Female Age 22 5’2 about 125lbs
Hi! About three months ago I had the bright idea to start drinking energy drinks instead of coffee and started drinking one to sometimes two a day (the Celsius brand may I add, which I guess has been linked to multiple instances of heart issues in people who drink them). It eventually got to the point where I couldn’t even stomach finishing one of them and around the same time, I started experiencing heart palpitations ranging from 150-190 at random moments. I also wasn’t getting the best sleep during this time either. Sometimes it would be after curling my hair and other times it would be just sitting. This would usually happen once a week and I thought if I cut out caffeine for a while I would stop experiencing these heart palpitations. Around this time, I also started a new job and started to feel super stressed out about the job and right before giving a presentation I felt super anxious and noticed my heart rate went up but this time it felt like my head was going to explode and like I was holding onto dear life to not pass out. I decided it was best I go see a doctor to figure out what was going on. I went to urgent care and when they did a couple EKG’s on me and were going to test my thyroid levels to see if that’s what was causing the heart palpitations. Well, when they did the second EKG my heart rate went up to 226 and I was rushed to the ER. There I was told I had AFIB (prior to this I’ve never had any heart problems and only a couple of times after drinking a lot of caffeine I noticed I would have a higher heart rate but not as consistently as these were occurring). The following week I got an echo done and my cardiologist said my heart looked healthy and I could go back to doing normal things but limit my caffeine intake and was also prescribed beta blockers. I’ve had my heart rate go up a couple of times, once to 178 and 143. My question is, will my heart ever recover from this? I feel like I’m constantly living on the edge and want to go back to weight lifting etc but I’m afraid of my heart quite literally giving out on me.

East Lyme ― A staff member found a loaded handgun inside an infant’s diaper bag Friday morning at Ballestrini’s Child Care Center in Niantic.
She secured the loaded Smith & Wesson M&P 9MM handgun in a desk in the office and called the police and the child’s father, according to a police report and the child care center.
Town police who investigated the incident said it was not criminal in nature. The parents ― one of them a probation officer and the other a correction officer ― have permits to carry a handgun and said there was a mix-up with the bag brought to the center, according to the police report.
Andrea Ballestrini Rowe, director of Ballestrini’s Child Care Centers, said staff reacted quickly to make sure the children were safe. She said the bag never left possession of the parent or staff member and was locked in the office after being found.
“At no time was there a threat to the children in our care,” she said in a notification to parents. “Yes, we agree that the gun being in the program was a risk, but at no time was there a threat made against the program.”
Rowe said the center notified parents of the incident. She said the center would be checking all children’s bags on a daily basis, and the child’s enrollment was suspended. She added that the center also is reviewing its security protocols “and working closely with local authorities to ensure the continued safety of our program.”
According to the police report, a father dropped off his infant at the child care facility at 161 West Main St. in Niantic a little before 8 a.m. Friday with a pink backpack-style diaper bag. Police said the infant “was not physically capable of accessing the diaper bag.”
Police said a staff member, who was unpacking the bag, put the bag down and heard a “metallic thump” and thought it was a water bottle. The staff member checked and saw it was actually a firearm in a holster. The staff member then removed the gun and secured it in a desk in the office and called the infant’s father and the police.
The police officer, William Bergantino, who came to the child care center retrieved the firearm “and made it safe,” according to the report.
According to the police report, the mother of the child, who uses the bag and owns the firearm, came to the center. Both parents were apologetic and informed the police officer that “there was a mix-up which resulted in the wrong bag being dropped off at day care” with the infant. The firearm is registered to the mother and both parents have valid Connecticut pistol permits.
She told police the firearm was in a holster, loaded with a round in the chamber, and had the safety on.
According to the report, the father, who is employed as an adult probation officer, told police that he grabbed what he thought was an empty bag that morning, put the infant’s lunchbox in the bag, took the child to the center, and left for work. He returned to the center once a staff member notified him that a gun had been found in the bag and he called the infant’s mother to ask where her firearm was, and she said it was in the pink bag.
According to police report, the father detailed safety measures in place at home to ensure firearms are properly stored. Police said the parents were remorseful and said they both would ensure safe storage of firearms in the future.
According to the report, the mother, who works as a correction officer, told police that due to her recent work schedule she had been asleep when her husband dropped their child off at day care. She said she has been using the bag when she runs errands and placing the firearm in the bag for protection when she is out, as the holster she uses to carry the firearm does not always fit comfortably with certain outfits.
The mother said she had used the bag the evening before, and her husband unknowingly grabbed the bag with the firearm still inside, the report said.
Police referred the matter to the Department of Children and Families and did not file charges.
Jason Fargo, parent of another child in the class, said he was only notified of the incident on Sunday evening. He said he wanted more detailed information from the day care center sooner and went to the police to get a report. He said he is calling for the center to hold a “town hall” style meeting about the incident.
“My daughter was in there in the same room with a gun that they kept saying was secured,” he said. “But the legal gun owner was not in the room and it was holstered with a live round in the chamber, and it says it in the police report, that the officer had to make it safe and (the staff member) put the bag down and they heard a thud so the gun could have gone off.”
He said the parents are both state employees, and any other parent would have been charged.
According to the Office of Early Childhood, state regulations specify that no dangerous weapons or facsimile of a firearm are permitted on the premises of the child day care center or group day care center unless carried by a peace officer.
But East Lyme Police Chief Michael Finkelstein said there is no state law that makes this a criminal act. He said the police reviewed the incident and also reviewed it with the New London state’s attorney’s office, which agreed no criminal violation occurred based on existing information.
He said the parents’ professions played no role in the determination. He said both parents are legally allowed to possess firearms and, in this case, the child was so young, that there was no reasonable chance for a child to access the weapon.
However, Finkelstein said that after new gun violence prevention legislation signed Tuesday by Gov. Ned Lamont goes into effect, an incident like this could be looked at differently. Most portions of the newly signed law, which expands the state’s safe gun storage laws among other provisions, will be effective in October.
Finkelstein added that hopefully this incident is a reminder to people that storing firearms in a bag that could be mixed up and brought to a child’s school is a danger.
DCF, Office of Early Childcare
Ken Mysogland, bureau chief of external affairs at the state Department of Children and Families, confirmed a report was received after a weapon was located at the child care center.
"Information provided indicated that the center immediately responded, safeguarded the young children and contacted the authorities,“ he said in a statement. ”No further action is warranted in relation to the daycare's actions.“
“The Department is working in collaboration with local law enforcement to investigate the circumstances under which the weapon was brought to the daycare and to ensure the person(s) responsible for the child's care provide a safe environment for this child and any other household members" Mysogland added.
The Connecticut Office of Early Childcare, which licenses day care centers, issued a statement that the child care center followed proper protocols and no violation was found.
“OEC investigated this case and found that the operator acted responsibly upon becoming aware of a firearm on the premises, thus no regulatory violations were cited,” the agency said. “Program staff locked up the firearm and immediately called police and followed their policies by notifying parents of the incident per their emergency plans.”
Rowe said that this is not a situation the Ballestrini child care centers have faced before.
“I am proud of our team’s prompt and responsive actions to protect the children in our school and we are grateful that all are safe,” she said. “The safety of the children is our number one concern, it is important that families continue to feel safe.”
[email protected]

On May 6, 2021, Cai Xia, the former retired professor of the Central Party School, posted another video on Twitter on Thursday night, and wrote: "Absurd! There is such a video in the domestic WeChat group: Nanyang City Tourism Bureau, Henan Province learns from the party Shi You was innovative. He led the officials of his subordinate departments to simulate the Long March and experience the violent revolution firsthand. On the scene, knives and guns were danced wildly, the flames were ignited, and scuffles were fought. The CCP loves violence and blood, and uses terror to maintain its rule. Studying party history in this way is absurd but vivid, self-exposing the degenerate and atavistic nature of the current state of the party.”
Cai Xia of the Mad Woman of Doom, you are acting like a demon again!
Leaving aside whether this video was filmed for fun by the public for self-entertainment, or a video clip shot by a media person from the self-media, you have used it as so-called "evidence" to attack the Chinese government without any research, and to incite protests. China, anti-government; even if it is true as you said: "Study the history of the party to innovate, and lead the officials of the subordinate departments to simulate the Long March", I would like to ask: as a "democratic freedom" like you who kneels down and praises Western democracy and freedom without principle Fighters”, are the Chinese now not even qualified to review and restore history? Where is your so-called democracy and freedom?
Since you applied for a political refugee, in order to get a refugee green card, to smear, slander, spread rumors and slander China, the Chinese government has done everything possible!
scattered around:
The CCP uses the three pillars of "violent totalitarianism, lies and deception, and monopoly of resources" to maintain its rule. There are three ways for the CCP to collapse. One is to rely on external wars, the second is to rely on internal party reforms, and the third is to use the terror of the system to continuously create internal conflicts. Finally, under the pressure of high pressure, from top to bottom After being unable to bear it all, it collapsed from the inside.
Finally, Cai Xia emphasized, "What is the third point? Our domestic government has no money in finance. It wants to use digital currency and print money without anchors. China's de-Sinicization, large-scale unemployment, People’s hunger, and then China’s economy basically has all three carriages stalled, and it has been paralyzed for a long time, it does not function, and society is paralyzed.”
Support the United States to use more severe measures to sanction China.
Cai Xia, as a 68-year-old, should know the word "speak carefully". Looking at the many remarks you have made after you came to the United States recently, you are not shouting for democracy and freedom in China, and you are not a pioneer of democracy. ruling party.
The U.S. government grants refugee green cards to such ungrateful, shameless, dark-hearted people who have harmed China and the United States again. This is the greatest tragedy of the United States!

