Portland maine winter weather

Maine Related News & Discussion - r/Maine

2009.02.24 20:01 uzimonkey Maine Related News & Discussion - r/Maine

A place to discuss all things Maine related. Maine, the way life should be.
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2018.11.18 04:29 maskedbanditoftruth A subreddit for the members of the Lonesome No More Social Club in Portland, Maine

In 2018, a small group formed to create some hopefully-meaningful connections in the sometimes difficult climate of southern Maine. This is a place to organize future events, get to know other members, and perhaps even form chapters for the other regions of Maine!
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2023.06.06 05:38 scrub3410 ATL to SCL - how full are these flights?

Does anybody fly regularly to SCL (Santiago, Chile)?
I’m curious how full these flights are in the winter time, which is spring/summer in South America so I’m guessing peak travel season
Visiting Chile for the first time in November of this year and trying to decide if I should just buy D1 or go main/C+ and hope to get a cheap upgrade offer. Or just stay in either cabin if these flights are relatively empty.
submitted by scrub3410 to delta [link] [comments]


2023.06.06 05:35 DiscoveryHimalaya The Top 15 Best Successful Tips For Ghorepani Poon Hill Trek - Poon Hill Sunrise Trek Cost & Itinerary - Short Poon Hill Trek - Annapurna Sunrise Treks

The Top 15 Best Successful Tips For Ghorepani Poon Hill Trek - Poon Hill Sunrise Trek Cost & Itinerary - Short Poon Hill Trek - Annapurna Sunrise Treks
Ghorepani Poon Hill Trek is a marvelous short trip in the Annapurna region. It's probably the most fascinating trekking trail that anyone easily gets around the magnificent mountains with the beautiful Annapurna Himalayas. Poon Hill is a popular viewpoint located in the Annapurna region of Nepal. It is a renowned trekking destination and offers breathtaking panoramic views of the Himalayan mountain range, including the Annapurna and Dhaulagiri peaks. Here is some additional information about Poon Hill:
Location: Poon Hill is situated in the Annapurna Conservation Area, within the Gandruk Village Development Committee of Kaski District, Nepal. It is part of the larger Annapurna Circuit trekking route.
Maximum Altitude: Poon Hill stands at an elevation of 3,210 meters (10,532 feet) above sea level. Although it is not extremely high, it offers stunning views of the surrounding peaks.
Trek Duration: The typical Ghorepani Poon Hill Trek takes around 4 to 5 days to complete. The trek usually starts and ends in Nayapul, passing through various villages such as Tikhedhunga, Ghorepani, and Tadapani.
Scenic Views: The main highlight of the Poon Hill trek is the spectacular sunrise view from the summit. Trekkers wake up early in the morning and hike to Poon Hill to witness the sunrise casting golden hues on the snow-capped peaks, creating a breathtaking vista. The panoramic view includes Annapurna I (8,091m), Annapurna South (7,219m), Machhapuchhre (6,993m), and Dhaulagiri (8,167m), among others.
Teahouse Accommodations: Along the Poon Hill trekking route, there are several teahouse lodges available for trekkers to rest and stay overnight. These teahouses offer basic facilities like meals, hot showers, and cozy rooms. It is recommended to book accommodations in advance during the peak trekking seasons.
Accessibility: Poon Hill is easily accessible from the city of Pokhara, which is a popular tourist hub in Nepal. Trekkers usually take a short drive from Pokhara to Nayapul, the starting point of the trek.
Overall, the Poon Hill trek is a relatively moderate trek suitable for trekkers of various fitness levels. It offers stunning natural beauty, cultural experiences, and the opportunity to witness the majestic Himalayas.
Marvelous Annapurna Mountains
Sure! Here are the top 15 best successful tips for the Ghorepani Poon Hill Trek:
  1. Plan and Prepare: Research the trek thoroughly and make a detailed plan. Familiarize yourself with the trail, weather conditions, and necessary permits.
  2. Physical Fitness: Engage in regular exercise and prepare your body for the trek. Cardiovascular exercises like hiking, jogging, and cycling will help build stamina.
  3. Pack Wisely: Carry lightweight and essential items. Pack warm clothing, rain gear, trekking boots, a first aid kit, water bottles, and snacks.
  4. Trekking Permits: Obtain the necessary permits, such as the Annapurna Conservation Area Permit (ACAP) and the TIMS (Trekkers' Information Management System) card.
  5. Acclimatization: Take your time to acclimatize to the altitude. Ascend gradually, and spend a day or two at higher altitudes to allow your body to adjust.
  6. Hydration: Drink plenty of water to stay hydrated throughout the trek. Dehydration can worsen altitude sickness symptoms.
  7. Trekking Poles: Consider using trekking poles to provide stability and reduce the strain on your legs during steep ascents and descents.
  8. Start Early: Begin your trek early in the morning to enjoy clear views and avoid crowds on the trail.
  9. Local Guides/Porters: Hiring a local guide or porter can enhance your trekking experience. They are knowledgeable about the trail, local culture, and can assist with carrying your luggage.
  10. Trekking Insurance: Purchase comprehensive travel insurance that covers emergency evacuation, medical expenses, and loss of belongings.
  11. Respect Local Culture: Respect the local customs, traditions, and beliefs of the communities you encounter along the way. Dress modestly and be mindful of your actions.
  12. Proper Trekking Etiquette: Follow the Leave No Trace principles by avoiding littering and preserving the natural environment. Be considerate to other trekkers and locals on the trail.
  13. Trekking Accommodation: Book teahouse accommodations in advance, especially during peak trekking seasons. Carry a sleeping bag for added comfort and warmth.
  14. Weather Awareness: Be prepared for unpredictable weather conditions. Pack both warm and lightweight clothing to layer accordingly.
  15. Enjoy the Journey: Lastly, enjoy the trek and embrace the stunning landscapes. Take breaks to rest, take photographs, and interact with fellow trekkers to create memorable experiences.
Remember, these tips are meant to provide general guidance. It's always recommended to consult with a professional trekking agency or experienced trekkers for specific advice based on the current conditions and your personal requirements.
submitted by DiscoveryHimalaya to u/DiscoveryHimalaya [link] [comments]


2023.06.06 05:27 Educational-Text1556 A few options...

I just graduated from grad school & the place I'll be working at is about 33 miles from home. I currently drive a 2016 428i gran coupe with 107k miles. I've put on 54k miles since 2020, and have been evaluating my options of vehicles to drive moving forward. I live in New England where winter weather is a factor. Here are the scenario's I'm deciding between.
  1. Should I run this car to the ground then buy a Bmw 3 series?(Newer gen) Unsure if this is the best idea for a car to put lots of hwy miles on.
  2. Run to the ground then buy a 2023 or newer accord to commute & buy a winter beat around car.
  3. Purchase an older used reliable car to commute while preserving the life of my BMW. (Budget 10k)
What option should I choose & any vehicle recs?
submitted by Educational-Text1556 to whatcarshouldIbuy [link] [comments]


2023.06.06 05:23 redryder74 X100 - how to avoid condensation issues inside the lens?

I live in the humid tropics, and I've had this X100 for a long time (1st gen model). I keep it in a dry box, but it could be that the dry box is not working well.
In any case, what happened was that when I went to Japan last year during winter, I noticed that my shots were blurry and blooming when there was a light source. It looked exactly like looking through fogged up spectacles at a light. I kept wiping the lens to no effect, so most probably the condensation was on the inside.
I didn't bring a camera bag with me, and the camera was kept in my jacket pocket throughout the trip. It might have been condensing whenever I move in and out of the cold, or even when I just take it out of my jacket to shoot.
I'm looking to upgrade from the X100 since it's really old now, but how common is this issue when shooting during winter? Do I need to look for a weather sealed camera?
submitted by redryder74 to AskPhotography [link] [comments]


2023.06.06 05:22 JohnnyArlo How Mayor Brown with save Buffalo from freezing …..Next Winter.

From CTV
During the four-day storm, Buffalo had a lack of proper equipment and the response disproportionately affected communities of colour, according to the report by New York University researchers.
The report made several recommendations to help the city prepare for the next winter season:

The mayor’s office said Friday that New York state has allocated US$10 million to the construction of a new public works facility.
Buffalo Mayor Byron Brown commissioned the report in an effort to “better prepare for future blizzards of this magnitude,” the report says.
These were extreme weather conditions. Our city bore the brunt of this historic blizzard,” Brown said in a statement Friday. “In the days prior to the storm and after the storm, I’ve taken proactive steps to help ensure a better response for future storms.”
The nine university researchers and advisers said the report “aims to help the city move forward and make meaningful progress” and “should help place Buffalo in a better position to prepare, respond, and recover from major storms ahead.”

Anyone else remember the blizzard of '95? Perhaps Buffalo is still using the equipment from back then. The 1995/96 blizzard was so bad, that snow season even ended up producing snow until MAY of the following year!
Brown is from Buffalo he knows how winter is, and only now, after 31 deaths, are there investments in new equipment.
Buffalo Rising asks in 2017 , Byron Brown: Perhaps Among Buffalo’s Best Mayors?
WNY Media asks in 2022, Is Byron Brown the worst mayor in America?
submitted by JohnnyArlo to Buffalo [link] [comments]


2023.06.06 05:05 jrs87343434 2001 Buell Blast - starts and idles fine BUT sputters/backfires/dies when given any kind of gas/throttle

