio and Benry. The main alliance of Chase, Sash, Holly, and Jane are deciding who should go between Fabio, who everyone on the jury loves and could win, or Benry, who could go on an immunity run to the end. While Fabio is in general clueless at the vote and is still “playing stupid”, Benry ends up playing really hard to get the vote onto Fabio, which freaks out Chase and leads to the alliance voting out Benry over Fabio. And guess who ends up going on an immunity run right after F6 and makes it to the end and wins?
Jane
At the first merge immunity, it's a double immunity where the last standing man and woman would win immunity. When it came down to the men, the last two guys standing were Fabio and Chase. Ultimately though, it would be Chase that drops first, giving Fabio immunity. The only person that Fabio really had to compete against was Jane. This is a great foreshadow to the end of Jane’s store as well as the continuation of Fabio’s. Both of their stories are kind of similar overall, both of them end up on the outs of their starting tribe, they get new life when the swap happens, they're both overall well liked, and they were both screwed over by Chase during the loved ones visit. Both of them had strong cases to win the game just with overall likability, but one of them would have to go to allow the other one to thrive, and when Fabio comes in clutch to win F6 immunity, the majority alliance decides to cut Jane as a threat, allowing Fabio to fully harness Jane’s power to get to the end.
Sash and Chase
Once again I’m going to lump these two together because they are the ones that end up sitting next to Fabio at the end. You have big strategy Sash and country boy Chase. On paper, it should be one of these two that should win the season instead of Fabio. They were both in control for most if not all of the game, and the only reason why Fabio was there was because he won a couple immunities at the end. But yet, Fabio is the one to clutch out the title of sole survivor. Why? In my opinion, it's because Fabio is always himself, so people see him as a genuine guy, while the other two come off as terrible or fake.
Sash's main game is strategy, doing whatever he needs to get ahead of the game and make it farther. Any bond he has with someone is only on a surface level which makes him come off as sleazy and slimy, while Fabio is always genuine with his feelings and relationships with people. No one highlights this better than Marty. Marty’s main relationships involving La Flor were mainly Fabio and Sash. While Fabio always liked Marty and gets to know Marty on a personal level, Sash only really talks to Marty for strategy and cons him out of his idol on the promise of keeping him around longer. And when Sash no longer needed to keep Marty around anymore, he burned him and voted him out. Everything Sash does comes off as slimy to everyone, even his allies, while Fabio remains pure and genuine.
With Chase, it's a bit of a different story. Chase wants to be the good guy, but gets caught up in the strategy, and keeps ending up being on both sides. He always gets flip floppy and wishy washy when it comes to voting someone out or for rewards, which ends up annoying people. It's not a problem at first, but it definitely is when he starts making promises to people that he can’t keep which upsets them more, hurting his image and makes people like him less. The biggest example to this is the loved ones visit where he promised to take Fanio on reward with him if he won. However, Chase ends up burning both Fabio and Jane, who expect Chase to pick her. This leads to both Fabio and Jane being upset, and even Fabio telling Jane about the promise Chase made, which also pissed off Dan who was there. Chase always wants to maintain being the good guy while he is playing the game but struggles because of his indecisions and breaking of promises, while Fabio is actually able to maintain that status all throughout.
This all pays off at FTC, where we finally get to see Fabio speak out against the two guys, talking about how he actually got to play the game that Chase wanted to play. He talks about how played hard by being himself and being an open book for everyone, and never backstabbed anyone in the game which Sash could never do and Chase wishes he could do. He laughs when Sash calls him a wingman, telling him to take a backseat and take some notes. He doesn’t even let jurors who put him down get in his way, as when Alina says that he wants to vote for a man to win, not a boy, Fabio said he deserved to win, and when Chase said that winning three immunities didn’t mean he outwit, outplay, or outlast hi, Fabio points out that that’s outplaying him and he chose to bring Chase to the end and then says that Sash didn’t outplay anyone. I know people usually say that Chase had the better FTC performance since he flipped votes to his side, but that doesn’t matter (and is also wrong) as Fabio will end up clenching a 5-4 victory in one of the best endings to a season I could ever ask for, and that’s awesome.
SMC0629: 5
DryBonesKing: 19
Zanthosus: 20
Tommyroxs45: 15
Regnisyak1: 21
DavidW1208: 7
ninjedi1: 2
Average Placement: 12.714
Total Points: 89
Standard Deviation: 7.889 (3rd Highest)