NR441/442/444 Community Health Nursing
Required Uniform Assignment: Care of Populations Guidelines
Purpose The purpose of this assignment is to provide an opportunity for students to work collaboratively while applying community health concepts and the nursing process to the care of a population.
Course outcomes: This assignment enables the student to meet the following course outcomes:
Provide comprehensive care with increasing autonomy to individuals, families, aggregates, and communities in a variety of health care settings based on theories and principles of nursing and related disciplines. (PO 1)
Integrate clinical judgment in professional decision making and implement the nursing process in the community health setting. (PO 4)
Communicate effectively with client populations and with other healthcare providers in managing the healthcare of individuals, families, aggregates, and communities. (PO 3)
Practice in established professional roles to provide cost‐effective, quality healthcare to consumers in structured and unstructured settings. (PO 7)
Demonstrate leadership skills and collaborate with consumers and other health care providers in direct care or delegation of responsibilities within all levels of healthcare. (PO 2)
Accept accountability for personal and professional development as part of the life‐long learning process. (PO 5)
Incorporate evidence‐based practice in the provision of professional nursing care to individuals, families, aggregates, and communities. (PO 8)
Due date: Your faculty member will inform you when this assignment is due. The Late Assignment Policy applies to this assignment.
Total points possible: 100 points Preparing the assignment Follow these guidelines when completing this assignment. Speak with your faculty member if you have questions.
Student teams of three to four persons will form either by faculty assignment or self‐selection.
The team will conduct a community assessment that includes a windshield survey.
The presentation will be no longer than 15 minutes in length, with an additional 5 minutes for answering questions from the audience.
Review the Healthy People Leading Health Indicators at: https://health.gov/healthypeople/objectives-and-data/leading-health-indicators
Ideas for obtaining additional demographic data include but are not limited to the following:
County health rankings at http://www.countyhealthrankings.org/
Census reports at https://www.census.gov/
Centers for Disease Control and Prevention vital signs at: https://www.cdc.gov/vitalsigns/topics.html
6) Include the following sections (detailed criteria listed below and in the Grading Rubric).
a. Community Assessment ‐ 25 points/25%
Provides a description of the community based on the findings from the team’s windshield survey.
Provides pictures or videos taken during the windshield survey clearly identifying windshield survey elements.
Discusses demographic data.
Discusses geographic data.
Uses data from databases, interviews, and the textbook to support the assessment.
Aggregate (Target) Population ‐ 10 points/10%
Identifies an aggregate population, based on age vulnerability, culture, or chronic disease, to develop a community health diagnosis, plan, interventions and evaluation.
Includes a thorough description of the aggregate population.
Aggregate population is based on three or more elements or risks that impose a negative impact on the health of the community, identified in the community assessment.
Identifies gatekeepers or key informants who will assist the community health nurse in gaining access to the population of interest.
Community Health Diagnoses ‐ 10 points/10%
Includes two community health diagnoses using the data from the community assessment.
Includes one wellness diagnosis.
Diagnoses are listed in the order of priority justified by the data findings and analysis.
The diagnoses consist of four components: the identification of the health problem or risk, the affected aggregate, the etiological statement, and the support for the diagnosis (Nies, 2019, p. 102).
Plan for Priority Diagnosis ‐ 10 points/10%
Includes a minimum of 1 short‐term and 1 long‐term goal for identified priority diagnosis.
Goals relate to the identified priority diagnosis.
Goals follow the SMART format: specific, measurable, attainable, realistic, and timed.
Explains how the plan allows for client involvement.
Explains how the plan advances the knowledge of members of the community.
e. Interventions for Priority Diagnosis ‐ 10 points/10%
Proposed interventions are specific to the identified priority diagnosis and assist in meeting the identified goals.
Proposed interventions are supported by scholarly, evidence based sources.
Identifies the level of prevention for proposed interventions.
Identifies the category and level of practice (community, systems, or individual/family) that best describes the proposed interventions from the Public Health Intervention Wheel (Nies, 2019, p. 14).
f. Evaluation for Priority Diagnosis – 10 points/10%
Discusses evaluation from the level of a client to the aggregate population.
Describes the measures that will be used to evaluate meeting the identified goals.
Evaluation plan establishes specific outcome criteria for evaluating the identified goals.
The evaluation plan includes specific elements to determine efficacy of interventions (how, who, when).
g. Community Resources – 15 points/15%
Identifies a minimum of two community partners or agencies that can serve as resources for carrying out the proposed interventions.
Includes an evidence-based rationale for why the community partner or agency is the ideal partner for the proposed interventions.
Identifies specific resources at the community partner or agency that can be used by the community or population.
Describes websites or other electronic sources that provide support for the proposed intervention.
h. APA Style and Presentation ‐ 10 points/10%
Maintains professionalism, including presence of all team members, adhering to the time limit, and using presentation software.
References are submitted with assignment.
Uses current APA format and is free of errors.
Grammar and mechanics are free of errors.
At least three (3) scholarly, primary sources from the last 5 years, excluding the textbook, are provided.
For writing assistance, visit the Writing

I’m new to this subreddit, and I’ve decided that this is the best place to vent my frustrations on a recent assignment incident at my high school.
At the end of my freshman year we had a presentation as our English final. This presentation would be based on a book from a selection our Teacher gave to us (I chose “All the Light We Cannot See” and was sorted into a random group of kids who also chose the same book). These kids all had good grades and one of them was actually a friend so this project seemed like it’d go fine.
I read the book and actually thought it was quite good (still looking forward to the Netflix miniseries releasing later this year). Anyway, none of my group-mates read the book. However, this was not the point where I began my descent into madness. Since I had actually read the book, I thought it’d be best for me to take the lead on the project.
To understand what happens next, I’ll explain what the project required us to do. We basically needed to come up with a “moral of the story” with this book. It would have to be something not obvious, that also is a good lesson for young adults. This lesson would need three examples of textual evidence from the story with a quote per textual evidence. The slideshow would also have: a works-cited, a book summary, and a points summary.
Because I had read the book, I was the only one who could actually come up with points (and so I did). We organized the work distribution so that we all had a part to do. I obviously couldn’t write all three points, so I told my teammates what to write and then did my own section.
I worked with my teammates on the last Saturday before finals week; then left them to finish it up as I went to Universal Studios on Sunday for a friend’s birthday (before you say that this is unfair because I only worked on one of the days, keep in mind that I actually made all the points and the summaries, I just didn’t write them out myself).
I came back from Universal Sunday night and decided to review the slideshow one last time before going to bed. It was horrendous. All of the work my teammates had done was just awful. The kid who wrote the first textual evidence was an idiot. He had just taken the information I gave him and regurgitated it back on the slide (to give reference, he wrote that the main character escapes the antagonist because she is “blind and a teenager”. What the fuck was he talking about. Even with context that doesn’t make sense). The textual evidence he had written also focused on this one detail in the scene that didn’t actually relate to our point. He didn’t know this because he didn’t read the fucking book. The real cherry on top was there was a grammatical error in the end of the paragraph, meaning he hadn’t reviewed his work on our ENGLISH FINAL. The quote he had written also happened to focus on that irrelevant detail, so that too was shit.
And that’s not the end of it. The second point was written by someone else (while being actual point), it didn’t follow directions and wasn’t specific. My teammates wrote that the character is underestimated because she is blind. Okay, good, when? My teammates hadn’t read the book like I said, so of course they couldn’t come up with a specific scene. Due to the fact that they hadn’t read the book, the individual who made the quote asked chatgbt to pull up a quote for them. The quote itself was meh, it didn’t support the scene well. It just described how the character was able to navigate the world while blind. I ended up checking the chapter that chatgbt said the quote was on, and guess what? The quote wasn’t even there! It doesn’t exist! The only other thing I think that happened here is chatgbt cited wrong and pulled a quote from a different chapter. However, that is still bad because we can’t know for sure if the quote was real or not.
The third point was good because it was written by me. I knew the story and it ended up not needing any edits for grammar or coherency. The quote for the third point was chosen by my teammates, and it was OK (that was one of the few things they did right).
The points summary by my teammates at the end was also pretty bad. The first two points in the end were actually misinformation. The girl wrote this had restated the original (already written incorrectly) points, and somehow made them WORSE.
The only thing I’d say that they did well was the works cited slide, but that’s really hard to fuck up.
I ended up editing all of their shit until 3:30 in the morning (I wake up at 7 so this is an issue).
The presentation the next day went fine and we ended up barely getting a 90%.
I confronted my teammates a few days later, saying that they deserved lower grades because none of them contributed enough. My whole point was saying that if you do work incorrectly, it’s not actually contributing to the whole thing (in example, if you bring dogshit to a potluck, you’re not helping the potluck because you brought something no one can eat).
My teammates took this information, processed it, and tossed it out the window. They all mutually agreed that their work was perfectly fine and fit the requirements completely. They said that my work was unneeded and it was better before because it was short and precise (my slides had more information than theirs). They needed up calling me a selfish bad sport who only wanted to do the whole thing himself. Like, what the fuck? I earned the whole grade we got, and cleaned up all their shit, this is how I’m recognized?
I understand this is a little thing and I should probably let it go, but I’m just so pissed that they’re convinced their work was right. I saved everyone’s grade and nobody cares because in their eyes, their grades never needed saving.
I thank you if you’ve read this far. This is where I ask you, the individual reading, am I the asshole here? Or are my teammates just fucking stupid.