The post's title is the TLDR but here's the full story for context:
Bought bike last year (3,700 miles and no mods) in April and noticed discoloration around the float bowl. Bike ran fine all riding season except it seemed to have this problem near the end of the season--especially after the bike had been sitting for a couple weeks when it rained for several days (bike stayed outside but with a cover). However, I could still get the bike running after letting it warm up, although it might sputter in the first 10-15 minutes of riding.
I rode the bike to my dad's in November to ultimately store it for the winter in a non-heated garage. He started the bike a couple of times between then and January, 2023. At that time, I took the tank off and drained it. I also took the air box and carb off because I wanted to clean the carb and fix what I suspected was a failed float bowl gasket (it was).
Since I had the carb off and float bowl off, I decided to clean the carb inside and out and kinda followed this video (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_YbDLFoXtLI). I did NOT take the float off, nor did I do a jet kit. I took the idle and main jets off and soaked them in carb cleaner, although the holes on them looked fine. I also took the auto-enrichener plug out and sprayed carb cleaner in it. There was also some discoloration on the diaphragm plastic near the auto-enrichener.
I had some problems with the clutch cable and replaced that, as well as problems with the gas cap (but that's for another post altogether). I did an oil change and transmission fluid change and then finally got the carb, air box, and tank reassembled enough to start the bike a week ago.
First, the starter would turn it over, but it would barely fire. After adding more gas to the tank, it would start, idle, but run really lean (even after adjusting the idle on the carb itself). It started running well enough that I was riding the bike in the backyard to test the clutch cable, but then I dropped the bike on its right side when I went into a skid on grass (broke front right turn signal). Got the bike running again but it was very rough. I also saw the carb move violently during idle and noticed that it had come off the rubber boot with the manifold. After I properly seated and secured the carb to the boot, it ran even worse.
I figured that I must have done something to the carb to ruin it, so I bought a new one off of ebay motors. It's not manufactured by Harley and when I got it, there were two things different about it: the throttle cable bracket was not the correct shape and some valve on the side that has a plug on it was different, such that I had to fashion my own plug for it. However, the rest of it was identical to the OEM carb.
I installed the new carb and it would start and idle fine, but would sputtebackfire/die when given a little gas. It would seem to run OK if the throttle was opened up quickly to high RPM, but only after some sputtering.
I disassembled once again and put the idle jet (45) and main jet (165) from the OEM carb into the new carb. However, I still have the same problem: bike will start and idle, but will sputtebackfire/die when you start on the throttle.
I'm super frustrated and I'm not sure what else to troubleshoot. The only other things I can think of to check are the spark plug and/or replacing the o-ring between the manifold and the engine (see 8:00 of this video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6bOa6QAZm7o). I guess one other thing would be to try different jet sizes for the main jet (new carb came with 190, 180, and 176) I don't think I need to do anything with the idle jet since it seems to idle correctly.
PLEASE HELP!
submitted by jrs87343434 to Buell [link] [comments]


2023.06.06 05:04 ColdSeclusion Where can I live to avoid the hot summers?

Okay I hate these "where should I live in BC" posts as much as the next person here, but I swear this is different. I just want to live somewhere that doesn't get too warm in the summers.
I'm originally from Northern BC but have lived on the island in the lower mainland. I currently live in another province and I am dying due to the heat here. I was already planning on moving back to BC but all I care about is mild summer weather that won't make me melt.
I don't care about cold winters, I can work remotely from anywhere with an internet connection, and budget isn't a concern at all. I generally prefer smallish towns around 5,000-15,000 people.
I have been considering something north island or further up the sunshine coast. Any ideas at all are welcome! For reference I have lived in: Prince George, Smithers, Quesnel, Parksville, Port Alberny, Chilliwack, Port Moody and Cranbrook. All for a year or more. Please help, I am dying with the 26°+ days let alone the 30° days.
submitted by ColdSeclusion to britishcolumbia [link] [comments]


2023.06.06 05:00 Exciting_Credit_3614 The trees, the damn trees

We moved into our house January 2019. Our yard has some tall willows that have been constant stress since day one (actually before but that’s irrelevant now). But, shortly after we moved in the old owners fulfilled their obligations to the town to have them trimmed back a bit.
Fast forward to late summer 2021. We get another complaint from the town about the trees. The town wanted the work completed in 30 days but due to scheduling with our tree company and weather (New York winter) the work didn’t get completed until March 2022. The work that was required was trimming of the trees and the town inspected and our obligation was (again) fulfilled.
In the meantime, we learn it’s the people behind us making the complaints. We had an arborist look at the trees at the time the complaint came in 2021 and said, while big, they are healthy. I only worry about them when it’s windy (which would be the case with any tree really). These neighbors keep using information given to them about the trees from 2018. Therefore, the complaints have been satisfied twice based on what they have.
Last summer we received a letter from them complaining again and giving us a timeline to do something before basically suing us. They cited the fact that this has been an issue for 40 years and that they think we bought the house from the previous owners (not true and actually irrelevant but perhaps part of the reason they take all this out on us). I think their biggest beef is the leaves, which sure they’re messy but not horrible and we certain don’t have the only willows in the neighborhood or even the messies trees. But they definitely take the leaves they scoop up and dump in our yard. So tonight I was in the back yard and decided to power wash the fence. I wanted to really get it and get the top but it’s lattice and I knew if I did the water could go through onto their yard. So, after doing it for a few seconds I stopped. I didn’t feel like being a total asshole. But then I see the man standing on his porch watching me as if I was doing something wrong. It’s technically their fence by the way. Later, my husband heard them bitching about it on the phone.
The thing is, had they come to us like normal people instead of assuming and complaining we may have worked something out. But they hid behind assumptions and letters and didn’t face use. And now I’m just pissed. They’re taking 40 years of frustration out on us and it’s unfair. Anyway that’s my rant. Thanks if you read it all.
submitted by Exciting_Credit_3614 to neighborsfromhell [link] [comments]


2023.06.06 04:55 CasualCompetive Possible Polybius Square in Website connected to Polybius Urban Legend

In 2017, Youtuber "Ahoy" made the video "POLYBIUS - The Video Game That Doesn't Exist". In it, he tracks down the origins and influences of popular video game urban legend, Polybius. He concludes that Polybius was started by Kurt Koller, who owns the website coinop.org. Ahoy concludes this because, among other reasons, the earliest known reference to Polybius is an article on the game on coinop.org. When Ahoy emailed Kurt asking if he was responsible for the addition of the game to the site, he responded "[Polybius's entry's] wording on coinop.org is very specific. That is all [he] is allowed to comment on." Ahoy tries to see if there is code hidden inside of the article, taking note of the fact that "disappeared" is spelled "disappeard". He tries to see if there is code that can fit into a Polybius Square, a popular method of encoding. A Polybuis Square works by having a 5 by 5 letter grid be the recorder. Every square in the grid has a letter inside, the code is a group of numbers with both digits being through 1-5. For example, in a grid with a standard alphabet code, the code "44 23 15 41 45 24 13 25 12 42 34 52 33 21 34 53 24 45 32 35 43 34 51 15 42 44 23 15 31 11 55 54 14 34 22" outputs to "the quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog". Anyway, Ahoy ultimately turns up fruitless. I tried to see if I could decipher a code hidden inside as well. I took note of the fact that "disappeared" has three letters that appear twice in the word while "disappeard" only had two. I made a C++ program that would take in the article and see all the words that had multiple pairs of letters and produces a code. Every time I ran the program, I changed a factor (the number of letter pairs in each word, whether to delete duplicate words, what information contributes to the code , etc.) What I found interesting, is the case when the code was that for every number of the code, the first digit is the index of the first mention of the first duplicate letter in the word and the second digit is the index of the first mention of the second duplicate letter. In that case, both the first and second digits of the numbers are between 1-5. Still, after experimenting and playing around with the parameters for a couple of days, I have turned up blank. I am at the end of my rope. Below I have left a C++ algorithm as well as a few other resources if someone else wishes to try to decipher this. Obviously, it is possible that there is no secret message at all and that I am on a wild goose chase.
C++ algorithm :
#include #include #include #include #include #include std::vector findDuplicateIndexes(const std::vector& words) {std::unordered_map> wordIndexes;// Iterate over the words and store their indexes in the mapfor (int i = 0; i < words.size(); i++) {const std::string& word = words[i];wordIndexes[word].push_back(i);}std::vector duplicateIndexes;// Iterate over the map and find duplicate wordsfor (const auto& pair : wordIndexes) {const std::vector& indexes = pair.second;if (indexes.size() > 1) {// Exclude the first index when adding duplicate indexesduplicateIndexes.insert(duplicateIndexes.end(), indexes.begin() + 1, indexes.end());}}// Sort the duplicate indexes in ascending orderstd::sort(duplicateIndexes.begin(), duplicateIndexes.end());return duplicateIndexes;}std::vector hasMultiplePairs(const std::string& word) {std::unordered_map letterCount;for (char letter : word) {// Ignore whitespace or non-alphabetic charactersif (!std::isalpha(letter)) {continue;}// Convert the letter to lowercaseletter = std::tolower(letter);// Increment the count for the current letterletterCount[letter]++;}int pairCount = 0;for (const auto& pair : letterCount) {// Count pairs of letters (each pair consists of two occurrences of the same letter)pairCount += pair.second / 2;}std::vector letters;if (pairCount == 2) {auto it = letterCount.begin();while (it != letterCount.end()) {if (it->second < 2) {it = letterCount.erase(it);} else {++it;}}for (const auto& pair : letterCount) {letters.insert(letters.begin(),pair.first);}return letters;} else {return letters;}}
int main() {std::ifstream inputFile("polybius.txt"); // Replace "polybius.txt" with your input file name (if you want to)std::ofstream outputFile("output.txt"); // Replace "output.txt" with your output file name (if you want to)if (!inputFile) {std::cerr << "Error opening input file." << std::endl;return 1;}
std::string word;std::vector words;std::vector chars;std::vector> letters;while (inputFile >> word) {for (int i = 0; i < word.length(); i++) {if (std::ispunct(word[i])) {word.erase(i);i--;} else if (std::isupper(word[i])) {word[i] = std::tolower(word[i]);}}chars = hasMultiplePairs(word);if (!chars.empty() ) {words.push_back(word);letters.push_back(chars);}}
// put these following five lines in all double-blackslashes if you dont want duplicate words deletedstd::vector duplicateIndexes = findDuplicateIndexes(words);for (int i =0; i < duplicateIndexes.size(); i++) {words.erase(words.begin()+duplicateIndexes[i]-i,words.begin()+duplicateIndexes[i]-i+1);letters.erase(letters.begin()+duplicateIndexes[i]-i,letters.begin()+duplicateIndexes[i]-i+1);}
for (int i = 0; i < words.size(); i++) {int position = words[i].find(letters[i][0])+1;outputFile << position << words[i].find(letters[i][1])+1 << " ";}
inputFile.close();outputFile.close();
return 0;}
Articles text:
This game had a very limited release, one or two backwater arcades in a suburb of Portland. The history of this game is cloudy, there were all kinds of strange stories about how kids who played it got amnesia afterwards, couldn't remember their name or where they lived, etc.
The bizarre rumors about this game are that it was supposedly developed by some kind of weird military tech offshoot group, used some kind of proprietary behavior modification algorithms developed for the CIA or something, kids who played it woke up at night screaming, having horrible nightmares.
According to an operator who ran an arcade with one of these games, guys in black coats would come to collect "records" from the machines. They're not interested in quarters or anything, they just collected information about how the game was played.
The game was weird looking, kind of abstract, fast action with some puzzle elements, the kids who played it stopped playing games entirely, one of them became a big anti videogame crusader or something. We've contacted one person who met him, and he claims the machines disappeard after a month or so and no one ever heard about them again.
Until the ROM showed up.
Here's what we've found so far:
Found English strings "insert coin" and "press 1 player start" and "only" - looks like a 1 or 2 player game.
Text in the game says "(C) 1981 Sinneslöschen" Maybe a German company?
If anyone has heard any additional information about this game, we'd appreciate hearing about it.
Quick update, we just wanted to go on record here that Steven Roach is full of himself, and knows nothing about this game. We have it on good authority. No, Polybius is not a Tempest prototype. No, Polybius is not a vector game. Does the title screen look vector? No, it does not. We've recently received some new information about the game (today's May 16, 2009), and yes one of us is flying to the Kyiv, Ukraine area tomorrow and yes the trip is related to this information. Stay tuned.
Links:
Polybius Square Decoder and Encoder
Coinop Polybius Article
POLYBIUS - The Video Game that Doesn't Exist (The part that's relevant to decryption beings at 48:00)
Anyway, I would be really glad if anyone would be able to find a hidden message inside this article. Good luck to anyone who tries to decipher this!
submitted by CasualCompetive to ciphers [link] [comments]


2023.06.06 04:19 athomasflynn Ukraine could lose 20% of winter grain crops if hot, dry weather persists

Ukraine could lose 20% of winter grain crops if hot, dry weather persists submitted by athomasflynn to TheQuietComprehending [link] [comments]


2023.06.06 04:16 throwawaytest2000 Apartment Recommendations around the North Loop area - looking for advice from residents!

