336 east 87th street

#PhillyRoomates4lyfe

2016.10.18 23:27 chounies #PhillyRoomates4lyfe

Cause we don't spend enough time on reddit.
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2011.04.17 15:20 electric_sandwich Apartments and Rooms in New York City: by redditors, for redditors

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2018.05.08 00:09 AdamLax Share apartment availabilities and needs

Indianapolis apartment and roommate listings
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2023.06.02 01:27 Addebo019 Sorry if it's a bit spammy but I thought I'd post an update to my Dodecalinear Tube Map using (almost). Finally got into Inkscape to fix some of the issues with the sketch in my previous post here. Still only Central London, but will post again when I get the rest in. Again, any suggestions???

Sorry if it's a bit spammy but I thought I'd post an update to my Dodecalinear Tube Map using (almost). Finally got into Inkscape to fix some of the issues with the sketch in my previous post here. Still only Central London, but will post again when I get the rest in. Again, any suggestions??? submitted by Addebo019 to TransitDiagrams [link] [comments]


2023.06.02 00:26 helpfulbenny Jez, I went to the offices on Cowper Street, they don't seem to know who you are.

Jez, I went to the offices on Cowper Street, they don't seem to know who you are. submitted by helpfulbenny to PeepShowQuotes [link] [comments]


2023.06.01 23:51 Ifeex June Events in Summerville!

Here is a list of events happening in Summerville for the month of June! Feel free to add additional events in the comments, and we'll add them to the main post for visibility.

Recurring Events:

Mondays:
6:30 - 8:30pm - Main Street Writes: Open Writers Group - Main Street Reads - FREE
7:00 - 9:00pm - Pub Trivia - Trolley Pub - FREE
Tuesdays:
5:30 - 6:30pm - Chess Club - Summerville Library - FREE
6:15pm - SpokeWorks MTB/Trail Ride - 10 miles - Sawmill Ridges - FREE
7pm - Music Trivia Night - Steel City Pizza - FREE
Wednesdays:
9:30 - 10:00am - Stories on the Square - Main Street Reads - FREE
10:30 - 11:00am - Baby & Me - Summerville Library - FREE
11:00 - 11:30 - StoryTots - Summerville Library - FREE
6:30 - 8:30pm - Music Bingo- Frothy Beard Off World - FREE
Fridays:
10:30 - 11:00am - Family Story Hour - Summerville Library - FREE
10:30 - 2:30pm - Problems Solved Friday Sewing Sessions - People, Places, & Quilts - $25
3:30 - 4:30pm - LEGO Club - Summerville Library - FREE
5:00 - 8:00om - Food Truck Friday - Carnes Crossroads
Saturdays:
8:00am - Coastal Cyclists CVS Road Ride - ~54 miles, 20-23mph - CVS @ Bacons Bridge - FREE
8:00-1:00pm - Summerville Farmer's Market - Downtown Summerville - FREE
8:00am - SpokeWorks Social Ride - 15 miles, 16-18 mph - SpokeWorks Bicycle Shop - FREE
8:00am - SpokeWorks Intermediate Ride - 25 miles, 16-21 mph - SpokeWorks Bicycle Shop - FREE


One Time Events:

Thursday, 6/1:
7:30pm - Flowertown Players presents: Curtains! - James Dean Theater - $30/adult, $25/student

Friday, 6/2:
5:00 - 8:00pm - Sounds on the Square - Nexton Square - FREE
7:00pm - Standup Comedy with Dat Phan - Old Trolley Theater - $20
7:30pm - Flowertown Players presents: Curtains! - James Dean Theater - $30/adult, $25/student
9:00pm - Standup Comedy with Dat Phan - Old Trolley Theater - $20

Saturday, 6/3:
9:30-1:00pm - Farmer's Market Slow Roll Bike Ride - Newington Plantation Pool - FREE
10:00-1:00pm - Hurricane Prep Expo - Ashley River Park - FREE
1:30-4:00pm - Interactive Movies: Encanto - Dorchester County Library - FREE
7:00pm - Standup Comedy with Dat Phan - Old Trolley Theater - $20
7:30pm - Flowertown Players presents: Curtains! - James Dean Theater - $30/adult, $25/student
9:00pm - Standup Comedy with Dat Phan - Old Trolley Theater - $20

Sunday, 6/4:
11:00-5:00pm - Knightsville General Store Vendor Event - Knightsville General Store - FREE
12:30-2:00pm - Lest We Forget Memorial Day Tribute - 105 Sumter Ave - $30
3:00pm - Flowertown Players presents: Curtains! - James Dean Theater - $30/adult, $25/student

Monday, 6/5:
6:00-8:00pm - Women in Business Networking Group - Taco Boy - $20

Tuesday, 6/6:
9:00-10:00am - SHE Leads Group - 126 E 2nd N Street - FREE

Wednesday, 6/7:
11:00-12:00pm - A Revolutionary Soldier's Perspective - Faith Sellers Senior Center - FREE

Friday, 6/9:
6:00-7:30pm - Farm Bingo with Goats - Flowertown Charm - $30/Adult, $15/Youth
7:30pm - Flowertown Youth presents: Little Women - James Dean Theater - $7

Saturday, 6/10:
10:00-11:00am - Walk with a Doc - Gahagan Park - FREE
10:00-12:00pm - Special Care Nursery Reunion - Summerville Medical Center - FREE
10:00-12:00pm - Sketching on the Square - Hutchinson Square - FREE
10:00-4:00pm - In Our DNA: SC - Genetic Screening - Dorchester County Library - FREE
12:00-5:00pm - Blood Drive - Keller Williams Key - FREE
2:30pm - Flowertown Youth presents: Little Women - James Dean Theater - $7
7:30pm - Flowertown Youth presents: Little Women - James Dean Theater - $7

Sunday, 6/11:
2:30pm - Flowertown Youth presents: Little Women - James Dean Theater - $7

Monday, 6/12:
9:00am - Tree Protection Board Meeting - Council Chambers - FREE

Tuesday, 6/13:
3:30-4:30pm - Little Lego Club - Dorchester County Library - FREE
5:00-7:00pm - Father's Day Craft Night - East Bay Deli - FREE

Wednesday, 6/14:
6:30-8:00pm - Tools for Caregiver's Telehealth - ZOOM - FREE

Thursday, 6/15:
5:30-8:30pm - Third Thursday - Hutchinson Square - FREE

Friday, 6/16:
7:00pm - Standup Comedy with Nick Hoff - Old Trolley Theater - $15
9:00pm - Standup Comedy with Nick Hoff - Old Trolley Theater - $15

Saturday, 6/17:
8:00am - The Longest Day 5k - 104 Greeting Hour Rd - $35
9:30-1:00pm - Farmer's Market Slow Roll Bike Ride - Newington Plantation Pool - FREE
1:30-2:30pm - Anime Club - Dorchester County Library - FREE
3:00-4:00pm - Teen Gamers - Dorchester County Library - FREE

Sunday, 6/18:
10:00-12:00pm - Dorchester Paws Adoption Event - Petco - FREE

Monday, 6/19:
10:30-12:30pm - 3 Day Kid's Sewing Camp- People, Places & Quilts - $48
4:00pm - Planning Commission Meeting - Council Chambers - FREE

Tuesday, 6/20:
5:30-9:00pm - World Refugee Day - Ashley River Park - FREE

Wednesday, 6/21:
4:30 - 5:30 - Adulting for Teens - Dorchester County Library - FREE
6:30-8:00pm - Tools for Caregiver's Telehealth - ZOOM - FREE

Thursday, 6/22:
1:00-3:00pm - Genealogy Club - Dorchester County Library - FREE
5:30-7:00pm - Resume Writing Workshop - Dorchester County Library - FREE

Friday, 6/23:
7:00 - 10:00pm - Silent Disco Summer Tour- Hutchinson Square - $15/headset