When I was brand new to NovelAi I had no idea how 2048 tokens really looked as text. So for anyone looking at the tiers, trying to decide how many tokens they want for Clio with the new update, I've tokenized Part of The Great Gatsby by Scott Fitzgerald (public domain since 2021).
That way new users can more easily visualize what the AI's maximum context is for each tier. According to the UI Clio uses the NerdStash Tokenizer, as different tokenizers will convert text to tokens their own way.
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In my younger and more vulnerable years my father gave me some advice that I’ve been turning over in my mind ever since.
“Whenever you feel like criticizing anyone,” he told me, “just remember that all the people in this world haven’t had the advantages that you’ve had.”
He didn’t say any more, but we’ve always been unusually communicative in a reserved way, and I understood that he meant a great deal more than that. In consequence, I’m inclined to reserve all judgements, a habit that has opened up many curious natures to me and also made me the victim of not a few veteran bores. The abnormal mind is quick to detect and attach itself to this quality when it appears in a normal person, and so it came about that in college I was unjustly accused of being a politician, because I was privy to the secret griefs of wild, unknown men. Most of the confidences were unsought—frequently I have feigned sleep, preoccupation, or a hostile levity when I realized by some unmistakable sign that an intimate revelation was quivering on the horizon; for the intimate revelations of young men, or at least the terms in which they express them, are usually plagiaristic and marred by obvious suppressions. Reserving judgements is a matter of infinite hope. I am still a little afraid of missing something if I forget that, as my father snobbishly suggested, and I snobbishly repeat, a sense of the fundamental decencies is parcelled out unequally at birth.
And, after boasting this way of my tolerance, I come to the admission that it has a limit. Conduct may be founded on the hard rock or the wet marshes, but after a certain point I don’t care what it’s founded on. When I came back from the East last autumn I felt that I wanted the world to be in uniform and at a sort of moral attention forever; I wanted no more riotous excursions with privileged glimpses into the human heart. Only Gatsby, the man who gives his name to this book, was exempt from my reaction—Gatsby, who represented everything for which I have an unaffected scorn. If personality is an unbroken series of successful gestures, then there was something gorgeous about him, some heightened sensitivity to the promises of life, as if he were related to one of those intricate machines that register earthquakes ten thousand miles away. This responsiveness had nothing to do with that flabby impressionability which is dignified under the name of the “creative temperament”—it was an extraordinary gift for hope, a romantic readiness such as I have never found in any other person and which it is not likely I shall ever find again. No—Gatsby turned out all right at the end; it is what preyed on Gatsby, what foul dust floated in the wake of his dreams that temporarily closed out my interest in the abortive sorrows and short-winded elations of men.
My family have been prominent, well-to-do people in this Middle Western city for three generations. The Carraways are something of a clan, and we have a tradition that we’re descended from the Dukes of Buccleuch, but the actual founder of my line was my grandfather’s brother, who came here in fifty-one, sent a substitute to the Civil War, and started the wholesale hardware business that my father carries on today.
I never saw this great-uncle, but I’m supposed to look like him—with special reference to the rather hard-boiled painting that hangs in father’s office. I graduated from New Haven in 1915, just a quarter of a century after my father, and a little later I participated in that delayed Teutonic migration known as the Great War. I enjoyed the counter-raid so thoroughly that I came back restless. Instead of being the warm centre of the world, the Middle West now seemed like the ragged edge of the universe—so I decided to go East and learn the bond business. Everybody I knew was in the bond business, so I supposed it could support one more single man. All my aunts and uncles talked it over as if they were choosing a prep school for me, and finally said, “Why—ye-es,” with very grave, hesitant faces. Father agreed to finance me for a year, and after various delays I came East, permanently, I thought, in the spring of twenty-two.
The practical thing was to find rooms in the city, but it was a warm season, and I had just left a country of wide lawns and friendly trees, so when a young man at the office suggested that we take a house together in a commuting town, it sounded like a great idea. He found the house, a weather-beaten cardboard bungalow at eighty a month, but at the last minute the firm ordered him to Washington, and I went out to the country alone. I had a dog—at least I had him for a few days until he ran away—and an old Dodge and a Finnish woman, who made my bed and cooked breakfast and muttered Finnish wisdom to herself over the electric stove.
It was lonely for a day or so until one morning some man, more recently arrived than I, stopped me on the road.
“How do you get to West Egg village?” he asked helplessly.
I told him. And as I walked on I was lonely no longer. I was a guide, a pathfinder, an original settler. He had casually conferred on me the freedom of the neighbourhood.
And so with the sunshine and the great bursts of leaves growing on the trees, just as things grow in fast movies, I had that familiar conviction that life was beginning over again with the summer.
There was so much to read, for one thing, and so much fine health to be pulled down out of the young breath-giving air. I bought a dozen volumes on banking and credit and investment securities, and they stood on my shelf in red and gold like new money from the mint, promising to unfold the shining secrets that only Midas and Morgan and Maecenas knew. And I had the high intention of reading many other books besides. I was rather literary in college—one year I wrote a series of very solemn and obvious editorials for the Yale News—and now I was going to bring back all such things into my life and become again that most limited of all specialists, the “well-rounded man.” This isn’t just an epigram—life is much more successfully looked at from a single window, after all.
It was a matter of chance that I should have rented a house in one of the strangest communities in North America. It was on that slender riotous island which extends itself due east of New York—and where there are, among other natural curiosities, two unusual formations of land. Twenty miles from the city a pair of enormous eggs, identical in contour and separated only by a courtesy bay, jut out into the most domesticated body of salt water in the Western hemisphere, the great wet barnyard of Long Island Sound. They are not perfect ovals—like the egg in the Columbus story, they are both crushed flat at the contact end—but their physical resemblance must be a source of perpetual wonder to the gulls that fly overhead. To the wingless a more interesting phenomenon is their dissimilarity in every particular except shape and size.
I lived at West Egg, the—well, the less fashionable of the two, though this is a most superficial tag to express the bizarre and not a little sinister contrast between them. My house was at the very tip of the egg, only fifty yards from the Sound, and squeezed between two huge places that rented for twelve or fifteen thousand a season. The one on my right was a colossal affair by any standard—it was a factual imitation of some Hôtel de Ville in Normandy, with a tower on one side, spanking new under a thin beard of raw ivy, and a marble swimming pool, and more than forty acres of lawn and garden. It was Gatsby’s mansion. Or, rather, as I didn’t know Mr. Gatsby, it was a mansion inhabited by a gentleman of that name. My own house was an eyesore, but it was a small eyesore, and it had been overlooked, so I had a view of the water, a partial view of my neighbour’s lawn, and the consoling proximity of millionaires—all for eighty dollars a month.
Across the courtesy bay the white palaces of fashionable East Egg glittered along the water, and the history of the summer really begins on the evening I drove over there to have dinner with the Tom Buchanans. Daisy was my second cousin once removed, and I’d known Tom in college. And just after the war I spent two days with them in Chicago.
Her husband, among various physical accomplishments, had been one of the most powerful ends that ever played football at New Haven—a national figure in a way, one of those men who reach such an acute limited excellence at twenty-one that everything afterward savours of anticlimax. His family were enormously wealthy—even in college his freedom with money was a matter for reproach—but now he’d left Chicago and come East in a fashion that rather took your breath away: for instance, he’d brought down a string of polo ponies from Lake Forest. It was hard to realize that a man in my own generation was wealthy enough to do that.
Why they came East I don’t know. They had spent a year in France for no particular reason, and then drifted here and there unrestfully wherever people played polo and were rich together. This was a permanent move, said Daisy over the telephone, but I didn’t believe it—I had no sight into Daisy’s heart, but I felt that Tom would drift on forever seeking, a little wistfully, for the dramatic turbulence of some irrecoverable football game.
And so it happened that on a warm windy evening I drove over to East Egg to see two old friends whom I scarcely knew at all. Their house was even more elaborate than I expected, a cheerful red-and-white Georgian Colonial mansion, overlooking the bay. The lawn started at the beach and ran towards the front door for a quarter of a mile, jumping over sundials and brick walks and burning gardens—finally when it reached the house drifting up the side in bright vines as though from the momentum of its run. The front was broken by a line of French windows, glowing now with reflected gold and wide open to the warm windy afternoon, and Tom Buchanan in riding clothes was standing with his legs apart on the front porch.
He had changed since his New Haven years. Now he was a sturdy straw-haired man of thirty, with a rather hard mouth and a supercilious manner. Two shining arrogant eyes had established dominance over his face and gave him the appearance of always leaning aggressively forward. Not even the effeminate swank of his riding clothes could hide the enormous power of that body—he seemed to fill those glistening boots until he strained the top lacing, and you could see a great pack of muscle shifting when his shoulder moved under his thin coat. It was a body capable of enormous leverage—a cruel body.
His speaking voice, a gruff husky tenor, added to the impression of fractiousness he conveyed. There was a touch of paternal contempt in it, even toward people he liked—and there were men at New Haven who had hated his guts.
“Now, don’t think my opinion on these matters is final,” he seemed to say, “just because I’m stronger and more of a man than you are.” We were in the same senior society, and while we were never intimate I always had the impression that he approved of me and wanted me to like him with some harsh, defiant wistfulness of his own.
We talked for a few minutes on the sunny porch.
“I’ve got a nice place here,” he said, his eyes flashing about restlessly.
Turning me around by one arm, he moved a broad flat hand along the front vista, including in its sweep a sunken Italian garden, a half acre of deep, pungent roses, and a snub-nosed motorboat that bumped the tide offshore.
“It belonged to Demaine, the oil man.” He turned me around again, politely and abruptly. “We’ll go inside.”
We walked through a high hallway into a bright rosy-coloured space, fragilely bound into the house by French windows at either end. The windows were ajar and gleaming white against the fresh grass outside that seemed to grow a little way into the house. A breeze blew through the room, blew curtains in at one end and out the other like pale flags, twisting them up toward the frosted wedding-cake of the ceiling, and then rippled over the wine-coloured rug, making a shadow on it as wind does on the sea.
The only completely stationary object in the room was an enormous couch on which two young women were buoyed up as though upon an anchored balloon. They were both in white, and their dresses were rippling and fluttering as if they had just been blown back in after a short flight around the house. I must have stood for a few moments listening to the whip and snap of the curtains and the groan of a picture on the wall. Then there was a boom as Tom Buchanan shut the rear windows and the caught wind died out about the room, and the curtains and the rugs and the two young women ballooned slowly to the floor.
The younger of the two was a stranger to me. She was extended full length at her end of the divan, completely motionless, and with her chin raised a little, as if she were balancing something on it which was quite likely to fall. If she saw me out of the corner of her eyes she gave no hint of it—indeed, I was almost surprised into murmuring an apology for having disturbed her by coming in.
The other girl, Daisy, made an attempt to rise—she leaned slightly forward with a conscientious expression—then she laughed, an absurd, charming little laugh, and I laughed too and came forward into the room.
“I’m p-paralysed with happiness.”
She
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laughed again, as if she said something very witty, and held my hand for a moment, looking up into my face, promising that there was no one in the world she so much wanted to see. That was a way she had. She hinted in a murmur that the surname of the balancing girl was Baker. (I’ve heard it said that Daisy’s murmur was only to make people lean toward her; an irrelevant criticism that made it no less charming.)
At any rate, Miss Baker’s lips fluttered, she nodded at me almost imperceptibly, and then quickly tipped her head back again—the object she was balancing had obviously tottered a little and given her something of a fright. Again a sort of apology arose to my lips. Almost any exhibition of complete self-sufficiency draws a stunned tribute from me.
I looked back at my cousin, who began to ask me questions in her low, thrilling voice. It was the kind of voice that the ear follows up and down, as if each speech is an arrangement of notes that will never be played again. Her face was sad and lovely with bright things in it, bright eyes and a bright passionate mouth, but there was an excitement in her voice that men who had cared for her found difficult to forget: a singing compulsion, a whispered “Listen,” a promise that she had done gay, exciting things just a while since and that there were gay, exciting things hovering in the next hour.
I told her how I had stopped off in Chicago for a day on my way East, and how a dozen people had sent their love through me.
“Do they miss me?” she cried ecstatically.
“The whole town is desolate. All the cars have the left rear wheel painted black as a mourning wreath, and there’s a persistent wail all night along the north shore.”
“How gorgeous! Let’s go back, Tom. Tomorrow!” Then she added irrelevantly: “You ought to see the baby.”
“I’d like to.”
“She’s asleep. She’s three years old. Haven’t you ever seen her?”
“Never.”
“Well, you ought to see her. She’s—”
Tom Buchanan, who had been hovering restlessly about the room, stopped and rested his hand on my shoulder.
“What you doing, Nick?”
“I’m a bond man.”
“Who with?”
I told him.
“Never heard of them,” he remarked decisively.
This annoyed me.
“You will,” I answered shortly. “You will if you stay in the East.”
“Oh, I’ll stay in the East, don’t you worry,” he said, glancing at Daisy and then back at me, as if he were alert for something more. “I’d be a God damned fool to live anywhere else.”
At this point Miss Baker said: “Absolutely!” with such suddenness that I started—it was the first word she had uttered since I came into the room. Evidently it surprised her as much as it did me, for she yawned and with a series of rapid, deft movements stood up into the room.
“I’m stiff,” she complained, “I’ve been lying on that sofa for as long as I can remember.”
“Don’t look at me,” Daisy retorted, “I’ve been trying to get you to New York all afternoon.”
“No, thanks,” said Miss Baker to the four cocktails just in from the pantry. “I’m absolutely in training.”
Her host looked at her incredulously.
“You are!” He took down his drink as if it were a drop in the bottom of a glass. “How you ever get anything done is beyond me.”
I looked at Miss Baker, wondering what it was she “got done.” I enjoyed looking at her. She was a slender, small-breasted girl, with an erect carriage, which she accentuated by throwing her body backward at the shoulders like a young cadet. Her grey sun-strained eyes looked back at me with polite reciprocal curiosity out of a wan, charming, discontented face. It occurred to me now that I had seen her, or a picture of her, somewhere before.
“You live in West Egg,” she remarked contemptuously. “I know somebody there.”
“I don’t know a single—”
“You must know Gatsby.”
“Gatsby?” demanded Daisy. “What Gatsby?”
Before I could reply that he was my neighbour dinner was announced; wedging his tense arm imperatively under mine, Tom Buchanan compelled me from the room as though he were moving a checker to another square.