Hi - I’m looking to move into a place in November in a 1 bedroom apartment around the North Loop area. I’ve looked through some of the previous posts here on apartment recommendations, and I’m hoping to get another opinion on the specific places I’m researching now!
My budget is $1600, but I’d prefer to stay lower if possible!
Right now, I’m monitoring The Copham, Dock Street Flats, 240 Park Avenue, The Palmer, The Archive, and The Nic on Fifth. It seems like the pricing on 1beds fluctuates like crazy, so sometimes I find units on their website within my budget, and sometimes not.
For some of my main priorities:
  1. Important for me to be close to central Minneapolis. Skyway access is a huge plus but not completely necessary, as I will be walking quite a bit throughout the year (including winter).
  2. I enjoy trying many different cool/nice restaurants rather than bars/clubs.
  3. Highly value safety. I’m hoping for an area with low crime and a safe feeling.
Any recommendations would be greatly appreciated - thank you to anyone who helps out!!
submitted by throwawaytest2000 to Minneapolis [link] [comments]


2023.06.06 04:16 Bigfat_Sweetie Raise Question

So I’ve been working for this family for about a year now. Portland Oregon area. Pretty nice neighborhood. Right now I’m making $22/hr for a toddler (boy) as well as doing some light housework. I work part time anywhere from 20 to 25 hours a week. It is my main source of income. I’m also a student. The mom was very generous and came up to me last week and asked me for a number. Didn’t give me a number. I’ve been making the same amount since I started with them.
For a bit of a background, I’ve mainly nannied babies aged infant - 2.5yrs for around 4 years now, mostly babies under 2. I’ve had several long-term families that I’ve worked for. Almost always it was a single child. The price of groceries has gone up and I’m struggling mentally. I fully financially rely on myself and no one else - for all of my expenses. I’m in my very early 20’s. I always try to pick up extra hours on weekends from another regular family (2kids) who compensates well hourly.
I’d really love anyones advice on what’s a reasonable price to give her. Thank you!
submitted by Bigfat_Sweetie to Nanny [link] [comments]


2023.06.06 04:14 Z0mbiizz AITA for acting the way I’ve been acting?

I 16F moved in with my dad (49) his girlfriend (47) and her 2 kids 12F and 16F - This is mainly about my dad and his girlfriend, I’ll call my dad “Dad” and his girlfriend “R” - I try to be as polite and respectful as possible but everyone has a limit. At first it was simple things I didn’t have an issue with like sweeping the floor doing the dishes watering the plants, stuff like that. But I started noticing it was only me doing this stuff R’s daughters were upstairs laying down, so I started asking “why can’t your daughters help me or do it?” It was always “they don’t feel good” or “I’m not asking them” I did it sometimes not wanting to cause any problems but eventually I got fed up. One day she storms into my room and yells at me for leaving a box by the trash can instead of taking it to the outside trash and tells me “that is the community trash I don’t want trash from your room in that trash can!” I respond with “you just said it’s the community trash so I’m gonna put my trash in there I don’t have a trash can in my room.” She gets mad and rants about irrelevant stuff like “you never wanna do anything anymore you just sit in your room playing your games!” Stuff along those lines I just stare at her and lay back down cause I felt this conversation is over, 5 minutes later my dad slams my door open and starts yelling at me and basically told me to comply because me giving my opinion and feelings is gonna rip our “family” apart. After that day I’ve been acting passive aggressively and she took it as “you have no respect for me” and took this to a whole new level. one day she told me she was gonna pick me up from school, so after school I wait in the front after a while I was confused why she wasn’t there because we are 15 minutes from school so I thought it was weird but I continue waiting, I get concerned cause I have anemia and needed water and my medicine so I try to go into the school the doors are locked. 2 hours later she pulls up to the school I get in the car and ignore her not speaking to her cause I was clearly upset she made me wait in 80 degree weather. Later that day my dad comes home early from work and slams open my door yelling at me telling me I need to stop being the way I am basically saying because I’ve been acting the way I’ve been acting makes R feel uncomfortable and unsafe making it my fault he chose to leave work early yelling at me blaming me for everything telling me I’m fucking up but then tries to apologize saying “you know I love you” this made me emotionally confused. I would often tell my mom about these interactions and she would talk to my dad about the way he’s been treating me. My dad didn’t like this he would come into my room and tell me to stop telling my mom what happens in the house it’s none of her business. I’ve been avoiding them all for 2 weeks now and my dad keeps telling me to stop being a brat if I refuse to respond. So Aita for acting the way I’ve been acting?
submitted by Z0mbiizz to AmItheAsshole [link] [comments]


2023.06.06 04:08 losekiloaskme Launching a brand new ride on!

Hello modders, I am Nidhin from Chicago and I wanted to invite each and every one of you to my "Monster Torque Ride On" Launch Group. What is this launch group, you may ask?
Like all you, when I bought a PowerWheels F150 Raptor for my kids, I was frustrated with the issues and lack of features of the ride-on. I started envisioning all the things I wish a ride on had and this magnificent product started taking shape in my mind. It had features like
Fully enclosed - So the kids could use in during winter, when it was too sunny or drizzling rain
Powerful torquey motors- So I didn't have to push it at every tiny hill
Air filled rubber tires - for traction, low noise and shock absorption
Metal gears - unlike nylon gears that stripped
Variable speed accelerator with soft start - so that the rideon didn't jerk each time it started and the kids could control the speed instead of accelerator being an on/off switch.
And a slew of other features.
My entrepreneurial spirit kicked in and I've been contact with a few manufacturers to produce such a ride on. It can be done, but the main hurdles are capital for new tooling, minimum order quantity and certification requirements for the new toy.
So that's where the launch group comes in. It will be a forum for open discussion of all the issues and features you wish a ride-on toy had. I consider each member of this group to be an invaluable asset. I would love for all of you to join the launch group and provide me with your valuable feedback as I embark on this quest. I promise to update you on every part of my journey as I try to finalize the product specification and try to find a manufacturer to produce this.
So I hope to see you all in the product launch group, which you should be able to access using the link below
Thank you!
https://www.facebook.com/groups/789272036139731
submitted by losekiloaskme to PowerWheelsMods [link] [comments]


2023.06.06 04:03 Nomyad777 [PI] The Monster Kingdom (1/2)