Saturday, 6/24:
10:00-4:00pm - 3rd Annual Lowcountry Peach Festival - Jedburg Junction - FREE
1:00-4:00pm - Craft Supply Swap - Dorchester County Library - FREE
3:00-5:00pm - Music in the Park - Brown Family Park - FREE
7:00pm - YMCA Comedy Night - Cane Bay YMCA - $20
7:00-10:00pm - Bad Manners at the Dinner Table - Flowertown Players - $20-30

Sunday, 6/25:
8:00-8:45 - TinyTykes Soccer Camp Week - Oakbrook Sports Complex - $120
9:00-11:00am - Highway Cleanup w/ SC Aquarium - Carolina Colors and Cuts - FREE
12:00-4:00pm - 3rd Annual Lowcountry Peach Festival - Jedburg Junction - FREE
2:00-4:00pm - Sunday Crafternoons - Dorchester County Library - FREE

Monday, 6/26:
4:00-5:30pm - Kid's Crafternoons: Origami - Dorchester County Library - FREE

Tuesday, 6/27:
8:00-9:00am - Education and Workforce Division Meeting - Council Chambers - FREE

Wednesday, 6/28:
6:30-8:00pm - Tools for Caregiver's Telehealth - ZOOM - FREE

Thursday, 6/29:
7:00-9:00pm - Clean Fun Comedy Show - Magical Memories Event Planning - $10-20

Friday, 6/30:
6:00pm - Summerville Dance Academy - Summerville PAC - FREE
submitted by Ifeex to summervillesc [link] [comments]


2023.06.01 23:49 Additional-Stress-17 Drain at The Middle East (Boston)

If there is a designated Boston Hardcore subreddit I apologize, I couldn't find one. I'm from Central MA and somehow in over a decade of going to shows have never been to the middle east, yes that includes going to AHC which I only found out about like five years ago. My question is what is it like there? I always know what the crowd is going to be like depending on what genre it is and what venue across New England I'm at. Paradise is one of my least favorites because of how many college kids show up and can sometimes ruin the vibe. I'm guessing Drain at the Middle East will be mostly just a hardcore crowd? What is your experience? And side question what is parking like in the area. Are there any lots or just getting lucky with street parking? Asking these questions because of a medical condition that I would like to be prepared and not get injured, and also just out of general anxiety. Thanks for listening to my ted talk.
submitted by Additional-Stress-17 to Hardcore [link] [comments]


2023.06.01 23:13 Wise_Focus_309 "OH. Ooooohhh. ..oh..."

You all have inspired me to relate a story from way back when I was a much younger man.
Setting: The mid 1990's, mid-sized city on the East Coast of the U.S.
I was a college student who normally wore the traditional late teen/early 20's male uniform of worn jeans, band t-shirt covered by plaid flannel, and Chuck Taylor All-Star high tops of varying colors.
I was enjoying my Sophomore year at my small college when I was tasked with an oral report in my current literature class. I knew the material, spoke often in class, and engaged well with the teacher and my classmates. Things were good.
I decided that for the presentation, I would actually put an effort into my appearance. I shaved that morning, put on the few dress clothes that I had brought from home, and even wore a tie. I thought that I cleaned up pretty well.
The presentation was well received, and I felt good about how everything went, so after class I decided to walk myself across the street to partake of a rented movie from the local Blockbuster video rental store.
*For those too young to remember, once upon a time you had to physically go to a store and choose a movie to watch, rent a VHS or DVD copy, and return it to the store when you were done.
*It was actually a really fun experience, and was even more fun when they started to rent video games as well.
*It also made you choose something you may not have chosen otherwise when your first choice was out.
*For further information on this topic, I recommend the film "Be Kind, Rewind," starring Mos Def (Yasiin Bey), Jack Black, and Danny Glover.
As I perused the store, I noticed that a couple of boxes were out of place, so I put them back in order as I decided what to watch that evening. An older woman turned to me and asked, "Excuse me young man, but I am taking care of my grandkids tonight and was wondering if this movie was appropriate?"
"Oh, 'Goonies?' That is a classic! There are a couple of scary parts for the younger kids, but it is nothing worse than what they would see in a cartoon. They should really like it." She thanked me and was on her way.
Another woman asked where the romantic comedies were, so I directed her to them. A man asked me my opinion of John Carpenter's "The Thing."
"Wow," I thought to myself. "My professional appearance must exude cinematic knowledge and expertise! People can't stop themselves from asking my opinion on film! Maybe I should put more of an effort in to dressing well."
As I approached the counter with my selection, I was brought out of my contemplation by the sight of the Blockbuster assistant manager behind the register.
He was wearing a blue button-down shirt, tan trousers, a brown leather belt and loafers, and a tie.
I was wearing a blue button-down shirt, tan trousers, a brown leather belt and loafers, and a tie.
The realization hit me. "OH. Ooooohhh. ..oh..."
TLDR: I thought that my professional appearance and vast knowledge of movies was attracting people to me for advice, when it turned out that I was just the moron who tried to impress his American Romanticism class by dressing like a Blockbuster employee.
As I have been on Reddit for a couple of months, I know that it is important to inform all of you that I am currently in therapy for this traumatic event and have been NC with Blockbuster for nearly 20 years!
submitted by Wise_Focus_309 to IDontWorkHereLady [link] [comments]


2023.06.01 22:32 reddit_user45765 "Me" generation ULINE owner adds her political ideas in their catalogs

submitted by reddit_user45765 to antiwork [link] [comments]


2023.06.01 22:22 slowlyerode Upcoming community yard/garage sale!

Upcoming community yard/garage sale!
June 3rd and 4th from 11am to 6pm at the Twin Peaks apartments on North East Street there will be a multi-family yard/garage sale. A huge variety of items and sizes, good deals, negotiation allowed, all left over items will be donated. It’s gonna be hot so we’ll definitely have cold drinks available! (:
submitted by slowlyerode to lansing [link] [comments]