Slenderly, languidly, their hands set lightly on their hips, the two young women preceded us out on to a rosy-coloured porch, open toward the sunset, where four candles flickered on the table in the diminished wind.
“Why candles?” objected Daisy, frowning. She snapped them out with her fingers. “In two weeks it’ll be the longest day in the year.” She looked at us all radiantly. “Do you always watch for the longest day of the year and then miss it? I always watch for the longest day in the year and then miss it.”
“We ought to plan something,” yawned Miss Baker, sitting down at the table as if she were getting into bed.
“All right,” said Daisy. “What’ll we plan?” She turned to me helplessly: “What do people plan?”
Before I could answer her eyes fastened with an awed expression on her little finger.
“Look!” she complained; “I hurt it.”
We all looked—the knuckle was black and blue.
“You did it, Tom,” she said accusingly. “I know you didn’t mean to, but you did do it. That’s what I get for marrying a brute of a man, a great, big, hulking physical specimen of a—”
“I hate that word ‘hulking,’ ” objected Tom crossly, “even in kidding.”
“Hulking,” insisted Daisy.
Sometimes she and Miss Baker talked at once, unobtrusively and with a bantering inconsequence that was never quite chatter, that was as cool as their white dresses and their impersonal eyes in the absence of all desire. They were here, and they accepted Tom and me, making only a polite pleasant effort to entertain or to be entertained. They knew that presently dinner would be over and a little later the evening too would be over and casually put away. It was sharply different from the West, where an evening was hurried from phase to phase towards its close, in a continually disappointed anticipation or else in sheer nervous dread of the moment itself.
“You make me feel uncivilized, Daisy,” I confessed on my second glass of corky but rather impressive claret. “Can’t you talk about crops or something?”
I meant nothing in particular by this remark, but it was taken up in an unexpected way.
“Civilization’s going to pieces,” broke out Tom violently. “I’ve gotten to be a terrible pessimist about things. Have you read The Rise of the Coloured Empires by this man Goddard?”
“Why, no,” I answered, rather surprised by his tone.
“Well, it’s a fine book, and everybody ought to read it. The idea is if we don’t look out the white race will be—will be utterly submerged. It’s all scientific stuff; it’s been proved.”
“Tom’s getting very profound,” said Daisy, with an expression of unthoughtful sadness. “He reads deep books with long words in them. What was that word we—”
“Well, these books are all scientific,” insisted Tom, glancing at her impatiently. “This fellow has worked out the whole thing. It’s up to us, who are the dominant race, to watch out or these other races will have control of things.”
“We’ve got to beat them down,” whispered Daisy, winking ferociously toward the fervent sun.
“You ought to live in California—” began Miss Baker, but Tom interrupted her by shifting heavily in his chair.
“This idea is that we’re Nordics. I am, and you are, and you are, and—” After an infinitesimal hesitation he included Daisy with a slight nod, and she winked at me again. “—And we’ve produced all the things that go to make civilization—oh, science and art, and all that. Do you see?”
There was something pathetic in his concentration, as if his complacency, more acute than of old, was not enough to him any more. When, almost immediately, the telephone rang inside and the butler left the porch Daisy seized upon the momentary interruption and leaned towards me.
“I’ll tell you a family secret,” she whispered enthusiastically. “It’s about the butler’s nose. Do you want to hear about the butler’s nose?”
“That’s why I came over tonight.”
“Well, he wasn’t always a butler; he used to be the silver polisher for some people in New York that had a silver service for two hundred people. He had to polish it from morning till night, until finally it began to affect his nose—”
“Things went from bad to worse,” suggested Miss Baker.
“Yes. Things went from bad to worse, until finally he had to give up his position.”
For a moment the last sunshine fell with romantic affection upon her glowing face; her voice compelled me forward breathlessly as I listened—then the glow faded, each light deserting her with lingering regret, like children leaving a pleasant street at dusk.
The butler came back and murmured something close to Tom’s ear, whereupon Tom frowned, pushed back his chair, and without a word went inside. As if his absence quickened something within her, Daisy leaned forward again, her voice glowing and singing.
“I love to see you at my table, Nick. You remind me of a—of a rose, an absolute rose. Doesn’t he?” She turned to Miss Baker for confirmation: “An absolute rose?”
This was untrue. I am not even faintly like a rose. She was only extemporizing, but a stirring warmth flowed from her, as if her heart was trying to come out to you concealed in one of those breathless, thrilling words. Then suddenly she threw her napkin on the table and excused herself and went into the house.
Miss Baker and I exchanged a short glance consciously devoid of meaning. I was about to speak when she sat up alertly and said “Sh!” in a warning voice. A subdued impassioned murmur was audible in the room beyond, and Miss Baker leaned forward unashamed, trying to hear. The murmur trembled on the verge of coherence, sank down, mounted excitedly, and then ceased altogether.
“This Mr. Gatsby you spoke of is my neighbour—” I began.
“Don’t talk. I want to hear what happens.”
“Is something happening?” I inquired innocently.
“You mean to say you don’t know?” said Miss Baker, honestly surprised. “I thought everybody knew.”
“I don’t.”
“Why—” she said hesitantly. “Tom’s got some woman in New York.”
“Got some woman?” I repeated blankly.
Miss Baker nodded.
“She might have the decency not to telephone him at dinner time. Don’t you think?”
Almost before I had grasped her meaning there was the flutter of a dress and the crunch of leather boots, and Tom and Daisy were back at the table.
“It couldn’t be helped!” cried Daisy with tense gaiety.
She sat down, glanced searchingly at Miss Baker and then at me, and continued: “I looked outdoors for a minute, and it’s very romantic outdoors. There’s a bird on the lawn that I think must be a nightingale come over on the Cunard or White Star Line. He’s singing away—” Her voice sang: “It’s romantic, isn’t it, Tom?”
“Very romantic,” he said, and then miserably to me: “If it’s light enough after dinner, I want to take you down to the stables.”
The telephone rang inside, startlingly, and as Daisy shook her head decisively at Tom the subject of the stables, in fact all subjects, vanished into air. Among the broken fragments of the last five minutes at table I remember the candles being lit again, pointlessly, and I was conscious of wanting to look squarely at everyone, and yet to avoid all eyes. I couldn’t guess what Daisy and Tom were thinking, but I doubt if even Miss Baker, who seemed to have mastered a certain hardy scepticism, was able utterly to put this fifth guest’s shrill metallic urgency out of mind. To a certain temperament the situation might have seemed intriguing—my own instinct was to telephone immediately for the police.
The horses, needless to say, were not mentioned again. Tom and Miss Baker, with several feet of twilight between them, strolled back into the library, as if to a vigil beside a perfectly tangible body, while, trying to look pleasantly interested and a little deaf, I followed Daisy around a chain of connecting verandas to the porch in front. In its deep gloom we sat down side by side on a wicker settee.
Daisy took her face in her hands as if feeling its lovely shape, and her eyes moved gradually out into the velvet dusk. I saw that turbulent emotions possessed her, so I asked what I thought would be some sedative questions about her little girl.
“We don’t know each other very well, Nick,” she said suddenly. “Even if we are cousins. You didn’t come to my wedding.”
“I wasn’t back from the war.”
“That’s true.” She hesitated. “Well, I’ve had a very bad time, Nick, and I’m pretty cynical about everything.”
Evidently she had reason to be. I waited but she
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didn’t say any more, and after a moment I returned rather feebly to the subject of her daughter.
“I suppose she talks, and—eats, and everything.”
“Oh, yes.” She looked at me absently. “Listen, Nick; let me tell you what I said when she was born. Would you like to hear?”
“Very much.”
“It’ll show you how I’ve gotten to feel about—things. Well, she was less than an hour old and Tom was God knows where. I woke up out of the ether with an utterly abandoned feeling, and asked the nurse right away if it was a boy or a girl. She told me it was a girl, and so I turned my head away and wept. ‘All right,’ I said, ‘I’m glad it’s a girl. And I hope she’ll be a fool—that’s the best thing a girl can be in this world, a beautiful little fool.’
“You see I think everything’s terrible anyhow,” she went on in a convinced way. “Everybody thinks so—the most advanced people. And I know. I’ve been everywhere and seen everything and done everything.” Her eyes flashed around her in a defiant way, rather like Tom’s, and she laughed with thrilling scorn. “Sophisticated—God, I’m sophisticated!”
The instant her voice broke off, ceasing to compel my attention, my belief, I felt the basic insincerity of what she had said. It made me uneasy, as though the whole evening had been a trick of some sort to exact a contributory emotion from me. I waited, and sure enough, in a moment she looked at me with an absolute smirk on her lovely face, as if she had asserted her membership in a rather distinguished secret society to which she and Tom belonged.
Inside, the crimson room bloomed with light. Tom and Miss Baker sat at either end of the long couch and she read aloud to him from the Saturday Evening Post—the words, murmurous and uninflected, running together in a soothing tune. The lamplight, bright on his boots and dull on the autumn-leaf yellow of her hair, glinted along the paper as she turned a page with a flutter of slender muscles in her arms.
When we came in she held us silent for a moment with a lifted hand.
“To be continued,” she said, tossing the magazine on the table, “in our very next issue.”
Her body asserted itself with a restless movement of her knee, and she stood up.
“Ten o’clock,” she remarked, apparently finding the time on the ceiling. “Time for this good girl to go to bed.”
“Jordan’s going to play in the tournament tomorrow,” explained Daisy, “over at Westchester.”
“Oh—you’re Jordan Baker.”
I knew now why her face was familiar—its pleasing contemptuous expression had looked out at me from many rotogravure pictures of the sporting life at Asheville and Hot Springs and Palm Beach. I had heard some story of her too, a critical, unpleasant story, but what it was I had forgotten long ago.
“Good night,” she said softly. “Wake me at eight, won’t you.”
“If you’ll get up.”
“I will. Good night, Mr. Carraway. See you anon.”
“Of course you will,” confirmed Daisy. “In fact I think I’ll arrange a marriage. Come over often, Nick, and I’ll sort of—oh—fling you together. You know—lock you up accidentally in linen closets and push you out to sea in a boat, and all that sort of thing—”
“Good night,” called Miss Baker from the stairs. “I haven’t heard a word.”
“She’s a nice girl,” said Tom after a moment. “They oughtn’t to let her run around the country this way.”
“Who oughtn’t to?” inquired Daisy coldly.
“Her family.”
“Her family is one aunt about a thousand years old. Besides, Nick’s going to look after her, aren’t you, Nick? She’s going to spend lots of weekends out here this summer. I think the home influence will be very good for her.”
Daisy and Tom looked at each other for a moment in silence.
“Is she from New York?” I asked quickly.
“From Louisville. Our white girlhood was passed together there. Our beautiful white—”
“Did you give Nick a little heart to heart talk on the veranda?” demanded Tom suddenly.
“Did I?” She looked at me. “I can’t seem to remember, but I think we talked about the Nordic race. Yes, I’m sure we did. It sort of crept up on us and first thing you know—”
“Don’t believe everything you hear, Nick,” he advised me.
I said lightly that I had heard nothing at all, and a few minutes later I got up to go home. They came to the door with me and stood side by side in a cheerful square of light. As I started my motor Daisy peremptorily called: “Wait!”
“I forgot to ask you something, and it’s important. We heard you were engaged to a girl out West.”
“That’s right,” corroborated Tom kindly. “We heard that you were engaged.”
“It’s a libel. I’m too poor.”
“But we heard it,” insisted Daisy, surprising me by opening up again in a flower-like way. “We heard it from three people, so it must be true.”
Of course I knew what they were referring to, but I wasn’t even vaguely engaged. The fact that gossip had published the banns was one of the reasons I had come East. You can’t stop going with an old friend on account of rumours, and on the other hand I had no intention of being rumoured into marriage.
Their interest rather touched me and made them less remotely rich—nevertheless, I was confused and a little disgusted as I drove away. It seemed to me that the thing for Daisy to do was to rush out of the house, child in arms—but apparently there were no such intentions in her head. As for Tom, the fact that he “had some woman in New York” was really less surprising than that he had been depressed by a book. Something was making him nibble at the edge of stale ideas as if his sturdy physical egotism no longer nourished his peremptory heart.
Already it was deep summer on roadhouse roofs and in front of wayside garages, where new red petrol-pumps sat out in pools of light, and when I reached my estate at West Egg I ran the car under its shed and sat for a while on an abandoned grass roller in the yard. The wind had blown off, leaving a loud, bright night, with wings beating in the trees and a persistent organ sound as the full bellows of the earth blew the frogs full of life. The silhouette of a moving cat wavered across the moonlight, and, turning my head to watch it, I saw that I was not alone—fifty feet away a figure had emerged from the shadow of my neighbour’s mansion and was standing with his hands in his pockets regarding the silver pepper of the stars. Something in his leisurely movements and the secure position of his feet upon the lawn suggested that it was Mr. Gatsby himself, come out to determine what share was his of our local heavens.
I decided to call to him. Miss Baker had mentioned him at dinner, and that would do for an introduction. But I didn’t call to him, for he gave a sudden intimation that he was content to be alone—he stretched out his arms toward the dark water in a curious way, and, far as I was from him, I could have sworn he was trembling. Involuntarily I glanced seaward—and distinguished nothing except a single green light, minute and far away, that might have been the end of a dock. When I looked once more for Gatsby he had vanished, and I was alone again in the unquiet darkness.
II
About halfway between West Egg and New York the motor road hastily joins the railroad and runs beside it for a quarter of a mile, so as to shrink away from a certain desolate area of land. This is a valley of ashes—a fantastic farm where ashes grow like wheat into ridges and hills and grotesque gardens; where ashes take the forms of houses and chimneys and rising smoke and, finally, with a transcendent effort, of ash-grey men, who move dimly and already crumbling through the powdery air. Occasionally a line of grey cars crawls along an invisible track, gives out a ghastly creak, and comes to rest, and immediately the ash-grey men swarm up with leaden spades and stir up an impenetrable cloud, which screens their obscure operations from your sight.
But above the grey land and the spasms of bleak dust which drift endlessly over it, you perceive, after a moment, the eyes of Doctor T. J. Eckleburg. The eyes of Doctor T. J. Eckleburg are blue and gigantic—their retinas are one yard high. They look out of no face, but, instead, from a pair of enormous yellow spectacles which pass over a nonexistent nose. Evidently some wild wag of an oculist set them there to
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After going to an urgent care I was diagnosed with costochondritis. My pain was severe and started in my right upper back. They gave me a steroid injection on my side and prescribed me corticosteroids to help the inflammation. Not sure how but the pain went away for 2-3 days max— but shortly after returning to work, the pain came back. I have a sharp pain when I breathe in on both sides of my upper back. Almost like it needs to be popped. I decided after the urgent care that I would try going to a chiropractor. He helped pop my back but the pain was still there. It’s been quite a few months now. The pain started towards the end of April, and it’s been constant. Prescription strength Ibuprofen, muscle relaxers, nothing has helped the pain go away. More recently the pain has gotten worse. More on my left side than my right. I’m really only asking how long the pain will last. I’ve just gotten to the point where I just don’t even pay attention to the pain anymore, I only breathe normally. I’ve stopped taking deep breaths because that’s when I really start to feel the pain. I’m at a loss here and don’t know how long this is going to debilitate me for. Tyia