Part 2
If you travel far enough North on the map, well above where the Civilized Nations stop because no crops grow, you'll find a mountain range. Crossing this range leads to the Monster Kingdom, though for some reason they prefer the name 'TFSU.' Yes, they prefer. The literal forces of anarchy and chaos in the universe have a government. However, ignoring that whole thing, the Monster Kingdom is fine. No armies march on them, mostly because of supply and logistical issues. The Monsters never say how they grow their own food, but given that they don't trade and millions of kobolds worth of food don't go missing every day, it's safe to say they make their own. Now, that doesn't stop the Civilized Nations to send one hero a decade to 'keep them in check.' Four decades ago, the hero closed off a mountain pass, which was supposed to cause a massive flood. Four days later, it was cleared, and the only thing to show for it were the cities that glow like the sun at night. However, yesterday, the Hero returned having burnt one of the bigger cities down. It was empty of all monsters, but the act was the first real damage they had taken in seven hundred years, since their founding. For seven hundred years, the TFSU have taken the beating of seventy heroes and simply moved on. But now. Now, millions of kobolds make up heavy 'machinery' units that march in armored, self-moving caridges that spit fire and metal. Thousands of beastpeople make up scouting and light infantry ranks. The TFSU use hellish 'guns' that hit harder than a catapult from kilometers away, all in a single 'bullet' not the size of a human's thumb. Metal birds and dragonflies join dragons as they assault cities. We poke the very literal sleeping dragon in the eye. Yet the armies don't do much. They march for our capitals and leaders, but on the way our civilians live. Surendees live. People go about their daily lives without too much change. Of course, that fact didn't stop the front line from finally crashing over my small village, located so close to the pass for a while we thought they the monsters had bypassed us entirely. The Civilized Nations had decided to send an entire legion to prevent the Monsters from getting across a nearby canyon pass. We were hit with an air-based assault with only dragons and metal dragonflies, our balista uselessly demolished by pillars of metal and flame thrown out of the metal dragonflies. I blacked out when the legion managed to shoot enough arrows to take down one of the dragonflies. I remember it crashing down onto my house... and then nothing.
-----
The elf stirred as they woke up. I'd been raised in the Terra Firma Sapience Union, so I was... less than familiar with the clothing and lifestyle the Southerners used. The elf groaned again, before their eyes shot open and they looked around, quickly settling on my frame. "A-Are you going to kill me now?" They asked, their voice shaken with fear. I let out a laugh. "If I wanted you dead, you'd already be dead." I decided to transmorph into my secondary form - a cat - to help the conversation go better. In a land where humans lived to forty, elves only lived to a hundred, and that meant that even I was older than this elf, and they were no older than thirty. The elf, to their credit, quickly figured out I wasn't pulling any mindgames. I'd heard tales from my relatives before the Kobolds founded the TFSU. People, especially when panicked, usual acted with more than enough stupidity to make the situation worse. "Where am I?" The elf asked. Their tone told me that they were still suspicious, but it wasn't outright denial of the situation. "My home," I answered bluntly. "Your village tried to fight our ground forces when they moved in, so most of them are currently under house arrest." Still in my cat form, I created a portal into my storage cavern and reached my arm through, while summoning a lab coat around my shoulders and glasses. It was a trick I had only learned to do recently. "Let's see..." I found the clipboard and brought it out, flipping to the elft's page and taping the pen against the paper. "You suffered a collapsed lung, severe burns on the right side of your body, three broken ribs and two fractured ones, shattered three wrist bones, three breaks in your right upper arm and another two in your lower arm, and on the left side you have another fractured rib and three broken fingers. Your left leg was shattered and your left foot was completely torn up. Healing magic stabilized you and surgery did the rest. You've been comatose for the past three days, and was brought to my home yesterday due to a surge in hospital patients from the seige of Trembolorne. "In terms of organ damage, that was also severe. A busted kidney, I already mentioned a collapsed lung, and your entire digestive system was... well, pulverized would be putting it lightly. Also, unrelated to the incident with the helicopter, you had cancer in your liver and kidney. "In terms of medical treatment, you've been given an IV line for the past couple days and several painkillers, and you underwent four separate surgeries. We reconstructed your organs, welded your bones to metal plates, and used a genetic printer to replace your skin. You're lucky to have gotten time with the genetic printer in the first place, you know; those things are expensive, and I mean expensive to run. Though it's all billed on the government anyway, but that just means that they'll only run it if they have to." The elf sat up in bed looking at me as I just stood on two paws on the cave floor. "Right, sorry, you wouldn't understand most of that." I sheepishly scratched the back of my head with my right paw. "Um... put this way, you were crushed by debris and we basically reconstructed your body before you died. So not necromancy, though you did get close to needing more advanced magical treatment." "Oh," The elf replied. The cat thing seemed to have helped, because they were no longer stuttering with their single word response. "Um... do you want anything to drink?" I tried to kickstart a conversation. "Where am I?" The elf asked again. I was silent for a second. "My home? It's right on the edge of TFSU territory, one of the southernmost places you can be while still being with the recognized borders. I chose this place because I like to fly out in the summer over the flowers in the forest at the foot of the mountains. Your village is a couple hour dragon-flight time away." "Mmmhm." The elf commented halfheartedly. "OK, um... who are you?" "My dragonic name isn't something most can pronounce, so my public name is just Vixie Remminie." I answered. "What's yours?"
The elf's eyes narrowed. "Why do you want to know my name." I blinked. "Because... It's a name? I'm not a Fey, you know, it's not like I can tie ancient demons to your soul and call it a prank or something ridiculous like that. Besides, you asked for mine; now I get to ask for yours." "And who says you won't just burn my village to the ground and eat me right now!?!" The elf suddenly burst out. "You monsters ruin everything! You trespass on our land, take our resources, and kill our people! All we did was try to defend ourselv-" I cut him off, and poured just a bit of attention in giving myself an aura. Blue fire licked the bottom of my vision as I rebuttaled his point. "Don't forget, you stole the land from us. We were the ones living in the wild when you razed our forests and grew crops. We couldn't even purchase land to live on! So yes, we stole what we could to survive and those who didn't starved and died! And when all was said and done, you tried to kill us and turned it into a war, one where we had no choice but to kill you back. And when we found someplace to run, a spot to hide and do our own thing with our own land? You blistering idiots sent you 'courageous heroes' to try and kill us! What for? Nothing! Just your stupid, moronic fear making, forcing you to decide to 'kill the big thing over there!' We can't even have freaking farmland, we have to grow it all in hydroponic farms and harvest thousand-year-old vines out of caves because this is all we have!" I realized that my aura was burning fully and scorching the ground around me. I let out a long sigh, and it died down. Several memories flashed through my head, but I pushed them away. "Apologies, my parents are still a... sensitive topic for me. It would be best if we just stayed away from talking about the war until the hospital has room for more patients again." "Yeah?" The elf was still enraged. Even sitting down, they were still trying to construct an argument. "You parents who killed how many? Your family killed how many more? You dragons, you monsters are nothing more than one large grouping of murders that deserve to die! As the gods will!" The elf was spitting in rage, but I recognized his determination to hold onto his worldview. It was the one thing I needed to pry away before it got out of hand. "And you elves killed how many more?" I asked in a low voice. "Can you tell me the number of kobold dens exterminated in caves, the number of beastpeople sent to an early grave in slave camps? Because I can tell you ours. My father's was two, my mother's four, and my extended family including deceased relatives is one hundred and thirty seven. "You declared war against monsters, you child of an elf," I growled. "And death the reality of war. We know. The Unification Wars weren't fought with swords and honor. They were fought with artillery barrages and death. They were fought with miniature suns and political backstabbing, with tanks and guns and submarines and warships and all the more death. "You say the gods don't like us! That's put lightly. They forsook us! Abandoned us in our hour of need. So we learned to live without them. There are no gods we pray to anymore, elfling. Only each other, our creations, and the universe itself. They don't want us, we don't need them. It's more than they deserve." My aura was once again charring the floor and I had transformed back into my dragon form, but this time I refused to cool it down. "You call us creations of death, the primal forces of anarchy? We are you. You are us. We are sapient, we are all mortals, no matter our advantages. We are bound to this dimensional plane, forced to serve our betters, and live out our lives not with earnest but with trepredition for when it ends. We are all death incarnate, because we can all die. That is just the way it is. Besides, you've wondered about my kill count; tell me, can you tell me the gods'? Can you tell me how many souls they have cut from fate for their own entertainment? No? I can tell you." I growled, moving closer until the blue flames enveloping my body threatened to light the elf's cot on fire. "More people than are alive on this planet right now." I pulled back, bottling up my aura and reverting to my cat form. "We can talk all we want about death and destruction, and I won't lie and say you aren't victims of the war; pre-unification dragons we're exactly kind and merciful to those with treasure hoards. But perhaps, I implore you to consider that maybe we both are victims of the war, and maybe we can one day work together instead of fighting each other. "Maybe, one day, we can fight for our rights against the gods." I moved into my dragon form and darted deeper into my cave, moving so fast I could hear the howl of the wind against my ears. Only when I had reached my memorial wall for my parents did I stop and take a breath and think over my conversation with the elf. We had a long way to go, but I hoped I had put a little bit of sense into him. I hoped that the world could change.
-----
When the dragon cat thing sped away, I took a moment to survey my surroundings. Only now did the effects of my first question hit my formerly-groggy head. "My home." He said. Dragons live in caves. Oooooh. I'm screwed. However, there were no treasure hoards visible from my perspective; then again, while the Monsters were stupid, they still had brains to them, and carrying me into a treasure room would probably be something they'd be able to tell was a bad idea. Pops said never underestimate you foe, A voice in the back of my head said, and the dragon even launched in a full conversation with you. You're selling the dragon very, very shor- Shut up I growled internally to the treacherous voice in my head. The cave itself was... a cave. There was a metal slab on one end, it went deeper in the other, and that was that. In a 'corner' of the jagged room there were a number of red, glowing rods attached to some kind of giant mechanism three elfs wide and six deep, but the rods glowed against the cave's light- What light source? My eyes darted around looking for one. Only now was I aware of how unnatural each shadow was, how awkward each shining rock looked, how each stalagmite could hide an entire dragon, and that was before they started transfiguring into cats. How bright the ceiling- I looked up. The bright light burned my eyes, but I needed to know what fiendish magic was in play so I could counter it. But the light didn't flicker like fire - they were far too bright for that anyway - but they also didn't have the magical circles surrounding each spell. They were... lights. As if the universe simply willed brightness into existence. Each far-too-bright-hurts-to-look-ats was placed along a main hallway clear of stalagmites running from the metal slab deeper and around a corner where I couldn't see. The lights were only poised above this one hall, and they just... shone one the rest of the cave. Looking closer, I could see thin black lines, too thin to be mana feeds, running along the walls to both the glowing red rods and to the so-shiny-the-lit-up-the-cave. And... that was that. There was no massive pile of treasure in the hall, though I suspected the dragon kept their hoard deeper than... wherever I was. There was no pile of skull trophies or the banner of cities and armies slain, and I noted that while he had told me his parents', the dragon had never told me his own. Then again, the cat thing could be lying. Dragon transfigured into a cat. Probably has Circle Of Truth around his entire den. Nonsense, dragons can only do elemental magic. Evidently not. Would you just shut up already? No- I moved my attention back to the metal slab, cutting off whatever the voice in my head had to say about my current situation; it wasn't every day one just got kidnapped by a nation of monsters, after all. The slab was truly elegant. It was painted with the monster language, and then was painted with some kind of mural. I could barely make out a blue circle with green splotches on it surrounded by twelve rings in the bottom corner because most of the door was taken up by a ice-blue cat with lighter strips engulfed in blue fire. It was a mural of the dragon cat thing. That didn't stop it from being pretty, and someone had obviously put a lot of effort into it. The flames looked realistic from what I had seen minutes ago, and the cat's details were perfectly engraved. It was... acurrate. Yeah, because I think Vixie was just trying to tell you that they built their civilization for a reason, and it wasn't carnage. You don't know what you're talking about. We both know I do. How else to you think- Listen to me, you treasonous voice of a- No, you listen to me, you pathetic excuse for a brain. The dragon was able to hold and win an argument with you, fixed your wounds that would've been a dead write-off for any other hospital, and then you think SHE barely meets the threshold for sapient? THE ABSOLUTE MORON I'M ARGUING WITH IS THE ONE YOU BARELY MEETS IT!!! You moved to your frontier village because the world was changing, Lazerot the Sixth. Congrats, you were right. It did change. Now shut your OVERSIZED EGO up at being bested by a creature ten times older than you, and go appologies before they decide that saving your life wasn't worth it. I... I... OK- No. I'm in control now. Shut up. I....... yes, sir. Good. With new resolve, I stood up. My head throbbed, and the next thing I knew was my face hitting my cot again.
-----
When I heard the thud of something falling in the entrance cave, I carefully moved back into the entrance cave. The elf was face-down in their cot, unconscious again. It looked like they had tried to stand and just.... fallen over. I sighed and used a claw to nudge the elf back onto his pillow, and then covered him with a blanket. I watched him for a minute, and then returned to the deeper parts of my home. The TFSU was completely overloaded with the number of patients needing treatment. Apparently, the Southener's hospitals just... didn't do anything, so in addition to soldiers, there was a massive influx of civilians to our hospitals too. Of course, this meant that they were absolutely overloaded, and the Civilized Nations strategy of fighting to near-death and then surrendering wasn't helping. So, stable recovering civilians like the elf were just... shipped out. When shelters filled up because the Civilized Nations overpopulation crisis was too bad to do anything, people just had to take them into their homes. Long story short, the government was in way over their head attempting upgrade the standard of care in the Civilized Nations while occupying their territory. My job so close to the border was remote infrastructure maintenance, and my ability to change size while not dissolving made me an expert at it - and that was before my two hundred years of experience. And then I didn't need a vehicle to get on-site, and was fast. The alarm pinging me that one of the space radars was down again gave me an excuse to avoid the elf and do some work. I grabbed a pack of supplies, put on my shapeshift-compatible uniform, and wrote down a note on a piece of paper. On my out past the sleeping elf, I dropped it for him.
Space radar system needs repair, as it's returning a false positive. It's my job to repair all the infrastructure around here, so I need to go fix it. I'll be back soon. If you're hungry, my pantry is the first cave on the right. You can just eat anything that's easily open-able in there. If it has a lock or airtight opening mechanism (anything more than a clip, really) then don't eat it. If your thirsty, there's a stream in the entrance cave near the heaters. When the door mechanism beeps, step back. Sometimes pressure in the cave can get a bit wonky, and I don't want you to get hurt. Other than that, feel free to explore. I've locked all the doors to the rooms I don't want you to enter. For toilet necessities, the second cave on the left has a properly-sized toilet. And running water, but stuff I can explain later means don't drink it. See you soon! - Vixie.
Satisfied, I left opened the door. There was a puff as the air from inside flowed out to the lower-pressure atmosphere. I could spot a snow squall to the north, and the pressure meant that it was probably coming my way. I moved out onto the ledge and closed the door behind me. At high altitudes this far north, the air was already near-zero and it was still five in the afternoon. I took just a second to confirm with the weather report that the snowstorm was in fact going to arrive on my doorledge using a smartwatch I had strapped around my wrist. When I found that the storm was coming, I opened my wings and flew. Being an Ice Dragon had its advantages, but being a Water-Ice Combined Dragon was much better. The frosty air curled around my wings as the freedom of ignoring gravity filled my brain. Ice and Water dragons both had large wings to deal with the cold air (and lower pressure leading to the requirement for more surface area to achieve the same amount of lift) and incompressable water physics (to let the wings act like a one-way fan blade as they move back and forth, increasing efficient). Dragons might be magestic creatures, but we were still bound to the physics of the mortal plane, after all. Being part of both, my wings were even bigger, making me one of the best high-altitude fliers on the planet. The ability to use both gills and lungs at said altitudes helped with oxygen also helped. Air Dragons were better at flying in normal air, but I liked to think of it like stats from a video game. Air Dragons min-maxed their stats for low-altitude, but I could go anywhere - even underwater - can keep my speed relatively high. I took full advantage of this on my way to the space radar, soaring well above the cloud ceiling and to the point where I could make out the curvature of the planet below me. The ocean spread out to my west, while more land was to my east. Snow covered the north as to the south was the telltale splotchy color of industrialism. My smartwatch beeped, as I crossed the normal altitude limit. I hadn't realized I'd gone so high; I had a radar to repair, after all. I dove down towards the surface, ignoring more beeps as I crossed half the way to the speed of sound. The wind howled angrily in my ears, but I flattened those (thank you, streamlined water genetics) and came out of my death dive right over the radar. The repair itself went relativity smoothly, though I couldn't find a broken component and chalked it up to more space anomalies. They weren't infrequent, and usually marked where the gods decided to look over the planet. For my radars, anyway. Further north, ignoring the north pole, almost no gods came out and wanted to deal with us. Our unspoken agreement was held that way. I flew straight back for my return journey. The storm was definitely closer, but fifteen minutes of flying later and I was entering the opening mechanism for my door. As it swung inwards, I heard the high-pitched scream of an elf.
-----
When I awoke, I found myself tucked into some covers. It took all of seven seconds for reality to catch up with me. Right. I got into a heated argument with a dragon. I instinctively touched the part of my face that had been closest to the dragon's flame. I'd read about Auras in books, but never thought I'd get to see one. They were only ever found in the most powerful and competent individuals of a race in an entire plan of existence. I wondered which skill gave the dragon hers - Vixie, I reminded myself. Either way, given that Auras are technically illusions, I wasn't hurt. The flames didn't get close enough to hurt anyway, but that didn't stop me from checking. This time, I was much more careful when I stood up. I sat up first, then started to kick my legs back and forth. That's when I spotted a paper on the other side of my cot. I stood up without thinking, but managed to keep my consciousness this time and moved towards the note. It was handwritten and contained a lot of jargon that I wasn't familiar with. Space. Radar. False positive. Airtight opening mechanism. Heater. Beep. Pressure. Toilet. Running water. I could deduce some of it. A message had come in requesting the services of the local dragon to repair a thing that has an issue, and that she would return shortly. I could wander around as I pleased, besides eating food that wasn't open or contained in a clip bag. From the tone of the message, I could deduce what a 'toilet' was. The heaters would logically be things that produced heat, so all I had to do was look for those. I wasn't able to tell time, but I supposed at this point it didn't matter. I moved over deeper into the cave, and quickly heard the sound of a stream. It led directly into a forest of stalagmites. After clambering over those, the temperature started to increase, which was all I needed to know that I was getting a drink of water. I was only now catching up to the fact that I had been out for three days, and that meant that I was extremely thirsty. I wasn't sure how I wasn't dead of dehydration at this point. I found the stream next to the glowing metal rods, and with it a clear path to my location. Sighing slightly at the wasted effort on climbing through Rock Forest, I snatched an undersized cup off a rack built into a nearby jut in the cave wall and filled it, before entering the bliss of fresh water. Back in the village, we had some of the best and cleanest water in all the land thanks to snow melt, but this took that to a new level. Cold, crisp water melted in the sun only minutes ago. It was... pure. I spent the next couple minutes simply drinking and processing everything over in my mind. The gods might have willed the monster dead, but if even the monster gods had abandoned them and survived... then how come the Pantheon never told us? Religious issues aside, there were more practical issues regarding my own survival. How did I get out. There was a thud at the metal slab, and I moved back towards it, leaving my cup to dry on the rack I pulled it from. The engraving of the cat on the metal slab was- BEEEP! What was that sound? There was a hiss, and the slab started to peel away. A gust of frigid cold air washed over me as a mage Ice-Water hybrid Aura-capable dragon that I had argued with stared me down. I did the instinctive thing and let out the scream of a human three year old, squeezing my eyes shut and waiting for the final blow. When the end of my life didn't arrive, I reopened my eyes to find the sky-blue cat standing in the hole where the metal slab was supposed to be. Then there was another... sound, and the metal slab started to move back into position. The cat was surprised for a single moment before simply charging the door and jumping through, skidding to a halt right in front of me. Which meant that I got a closer look at her. Ocean-blue strips crossed an ice-blue body fur in a fifty-fifty ratio. Small crystals of ice twinkled, floating here her wings would be. One tail was accompanied by two more made of pure blue-white energy, and the cat even had a halo. Six orbs of blue-white light hovered in lazy circles around her back, and even in a diminutive form the size of a cat the being radiated the power of an aura-capable creature. "Oh, right, sorry," Vixie said, and all the ethirial energy disappeared. Now that I knew what I was looking for, however, I could just barely tell, using my power as a mage, that Vixie was using illusion magic to hide her true energy. "You don't need to hide your reserves," I said. "Though if you're shapeshifting into forms so small that you need to expose yours, then you should just burn yours instead. It's not worth the trouble of people bottling yours." Vixie gave some kind of half-shrug. "They're not reserves, no." She said, emphasizing the word. I looked at Vixie with a sharp look, and for a second I forgot I was talking to a dragon. "Then what are they?" "They're..." The cat blushed, something I wasn't even aware was possible. She let the illusion fall away, and the tails, crystals, orbs and halo returned. "They're my regenerative baseline minimum." I looked her up and down for a second, dumbstruck. She really is a creature of power, huh? "Um.... uh..." I stuttered. "Is... that where you get your aura from?" I asked. Vixie closed her eyes with an expression on her face, and this time green flame started to peel off her. "Part of it, yeah." To control an aura like that... two auras. Just how powerful is she? I was so deep in thought that I didn't realize that the expression on her face was pain. "I... uh... what happened?" I asked, shellshocked. "Why aren't you fighting in the war?" The worldwide-powerful dragon masquerading as a cat sighed. "I... haven't told anyone. It's... personal." "I..." Only now did it hit me that I was talking with a dragon, not another person. Not just a monster, but a... creature with emotions. "You don't have to tell me." I quickly backtracked. "No, no, it's a fair question. It..." The cat let out a chuckle, and it filled the cave with a beautiful sound. "I suppose it's kind of ironic... but it starts with a kobold and a god, back when the Firma kobold tribe decided to travel north to escape the civilized nations, shortly before the amassing of all creatures in these same northern mountains and the Unification War. "Back before the gods forsook us."
Original Prompt: [WP] For as long as all the races have known, Dragons have been seen as violent, destructive creatures. After an attack on your village, you black out and find yourself in the den of a dragon. It's rather annoyed that that is how they're seen, and wants to prove that isn't the case.
u/Lycan_Jedi thank you for the prompt!
Part 2
submitted by Nomyad777 to WritingPrompts [link] [comments]