2023.06.01 22:09 clearliquidclearjar TALLAHASSEE WEEKLY EVENTS, 6/1 – 6/7

THIS IS JUST AN INCOMPLETE PLACEHOLDER. CHECK BACK TOMORROW FOR THE FULL LISTING.
Events are listed by the day. Events that happen every week appear first, one time stuff after that. If you have anything you’d like people to know about, comment here or message me and I’ll add it in. If you’d like further info about any of the events, look it up! I usually don’t have any extra to add.
Large Scale, Ongoing, and Multi-Day Events
Local Running, Walking, and Biking Info: https://troubleafoot.blogspot.com/
OutdooFarmer’s Markets:
THURSDAY, 6/1
  • Blue Tavern: Bluegrass Jam with Dennis Hardin. 5pm
  • Blue Tavern: Wasted Potential Brass Band. 8pm
  • House of Music: Steeln’ Peaches: The Music of the Allman Brothers Band. 8pm
FRIDAY, 6/2
  • Lake Tribe: Flannel Friday. Flannel Fridays will be featuring a wide range of fall themed 'Pop-up' activities such as food trucks, live music, campfires, s'mores roasting, new seasonal brews, and more! Come dawn your flannel and cozy up to the simpler things in life. Our beers taste like the outdoors feel, let our tasting room be your Friday cabin retreat. 4pm
  • Gamescape: MTG Friday Night Magic. FORMAT: Standard Constructed. Swiss rounds as determined by the number of players with a maximum of 5 rounds. 7pm/$5
  • Hobbit West: Friday Night Dart Tournament. Anyone can Enter! Sign ups at 7:30, Darts fly at 8:00/$10 entry fee
  • Ouzts Too: Karaoke with DJ Nathan. Best karaoke DJ in town. 8pm
  • Club Downunder: CDU X Hip Hop Club Presents Freestyle Friday. Show off your freestyle rap or poetry skills at Freestyle Friday! Doors are at 7:30 with the show starting at 8:00 in Club Downunder! Send an email to [email protected] to sign up! 8pm
  • The Bar at La Casa: Karaoke with DJ FUSION. 9pm
  • Just One More: Karaoke with DJ Rah. 9pm-11pm/21+
  • 926: The Hot Friday Night Party and Drag Show. 9pm/$5/18+
  • Blue Tavern: Everett Young. 5pm
  • Square Mug: Jordie Hendrix. 6pm
  • The Plant: Maker’s Market featuring local artists selling handmade items and live music by Bad Weather, High Speed Suicide, Speed Runner, ArsonGender, and Computer Man. 6:30pm
  • Ology Midtown: Kanise featuring Facey. 7pm
  • Island Wings: Lee C Payton performs a tribute to Kathryn Belle Long. 7pm
  • Fire Bettys: Groove Merchants. 8pm/21+
  • The Bark: Saturnalia, Gangs of Paris, Headfoam, and Wojtek. 8pm
SATURDAY, 6/3
  • Brinkley Glen Park: Invasive Plant Removal. Join Master Gardener Volunteers at this weekly invasive plant removal event. This is a great way to learn to ID our invasive plant species and how to remove them. We recommend wearing long pants and sleeves, closed-toed shoes, gloves, a hat and mosquito spray. Bring gardening tools such as hand clippers, loppers, trowels, etc. if you have them. We are removing coral ardisia bushes and berries, nandina, tung trees, Tradescantia flumenensis, cat's claw vine, winged yam, Japanese climbing fern, skunkvine and more. Directions: The best way to get there is to take Meridian Rd to Waverly Rd, go to the next intersection and turn left onto Abbotsford Way, then turn left at the next road called Woodside Dr. At the stop sign turn left onto Lothian. Lothian ends in a cul-de-sac and there is a sign that says Brinkley Glen Park. 8:30am-11:30am
  • The Rose Room: The Rose Revue. Performances by your favorite entertainers and special guests! Shows at 8pm, 10pm, & Midnight! A unique cast EACH show! 7pm
  • Duke’s and Dottie’s: Line Dancing Plus Lessons. 7pm/21+
  • Bird’s Oyster Shack: Laughterday Night Fever. This week: Five Year Anniversary Laughterday Night Fever! Join us every Saturday at Bird's Aphrodisiac Oyster Shack for a free comedy show! 8:30pm
  • La Casa Bar: Karaoke With Nathan. 9pm-1am
  • Blue Tavern: First Saturday Swim with Bluegill Bill. 5pm
  • Tally Print Studio (225 E Pershing St): Grand Opening featuring local printmakers, food vendors, live screen printing, clothing swap, and live music from DJ Enigumatic, Danitza, Rachel Hillman, and Sleep John B. 5pm-10pm
  • Oyster City Brewing Co: Mechanical Lincoln. 7pm
  • The Bark: Boy Named Sue, Teens In Trouble, and Copyright Claim. 7:30pm
  • Square Mug: Suddenly, Bench Warmer, and Sarah Morrison. 8pm
  • Blue Tavern: Prine Time: Local Songwriters cover the music of John Prine. 8pm
  • House of Music: The Funky ‘Taters featuring Lili Forbes and friends. 8pm
SUNDAY, 6/4
  • Bicycle House: Sunday Ride. Ride at 10:30 AM from Bicycle House. We will ride the Cascades trail to the St Marks trail and down to Wakulla station and return, about 31 miles. Ride speed is 12 to 14 mph, with periodic regroups. Vernon Bailey is the ride leader. Vernon is a new CCC member who’s been biking for 50 years enjoys riding with small groups and weekend touring. 10am
  • Gamescape: Pokémon League. Come learn, play, and trade with the Pokémon Trading Card Game and the Pokémon video games! We LOVE seeing new players, so come learn how to play! We play both the Trading Card Game and the Video Game casually and competitively. The store offers lots of different seating arrangements to meet our group's needs, as well as food, drinks, and Pokémon products for purchase. We are also hold regular, officially sanctioned tournaments for Pokémon Trading Card Game and Video Game Competitions! 2-4pm
  • Lake Tribe: Colby Scheib. 3pm
  • House of Music: Songwriter Sunday. Songwriters of Tallahassee hosted by Rachel Hillman. Bring your original songs on Sunday - sign up is at 4:30. No Cover Songs please - this is an event celebrating original music. Accompanists and Bands Welcome - you must be able to set up within two minutes, so no crazy pedals or amp shenanigans. No Backing Tracks - Please find someone to play your song with you. 5pm
  • The Plant: Open Jam. All instruments, all players welcome. 5pm-9pm
  • House of Music: Perkins Street Pickers. 5pm
  • Oyster City Brewing: Comedy Night. Come have some laughs with us on Sunday nights! If you are interested in participating in the show, reach out to [email protected] 7:30pm
  • The Rose Room: Synful Sunday. 8pm
**MONDAY, 6/5
  • Just One More: Bingo. 5pm-6:30pm
  • American Legion Hall: Cha Cha - Weekly Lessons. 6:15pm/$5
  • Hangar 38: Bingo. 6:45pm
  • Vino Beano: Tipsy Trivia. 7pm
  • The Rose Room: Karaoke Night. 8pm
  • Oyster City Brewing: The Bachelor Watch Party! 8pm
TUESDAY, 6/6
  • Blue Tavern: Happy Hour with Paddy League. 5pm
  • World of Beer: Poker Night. 6pm
  • The Rose Room: Drag Bingo and Open Stage Night ft. Britney T. Foxx! 6pm
  • Crafty Crab: BOOMIN' Karaoke. 7pm
  • Ology Midtown: Jazz Jam Sessions. 7pm
  • Island Wings: Trivia. 7pm
  • House of Music: Tuesday Trivia & Karaoke. 7pm
  • Burrito Boarder: Karaoke with DJ Roldus. 8pm
  • Blue Tavern: Tuesday is Blues Day. Every Tuesday is Blues Day @ the Blue Tavern and Blues Meets Girl is a Tallahassee favorite. This perfect, intimate venue provides just what you need for both a mid-week break and authentic blues music experience. 8pm
  • 4th Quarter: Professor Jim's Tuesday Night Trivia. Popular for a reason! 8pm
  • Argonaut Coffee: Trivia Tuesday. 8pm
  • 926: Tacos and Trivia. 9pm
  • Fire Betty’s: Comedy Show. 9pm/21+
  • Retrofit Records: Janelle Monáe “The Age Of Pleasure” Album Listening Party. 8pm
WEDNESDAY, 6/7
  • Rose Room: Women's Wednesday. Featuring Our Rose Roulettes and drink specials all night long. A night for all of our female-identifying friends to enjoy a safe space and an awesome happy hour! 5pm-2am
  • Blue Tavern: The Wednesday Night Lab Session hosted by Jim Crozier. 5pm
  • Sugar and Spice Tally: Game Night. Join us every Wednesday Night for community game night. Bring your own or use ours! Let me know if you need to reserve space for a large group. Free to attend! 5pm
  • Tara Angel’s Magic: D&D Experience - Adult (18+) Group. Dungeons & Dragons 5th Edition - Candlekeep Mysteries. A one-shot is a D&D event that starts and finishes in the same session, typically lasting 3 - 4 hours. We have pre-generated characters for players to choose from. WHAT TO BRING: Pencils, Dice (can be purchased in store), Mask (encouraged for unvaccinated participants), Enthusiasm! Please sign up in advance to reserve a spot in this campaign. Tickets can be purchased in-store, over the phone, or on the website. For more information, please email [email protected], or call: (850) 878-4555 6pm-9pm
  • Goodwood: Wonderful Wednesday. 6pm/$5
  • Level 8 Rooftop Lounge: Trivia. 6pm
  • The Great Games Library: Open Game Night. 6pm/free
  • American Legion Hall: Sue Boyd Country Western and More Dance Class. Session 2 - Beginner 6:30 to 7:45 pm What: East Coast Swing and Waltz. Cost: $8.00 per person. Wear comfortable shoes you can turn in. 7:45 to 8:15 - Practice dance with paid admission. 8:15 to 9:30: Intermediate - 2 Step and WCS. $8.00 per person or $13.00 for both classes. Vaccines are required. Face masks are optional. Changing partners is optional. 6:30pm
  • Perry Lynn’s Smokehouse in Quincy: Wed Night Open Mic w/ Steven Ritter and Friends. 6:30pm
  • Hangar 38: Trivia. 6:45pm
  • Oyster City Brewing Tallahassee: Trivia. Teams up to 6 players for three rounds with 10 questions and a tie breaker each round. Winners are by round so don’t worry if you need to come late or can’t stay the whole time! Prizes include a round of beer, a 6 pack and a gift card! 7pm
  • Proof: Trivia. 7pm
  • Vino Beano: Wine Bingo. 7pm
  • Fermentation Lounge: Trivia. 7pm
  • House of Music: Open Mic at House of Music. Join us Wednesday nights for open mic in the bar with host Mike Ingram of The Brown Goose. Come early for Happy Hour and dinner! 8pm
  • Blue Tavern: Warehouse Wednesdays Open Mic Night. The open mic night that has run continuously for almost 20 years, once housed at the Warehouse, lives on at the Blue Tavern. Doc Russell continues as the host with the most. Sign up starts at 8pm/free to attend
  • Fire Betty’s: Karaoke! 8pm/21+/free
  • Dukes and Dotties: College Night and Line Dancing Lessons. 8pm
  • The Bark: Karaoke with DJ Nathan. Best karaoke DJ in town. 9pm
  • 926: Dragged Out Wednesday. 10pm
  • The Bark: Dikembe, Glazed, and Professional Businessman. 7:15pm
submitted by clearliquidclearjar to Tallahassee [link] [comments]