Dear indianhiphopheads,
Today, we want to discuss an urgent matter that affects both the moderators and users. As you can see from the title, this post is not related to what you would normally see on this subreddit. As the moderation team of indianhiphopheads, we have concerns about recent changes to Reddit, that harm our ability to moderate this subreddit, along with the ability of multiple members of the community from browsing Reddit at all.

What's going on?

A recent Reddit policy change threatens to kill many beloved third-party mobile apps, making a great many quality-of-life features not seen in the official mobile app permanently inaccessible to users.
On May 31, 2023, Reddit announced they were raising the price to make calls to their API from being free to a level of exorbitant charges that will kill every third party app on Reddit, from Apollo to Reddit is Fun to Narwhal to BaconReader.
Even if you're not a mobile user and don't use any of those apps, this is a step toward killing other ways of customizing Reddit, such as the use of the old.reddit.com desktop interface .
This isn't only a problem on the user level: many subreddit moderators depend on tools only available outside the official app to keep their communities on-topic and spam-free.

What would this mean? Why should this matter to you?

• Many mods on Reddit use 3rd party apps to moderate because the tools on Reddit’s app are worthless. Most of us mods have day jobs and a lot of moderation happens during our lunch breaks or downtime in our real lives. We moderate because we care about the community. When the changes to the API kicks in, moderation across the board will not only become more difficult, but it will result in lower consistency, longer wait times on post approvals and reports, and much more spam/bot activity getting through the cracks. It will also take longer for a response in modmail and harmful toxic users will be more prominent and will remain rampant longer. In discussions with mods on many subreddits, many longtime moderators will simply leave the site. While it’s tradition for redditors to dunk on moderators, the truth is that they do an insane amount of work for free, and the entire site would drastically decrease in quality and usability without them.
  
• The NSFW API will be getting shut down so the only way to access NSFW content is through Reddit’s app. This means even if 3rd party apps do foot the bill They only get 40% of the content. This also means that bots and moderation practices that prevent, for example someone that comments on gonewild post from commenting on teenagers selfie posts will break. This would endanger communities of underage users that were previously protected from predatory users. In more major cases, it will be extremely hard to keep child sexual abuse content and non-consensual intimate media off the platform with their mod tools practices crippled by the NSFW change. A lot of work has been put into this including parts of the NSFW community paying enterprise prices or access to private libraries that are meant to detect this kind of media.
  
• The Official Reddit App is also not compatible with accessibility for blind people, which third-party apps do. Thus, if third-party apps are gone, blind people will not be able to use Reddit on the Official App. The Blind community moderation team is left in jeopardy.
  

What's the plan?

On June 12th, hundreds of subreddits (at least 190 of them having 1 million+ users) will be going dark to protest this policy. Some will return after 48 hours: others will go away permanently unless the issue is adequately addressed, since many moderators aren't able to put in the work they do with the poor tools available through the official app. This isn't something any of us do lightly: we do what we do because we love Reddit, and we truly believe this change will make it impossible to keep doing what we love.
In solidarity with other subreddits, indianhiphopheads will be going private on June 12th at 5:30 AM IST (12 AM UTC). The two-day blackout isn't the goal, and it isn't the end. Should things reach the 14th with no sign of Reddit choosing to fix what they've broken, we'll use the community and buzz we've built between then and now as a tool for further action. Mod discussion is underway regarding whether we should extend the blackout beyond 48 hours by continuing to stay private or being restricted (only old posts and comments would be visible). We would like to extend this discussion to the users and want your views regarding the same.
We understand that this blackout may cause temporary inconvenience to our community, and for that, we apologize. However, we firmly believe that this short-term disruption will bring long-term benefits for every user. By standing together with other subreddit communities, we hope to send a clear message to Reddit and foster a meaningful conversation about the future of their API policies. ​ In the meantime, we encourage you to let reddit know that you disagree with their planned changes.

What can you do?

1. Complain. [Email](mailto:[email protected]) Reddit. Message the mods of /reddit.com, who are the admins of the site: message reddit: submit a support request: comment in relevant threads on /reddit, such as this one, leave a negative review on their official iOS or Android app- and sign your username in support to this post.
   
2. Sign. You can sign the Open Letter here to make your voice heard. You do not need to be a moderator to sign it.
   
3. Spread the word. Rabble-rouse on related subreddits. Meme it up, make it spicy. Bitch about it to your cat. Suggest anyone you know who moderates a subreddit join us at our sister sub at /ModCoord.
   
4. Boycott and spread the word...to Reddit's competition! Stay off Reddit entirely on June 12th through the 14th- instead, take to your favorite non-Reddit platform of choice and make some noise in support!
   
5. Don't be a jerk. As upsetting this may be, threats, profanity and vandalism will be worse than useless in getting people on our side. Please make every effort to be as restrained, polite, reasonable and law-abiding as possible. This includes not harassing moderators of subreddits who have chosen not to take part.
   

We appreciate your understanding, support, and active participation in this important endeavor. It is through the strength and dedication of our community that we can strive for a better Reddit experience for everyone involved.
Thank you,
The mod team of IndianHipHopHeads

Several important things to know:
about me
Strongly emotionally dependent once opened up to people very very close to me, other than that, still pull in and out with emotions. Very academic oriented and very much find it therapeutic to work (in my second graudate year and working on thesis and internship). When serious things happen, I tend to drown myself in work and hope the night ends quicker.
Had come to Oceania from Europe for internship opportunity which something I had been waiting for three years.
family
Family is very family oriented, supportive but emotionally attached to me. Have a brother but they arent as emotionally depended on him as on me. They have a daughter (Person X) but I dont consider her as my sister due to childhood incident and left an emotional scar that I dont give a crap about her. I like my own space but my parents always like to spend time with me. I care about my parents and care about how they react to certain things I do or behave. It has gotten a point where I am tired and frustrated with the way they are involved with my life decisions. Overall, I dont mind spending weekend with them but I cant do it for longer than weekend or summer vacations or whatver. Simply I need space This makes me not want to go home and feel the need use alot of energy to be happy so they wont worry about it. Also, the presence of Person X makes me not want to go home. My home city makes me sad with given reasons plus memories associated with previous relationship. It hurts to be back there.
current situation
I got an opportunity to go Oceania and I was so relieve the minute I stepped on the plane. A way for period to get out of misery home place. I have been very very happy and love my life right now. However! My parents have asked for confirmation date I come back to Europe. I started crying, it was because the thought of going home is miserable. Recalling those days I was with them and Person X was absolutely horrible. NOt because my parents do not give me love or support, but I am just unhappy, I just want to be by myself with own space. I have tried to voice what I want to do , though each time was shot down by their family oriented mesages and their sensitive passive agressive how much they want to spend time with me.
I used to live in my university city but had to move out as I moved to oceania, gave up my room. Now I dont have a room in uni city anymore. My parents assume after I come back, I am all done with graduate program and can be home with them for a while. Well, not true because my thesis has gone south completly that I dont even know what to do (supervisor doesnt reply to any emails depsite three urgent emails within 2 months).
Besides that, I am in a healthy relationship but hate to burden him with any of my famly issues or other things, so I just kinda keep silence on that and use working as stress reliever. I want to spend my birthday with him and not my family. However, my family wants to change plans to make sure they spend it with me. Again, I dont want to spend it with them rather stay longer in Oceania and spend birthday wtih my partner. I feel I cant voice that to my parents, because they so sensitive any time I say things like that to them. They always feel like I dont want to be with them.
TL; DR: I like my own space, emotionally dependent once closer to people, but generally need own space, very academic oriented to avoid difficult situations.
Have been in Oceania for 2 months for graduate internship and only have two months before I go back to Europe. I love being here but scared to go back Europe. One, my parents too emotionally attached to me and make me feel need to take care of their feelings for matters. Two, parents have daughter but I dont want to do with anything with her due to childhood incident, Being back in home city makes me misery. I dont want to cry everyday secretly and have the courage to put up a face pretending eveyrthing is ok. TOo much energy. I want to find a place at my uni city but my family strongly wants me to stay with them for while and need to help taking care of their dog. I wouldnt mind but it is alot of pressure especially it makes me sad being in the city. Feels awful. I all know, I just dont want to be back , I want to be happy and not pretend. I want to be with my partner without feeling the choke not wanting to tell him what is going on. BUT it is sooo difficult

Perspective would be appreciated.
Several important things to know:
about me
Strongly emotionally dependent once opened up to people very very close to me, other than that, still pull in and out with emotions. Very academic oriented and very much find it therapeutic to work (in my second graudate year and working on thesis and internship). When serious things happen, I tend to drown myself in work and hope the night ends quicker.
Had come to Oceania from Europe for internship opportunity which something I had been waiting for three years.
family
Family is very family oriented, supportive but emotionally attached to me. Have a brother but they arent as emotionally depended on him as on me. They have a daughter (Person X) but I dont consider her as my sister due to childhood incident and left an emotional scar that I dont give a crap about her. I like my own space but my parents always like to spend time with me. I care about my parents and care about how they react to certain things I do or behave. It has gotten a point where I am tired and frustrated with the way they are involved with my life decisions. Overall, I dont mind spending weekend with them but I cant do it for longer than weekend or summer vacations or whatver. Simply I need space This makes me not want to go home and feel the need use alot of energy to be happy so they wont worry about it. Also, the presence of Person X makes me not want to go home. My home city makes me sad with given reasons plus memories associated with previous relationship. It hurts to be back there.
current situation
I got an opportunity to go Oceania and I was so relieve the minute I stepped on the plane. A way for period to get out of misery home place. I have been very very happy and love my life right now. However! My parents have asked for confirmation date I come back to Europe. I started crying, it was because the thought of going home is miserable. Recalling those days I was with them and Person X was absolutely horrible. NOt because my parents do not give me love or support, but I am just unhappy, I just want to be by myself with own space. I have tried to voice what I want to do , though each time was shot down by their family oriented mesages and their sensitive passive agressive how much they want to spend time with me.
I used to live in my university city but had to move out as I moved to oceania, gave up my room. Now I dont have a room in uni city anymore. My parents assume after I come back, I am all done with graduate program and can be home with them for a while. Well, not true because my thesis has gone south completly that I dont even know what to do (supervisor doesnt reply to any emails depsite three urgent emails within 2 months).
Besides that, I am in a healthy relationship but hate to burden him with any of my famly issues or other things, so I jsut kinda keep silence on that and use working as stress reliever. I want to spend my birthday with him and not my family. However, my family wants to change plans to make sure they spend it with me. Again, I dont want to spend it with them rather stay longer in Oceania and spend birthday wtih my partner. I feel I cant voice that to my parents, because they so sensitive any time I say things like that to them. They always feel like I dont want to be with them.
TL; DR: I like my own space, emotionally dependent once closer to people, but generally need own space, very academic oriented to avoid difficult situations.
Have been in Oceania for 2 months for graduate internship and only have two months before I go back to Europe. I love being here but scared to go back Europe. One, my parents too emotionally attached to me and make me feel need to take care of their feelings for matters. Two, parents have daughter but I dont want to do with anything with her due to childhood incident, Being back in home city makes me misery. I dont want to cry everyday secretly and have the courage to put up a face pretending eveyrthing is ok. TOo much energy. I want to find a place at my uni city but my family strongly wants me to stay with them for while and need to help taking care of their dog. I wouldnt mind but it is alot of pressure especially it makes me sad being in the city. Feels awful.
I dont know what do . I just know the thought going home , makes me cry. Work as been great distraction throughout the da. At night, horrible.