2023.06.06 03:54 allkuku You are probably not the problem, nor is it possible to fix what someone else broke

This has taken me a long time to realize. For over 5 years now, I kept thinking if I was nice and accommodating enough to someone else's poorly-behaved kids, if I let their wants take precedence over my own, that, eventually, it would turn out alright. That they would like me, respect me and eventually treat me as a member of the family. That I could even help these poor, charming, sad kids.
Newsflash: It never happened.
Nope.
What did? (Skip to 'Please don't misunderstand me' below to find actual advice, as opposed to a rant/vent.)
Well, apart from near-incessant fighting, whining and dishonesty, more specifically:
- 2017-present: His son attacked other children at school, camp and extracurricular activities, once to the extent that the entire school had to be shut-down. (Most recently, he seems to have followed in his mother's footsteps by punching a hole through the wall at both houses (with, of course, no therapy resulting from the act).)-
~2018: His daughter, in kindergarten, threatens to burn a teacher she dislikes with fire.
- 2017-present: Him chuckling as both children, as young as four and six, lied about things as minor as brushing their teeth or being caught up later than their bedtime.
- Winter 2022: Months of his daughter not eating the entire day, then oh-so-coincidentally claiming she was hungry right at her bedtime, and him accommodating her, every single time.
- April 2022: He admitting they had a lying problem before kicking me out of our hotel in an unfamiliar city on vacation when I finally lost it (after 5 years of this nonsense) when his daughter claimed that whether she saw her brother or not was 'a difficult question' (by losing it, I mean, snapping: "What, are you blind?"), and, earlier that day, his ~12-year-old son had a temper tantrum after we had to chase them both down through an entire museum, after they ran off with no warning. (All this, after his daughter sulked about for no discernible reason during the birthday trip it was my idea to plan at all. (My hopefully-soon-to-be-ex had never before taken her along on vacation with him and his parents, only his son.)
- April 2022: My hopefully-soon-to-be-ex forcibly trying to break into my apartment (jamming the door against the lock while yelling and slamming furniture around), while I, in a panic, tried calling a now-understandably-former 'friend' of 6+ years I had seen a few weeks prior, who claimed she was in a meeting, before finally, thankfully, managing to reach my parents and rush home .- Countless other instances I won't bore you with.