2023.06.01 21:46 416Radar Incident Outside Toronto School Resolved with Arrest and Recovery of Replica Gun

Incident Outside Toronto School Resolved with Arrest and Recovery of Replica Gun
The arrest took place near Bowmore Road Junior & Senior Public School after police received a report about an armed male suspect in the vicinity of Kellner Court and Edgewood Grove, located near Coxwell Avenue and Dundas Street East at approximately 8:55 a.m.
submitted by 416Radar to 416Radar [link] [comments]


2023.06.01 21:45 fidelityportland TriMet's problems are exponentially worse than anyone is talking about

Public opinion of TriMet's decisions have been pretty mixed, mostly because TriMet's decisions are so convoluted that they can be a real challenge to understand. In reality, Metro and Portlanders need to have a bigger civic conversation about the future of TriMet, looking at the big picture. We have 3 looming existential crises of TriMet to be concerned about that are bigger than revenue dips, crime, or homeless people.
Civic leaders and the public are focused on a quick "fix" for TriMet revenue drops - even though we've seen this coming for a long time, it's very predictable that TriMet's Board of Directors acts at the last minute. Also, very predictably, TriMet's Board opted for a fare increase because over the previous 20 years that's been a go-to answer to every problem (except for that one time they killed Fareless Square). The politically appointed boards of TriMet and Metro lack the unique specialized knowledge of the issues I'll bring up here. If TriMet knows about these larger issues, they're obviously burring it from public view. In the short term, increasing fares is like putting fresh paint on a house that's on fire; in this situation, that paint is HIGHLY flammable.
First - fare hikes as a tactic is a brain-dead move. Just the most utterly stupid and self-sabotaging response to a looming budget shortfall. I'm dwelling on this because it illustrates their terrible decision-making, which is functional proof they have no idea what they're doing. Some of the core reasons for this:
Reading comments about the fare hikes, most of the public thinks TriMet is dealing with a safety or utilization issue. Both of these are 100% true: soft-on-crime progressives have wholly obliterated the working class perception of TriMet safety - there are so many different ways this has happened, but we should thank so many people in the media and political class: Ana del Rocio's crying wolf about racism in fare inspections (and the media entertaining it), or Mike Schmidt deinstitutionalizing of the justice system, or Legislature's inability to act on the massive mental health crisis and drug addiction crisis in Oregon. No matter the underlying cause, we have a system where deranged violent mentally ill tweakers can be disruptive on the train, but working-class people face a $250 fine if they can't afford a $2.50 ($2.80) ticket. TriMet is less safe, especially the light rail and bus lines. We could hypothetically talk about various policy and infrastructure changes, such as turnstiles and security guards - but pragmatically, this won't do shit when our society has adopted a philosophy of transforming the urban core into an open-air insane asylum and opened the doors to the prisons. This safety issue is well beyond TriMet's scope, and even if there was consensus among TriMet and Metro to solve this, the entire justice system and Legislature is still broken.

Fare Hikes and Utilization is the Red Herring - Let's talk about TriMet's future

In reality, multiple design choices made decades ago set us up for failure. But we also have to thank brain-dead progressive lunatics and corrupt politicos who have steered our transit decision-making into the ground.
There are three specific issues I'm going to talk about, with each becoming more consequential and disastrous for TriMet:

The strategic design of TriMet's system is broken, and it's been broken before.

If you looked at a map of TriMet's bus and rail system, you'd see a design pattern often referred to as a "Radial Design" or sometimes a "Hub And Spoke" design. The Hub and Spoke strategy is building our transit system around centralized locations to connect to other routes. For Portland the idea is to go downtown (or sometimes a Park and Ride) where you can connect to your next destination. This is why the majority of bus routes and all the max routes go downtown, to our Transit Mall and Pioneer Square.
Downtown planning was a smart idea in the 1960s when it was coupled with Main Street economic theory and prototype urban development zones - all of this wrapped up in the 1972 Downtown Plan policy. During these decades, the primary economic idea of urban revitalization was that downtown cores could provide better business climates and shopping districts that amplify economic activity synergistically. In other words, packing all the office jobs and luxury shopping in one area is good for workers, business, and civic planning.
All very smart ideas in yester-year, so TriMet became focused on serving the downtown business community myopically. This myopia became so paramount that it was considered illegitimate (actually taboo, borderline illegal) if you used a Park & Ride facility to park and NOT ride downtown. Amanda Fritz once explained that we couldn't expand Barbur Transit Center because that would result in students parking at Barbur Transit Center and riding the bus to PCC Sylvania. This view implies that TriMet exists only to service downtown workers, not the students, not the impoverished mom needing to go to a grocery store.
How does TriMet's hub and spoke design represent its purpose?
Portland's unspoken rule of transit philosophy is that jobs pay for the system (remember, business payroll taxes pay for most of it), so TriMet should be focused on serving people utilizing it for their job - employers pay for it, and they get value out of it. But this is both unspoken (never said aloud) and largely unobserved. The whole idea of TriMet as a social service to serve low-income people, to help impoverished people - well, those ideas were just lukewarm political rhetoric that is tossed out as soon as some Undesirable with tattered clothing reeking of cigarettes gets aboard - then Portlanders jump right back "this is for workers only!" Sadly, there hasn't ever been a public consensus of why TriMet exists because I could equally argue that TriMet's purpose isn't serving the working class; it's actually vehicle emissions reductions - but here, too, reality contradicts that this is the purpose for why we operate TriMet. TriMet's real purpose seems to be "Spend money on lofty capital projects" and if we want to be cynical about it, we can elaborate "…because large capital projects enable grift, embezzlement, and inflating property values for developers."
We haven't always depended upon a hub and spoke design. A great article from Jarrett Walker written in 2010 on his Human Transit blog explains in "The Power and Pleasure of Grids"
Why aren't all frequent networks grids? The competing impulse is the radial network impulse, which says: "We have one downtown. Everyone is going there, so just run everything to there." Most networks start out radial, but some later transition to more of a grid form, often with compromises in which a grid pattern of routes is distorted around downtown so that many parallel routes converge there. You can see this pattern in many cities, Portland for example. Many of the lines extending north and east out of the city center form elements of a grid, but converge on the downtown. Many other major routes (numbered in the 70s in Portland's system) do not go downtown, but instead complete the grid pattern. This balance between grid and radial patterns was carefully constructed in 1982, replacing an old network in which almost all routes went downtown.
Over the years the grid pattern was neglected in favor of a downtown-focused investment strategy. To a real degree it made practical sense: that's where the jobs were. But again, this is the presumption that TriMet and Mass Transit ought to service workers first, and there's not much consensus on that. But while we can't decide on TriMet's purpose, we can absolutely agree on one important thing: Downtown is dead.
No 5-star hotel is going to fix it. (As of writing, I'm not even convinced that this mafia-connected bamboozle of public fraud will open.) No "tough-on-crime" DA to replace Mike Schmidt, like Nathan Vasquez, will fix downtown. It's not JUST a crime problem: most of the problems we deal with today mirror the problems facing Portland in the 1960s, especially our inability to invest in good infrastructure people actually want to use. That's on top of crime, vandalism, and an unhealthy business ecosystem.
IF we want to maintain TriMet (and that's a big IF, for reasons I'll explain below), then it will be focused on something other than downtown. We need to move back to a grid-design transit system, as this is a much easier way to use transit to get around the city, no matter your destination. If TriMet continues to exist and operate fleets in 20-30 years, this is the only way it exists - because it will just be too inconvenient to ride downtown as a side quest to your destination, especially as we look at 10, 20, 30, 40 years from now.
Of course, we can only transform some parts of the transit infrastructure this way, and there are no uplifting and moving train tracks here. So light rail doesn't have a future in the grid system - but even without the grid system, light rail is doomed.