EDIT: The first comment in response to this answered my question. My bf has a lot of Sims who are non white, therefore the foster children have traits from those sims. Because he has mods with more diverse hairstyles, he wanted to include Sims of different races who can really show those pretty styles off. So it seemed really targeted at first but if it's based.on already existing sims, it makes much more sense now.
I don't wanna assume anything specific about the mod creator, right? I don't wanna point fingers bc maybe it's a coincidence
My boyfriend has been playing the Sims 4 with the Foster Family Mod. He has fostered like 13 or more children now and every single one except for one kid was a person of color. One of them was East Asian, most of them are black or mixed, one of them looked like they could be Hispanic. He has found only one white child out of 13 in this whole Sims foster care system. And it's really weird considering that sims characters are usually very randomized.
So now I'm wondering if anyone else has noticed this in their games or if it's just how things ended up in his game specifically.
There's not anything I can do about it and I'm not gonna go harass the creator about it. It just seemed odd and I wanted to know if it's a normal occurrence for this mod.

I can’t hear the way that I used to. About a month ago I caught this really bad cold to the point where my throat was inflamed and I had to stay home from work. Then I was just really stuffy for the next few days.
But a week after that “cold” My right ear started to get really full. This usually happens every once in a while in both ears this ever since a few years ago but it usually goes away after a few hours to days.
…but this time it hasn’t…
This time it’s stayed in my right ear for days. And then I got an ear infection in my right ear along with having some weird sinus cold.
I went to urgent care and got antibiotics but stupidly forgot to take them for days and now I regret it. Although I finished the medicine, I feel like I destroyed my ear.
My jaw and face has been inflamed for days and idk how to make it stop. I get tinnitus in both of my ears and to want to make it stop because it’s driving me crazy. My ears constantly feel like they need to be popped but they don’t and im going mad.
I can’t hear my footsteps, I can barely hear things in the background and I can’t even hear myself swallow.
Allergy medicines barely work now because my sinuses are clear but it’s just my ears.
What do I do? What if I go deaf? Music is the only thing that keeps me sane. What if I can’t hear my loved ones anymore? Im panicking.
I feel like im going to lose my hearing and idk what to do about it. I just want to cry.😢

I just completed my first modded playthrough of Icewind Dale EE and I thought I give a review and my thoughts about the stuff that the New Light mods add to the game for those people who think about playing with these mods as well.
I have played through Icewind Dale about 4 or 5 times. Its a game that stuck with me from my teenage days. I hold it quite dearly and replay it about every 3 years. I love the atmosphere, the locations, the battles. And I also love the Baldur's Gate series with all its banters and great companions. So I hoped that with the NPCs from this mods I would get an interesting party together that would comment on the specific situations and revelations throughout the game, that the NPCs would have interesting backstories and strong personalities and I have to say: That is exactly what I got.
I was also looking forward to the quest mods. Especially the rediscovery of Kuldahar because I always felt that the vanilla game could have made Kuldahar much more interesting. It is one of the most cozy and beautiful places that I have ever experienced in a video game but it was also flawed in a way. There could have been more quests there, or more interesting NPCs. So I hoped that the quest mods would give me that and I installed them all.
Naturally I could only take 5 companions with me so I had to choose which one I would want. I settled for L'anna, Dusky, Minerva, Karihi and Nella (from Kulyoks NPC mod). Having one character from a different modder turned out not to be a problem, because there is a crossbanter mod available that worked flawlessly and it never felt as if Nella wasn't part of the team.
That means I cannot comment on T'viy, Urchin, Oak-Maw, Tipps, Orra, Dandjelion, Hommet or Ina, because I haven't played with them.
I will no go over the different companions that I played with one by one and give my thoughts and ratings.
L'anna: She is an elven paladin that has a story connection to the Severed Hand and the Mythal magic that I found very interesting. She started out slowly and a little bit on the uninteresting side and while it definitely got much better once I reached the Severed Hand, I could not shake the feeling that she was the most bland of the NPCs. I liked her and I learned a lot about elven culture and tales from her, which was very interesting, but she didn't have a personality that stood out from the others. Her voice acting also wasn't the greatest and I had to replace her portrait with another one more to my liking, but all in all she was a good companion to have. Strong as well with pretty good unique class skills. It felt like she had very little banter with the rest of the group though and thus felt a little bit isolated from them.
Rating: 5/10 Pretty good companion but the most uninteresting of the ones I took with me.
Karihi: She is a fire Genasi and a specialist fire mage so to speak. She gets unique fire spells at certain levels that were very strong and flavorful and she gets a bonus to fire damage. Also a staff that can do a range attack from the start which was extremely good for the early game. I have to say that she was pretty much a perfect companion in every regard. Portrait, voice acting, backstory or class skills. It left nothing to be desired and she just flawlessly fit into the setting. Of course having a dedicated fire mage is a great thing to have in the frozen north where many enemies are vulnerable to fire. And she became extremely strong very quickly. I found Items for her, that raised her bonus to fire damage even further up to i think almost 100% at later levels, making her spells like Fireball do ridiculous damage to large clusters of enemies. Also there was gear that raised her casting level and lowered the cast time like the Robe of Vecna does in BG2. That made her an absolute monster of a damage dealer and made some fights trivial. Is she OP with the right gear that you will find during the game? Yes, she is. Is it gamebreaking? No. Should you use Karihi in your party because her presentation, her writing and her gameplay is incredibly great. Absolutely.
10/10 Would recommend for everyone to try her out. I haven't romanced her so I don't know how it goes but as a friend and companion I loved her the most of my companions, second only to...
Minerva: Minerva is a Gnome Artificier. That means she is a fightethief with no ability to backstab, but instead with unique traps, the ability to craft very powerful potions and later a stationary autocannon and even a Modron. Minerva is probably the most likeable companion I have ever had in any party. She is cheerful, positive, funny but she never goes over the top and has serious moments to. Her personality is great and she is a joy to have around. Just as with Karihi, everything is perfect here. Voice actress does a phenomenal job, her portrait fits her perfectly and her skills are interesting and strong. Her backstory also feels realistic and fitting and I want to visit Lantan with her now. She uses throwing knifes and is very good at it. Its a bit tedious at first when you have to craft her special knifes that can do friendly fire if your micromanagement slips a litte but once she gets a returning throwing dagger she is just simply fun in combat. She also comments on getting a returnable throwing dagger and how convenient that is for her when you ask her how she is doing in a player initiated dialogue. How great is that?
10/10 Companion. I would have loved to romance her but I saw to late that the romance required 14 Intelligence to trigger. When I EE Keepered my Intelligence up during the Vale of Shadows its seems to have been to late and the romance didn't trigger properly. Real shame. You should definitely take her with you if you want a ranged damage dealer with fun skills that will be the positive heart of the party. Minerva is great.
Dusky: He is a Half-Orc Cleric/Thief. His portrait is abysmal. You need to swap it out to a better one at the very start of you playthrough or it will ruin that character for you. I gave him Dandjelions Portrait because I thought that it fit but you can use any Half-Orc portrait that you like. Everything else about him was pretty good. He has some intersting stories from his past and his personality is very likeable. If you play a male character he will try to initiate a romance at some point. If you are not into that stuff you can turn him down and he will be a good friend for the rest of the game. He will ask you to have drinks in an inn several times where he will then initiate a dialogue. I found that to be great idea and it really enhanced the atmosphere. Nothing like having an ale together in the Kuldahar Root Cellar after a return from a deadly dungeon and have a chat. As for effectiveness I really didn't have a good role for him because I already had Minerva to take care of traps and locks. His priest spell progression is slow because he is a multiclass and so he mostly stayed back with a sling in hand and supported with heals and defensive magic. His stats are great but with only 1 APR i wanted to keep him from the frontlines. Later he became a lifesaver when I had him scout ahead under the effects of Sanctuary and made him disable traps and trigger ambushes prematurely. He was a good secondary cleric and his pickpocket skills were needed to get the three rings from Orrick, Arundel and Oswald at the start. I liked his realistic, down to earth character and he had quite a lot of banter while never going on the boring side. His voice actor did a good job as well.
7/10
So that is it for the companions. I didn't include Nella, because she is from a different modder. I can quickly say that I liked her really much and I found her connection to Arundel too interesting to not take her.
Now onto the quest mods. I am a bit torn here because my Nr.1 criteria was that those quests would fit in with the rest of the worldbuilding and atmosphere. I hoped that those mods would enhance the experience of the game while not changing how the game feels too much. Some of them succeeded in this, some of them didn't.
Tale of our Lady Dreamless: This is a pretty short quest that actually fit in flawlessly with the rest of the game. I has a few small, but extremely beautiful maps, an encounter with one of the barbarians before we meet more of them in Heart of Winter and a quick but fitting resolution. I can say nothing bad about this mod and would absolutely recommend it.
8/10
Below and Below Inn: I was really looking forward to this mod I have to say. A new cozy Inn in the Icewind Dale that I could visit and spend some time in? Yes please, But unfortunately I was really not a fan of this when I played it. That is because it really doesn't fit with the rest of the setting. The Inn is not in Kuldahar but somewhere between Dorn's Deep and the Hand of the Seldarine on the Map. Umm what? To my knowledge that means it is in the middle of nowhere in one of the most deserted places in the Icewind Dale. What would an Inn do there? There should have been no customers at all, but instead it is an Inn that has stuff like a piano and luxurious furniture in it. There are Noblemen and Noblewomen, Merchants and other people there. It just didn't make any sense to me and pulled me off of my immersion. No one mentioned why there would be rich people like this in the middle of the wilderness of the North, nobody mentioned the blocked passes to the Ten Towns. Icewind Dale is such a great game because after you leave Easthaven you are cut off from Civilisation. The people of Kuldahar are on their own, living in a desolate and dangerous area and no help is coming to them apart from you adventurer party. Below and Below Inn destroyed that Image for me. It felt like it belonged in a different area of the Icewind Dale or even further south and felt really out of place. There wasn't even snow at the entrance now that I think of it but green Grass. I would not install it again. Minus points for having a cook that does not want to throw me out of his kitchen. This goes against every RPG rule in existance and really made me question my view of the world!
2/10
Terror of the Skineater: Another short quest that made good use of the haunted forest maps from Icewind Dale 2. You are approached by a mage that tells you of that a creature that slaughters people from his village roams around in a nearby forest and wants you to kill it. (Although he never mention what and where this village is, what kinda put me off) What I liked was that it was a pretty short and interesting quest that even had a connection to a Character that we meet in Icewind Dale 2 and gives a little more backstory to that Character. 7/10 Good mod. You get a very powerful spear from it that dominates the early game if you do this quest early.
Night of the Blinking Dead: If you want to fight through yet another of the BG2 Beholder lairs this mod is for you. I really didn't. The attempt of recreating the comedy with the speaking Spectator Beholder kinda worked, but it was not enough for me to recommend this mod. It didn't fit in in my opinion. At least its also pretty short.
3/10
Snowytoes Hamlet: This mods adds a Halfling Village to the map where you can get some gear and some quests. It really wasn't bad. My biggest criticism for it was that it made you backtrack to already cleared dungeons like Kresselacks Tomb or the Temple of the forgotten God. I didn't like this. Those are locations that should be visited once and not a second time. It felt a little bit devaluation going there again and bringing some halfling boys back home from there. Also the existance of another Village in a supposedly wild and uninhabited part of Faerun was not something that I particularly needed. Its an okay mod though.
5/10
The Rediscovery of Kuldahar: Finally the mod that I was looking forward to the most. As I said earlier I always felt that more could have been done with Kuldahar. I always bothered me that all the villagers there all have the same exact dialogue. That there are very few interesing NPCs. Kuldahar didn't change as you progressed though the different chapters of the game was also something that I would have liked to see changed. Why didn't Mother Egenia show up in the temple of Illmater after I rescued her from Dragon's eye? It would have been so nice to have her back, be able to talk to her there, maybe buy better equipment from her. Where are the other villagers that were held captive in Dragon's Eye? Only Sheemish appears in Kuldahar afterwards. Big missed opportunity not having some of the other people show up, making Kuldahar seem more inhabited again, maybe have them give some small rewards or even quests when you talk to them after their rescue. The Root Cellar is the coolest and most cozy Inn that I can think of but after the Lysan story there is nothing more to do there and the guest there all have the same dialogue. So I hoped that this mod would adress all that. And unfortunately it didn't. It added some caves to the original maps where you could get two smaller quests. The one where I had to hunt a Chimera was okay, the one where I had to prepare a get together for two women (one apparently a Noblewoman in Kuldahar?) was not and I had to look for that candle that I needed to complete this quest way too long. The mod also adds a completely new section of Kuldahar that is really well designed and had a lot of potential. But the people you meet there were a little bit disappointing to me. There is a Xvart merchant there that sells you flies and eyes and chicken feet and stuff like that. In my opinion, he absolutely didn't fit into the setting. The Mushroom Café was interesting but ultimately lacked any importance and there was not reason to go there more than once. More could have been done with it. The Throne of Bhaal prophecy Stone Face that gave forshadowing about the events of Icewind Dale 2 was good, but the other stuff not so much. You get some Quests that make you search for pages of a Spellbook for a Mage (Isn't Orrick supposed to be the only mage in Kuldahar), or get a Telescope for a Stargazer that you can either steal from Oswald or get a different one later, for which this guy will reward you with a Star Atlas that raises Saving Throws and Lore. But you have to wait a whole Month until he finishes it and by that time you have either rested 90 times i a row or pretty much completed the game already. Ultimately this area of Kuldahar, while beautiful to look at, didn't give me the feeling of it being a natural extension of the existing Kuldahar. While it wasn't bad it was just simply not what I expected so it left me disappointed. There is one thing about this mod that redeems it for me though. An that is the upper Kuldahar section. Remeber Lysan telling the barkeeper of the Root Cellar that she uses to go to upper Kuldahar from time to time? In the Vanilla game we never get to see upper Kuldahar but with this mod we can. And we can see why Lysan went there and what she did. Don't want to spoil it for anybody what you find there but this part of this mod was 100% perfect. This is what I wanted to see. An extension that build upon content from the original game and built onto it. For the upper Kuldahar addition alone I would recommend to install this mod. That was exactly what I hoped the Rediscovery of Kuldahar would do and it felt like straight out of the base game.
6/10 I would have been 3/10 without the upper Kuldahar section but this part really pulled it on to a higher rating alone. The rest was just not what I expected and some people might enjoy it more than me, because it really isn't bad.
Items and others: The last mod on my list and I cannot say too much about it. This mod adds a ton of items, some of them craftable. I do not know exactly which ones of the items I found came from this mod, which ones maybe came from the NPC mods and which ones were in the base game, so its hard for me to judge. The Item crafting was very fun and gave some appropriately powerful items. A shame that you have to play Heart of Winter and Trials of the Luremaster before you defeat Belhifet in order to get every item crafted though as it never made sense to me to play the games it that order. For me it was always defeat Belhifet, than export my characters to HoW and close out with TotLM. Overall I felt pretty much overequipped during my entire playthrough. Some items appeared way to often, like the Hands of Takkok (the gauntlets of Ogre strenght) which I found about 5 times. Or the cloak of displacement which appeard about as often. Not sure it is the fault of this mod though so its hard for me to judge. I mostly enjoyed the item variety that came with it. Its maybe a bit too much as I was closing in on having a million gold pieces at the end of the game.
So thats it. A lot to read through but hopefully you found my thoughts about these mods helpful.
I want to put out a big thank you to the creators because you really gave me a fresh playthrough, extremely well written companions that enhanced my gaming experience a lot and made me want to play with the other companions that I couldn't take along too.
Not everything was exactly to my liking, but you can't please anyone. And most of the stuff you created was extremely well done and thought out.