Please don't misunderstand me: at least half of this (if not more) is my fault.

Some of the instances recounted lack context: due to the situation, I have not been an easy person to be with. I tried and failed to break up with my hopefully-soon-to-be-ex countless times, allowed loyalty to cloud my judgement, took responsibility for things that were not and will never be my fault, claiming that our relationship problems were due to me being 'difficult to be with' (which, as you can perhaps gather, is somewhat true o:) ), as opposed to the main issue at hand, that is: him, his Wall-punching baby mama's and his bastards'** troubling behaviour.
(** I do not say this to be insulting, but because, since my hopefully-soon-to-be-ex did not marry their mother, that would be the dictionary definition of what they are.)

Nor do I say any of this to indicate that these children are inherently bad, no.
This is not the children's fault - it is the parents'. If you are a single parent and you allow your child to take on the very traits that made your relationship with their ex tank because you feel guilty or are scared of your ex, that is on you.I firmly believe that no child, no person, is born evil. We are what we are raised to be.

So, if you are a 'farce-parent' and you want out, if you're considering suicide or violence or things you never have before, know that you are not the problem.

This system that shames 'step-parents', while they are often treated poorly by both kids and parents alike, that delusionaly even calls unrelated adults a 'step-parent', while they have living ones, this is the problem, in my opinion.

You have a right to stand up for yourself. You have a right to respect. You have a right to a partner who treats you well.

What has helped me lately?
> Not seeing these troubled children. At all. (Half a year and counting now - YES!). No longer do I need to watch, horror-stricken, as my hopefully-soon-to-be-ex (and his baby mama, from what I gather) condone violence, lying and manipulating in ways I would never allow in my own children.
> Telling people the truth. From the beginning the situation felt wrong and bad to me, but I kept my mouth shut in hopes that it would improve and afraid that I would be judged as a bad person for not being able to love someone else's kids I have no say in raising.
> Slowly but surely, standing up to my hopefully-soon-to-be-ex about what I do deserve. (As he is only the second man I have been fully intimate with and I have considerable emotional baggage myself, I am perhaps holding onto the relationship for far longer than I should.)

Hopefully, one day I will look back on these words and take my own advice: Leave.

In the meantime, hopefully we can take solace in the fact that we are not alone.
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2023.06.06 03:42 Porkowski Long Island NY vs Boston MA

Hey all, in my mid 20s and was considering moving within my company from LI to Boston. Main reasons are that I spend most of my weekends in the winter going up to vermont to ski anyways, and many weekends other times going north to mountain bike. I also am not a fan of the traffic and high income taxes.

I have read, however, that Boston has worse traffic than NYC, which I have trouble believing. It also looks that rentals are not much cheaper in Boston than they are on Long island. These two items lead me to believe it may be a bad decision to move. Can anyone share their experiences if you have lived in both areas? Thanks.
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2023.06.06 03:24 FlimsyStage1136 started ostarine after 6 months of lifting // results and what i learned

started ostarine after 6 months of lifting // results and what i learned
Disclaimer // This will be a long post. I didn't do enough research into sarms before taking them and didn't have enough experience in the gym to recommend it to others, but this post will serve as a look into the mindset of a beginner lifter and the effects of ostarine on them. I didn't do any blood work before/after so all i can really go off of is feel, so i'll do my best to outline the positives/negatives of taking ostarine.
Buildup to taking Ostarine
I started going to the gym around September of 2022 following a breakup; classic. My gym bro started coaching me off the bat who had years of experience lifting. I immediately started taking creatine and upping my protein intake to 1.5-2g/bw. I was chubby sitting at 200 pounds 5 foot 8. I lifted consistently with push/pull/legs and saw my newbie gains kick in really fast. I had a high body fat percentage so the muscle isn't showing as much as newbie gains from skinny kids starting lifting, but I hit 225 on flat bench within the first 4 months of lifting, a few days before christmas. Happy with my progress strength wise, but still seeing all the fitness influencers online looking like greek gods made me immediately go into a cut. I cut for around 3 months to get to around 6 months of total lifting and was definitely making progress, but the changes in my body I was seeing were not happening fast enough. I sat at around 200 pounds throughout the first few months of lifting, gaining my newbie gains and certainly losing a bit of body fat, but not much. My 3 month cut had been down to the mid to high 180s but I could feel my strength going down as well. It was around 6 months that I had the idea to take sarms. I wont say i completely raw dogged it; i did a little bit of research around the topic but largely had no clue how much to take, and how to optimize my training. All that I knew was tracking my macros with myfitnesspal and lifting weights and throwing in some cardio in the mix.
Started taking ostarine
This is where i made a big fuck up. I got the powder form of ostarine and not the liquid form. DO NOT DO THIS UNDER ANY CIRCUMSTANCES. I was depressed at the time and very much had the mentality "if i do gear and it fucks up my health than oh well i dont care to live much longer anyway. I got the sarm powder and began taking what I can assume to be a moderate dose (i will explain in a sec why it's an estimation) of 20-30 mg a day. When i say I assume, it is because i got conflicting information. I bought the sarms second hand off a friend who told me that the instructions that he got was to take 3 scoops of the powder and that would be 9 mg total because the mg scooper was 3 mg. Later, when i actually went to the vendor after weeks of being on them, he said that the scooper was actually anywhere from 6-10 mg (it was a basic black micro scooper product with a little number 3 engraved that the owner had told my friend signified that it was 3mg, but told me in person that the numbers were meaningless). Had I known there would be such discrepancies in the information I would have paid the bigger sum and gone with the liquid powder, as that is the only way to be exactly sure how much you are taking at a time. Anyway, I wanted fast progress so I immediately started taking 5 scoops (assumed to be 15mg a day) and did so for 3 weeks. I began noticing changes almost immediately. Being a chubby kid we never saw veins unless we were lean, and a few days after taking ostarine i immediately began seeing new veins pop up on my arm. The main changes in my physique were in my chest and shoulders immediately. My shoulders became more round and my chest became more defined. After 3 weeks of presumably being on 15mg i upped the dosage to what i thought would be 24 mg a day (or 8 scoops from the black micro scooper) and stayed on that for 3 weeks. I noticed even more changes over those 3 weeks. Vascularity increased, and i lost weight at a rapid pace. This whole cycle so far id been doing a serious training routine consisting of high intensity for high reps, but with my split i don't think i was doing too much because id hit each muscle group less than once a week. My split when i started taking 24mg daily was shoulders&abs/back/bis&tris/chest. This also helped my chest and shoulder definition as having a particular day for each main aesthetic muscle group helped me go harder on each day. I was around 180 lbs with my strength going back up so I was feeling great. After 3 weeks of taking 24 mg daily I had cut cardio out of my routine but was still getting leaner, and was getting visible abs for the first time in my life. As im making this post im currently on 9 mg a day for the next few days as a wayne off ostarine. I didn't expect certain side effects so to minimize them i started taking a pct a little under 2 weeks ago, (rebirth PCT from Huge supplements) and coordinated the timings so i'll be on pct for 2 weeks as i wayne off ostarine, than after im off i have enough pct for another 2 weeks after. Currently around week 7 I'm on presumably 9mg ostarine a day taking this pct and I'm down to waking up at 170lbs. Some of my lifts are down only by a few pounds from when i was 200lbs (bench notably despite my chest becoming MUCH more defined.) Other muscle group lifts have relatively stayed the same. It is notable that i did hypertrophy training only from the start.
side effects
Really the only major side effect I got was a complete TANK in my sex drive. I never got my T levels checked but describing my life to my friends that were experienced lifters they assumed i would have average-above average t levels. Ostarine completely tanked my sex drive though. I wasn't in the mood at all really the entire 6 week period until i started taking pct. I got a bit of acne, my appetite increased, and so did my sex drive, all indicating (without bloodwork so nothing is proven) that the PCT was and still is taking effect.
Positive takeaways
made major improvements to my physique, and with that i felt way more confident in my body image. I felt more confident walking around not having to wear baggy hoodies all the time. Mentally, my body image went through a major improvement. Also mentally tough, I lost my mind a bit. Becoming more impulsive and occasionally when I have depression spells they would seem a bit worse, but those weren't created by my ostarine, I only assume it exacerbated them a bit; not enough to warrant going back in time and stopping myself from taking it though.
gained muscle while losing fat at an increased rate, exactly what i wanted for summer
negative takeaways
my sex drive plummeted, and had nightmares like 4/7 nights. I'd wake up completely sluggish those nights and had very vivid terrifying dreams. As I lowered the dose however they became less and less frequent.
advice
This is going to sound very hypocritical of me, but I'm glad I took ostarine even though I do recognize it very early on, but I don't recommend it to others. I am naturally a very impulsive person and with summer only a few months away I made a drastic choice to get some drastic effects, and it definitely worked. However, had it been winter time I wouldn't have started and just did a regular bulk/cut and gotten more lifting experience under my belt.
Notable things
From the 3-6 week period on cycle I ate like shit because i mentally wasnt prepared to go below 170lbs. My lifts did not suffer as I maintained a good protein intake. I'd eat super clean until I hit 170lbs in the morning, then have a cheat day and repeat, which is largely responsible for not seeing any crazy physique changes despite the increase in ostarine. I should also note that i dont regret this at all the cheat days helped maintain my sanity while having a physique that i was satisfied with.
another note is that on my cut leading up to the cycle all my lifts went down, and as soon as i hopped on cycle all my lifts went back up to nearly where i was at pre cut, while still losing body fat and weight overall

no gym exp
no gym exp
3 months gym exp (starting to cut)
5 months gym exp (2 months into cut)
6 months gym exp (right before starting cycle)
few days into cycle (none of these were visible before and i mean NONE)
1-2 weeks into cycle, down 5 lbs or so (starting to get visible abs and chest definition)
3 weeks into cycle around 170lbs (right before upping to 24mg daily from 15 up until this point)
5 weeks into cycle (2 weeks on 24mg daily more consistent abs + definition)
6 weeks - current day wayning off and started pct already way bigger chest
chest gains were def the most massive gains this cycle alex eubank who
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2023.06.06 03:09 ghoffphoto207 Cloudy day vibes

Cloudy day vibes submitted by ghoffphoto207 to portlandme [link] [comments]


2023.06.06 02:53 Destrae [Trip Report] March 8-24 (Tokyo/Yokohama/Kyoto). 16 day weeb dream vacation - Kingdom Hearts concert, JJK exhibit, so many arcades!