The fatal flaws of light rail in Portland.

I want to preface this by saying I like light rail as a strategy, it's not a bad system or bad civic investment. I could write another 5,000-word essay on why Seattle did an excellent job with light rail and the specific decisions Portland made wildly incorrectly. In transit advocacy the wacktavists inappropriately categorized skeptics of Portland's light rail as some soft bigotry - as if you're racist if you don't like Portland's light rail - even though, ironically, most light rail systems tend to be built for the preference of white culture and white workers, precisely what happened here in Portland and most cities (but this is all a story for another time).
Portland's light rail system has a capacity problem and has dealt with this capacity problem quietly for the last 20+ years. When you see the capacity problem, you can quickly understand this light rail system won't work in the future. All the other smart cities in the world that designed light rail realized they needed big long trains to move many people. Portland decided to limit the train car length to the size of our city blocks to save construction costs - and this has always been a fatal flaw.
Portland's highest capacity train car is our Type 5, according to Wikipedia it has a seating capacity of 72 and an overall capacity of 186 per train car, meaning each train can accommodate up to 372, but even these numbers seem unreliable (*edit). Let's compare:
Portland's light rail lines have roughly the same people moving capacity as a single lane of a highway, maybe marginally more, maybe marginally less. These other cities have a light rail system that can move the same amount of people as an entire 3-lane highway.
You might suspect that Portland could simply run trains more frequently - but nah, that's impossible because the trains run through the central core of downtown Portland, and they're blocked by the real interfaces with road traffic and bottlenecks. TriMet/PBOT/Metro has offered rosy ideas that we could hypothetically run cars every 90 seconds, 2 minutes, 4 minutes, or 6 minutes (depending upon who you ask) - but these are garbage numbers invented out of thin air. For example, you could stand at Pioneer Courthouse Square at 4:50pm on a Wednesday in 2016 - there was a train opening doors to load passengers, and you could visibly see the next train at Pioneer Place Mall pulling into the station behind. Trains were running at approximately a 3 to 4 minute at peak - but on paper, TriMet will claim anything, as they don't give a shit about lying to the public. But the bigger problem is that trains were full. You might have to wait 90 minutes to find a train that offers a seat. And god forbid you had a bike.
I'm not making this very real capacity problem, Metro even acknowledges:
At the busiest hours of the day, 40 light rail trains must cross the river and traverse downtown – one train every 90 seconds. As the region grows and the demand for light rail increases, the region will need at least 64 MAX trains through downtown every hour, more than one train each minute. Our current system can't support that change.
Suppose you're silly enough to trust government propaganda. In that case, you can read the details of Metro study on this in 2019. If we assumed their numbers added up, it's just fucking impossible to run 62 trains per hour, because passenger loading and unloading can take a full minute (sometimes longer). So unless we want to apply substantial g-forces onto the passengers, the train isn't accelerating out of the stops fast enough. Not to mention how unreliable this whole system would be if a sole tweaker, bike rider, or person with a stroller held up the system for 2 minutes.
This is why the bottom line needs to be upfront about capacity - quoting Metro's study here:
Today MAX is limited to 2-car trains because of the length of downtown city blocks. A tunnel could allow for longer trains if the stations outside the downtown core are retrofitted. In the long-term, this could greatly increase MAX capacity.
Do you see that trick? Build a tunnel, yes - but the entire system has to be retrofitted. Literally every light rail station would need to be redesigned, the lines themselves recalculated for larger heavier trains - and extending platforms at Willow Creek might be simple enough, but how in the living fuck is Metro going to afford to expand the Zoo stop? Doubling the size of that platform would cost $500 million alone.
If the city weren't full of cheap dipshits, we would have elevated or buried our light rail lines in the 1980s or 90s, enabling longer train cars to run. Yes, we all knew back then that it was the best practice not to have light rail running on the street - it's less safe, less reliable, runs slower, and limits train car size. Oops.
Just to keep TriMet's own bullshit inflated utopian vision, it would mean spending another billion dollars just to unfuck downtown, bypass an aging bridge, and potentially allow a marginally higher volume of trains - which again is a band-aid on a mortal wound.
The real buried lede is that to add extra train cars means retrofitting all the stops in the system - that's tens of billions of dollars. You can argue costs, but Metro knows we need to do this. It means shutting down the system for a year or years while construction and retrofits happen. It's fucking outrageous. Is this system worth of people per line worth 20, 30, or 40 billion dollars? Fuck no, it ain't. Again, if we had a raging metropolis of industry and commerce downtown, we could reasonably entertain the idea for a moment - but we don't and never will again.
Some folks might argue that if we kill off the light rail system we'd lose out on all those lucrative Transit Oriented Developments. Originally the public was told that Transit Oriented Development strategy would cause a massive infusion of private investment because the light rail was so damn lucrative and desirable for Richard Florida's Creative Class. Turns out the Creative Class is now called today the Laptop Class, and they don't give a flying fuck about street cars, light rail, or walking scores - because most can't be bothered to put pants on during their "commute" from bed to desk. TOD was all a fantasy illusion from the beginning, as multiple studies about Portland commuters showed that college-educated white folks riding Max were equally comfortable riding their bike as a substitute for the same commute. All of these billions of dollars was to accommodate white fare-weather bikers. So here's my hot take on transit: pave over the rail lines and put in bike lanes, and boy, then you'd have a bike system to give folks like Maus a hardon. But of course, Bike Portland would complain because their focus isn't biking; they exist only to favor all poorly thought utopian transit ideas.
Another group of Max/TOD advocates would claim that TOD is better for disabled and impoverished people. And yeah, there's truth there, but see my entire argument above about the Hub & Spoke design of TriMet being the antithesis of transit as a social service. If you believe that TriMet should serve low-income people, you must advocate for a bus-centric grid design.
But even if you're a die-hard believer in light rail - there's another inevitable reality coming that is the nail in the coffin.

Autonomous vehicles will replace mass transit faster than the automobile replaced the horse.