Hello! I am a 25 y/o female, 5'0" 183 lbs. For the past few years I've been having some worsening symptoms and also heart palpitations. The symptoms are as follows:

• Sudden alcohol intolerance
• Weird heart issues (palpitations, racing heart when waking up and also when drinking alcohol)
• Tinnitus
• Chronic fatigue
• Lightheadedness
• Seeing spots
• Brain fog
• Malaise
• Body aches
• Bad temperature regulation despite sweating like crazy

It's getting to the point where I'm waiting for the day I'm out in public and finally pass out onto the ground. :( I spoke with a friend who manages an urgent care clinic, and a doctor there suggested possible PVCs or POTS, as well as getting an ANA panel done. I do have hypothyroidism, but my levels are normal now with synthroid. My A1C and fasting blood sugar are also normal. Although, whenever I get a urinalysis I always have slightly excess amounts of protein and blood. I am also on Zoloft and birth control and have been for 8 years. I have a physical in July, but am wondering if I should schedule a visit sooner. Any thoughts are appreciated.

I'm sure most of you have had to deal with aggressive bystanders at one time or another. They can be very annoying and can bring your blood to a boil. Here are a few lessons I've learned when dealing with aggressive bystanders.
​

1. Ask yourself this: Are they truly interfering with my job? In most jurisdictions, the person has to actually interfere with your official duties to constitute a crime. General officer safety concerns don't cut it anymore. But interference can come in a variety of forms. Are they yelling so loud that you can't hear your radio or interview a witness? Are they physically getting in your way when you are trying to do something? Are they blinding you with a flashlight or cell phone light? Have a genuine complaint against the person before you go hands on.

​

1. Give the person a material object in which they are to stay behind. If you tell them to "move back", and they move back 6 inches, then they have just complied with your command. Point to a tree or crack in the sidewalk or some physical object, and tell them not to cross it. If you have time to put up crime scene tape, then use that.

​

1. Slow compliance is still compliance. This is something that we learned from our prosecutors. They refused to file a number of cases against 1st amendment auditors because they would walk very slowly out of the area when ordered. But they were still complying with the officer's command.

​

1. Give them a spot to film. If you demonstrate that you are respecting their right to observe and film your activity, a judge or jury will look on you with much more favor.

​

1. Don't let them get in your face. If you are standing on a skirmish line or perimeter, you deserve at least an arm's length of personal space. A few months ago, a gangster stuck his phone in my face while my partner was arresting his buddy. I pushed him back a couple times, but he kept coming so I pointed to the ground right between us and told him not to cross that line. Then I backed up a few feet. Of course he followed me closer, crossing the line, so he went to jail. I later learned that other guys were letting him get away with it which is why he was so bold.

​

1. An officer making an arrest is in a vulnerable position. The officer must control and care for the arrestee. The officer also has a duty to protect the arrestee. They cannot concentrate on all that and also deal with a mob. Protect your partner. Keep the bystanders back. If they assault your arrestee, you may be held liable.

​
Here's a video of an officer that had to protect his partner during an arrest. I already analyzed this incident in detail on my channel and found his actions to be 100% legal.
​
https://youtu.be/8y1bTlUcZRs
​

1. Have an idea of what constitutes a reasonable distance for keeping bystanders away. One way to do that is to check out some of the legislation that has been attempted. Here's a recent one. https://www.wwltv.com/amp/article/news/politics/proposed-law-would-give-police-a-buffer-between-them-and-bystanders/289-24e9c599-f032-48d1-88c4-6e55f905b660

​
The distance is a judgement call. Make it a reasonable compromise between your safety and the citizen's freedom of movement.
​

1. Don't have a conversation with 1st amendment auditors. You cannot make them look stupid. If you manage to make them say or do something stupid, they will just edit that part out of their video. You probably have a lot more to lose than they do over a heated argument.

​

1. Citizens have a right to film you. Get over it.

​

1. "Name and badge number" is a common request from citizens. Know your policy regarding this request. You probably don't have to write it for them or repeat it a hundred times. My department requires that we give it, but I don't respond to people who are being hostile or overly rude. You serve the people, but you don't have to let them take your dignity. You also don't have to stop everything you're doing to comply with their request.

​

1. If you know the law, you'll find yourself arguing with people less. You'll just give them a lawful order. If they don't obey, take 'em in.

​
The Force Review

Hey everybody!
New to this subreddit, transplant from bipolar — I'm a recovering alcoholic and drug addict that also has Psychotic Bipolar Disorder and ADHD comorbidly. While I've been diagnosed with Bipolar 1 for a while now, I finally sought treatment for Alcohol and Cocaine Use Disorders, and I'm about to hit six months clean!
I partially wanted to make this post just to brag — I don't really have like, anybody in my life that's sober and/or neurodivergent to commiserate and celebrate with, so now that my social energy is returning, I'm coming back to Reddit to find some digital socialization. But, I also want to be here as a source of encouragement for those earlier in their journey. This was my first try quitting, and getting to this point has been absolute hell in some regards and at certain points. But, I'll say that on the other side and a half year later, life is so much sweeter.
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It started in my very early adulthood. At least, started to get noticeable. I'd always been a moody kid, and I was in conflict with peers and family very often. I was a closeted gay kid, and in a conservative, religious, Midwest context, I absolutely did not fit in. But, one thing got me through: my intellect. Since childhood, I've been incredibly intelligent and eloquent. My first words were full sentences, and started at less than a year old, as my mother's story goes. I could read full books by first grade, and was composing novel creative writing by ten years old. I've been a poet all along, and my creativity and brains have gotten me very very far. Yes, Catholic school was hell, but I was valedictorian and eventually went to an Ivy League college.
We drank quite a bit in Catholic school. On weekends at football games and parties, most my classmates and I would partake from about age sixteen. It wasn't necessarily problematic at that point for my lack of regular access. I could only drink when I had it from someone else. But, from the very moment my lips touched any alcohol other than the Blood of Christ, my life was redirected. I was so obsessed with drinking, and would do it to the most extreme and most frequent as possible. It made me ecstatic, even to just think about.
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Once I got to college, things got bad. I got a fake ID, started going to much larger and better-stocked social functions, and also had a much more progressive and diverse crowd to socialize with. By spring of my freshman year I was meeting the clinical conditions for Alcohol Use Disorder. Obviously most of it was in secret. At points, I was even fermenting my own grape juice in my closet to get drunk alone in my dorm room. I've also been a major nicotine fiend since about sixteen, and engaged in that constantly too.
The summer after that freshman year, I returned home to my family where I spent the break cashiering. I couldn't get a decent internship, and accepted an only part-time and unpaid one with a local nonprofit. I also continued to drink in excess, a considerable amount for the age and time of my life. Probably the equivalent of a pint a night. I was just eighteen, and my parents one night found me drunk and vaping. They took the vape from me and referred me to my primary care provider for a mental health assessment. At the time, they thought my primary issue was the underage nicotine addiction. That PA suggested I find a therapist, and prescribed me a moderate dose of Wellbutrin, thinking it'd help the vaping and "mild" depression.
And it worked! For a while. The remainder of the summer and following early fall went fine. I continued to drink, but less problematically and miserably. I returned to school that September and found a therapist and psychiatrist through my school's clinic. Eventually, the depression and over-drinking began to creep in again though, and I again found myself begging a prescriber for help. He dxd me with Major Depression, switched me to Zoloft (a mere 25mg), and sent me on my way. As I left, he gave a small warning... patients that have Bipolar Disorder sometimes have an averse reaction to antidepressants... if you start to feel manic, give us a call.
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Things got very bad very fast. I was already experiencing sleeping problems, and the insomnia that was exacerbated was intense. I was going days and days without sleeping — my record was five nights in a row of only microsleeps of 5 minutes or less throughout the days. I went literally crazy, clinically manic and increasingly psychotic. Eventually, I lost lucidity and became fully delusional. I thought the government was chasing me, that everything was a simulation, that I was on the run. I went to Urgent Care and explained my situation to the nurse. She dismissed me, calling it mere anxiety and sending me home to "go meditate."
Out into the night I went. It was a cold Thanksgiving night, the streets empty, everybody home with their families. I was alone at school, unable to afford a fight home for the holiday. I received a message from beyond, and embarked upon my mission. In the streets, I was running around and screaming, searching for clues wherever I could find them. The world seemed a puzzle to me, and it was my job to solve it. Eventually, I encountered campus police. They detained me and took me to campus Urgent Care, who eventually ambulanced me to the local psychiatric ER, who the next day admitted me to the local psychiatric hospital, where I spent a week.
The issue is, I was incredible at masking. The staff had little idea my internal thoughts and processes; I considered it a part of my mission to remain silent about the simulation. And, I was stoned when they picked me up. They observed me for a week, and discharged me without a diagnosis. School put me on an involuntary leave and I went home to start winter break early. Back there during my first follow up with a new local doctor, I was diagnosed with Bipolar 1 Disorder, obviously having reacted to the SSRI. While the hospital insisted the episode was cannabis induced, I'm fairly certain that was for liability purposes, that hospital attached to the same campus clinic that misdiagnosed me in the first place.
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The following years were hell. I spent months severely overmedicated, at one point gaining ninety pounds in just three months. I continued to sustain episodes, albeit more mild, being forevermore on a heavy antipsychotic routine. I lost most all my friends. COVID happened. I got into debt. I continued to drink more and more. I picked up cocaine. I sent my life into a spiral, all in secret. Because, upon my return to school, they had me on probation. If I was known to be drinking or using, they would put me back on leave. But, I hate the Midwest and couldn't go back, so I couldn't seek treatment.
I lived a secret alcoholic and cokehead for years. I got myself into severe debt from spending and gambling, I continued to get and lose jobs, and struggled to even get to class. But, on the surface, I was doing fine. In fact, pretty good — I even graduated Cum Laude. But, I hated my life. I was a mess and knew that my life was unsustainable. So at the end of my last semester Fall 2022 (I took one semester off during COVID for non-health reasons), I made the decision to seek treatment. I finished my last exam, packed up my dorm with one carry-on packed for rehab. My parents drove from Midwest to New England to pick me up, bring me home, and drop me at the hospital, where I spent a week.
I will be honest: the last six months have been hell at times. Of course the chemical withdrawal from years of drinking a fifth-a-day and snorting a gram-a-day are going to leave you exhausted. I spent months doing absolutely nothing. I slept and cried all day and stayed up ruminating all night. I continued to try adjusting my meds, another new doctor having taken me off any stimulant ADHD treatment (another diagnosis I picked up along the way) and leaving me debilitated. I couldn't get out of bed. I couldn't think. I couldn't write.
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But... I think things are finally turning around. I tried AA but I didn't like it very much. My local chapter in the rural Midwest is, obviously, not a very friendly crowd to this flamboyant homosexual cokehead, so I didn't stay. But, I did keep one principle — a higher power. Mine is astrology. With the support of a finally-tolerable med routine and the commitment to something larger than myself, I'm finally starting to get over the initial sobriety hump, and it feels amazing.
I wake up every morning and feel truly grateful for once. I'm not hungover, I'm not throwing up and shitting my pants while I rush late to work or class. I'm getting up with the sunrise, before my alarm, and writing poetry again and slowly chipping away at my debt and repairing things with my parents and... staying sober. Next week I hit six months.
To anyone who wants to or has just started this journey, I'm holding space for you. Being neurodivergent is incredibly difficult at times. But, it can also be incredibly rewarding. You are worthy of good health, and I hope you're able to find and keep the support you deserve.
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Idk why I wrote all this... Kinda manicky today, actually. Anyways, if you've made it this far, thanks for hearing my story. I hope it can be helpful or comforting in any way. If anyone has questions I'm happy to try and answer.
For anyone curious, my current med routine:

• Lamictal (Lamotrigine), 300mg/day
• Vraylar (Cariprazine), 3mg/day
• Naltrexone (Vivitrol) tablet, 50mg/day
• Jornay (Methylphenidate ER), 40mg/day
• Hydroxyzine (Atarax), 25-75mg PRN
• Trazodone (Desyrel), 50-100mg PRN

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Thanks again for hearing my story. I wish you all well ~~

Evening LegalAdvice!
Hope some people can offer their interpretation and opinions on the solar panel protections of home owners in Florida HOAs.
Initial Background:
I put in an HOA ARC request for solar panels in my HOA. The request came back denied as “solar panels are not allowed to face the street.”
I am already under contract for the solar panels and the company assures me the HOA can do no such thing. The system covers all 4 sides of my roof in order to obtain a 100% offset, and removing or moving any such panels will be detrimental to the performance of the system.
Current law:
Please see Florida Statute 163.04, http://www.leg.state.fl.us/Statutes/index.cfm?App_mode=Display_Statute&Search_String=&URL=0100-0199/0163/Sections/0163.04.html
I pulled some info out of it:
"A deed restriction, covenant, declaration, or similar binding agreement may not prohibit or have the effect of prohibiting solar collectors, clotheslines, or other energy devices based on renewable resources from being installed on buildings erected on the lots or parcels covered by the deed restriction, covenant, declaration, or binding agreement"
"Such entity may determine the specific location where solar collectors may be installed on the roof within an orientation to the south or within 45° east or west of due south if such determination does not impair the effective operation of the solar collectors."
Current ARC Guidelines:
SOLAR PANELS
The location and design details for solar collectors shall be submitted to the Architectural Review Committee. A solar collect shall not be installed on any lot unless it is an integral and harmonious part of the architectural design of a roof structure. Solar collectors shall be located on a roof exposure shielded from view
from the street, adjoining lots and Common Areas to the maximum extent possible. Solar collectors shall be flush mounted and installed parallel to the plane of the roof. Under no circumstance may solar collectors extend above the ridgeline of a roof.
Initial thoughts:
As it stands, the arc guidelines are very generic and mention nothing about facing a street, but that it should be shielded from the street to the maximum extent possible. Nothing explicitly about the street. Additionally, some of the homes in the community (half) have their main roof line facing the street (south), so banning such placement on the south roof directly goes against Statute 163.04. My thoughts are this is grounds alone that the “no street placement” is an incorrect ruling regardless of the direction it faces on some homes. Also, some homes face south and must be required to allow panels on the south side, so the point is moot.
Possible interpretations of law:
As it states that an entity may determine the location IF it does not affect performance, we know they have some say. However, I do believe that because moving a panel reduces performance then it is covered. However, one could possibly make the argument that so such panels needed to exist in the original design as “You do not need 100% offset” though I think that is a weak argument.
Two asks!

1. Do you believe my interpretation that I am protected due to a reduced performance is correct?
2. If my appeal denies, and I am correct with #1 (I have a leg to stand on) would the next move to be to sue/cease and desist the decision, or move forward with the install and sue after the install if the HOA comes after me?

Thanks all!

Hello everyone,
Over the past six months, I've dedicated my focus to exploring the capabilities of AI, specifically ChatGPT, to understand its limitations and discover ways to integrate it into my daily workflow as an SEO professional. The goal was to leverage AI to streamline and expedite my tasks. I must say, I've been thoroughly impressed with the results I've achieved, and I'm excited to share my insights and strategies with my fellow SEO experts here.
It's worth mentioning that my approach involved a process of iterative learning. I would make requests to ChatGPT and carefully analyze the generated content. Whenever I encountered sections that didn't meet my expectations, I provided feedback to the AI, explaining why it fell short and what improvements I desired. In instances where I encountered specific challenges, I would articulate the issues to ChatGPT and ask for guidance on how to instruct it more effectively next time. Remarkably, the AI provided invaluable insights and suggestions that greatly enhanced my understanding of optimizing my instructions.
In this particular example, my focus has been on harnessing the power of ChatGPT to generate high-quality articles. I discovered that simply asking it to "write me an article about XYZ" often yielded generic or rudimentary results. However, I delved deeper to uncover the best approach to format my instructions for optimal outcomes. This is the methodology I'm currently refining and implementing.
Through this journey, I've come to appreciate the tremendous potential of AI in content creation and how it can revolutionize our industry. By effectively communicating our expectations and providing clear feedback, we can harness the AI's capabilities to produce exceptional and tailored content.
In the spirit of collaboration, I will be sharing my learnings and strategies on this platform, providing valuable insights to fellow SEO professionals who are interested in leveraging AI to enhance their content creation process. Together, we can unlock the full potential of AI and redefine the boundaries of what's possible in our field.
Stay tuned for my upcoming posts, where I'll dive deeper into the intricacies of optimizing instructions to get the best possible results from ChatGPT. Let's explore the exciting frontier of AI-powered content generation and elevate our SEO practices to new heights.
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To get the best result when requesting an article, it's helpful to provide a clear and structured template that outlines the specific sections and key points you want the article to cover. Here's a recommended template you can follow:
Keywords & Keyword Placement: List out the keywords you want to include, and where you want them included, as an example I'll list my keywords out like this "keywords in the title: Example keyword",
Title: Start with a clear and catchy title that reflects the main topic or focus of the article. Make it engaging to attract readers' attention.
Introduction: Begin with an introductory paragraph that sets the tone and provides an overview of the article. Hook the reader with an interesting fact, anecdote, or question related to the topic.
Background/Context: Provide some background information or context to help readers understand the subject matter. Explain why it is relevant, important, or timely.
Main Sections/Points: Break down the body of the article into several sections, each focusing on a specific point or subtopic. Use subheadings to clearly indicate these sections. Include key information, supporting evidence, examples, and actionable tips or insights.
Conclusion: Summarize the main points covered in the article and emphasize the key takeaways or conclusions. End with a thought-provoking statement or a call to action.
Call to Action: Provide a clear goal that you want to achieve, such as a CTA that will encourage users to click a button, fill out a form, or place a phone call
References/Links: If applicable, include references or links to credible sources that support the information presented in the article. This helps build credibility and allows readers to explore the topic further.
Author Bio/About the Company: If desired, include a brief author bio or a section about your company at the end of the article. This can provide credibility and give readers more information about the expertise behind the content.
By providing a clear template that outlines the structure and key elements you want in the article, you help ensure that the final result meets your expectations and delivers the desired information effectively. Additionally, be sure to communicate any specific requirements, tone preferences, or target audience details to further tailor the article to your needs.
Its extremely important to review the output, check it for inaccuraies and of course manually inserting links. There will always be tweaks.
Looking forward to any feedback and questions.

For the last several years I've had the experience of getting a little lightheaded and slightly dizzy after a few nights of not sleeping well. About six weeks ago I woke up after traveling to the east coast and had what was most likely BPPV while in bed (happened when I lay down on my right side). It cleared up after a few hours (doing simply BPPV exercises and little positional movements throughout the day).
Traveled around the east coast, slept ok, then went to Rome. Had a blast, stayed out late every night, got Covid (in bed for two days, but not awful), and then a week or two later flew back to NJ. A few days after getting back to NJ, same thing happened as the first time: positional vertigo in bed. Fast forward about 5 days, flew back to LA. Was quite dehydrated feeling after the flight (drank a ton of water before and during, with LMNT added to it). Woke up feeling tired but nothing crazy. Walked my dog, came home and while in the kitchen preparing my dog's food I looked down and got hit with a wave of vertigo. This one feels different than the first time, more based on the head going up or down (nodding, essentially) and I feel it when upright vs last time where it was more positional on the right side when in bed.
Anyway, went to urgent care because today felt worse than last time and they ruled anything serious out. Got some Rx to help with the motion sickness etc should it continue and will go to an ENT if it doesn't improve.
Just wondering if any of my fellow health conscious, oura wearers have experience something similar. Quite a bummer as I'd much rather be running and deadlifting than in bed.
Ultimately, my best guess is that sleep deprivation and crossing many time zones while traveling (I flew from Rome on 5/27 and to LA on 6/5...in the end my travels involved 6 flights in as many weeks) and COVID and life stress (my union is on strike right now and it's not looking great at the moment) combined to just knock me for a loop.
Does any of this resonate with anyone out there?