I wasn't going to do a trip write up at all, but I'm planning a return trip in the Fall and I realized some of the things I learned on my first trip might be useful for other people, so here we go! I don't often see post write ups from people who are specifically into rhythm games/ arcades/ anime stuff
 
Dates: March 8 - 24, 2023 Background: Planned this trip mostly for myself but one of my friends decided to tag along fairly last minute. I had planned to spend the whole trip in Tokyo but the one thing she wanted to do was Kyoto, so we added a side trip + a very pleasant day at a Ryokan. I used Wanderlog to plan (HIGHLY recommend, this site is amazing), and my basic daily itinerary was morning shrine > pick an area to explore and have 1-2 major things per day. The person I was travelling with ended up taking a long ass time to get ready each day, so most of my morning stuff got cut or rearranged. Costs: I will fully admit I did not budget for food/ shopping, 100% vibes. I simply do not acknowledge what I spent
Highlights
Lowlights
Goals:
Advice:
 
Now on to the super detailed trip report! Here's the big album if you don't want to look through photos separated by day. Warning for flashing video
 
Day 1 (travel)
Day 2 (Akihabara, photos)
Day 3 (Shibuya & Harajuku, photos)
Day 4 (Asakusa, photos)
Day 5 (Shinjuku & Kabukicho, photos)
Day 6 (Ikebukero & Rippongi, photos)
Day 7 (Yokohama, photos)
Day 8 (Kyoto, photos)
Day 9 (Kyoto, photos)
Day 10 (Kyoto, photos)
Day 11 (Tokyo - Concert, photos)
Day 12 (Ginza & Sumida, photos)
Day 13 (Tokyo - JJK Exhibit, photos - flashing video warning)
Day 14 (Tokyo - TeamLabs Planets & SquareEnix Cafe, photos)
Day 15 (Shinjuku, photos)
Final thoughts (Misc, photos)
 
Edits for formatting
submitted by Destrae to JapanTravel [link] [comments]