I work in advanced technology, and the thing about tech is that the public and politicians deny that it's going to be there until the majority of the public finally experiences it. You could say this about personal computers, internet, cloud compute, electric cars, smartphones, distributed ledger (cryptocurrency), AI, and driverless vehicles.
Schrodinger's technology doesn't exist until it's measured in an Apple store or your mother asks you for tech support.
No one thought AI was really real until ChatGPT did their kid's homework, and today most people are coming to terms with the fact that ChatGPT 3.5 could do most people's jobs. And that's not even the most advanced AI, that's the freeware put out by Microsoft, they have paywalls to access the real deal.
In 2018 I rode in my colleague's Tesla in self-driving mode from downtown Portland to Top Golf in Hillsboro. We started our journey at the surface parking lot on the west side of the Morrison Bridge. He used his phone to tell the car to pull out of the parking spot and to pick us up. Then he gave the car the address, and it drove us the entire way without any human input necessary. The only time he provided feedback was to touch the turn signal to pass a slow car on the highway. People think self-driving isn't here - but it is - and it's gotten exponentially better and will continue to do so. People will complain and moan about idealized, utopian, pedantic "level 5" full self-driving, how none of it exists or could exist, as a Tesla passes them on the road and the driver is half asleep.
Of course, Portland and every major city have also thought deeply about self-driving technology, and a few places have implemented self-driving solutions - but so far, none of these are really at scale. Though it will be a short time before cost-conscious cities go all-in.
TriMet kicked around the idea of using an autonomous bus for a leg of the trip of the Southwest Corridor project, connecting a segment of the light rail route to the community college. It was bafflingly stupid and short-sighted to think they could use it in this niche application but that it wouldn't open the floodgates for a hundred different applications that eviscerate TriMet's labor model. The simplest example of autonomous operation would be to operate the light rail systems - because they don't make turns, all we need is an AI vision service to slam on the breaks if necessary - that technology has existed for 20+ years. We could retrofit the entire train system in about 3 to 6 months - replace every Max operator with a security guard, and maybe people would ride the Max again? But I digress.
Let's speculate about the far-future, some 5, 10, or 20 years from now: your transit options will expand significantly. The cost will decrease considerably for services using automated vehicles.
You'll look at your options as:
Just a few years into this future we'll see a brand new trend, one that already exists: a shared autonomous vehicle like a privately operated bus. For example, Uber Bus - it already exists as a commuter option in some cities, it's just not autonomous yet. The significant benefit of an autonomous bus is that these shared vehicles will utilize HOV lanes very commonly, and commuting in an autonomous vehicle will be as fast as driving to work in your manually operated car while also being less expensive.
Simultaneously automobile accidents in autonomous vehicles will be virtually non-existent, and insurance companies will start to increase prices on vehicles that lack AI/smart assisted safety driving features. Public leaders will see the value of creating lanes of traffic on highways dedicated explicitly to autonomous vehicles so that they can drive at much higher speeds than manually operated traffic. Oregon won't lead the way here, but wait until Texas or one of the Crazy States greenlights a speed limit differential, and self-driving vehicles have a speed limit of 90, 120, or 150 miles per hour. You might think "accidents would be terrible and deadly" but there will be fewer accidents in the autonomous lane than in manual lanes. At this point, it will be WAY faster to take an autonomous vehicle to your work.
Purchasing power of consumers will decrease while the cost of vehicles will increase (especially autonomous vehicles), making ownership of any vehicle less likely. Frankly, the great majority of people won't know how to drive and will never learn to - just like how young people today don't know how to use manual transmission. However, fleets of autonomous vehicles owned by companies like Tesla, Uber, and Lyft will benefit from scale and keep their autonomous bus fleets operating at low cost. This will lead to a trend where fewer and fewer people will own an automobile, and fewer people even bother learning how to drive or paying the enormous insurance cost.... while also depending upon automobiles more than we do today.
Eventually, in the distant future, manually driven vehicles will be prohibited in urban areas as some reckless relic from a bygone era.
Cities and public bodies don't have to be cut out of this system if they act responsibly. For example, cities could start a data brokering exchange where commuters provide their commuting data (i.e., pick-up point, destination, arrival time). The government uses either a privatized fleet or a publicly owned fleet of autonomous vehicles to move as many people as possible as often as possible. Sort of a publicly run car-pool list - or a hyper-responsive bus fleet that runs for the exact passengers going to exact locations. A big problem companies like Uber, Lyft, and Tesla will have is that they'll lack market saturation to optimize commuting routes - they'll be able to win unique rides, but the best way they can achieve the lowest cost service model is these super predictable and timely commuter riders. The more data points and riders, the more optimization they can achieve. These companies can look at the data for as many people as possible and bid for as many routes as possible - optimizing for convenience, time, energy usage, emissions, etc. The public will voluntarily participate if this is optimized to get the cheapest ride possible. If the government doesn't do this, the private sector will eventually.
As a parallel, no one today even considers how Metro runs garbage collection. No one cares. And if you didn't like Metro's trash service, if you needed a better service for unique needs, you go procure that on your own. Likewise, you wouldn't care about the quality of the commuting trip as long as it's up to some minimal standards of your class expectations, it's reliable, nearly as quick as driving your own vehicle, and it seems reasonably affordable.
If the public ran this data exchange, fees could subsidize lower-income riders. This is a theory on what a TriMet like system or mass transit system could look like in a primarily autonomous world where most people don't own their own or drive an automobile.
This system would be far from perfect, opening up all sorts of problems around mobility. However, it's hard to see how autonomous vehicles will not obliterate the value proposition of mass transit.

Another narrative on the same story.

As the working class moves to autonomous vehicles, transit agencies will collect fewer and fewer fares - prices and taxes will rise, creating a cycle of failure. As a result, some cities will make buses self-driving to cut costs. It could start with Tokyo, Shanghai, Oslo, et al. Again, it's unlikely that Portland or Oregon will be the first movers on this, but when cities start laying off hundreds of mass transit operators and cutting fares to practically nothing, there will be substantial public pressure to mimic locally. It will be inhumane, it will be illiberal, to make those impoverished bus-riding single mothers pay premiums. As most of the fleet becomes autonomous, responsive, and disconnected from labor costs, the next question arises: why do we still operate bus routes? Why big buses instead of smaller and nimble vehicles?
This alternative story/perspective leads to the same outcome: we figure out where people are going and when they need to get there - then dispatch the appropriate amount of vehicles to move that exact number of people as efficiently as possible.
But our local government getting its act together on all this is outside the world of possibility.
In a practical sense, we're going to see history repeat itself. Portland's mass transit history is about private and public entities over-extending themselves, getting too deep in debt on a flawed and outdated idea. As a result, the system collapses into consolidation or liquidation. Following this historical pattern, TriMet/Metro won't respond to changing conditions fast enough, and laughably stupid ideas like cranking up taxes or increasing ridership fares will continue to be the only option until the media finally acknowledges these groups are insolvent. I just hope we don't spend tens of billions of dollars propping up this zombie system before we can soberly realize that we made some mistakes and these vanity-laden projects 20 and 30 years ago need to die.
You see, the biggest flaw with TriMet isn't the design, it needs to be outpaced by technology, it's that the people making decisions at TriMet and Metro are going to make the politically expedient decisions, not the right decisions. They won't redesign, and they won't leverage technology for cost savings, so this charade will just get going along until the media simply declares they're insolvent.
Back to fares for a second - the media happily reprints TriMet's horseshit take about "The higher fares will bring in an estimated $4.9 million in annual revenue starting next year, the report says." Just sort of amazing to me there's no skepticism about this number - but most spectacular is no media considerations about alternative solutions. For example, I could tell TriMet how to save $9,548,091 next year - a useless program primarily utilized by white middle-class folks who own alternative methods of transport - and this would inconvenience way less transit-dependent people than raising fares. But, that's off the table - we're not even developing a decision matrix for when we kill the blackhole of money known as WES.
submitted by fidelityportland to PortlandOR [link] [comments]


2023.06.01 21:31 Clay_Bricks Every retiring LEGO set (June 2023 update)