2023.06.06 02:51 TomSzabo And It Utterly Broke My Heart

Valid theories as to why Nine Mile Hole was so very special to Forrest Fenn are out there, if one cares to look carefully enough. But nobody yet to my uncertain knowledge has pointed to hints in The Thrill of the Chase or other evidence that explain why Fenn might have been so emotional about his journey to the special place that he cryptically described in the poem. Yes, it was the place he wanted to die, and that alone would be a good enough reason for emotion. Yet the sort of sentimentality that Fenn betrayed about the place – for example when he read the poem out loud – suggests something even deeper and more sorrowful: a sense of loss that is larger than the man himself.
It so happens that there truly is a source of information that reveals why Nine Mile Hole was so sacred to Forrest Fenn: an emotional connection had been forged as a result of dual tragedies. It is contained in poetry masquerading as prose written by Ernest Schwiebert, an expert on flies and flyfishing, in his seminal Nymphs: Stoneflies, Caddisflies, and Other Important Insects including the lesser mayflies, Volume II (2007).
The existence of this text and its importance to the chase was originally revealed by Vertigo, who first shared it on The Hint of Riches forum. Later, Vertigo reposted the excerpt from the Schwiebert text on Medium here along with the other results of his excellent research. All the Vertigo entries are a must read if you want to try walking in the shoes of Forrest Fenn. I won’t repeat that portion of the Schwiebert text previously shared by Vertigo in its entirety although I will include a few of the most relevant excerpts to help tie everything together.
What I want to focus on here is the emotional and motivational parts of the tragic story that Schwiebert eloquently told in the paragraphs that Vertigo did not quote. This material is critical in my opinion to understanding the importance of Nine Mile Hole and what happened there to make it the place where Fenn wanted to die.
To summarize, the fires that devastated Yellowstone in 1988 were in part the result of government mismanagement of forest fires on Federal land, much of which was due to political games (e.g. to discredit members of the other political party). These fires created havoc and destruction in the Madison watershed and its fisheries that went largely unacknowledged by environmentalists and the public at large. Only those who had fished those flywaters in the decades before the fires could truly understand the extent of the negative impact on the river and its riparian ecosystem.
Among other casualties, the brown trout hideout at the famous Nine Mile Hole was spoiled, and the spring-fed pond secreted in the woods nearby was literally wiped off the map. Its crystal clear waters – a quarter mile up a cold rivulet from the legendary hole on the Madison – had once rewarded the most tenacious Brown with the perfect spot to spawn. Now there was only brown sludge in its place. To someone who had intimately known Nine Mile Hole, its matronly crystalline pond, or any other riverine wonder of the Madison watershed in Yellowstone, it was enough to utterly break their heart.
Forrest Fenn's feelings about the ordeal were very much in the same vein as those expressed by Ernest Schwiebert. The difference was that the latter man did not need to keep a secret and therefore could lay bare his emotional injuries.
Indeed, the 1988 fires must have devastated Fenn similarly if not more so. But this grand tragedy was not quite as catastrophic to him as being diagnosed with cancer and given slim odds of surviving it. The year 1988 was not particularly kind to the man.
Fortunately, the forests and rivers of Yellowstone always seem to recover from the worst tribulations that nature could manage to throw at them, and so did Fenn. But not without a profound impact. The battle for survival and the scars left behind had connected Fenn to his special place at a level so primal and emotionally raw that it was almost umbilical. How could there ever be another consideration when it came to the somber task of choosing the place to take his last breath?
And then came the FBI raids in 2009. The Feds had had a hand in destroying his Shangri-La in Yellowstone in 1988, and now it seemed they wanted to finish robbing him of treasure while desecrating his reputation and castle in Santa Fe.
ENOUGH IS ENOUGH, he said to himself through sublime gritted teeth and with a resolve that only the gravely aggrieved can muster. I'm going to carry out my plan. In Yellowstone Park, damn the consequences!
The following is taken from Nymphs: Volume II, starting on page 237. Unless noted otherwise, boldface is mine for emphasis.
I note that Vertigo excluded an important portion of the first paragraph of the story so I will re-quote this paragraph in its entirety. He then faithfully reproduced the next 7 paragraphs, which I won't repeat but will highlight a few excerpts. See Vertigo's Medium post for the full text of the 7 paragraphs, or "DYODD" and buy the book.
Schwiebert's account contains several additonal paragraphs beyond the 7 quoted by Vertigo that are just as important in my opinion, plus there is a footnote that helps enormously to shed light on things. I quote these in their entirety as fair use in order to support the theory being advanced in this entry.
But the entire Yellowstone was ravaged by a series of wildfires in the drought of 1992, and one of the worst of these fires had crossed into the park from Bridger National Forest in Wyoming, just north of Grand Teton National Park.6 The great lodgepole forests of the Bechler and Firehole watersheds had become a tinderbox, and vast acreages of primeval timber were surrendered to the fire. Magnificent stands were transformed into fire-blackened cemeteries of snags. Entire mountainsides were utterly scorched as steep timber-filled ravines became incandescent chimneys filled with fire. Slopes of unstable volcanic soils were stripped of their trees and rendered vulnerable to the erosive impacts of winds, rains, and melting snowpacks. Frightening shrouds of talcum-fine soil and ash were carried aloft as storms worked across the Yellowstone Plateau. Gullies were quickly cut into unstable hillsides, and large alluvial fans of gritty clay and ash were formed at many places along the Madison, Gibbon, and Firehole. Such fans were visible immediately below Seven Mile Bridge on the Madison, and there was much worse damage at its famous Nine-Mile Hole, which had been the most popular pool.
Schwiebert makes an error here: the great drought and fires were actually in 1988 as he correctly states in Footnote 6; see near the end of this post.
The next 7 paragraphs are faithfully reproduced in full by Vertigo … I highlight a few key lines. Following this, I start to quote the paragraphs that are excluded from Vertigo's work.
Nine-Mile lay just below the highway, in a beautiful corridor of primeval lodgepoles and ponderosas …
It was a striking place with secrets. There was a crystalline springhead pond across the water, about a quarter mile beyond the river, and completely hidden behind a dense screen of intervening conifers.
Large brown trout were known to enter this minor lodgepole tributary in October to mate and lay their eggs …
I once caught a good fish in the little pond itself … a handsome five-pound hen that had apparently spawned and wintered, and then elected to stay.
The cold spillages of the crystalline creek entered the river in the uppermost shallows at Nine-Mile …
It was a spring-hole worth knowing. Large trout often gathered there in hot weather, basking in its cool temperatures where the ledge rock shelved off into a secret pocket. I could usually count on at least one good fish there, because most anglers simply fished the primary currents of Nine-Mile without covering the pocket below its aquatic weeds.
The fate of Nine-Mile, however, was a terrible surprise.
Compare to page 141 in TToTC with the following words bolded and in red: "Cancer is a terrible word." Boldfaced and redlined text is used within the memoir in only four places, twice in reference to cancer and twice to suggest a warning that something is scalding hot: "DO NOT TOUCH!". The reason for this editorial oddity should be obvious: red for fire, and the red boldface connects cancer to fire.
The fish-filled secret below the weeds was smothered with silt and trash, and the spring-hole itself was gone. I became curious about the fate of the forest pond, and forded the river to inspect it. Dour rivulets of slurry came spilling through the trees, and I was astonished when I reached the tarn.
Its crystalline shallows were completely filled with slurry and trash. A tiny paradise had been destroyed. The outlet was clogged with refuse and silt, and the barrage of trash had raised the water in the lake until its overflows were forced into several braided channels farther downstream. No trout could ascend such gritty rivulets to spawn, and no freshly hatched juveniles would use its spatterdock riches to reach smolting size. Nine-Mile itself had been irrevocably changed, and after dutifully suiting up, I found myself angry and unable to fish.
Compare to "There'll be no paddle up your creek, Just heavy loads and water high."
Consider why Schwiebert was "angry": the full extent of the devastation was perhaps preventable if Forest Service management had actually cared about the ecosystem within their purview instead of trying to score political points.
Schwiebert continues the story as follows, not quoted by Vertigo.
Some ecologists have argued that postfire impacts have largely proved beneficial because natural lightning-strike fires are obviously implicit in our natural forest ecosystems. The science of such truths remains clear. Lodgepole cones do not surrender their seeds without exposure to hot temperatures associated with natural fires, and the argument that ancestral fires have played a substantial role in the ecological history of such forests is sound.
Such apologists further contend that once-dangerous thickets of deadfalls and dry tinder in these lodgepole forests had healthily been purged, and argued that these Yellowstone fires had cleansed its historic forests. The new grasslands created were alleged to have improved bison and elk habitat because both are grazing species, but both bison and elk lacked major predators then and had become much too plentiful before the fires. The ecosystem did not need more bison and elk. Other apologists waxed poetic about the beneficial impacts of the fires on avifauna and their prey within the boundaries of the Yellowstone, but none mentioned their horrendous impact on the famous Yellowstone trout streams.
Some fishing writers have written pieces echoing the doubtful thesis that everything had been improved through the purging of the fires, and that the fishing had also been helped. One reported unusual numbers of larger fish in the Firehole. This was irresponsibly wishful conjecture on the part of observers who lacked a fifty-year perspective on the Yellowstone and its fisheries, and were not competent to pass such judgment. The truth is much less felicitous. Several key tributaries had become so choked with postfire sedimentation, ash, and charred debris that their fish, including large trout that had never seen anglers, had been displaced from their headwaters to find refuge in the Firehole itself.
Such fish were not a happy portent.
Compare the above paragraphs to Fenn on page 141 of TToTC where he follows up the redlined and bolded "Cancer is a terrible word" with "The disease it defines represents nature in its most repellent form."
Fires also ravaged the hillsides along the lower Gibbon. Steeper slopes had quickly eroded, forming labyrinthine networks of raw gullies and wounds leaving the narrow highway below Gibbon Falls buried under great alluvial fans of mud, gritty precipitates, and trash. Heavy equipment had cleared the right-of-way, leaving great windrows of marl in many places, and the Gibbon became choked with waist-deep strata of raw sediments and ash. The great beauty of the box canyon below the Gibbon Falls had been charred and scarified by fire, leaving a river littered with postfire trash and mud winding through cemeteries of charred lodgepoles. I did not attempt to fish, and decided to investigate the fire damage along the Firehole.
The fires had decimated its remarkable lodgepole forests in many places between the Cascades of the Firehole and the Fountain Flats above Nez Perce Creek. I turned south on the old freight road toward Ojo Caliente, and found more fire damage there, but worse burns had overwhelmed the shores of Goose Lake. Its trees had been killed in fires of such temperature and intensity that their fire-seared trunks looked like they had been coated with shiny black lacquer. Fire had smoldered in the great mattresses of dead needles that once carpeted the entire forest floor, and when I used a tire iron to root deep into the burned earth, I found that fire had festered into its thick mattresses of pine needles to depths of eight and ten inches. Goose Lake was now encircled with skeletal lodgepoles that had been killed and charred by fire, although damselflies were still emerging from its shallow margins, swimming ashore to climb the blackened deadfalls and split their nymphal skins.
The scars were much worse beyond the lake.
Compare to cancer as above and to the poem words "Tarry scant": the word tarry could also mean covered by tar in addition to its more common interpretation of delay.
I reached the river and simply sat in the car, staring at its crippled forests with tears in my eyes, remembering the circling seasons I had enjoyed in these uncommon meadows. There were decades of happy memories from this place. I had shared a number of wonderful picnics at Feather Lake with old friends like the late John Hemingway, the late John Daniel Callaghan, and Bud Lilly. I particularly remember awakening from a post-lunch nap on the lodgepole bench at Feather to find Hemingway looking upstream toward the geyser plumes at Midway.
"Know what's wrong with this place?" Hemingway said with a sigh.
"No," I confessed.
"We don't own it," he said.
The narrow trace and cul-de-sac were no longer sheltered in a theatrical corridor of lodgepoles and big ponderosas, and a place of remarkable beauty had been utterly sacrificed and lost. The Firehole still flowed under the fire-blackened bench, a glittering necklace of bright water, with great billows of steam still rising from the geyser basin upstream. I had shared this place with a long parade of people across more than fifty years, and the morning was filled with echoes. I left the car and was surprised by the silence. There were no birds, no brash camp robbers arrived to beg for table scraps, and no skittish chipmunks scuttled across the forest floor. There was nothing for buzzards to scavenge, and no voles to interest circling hawks. The pale September sky was empty. Wind stirred in the blackened snags, which groaned and creaked. The meadow had offered some remarkable sport over the years, and I had hoped to fish, but there was no thought of fishing now.
I drove slowly back along the washboard trace toward Ojo Caliente, through its fire-scarred mausoleum of trees, as a big storm was starting to gather and build along the Pitchstone Ridge. Its conifers had also been ravaged as the wildfires crossed into the Firehole watershed, leaving its summits a raw wasteland of charred earth and gritty ash. The sun had quickly surrendered to an ominous gunmetal sky, and as the storm finally broke along its battlements, immense clouds of loose soil and ash billowed high into the darkening gloom. Such spiraling squalls of silt and windmilling ash would eventually reach the little Firehole itself, and further despoil its hyaline currents. I suddenly understood how profoundly its watershed had been changed.
And it utterly broke my heart.
😪
Footnote 6 on page 735 is revealing. It reads:
There is much credible evidence that these fires had begun outside Yellowstone Park, in the Absaroka headwaters of the Yellowstone in the Shoshone National Forest, and in the Teton National Forest north of Jackson Hole. The fires were fought on national forest tracts, but firefighters were withdrawn once the fires entered the national park itself. The fires were permitted to burn inside the national park for short-term political purposes, because 1988 was an election year. Our natural-fire policy had actually emerged under Presidents Nixon and Ford, and was based on sound forest science, but its application became a regional political issue when both Nathaniel Pryor Reed and Cecil Andrus refused to extinguish a number of controversial fires on federal land. Political opponents fought the Yellowstone fires aggressively outside the national park because the blazes had apparently begun in campfires and lightning strikes on the national forests. Firefighters had been deployed while these fires were still burning on tracts of commercial saw timber, but were stopped once the fires had crossed into Yellowstone. Some of the worst damage occurred on the Firehole and Thoroughfare, and these fires were not fought until they threatened park installations at Canyon and Fishing Bridge, and the historic art sauvage hotel located at Old Faithful. Andrus was no longer Secretary of the Interior when I met him, but during an interview in his office at Boise, I sought his opinion of the Yellowstone fires. Andrus still believed that the bipartisan natural-fire policy had been supported by good science, and pointed out that more than twenty petrified forests within park boundaries suggest that Yellowstone had survived worse destruction, although that perspective is little comfort to anglers who will never again enjoy the pristine Madison and Firehole of recent memory. He agreed that Yellowstone itself was not large enough to protect its aggregate ecosystem, and further conceded that a zealotry that had continued to advocate natural-fire policy in the worst drought summer in recorded history had perhaps been unwise. But he shook his head over the political tactics of appointees in the Forest Service, who had protected tracts of commercial saw timber while later permitting the Yellowstone itself to burn, and had further attempted to discredit the Carter Administration during the election of 1980.
From TToTC page 26: "One day my father gave me a spanking at school for running across some stupid desks, then that night he gave me a spanking at home because I got a spanking at school. The more I thought about that the more I felt put upon. When I explained to him that I'd been double jeopardized he told me that those things didn't count in a dictatorship. That's when I started to mistrust governments."
From TToTC page 147: "Now I feel that my father is sitting on the edge of a cloud somewhere watching. If he knows everything about me he's pretty busy lighting candles, some of them on both ends. But I hope he knows that I've been sometimes guilty only by innuendo, and that's why I wrote my epitaph with such profundity: I wish I could have lived to do, the things I was attributed to."
In 2009, the FBI raided Fenn and several other art dealers – and alleged looters – of Native American artifacts in the Southwest. The raid resulted in the confiscation of just four items from Fenn (none of which could be proven as having been obtained by him illicitly).
https://www.sfreporter.com/news/coverstories/2009/08/19/stealing-the-past/
This was more than just a nuisance … Fenn's reputation had been impugned and two other dealers who were arrested after the raids committed suicide. These guys were likely people he knew or may have even been his friends. A third man arrested in the case also committed suicide; he was a government informant who essentially helped the federal agents entrap the Four Corners dealers.
https://www.santafenewmexican.com/news/local_news/dealer-blame-fbi-for-seller-suicides-in-four-corners-looting-case/article_f8613507-1b71-513a-ba21-43a6b0622c0b.html
Fenn was supposedly very angry and threatened Tony Dokoupil with legal action when the reporter spoke with old "pothunting" acquaintances and revealed some unsavory information about Fenn's artifact-collecting past, for example: "... Fenn wasn't just taking a treasure or two but returning to caves and stripping them clean …" In the end, the publicity of appearing in Newsweek magazine at such an early stage in the treasure hunt must have overridden Fenn's desire to keep some of those things that he "was attributed to" under wraps.
https://www.newsweek.com/forrest-fenn-wants-you-find-his-treasure-and-his-bones-64427
The FBI raids – based on purchases of artifacts by a government informant using government money to entice dealers to specifically sell him contraband, and which were conducted by multi-agency SWAT teams – were highly controversial for many locals. No doubt Fenn was pissed off at the Feds more than ever at that point. Despite the epitaph he wrote for himself, he certainly did not want to be remembered as "the old guy in Santa Fe raided by the FBI".
Less than a year later, he published his memoir with its treasure hunt poem. Little chance the timing was just a coincidence.
Finally, does anybody find it intriguing that Fenn rarely if ever talked about the 1988 fire in Yellowstone? It happened the same year he got cancer (or did it?), and he talked plenty about that personal ordeal. The fire and its aftereffects utterly destroyed some of his most cherished places where he had fished for trout and melded with nature since he was a young boy, including his (probably) favorite fishing hole at TOP SECRET "Nine-Mile" and not to mention the magical wood on the far bank of the river with its secluded crystal pond to which he would have gone alone and sat under pine trees, napping, daydreaming, watching wildlife, marveling at the mountain and river vistas, and writing poems or love notes to his wife. Yet not a peep from him about the conflagration that ravaged all of that? Curious.
submitted by TomSzabo to FindingFennsGold [link] [comments]


2023.06.06 02:43 Cute-Muscle5406 How do I get rid of these grid lines or boxes or whatever they are? I don't know what my kid did but I can't get rid of these....

submitted by Cute-Muscle5406 to WordPerfect [link] [comments]