Another month, another retirement update! A lot of sets changed dates this month, and even more new sets got added! Which reminds me, I'm considering making a /legoleak Discord server in order to expand more on leaks, answer questions, and provide daily retirement updates. If there's interest in that, I'll work on having it done before the next list!
As always, we owe a massive thanks to ZombieYeti from the BrickHound Discord for providing this valuable data. If you're looking for real-time in-stock/deal alerts for Lego.com and other sites, make sure to check out his server: https://discord.gg/BwezK2t5qf
This information is scraped directly from Lego's website, and all dates are subject to change. ZombieYeti is currently developing a website to host this data and offer real-time updates. In the meantime, here is a list of every set and their corresponding retirement date as per LEGO's system!
FULL LIST ON GOOGLE SHEETS HERE <--
If you have any questions, please don't hesitate to ask. Due to Reddit's character limits, we can't include everything here, but the full spreadsheet contains every set.
CHANGES IN JUNE:
Theme Set # Set Name Old Date New Date Change
Avatar 75577 Mako Submarine Dec 31, 2024 Dec 31, 2023 -1 year
Avatar 75578 Metkayina Reef Home Dec 31, 2024 Dec 31, 2023 -1 year
Classic 11020 Build Together Dec 31, 2024 Dec 31, 2023 -1 year
Duplo 10966 Bath Time Fun: Floating Animal Island Dec 31, 2024 Dec 31, 2023 -1 year
City 60388 Gaming Tournament Truck Dec 31, 2023 Dec 31, 2024 +1 year
Creator 31143 Birdhouse Dec 31, 2023 Dec 31, 2024 +1 year
Friends 41735 Mobile Tiny House Dec 31, 2023 Dec 31, 2024 +1 year
Harry Potter 75969 Hogwarts Astronomy Tower Dec 31, 2023 Dec 31, 2024 +1 year
Icons 10306 Atari 2600 Dec 31, 2023 Dec 31, 2024 +1 year
Ideas 21331 Sonic the Hedgehog - Green Hill Zone Dec 31, 2023 Dec 31, 2024 +1 year
Jurassic Park / World 76946 Blue & Beta Velociraptor Capture Dec 31, 2023 Dec 31, 2024 +1 year
Jurassic Park / World 76951 Pyroraptor & Dilophosaurus Transport Dec 31, 2023 Dec 31, 2024 +1 year
Marvel 76226 Spider-Man Figure Dec 31, 2023 Dec 31, 2024 +1 year
Marvel 76241 Hulk Mech Armor Dec 31, 2023 Dec 31, 2024 +1 year
Marvel 76243 Rocket Mech Armor Dec 31, 2023 Dec 31, 2024 +1 year
Marvel 76245 Ghost Rider Mech & Bike Dec 31, 2023 Dec 31, 2024 +1 year
Marvel 76256 Ant-Man Construction Figure Dec 31, 2023 Dec 31, 2024 +1 year
Speed Champions 76906 1970 Ferrari 512 M Dec 31, 2023 Dec 31, 2024 +1 year
Speed Champions 76907 Lotus Evija Dec 31, 2023 Dec 31, 2024 +1 year
Star Wars 75333 Obi-Wan Kenobi's Jedi Starfighter Dec 31, 2023 Dec 31, 2024 +1 year
Star Wars 75344 Boba Fett's Starship Microfighter Dec 31, 2023 Dec 31, 2024 +1 year
Technic 42138 Ford Mustang Shelby GT500 Dec 31, 2023 Dec 31, 2024 +1 year

NEW SETS ADDED:
Theme Set # Set Name Retirement Date
City 60381 City Advent Calendar 2023 Dec 31, 2023
Friends 41758 Friends Advent Calendar 2023 Dec 31, 2023
Harry Potter 76418 Harry Potter Advent Calendar 2023 Dec 31, 2023
Marvel 76267 Marvel Advent Calendar 2023 Dec 31, 2023
Ninjago 71777 Kai's Dragon Power Flip Dec 31, 2023
Ninjago 71778 Nya's Dragon Power Drift Dec 31, 2023
Ninjago 71779 Lloyd's Dragon Power Spin Dec 31, 2023
Star Wars 75366 Star Wars Advent Calendar 2023 Dec 31, 2023
Batman 30653 Batman 1992 Polybag Dec 31, 2024
Batman 76224 Batmobile: Batman vs. The Joker Chase Dec 31, 2024
Batman 76252 Batcave – Shadow Box Dec 31, 2024
Batman 76264 Batmobile Pursuit: Batman vs. The Joker (4+) Dec 31, 2024
Batman 76265 Batwing: Batman vs. The Joker Dec 31, 2024
City 60367 Passenger Airplane Dec 31, 2024
City / 2K Drive 60395 Combo Race Pack Dec 31, 2024
City / 2K Drive 60396 Modified Race Cars Dec 31, 2024
City / 2K Drive 60397 Monster Truck Race Dec 31, 2024
Creator 31144 Exotic Pink Parrot Dec 31, 2024
DREAMZzz 40657 Dream Village Dec 31, 2024
Friends 41756 Holiday Ski Slope and Café Dec 31, 2024
Friends 41760 Igloo Holiday Adventure Dec 31, 2024
Harry Potter 76419 Hogwarts Castle and Grounds Dec 31, 2024
Harry Potter 76421 Dobby the House-Elf Dec 31, 2024
Icons 40634 Icons of Play Dec 31, 2024
Mario 71422 Picnic at Mario's House Dec 31, 2024
Marvel 76249 Venomised Groot Dec 31, 2024
Marvel 76261 Spider-Man Final Battle Dec 31, 2024
Marvel 76262 Captain America's Shield Dec 31, 2024
Marvel 76263 Iron Man Hulkbuster vs. Thanos (4+) Dec 31, 2024
Marvel 76266 Endgame Final Battle Dec 31, 2024
Minecraft 21247 The Axolotl House Dec 31, 2024
Minecraft 21248 The Pumpkin Farm Dec 31, 2024
Minecraft 21249 The Crafting Box 4.0 Dec 31, 2024
Minecraft 21250 The Iron Golem Fortress Dec 31, 2024
Ninjago 71789 Kai and Ras's Car and Bike Battle (4+) Dec 31, 2024
Ninjago 71790 Imperium Dragon Hunter Hound Dec 31, 2024
Ninjago 71791 Zane's Dragon Power Spinjitzu Race Car Dec 31, 2024
Ninjago 71792 Sora's Transforming Mech Bike Racer Dec 31, 2024
Ninjago 71793 Heatwave Transforming Lava Dragon Dec 31, 2024
Ninjago 71794 Lloyd and Arin's Ninja Team Mechs Dec 31, 2024
Ninjago 71795 Temple of the Dragon Energy Cores Dec 31, 2024
Ninjago 71796 Elemental Dragon vs. The Empress Mech Dec 31, 2024
Ninjago 71797 Destiny's Bounty - Race Against Time Dec 31, 2024
Ninjago 71798 Nya and Arin's Baby Dragon Battle (4+) Dec 31, 2024
Sonic 76993 Sonic vs. Dr. Eggman's Death Egg Robot Dec 31, 2024
Star Wars 75359 332nd Ahsoka's Clone Trooper Battle Pack Dec 31, 2024
Star Wars 75360 Yoda's Jedi Starfighter Dec 31, 2024
Star Wars 75365 Yavin 4 Rebel Base Dec 31, 2024
Star Wars 75368 Darth Vader Mech Dec 31, 2024
Star Wars 75369 Boba Fett Mech Dec 31, 2024
Star Wars 75370 Stormtrooper Mech Dec 31, 2024
Duplo 10987 Recycling Truck Dec 31, 2025
Duplo 10994 3-in-1 Family House Dec 31, 2025
Duplo 10997 Camping Adventure Dec 31, 2025
Ninjago 71799 NINJAGO City Markets Dec 31, 2025
Technic 42161 Lamborghini Huracán Tecnica Dec 31, 2025
Icons 10323 PAC-MAN Arcade Dec 31, 2026
Technic 42160 Audi RS Q e-tron Dec 31, 2026

SETS RETIRING IN 2023:
Theme Set # Set Name Retirement Date
Classic 11015 Around the World Jul 31, 2023
Creator 31123 Off-Road Buggy Jul 31, 2023
Disney 10780 Mickey and Friends Castle Defenders Jul 31, 2023
Disney 43203 Aurora, Merida and Tiana's Enchanted Creations Jul 31, 2023
Dots 41962 Unicorn Creative Family Pack Jul 31, 2023
Mario 71404 Goomba's Shoe Jul 31, 2023
Mario 71407 Cat Peach Suit and Frozen Tower Jul 31, 2023
Mario 71409 Big Spike's Cloudtop Challenge Jul 31, 2023
Mario 71412 Big Bad Island Jul 31, 2023
Mindstorms 51515 Robot Inventor Jul 31, 2023
Minecraft 21187 The Red Barn Jul 31, 2023
Ninjago 71738 Zane's Titan Mech Battle Jul 31, 2023
Ninjago 71754 Water Dragon Jul 31, 2023
Ninjago 71756 Hydro Bounty Jul 31, 2023
Ninjago 71759 Ninja Dragon Temple (4+) Jul 31, 2023
Ninjago 71762 Kai's Fire Dragon EVO Jul 31, 2023
Ninjago 71770 Zane's Golden Dragon Jet Jul 31, 2023
Ninjago 71773 Kai's Golden Dragon Raider Jul 31, 2023
Technic 42129 4x4 Mercedes-Benz Zetros Trial Truck Jul 31, 2023
Minifigures 71038 LEGO® Minifigures Disney 100 Aug 31, 2023
Architecture 21054 The White House Dec 31, 2023
Art 31203 World Map Dec 31, 2023
Art 31205 Jim Lee Batman Collection Dec 31, 2023
Art 31206 The Rolling Stones Dec 31, 2023
Art 31207 Floral Art Dec 31, 2023
Avatar 75571 Neytiri & Thanator vs. AMP Suit Quaritch Dec 31, 2023
Avatar 75573 Floating Mountains: Site 26 & RDA Samson Dec 31, 2023
Avatar 75577 Mako Submarine Dec 31, 2023
Avatar 75578 Metkayina Reef Home Dec 31, 2023
Batman 76181 Batmobile: The Penguin Chase Dec 31, 2023
Batman 76220 Batman versus Harley Quinn (4+) Dec 31, 2023
Brickheadz 40540 Lion Dance Guy Dec 31, 2023
Brickheadz 40541 Manchester United Go Brick Me Dec 31, 2023
Brickheadz 40542 FC Barcelona Go Brick Me Dec 31, 2023
Brickheadz / Avatar 40554 Jake Sully & his Avatar Dec 31, 2023
BrickHeadz / Disney 40377 Donald Duck Dec 31, 2023
BrickHeadz / Disney 40378 Goofy & Pluto Dec 31, 2023
BrickHeadz / Disney 40476 Daisy Duck Dec 31, 2023
BrickHeadz / Disney 40477 Scrooge McDuck, Huey, Dewey & Louie Dec 31, 2023
BrickHeadz / Disney 40550 Chip & Dale Dec 31, 2023
BrickHeadz / Disney 40553 Woody and Bo Peep Dec 31, 2023
BrickHeadz / Disney 40622 Disney 100th Celebration (Oswald, Mickey, Snow White, Tinker Bell) Dec 31, 2023
BrickHeadz / Harry Potter 40495 Harry, Hermione, Ron & Hagrid Dec 31, 2023
BrickHeadz / Harry Potter 40560 Professors of Hogwarts Dec 31, 2023
BrickHeadz / Minecraft 40624 Alex Dec 31, 2023
BrickHeadz / Minecraft 40625 Llama Dec 31, 2023
BrickHeadz / Minecraft 40626 Zombie Dec 31, 2023
BrickHeadz / Star Wars 40539 Ahsoka Tano Dec 31, 2023
BrickHeadz / Star Wars 40623 Battle of Endor Heroes Dec 31, 2023
City 30590 Farm Garden & Scarecrow Polybag Dec 31, 2023
City 30638 Police Bike Training Polybag Dec 31, 2023
City 30639 Dog Park and Scooter Polybag Dec 31, 2023
City 41723 Donut Shop Dec 31, 2023
City 41726 Holiday Camping Trip Dec 31, 2023
City 60253 Ice-Cream Truck Dec 31, 2023
City 60313 Space Ride Amusement Truck Dec 31, 2023
City 60314 Ice Cream Truck Police Chase Dec 31, 2023
City 60315 Police Mobile Command Truck Dec 31, 2023
City 60317 Police Chase at the Bank Dec 31, 2023
City 60318 Fire Helicopter Dec 31, 2023
City 60319 Fire Rescue & Police Chase Dec 31, 2023
City 60320 Fire Station Dec 31, 2023
City 60321 Fire Brigade Dec 31, 2023
City 60322 Race Car Polybag Dec 31, 2023
City 60323 Stunt Plane Dec 31, 2023
City 60324 Mobile Crane Dec 31, 2023
City 60325 Cement Mixer Truck Dec 31, 2023
City 60327 Horse Transporter Dec 31, 2023
City 60330 Hospital Dec 31, 2023
City 60332 Reckless Scorpion Stunt Bike Dec 31, 2023
City 60333 Bathtub Stunt Bike Dec 31, 2023
City 60335 Train Station Dec 31, 2023
City 60338 Chimpanzee Smash Stunt Loop Dec 31, 2023
City 60339 Double Loop Stunt Arena Dec 31, 2023
City 60341 The Knockdown Stunt Challenge Dec 31, 2023
City 60342 The Shark Attack Stunt Challenge Dec 31, 2023
City 60343 Rescue Helicopter Transporter Dec 31, 2023
City 60346 Barn & Farm Animals Dec 31, 2023
City 60348 Lunar Roving Vehicle Dec 31, 2023
City 60349 Lunar Space Station Dec 31, 2023
City 60350 Lunar Research Base Dec 31, 2023
City 60351 Rocket Launch Centre Dec 31, 2023
City 60353 Wild Animal Rescue Missions Dec 31, 2023
City 60354 Mars Spacecraft Exploration Missions Dec 31, 2023
City 60355 Water Police Detective Missions Dec 31, 2023
City 60356 Bear Stunt Bike Dec 31, 2023
City 60357 Stunt Truck & Ring of Fire Challenge Dec 31, 2023
City 60358 Cyber Stunt Bike Dec 31, 2023
City 60359 Dunk Stunt Ramp Challenge Dec 31, 2023
City 60360 Spinning Stunt Challenge Dec 31, 2023
City 60361 Ultimate Stunt Riders Challenge Dec 31, 2023
City 60371 Emergency Vehicles HQ Dec 31, 2023
City 60381 City Advent Calendar 2023 Dec 31, 2023
City 60382 Vet Van Rescue Dec 31, 2023
City 60385 Construction Digger Dec 31, 2023
City 60390 Park Tractor Dec 31, 2023
City 60393 4x4 Fire Truck Rescue Dec 31, 2023
City 60394 ATV and Otter Habitat Dec 31, 2023
City 60398 Family House and Electric Car Dec 31, 2023
Classic 11014 Bricks and Wheels Dec 31, 2023
Classic 11018 Creative Ocean Fun Dec 31, 2023
Classic 11019 Bricks and Functions Dec 31, 2023
Classic 11020 Build Together Dec 31, 2023
Classic 11021 90 Years of Play Dec 31, 2023
Classic 11022 Space Mission Dec 31, 2023
Classic 11031 Creative Monkey Fun Dec 31, 2023
Classic 30510 90 Years of Cars Polybag Dec 31, 2023
Creator 30641 Panda Bear Polybag Dec 31, 2023
Creator 30644 Vintage Car Polybag Dec 31, 2023
Creator 31111 Cyber Drone Dec 31, 2023
Creator 31118 Surfer Beach House Dec 31, 2023
Creator 31127 Street Racer Dec 31, 2023
Creator 31128 Dolphin and Turtle Dec 31, 2023
Creator 31130 Sunken Treasure Mission Dec 31, 2023
Creator 31131 Downtown Noodle Shop Dec 31, 2023
Creator 31132 Viking Ship and the Midgard Serpent Dec 31, 2023
Creator 40461 Tulips Dec 31, 2023
Creator 40469 Tuk Tuk Dec 31, 2023
Creator 40568 Paris Postcard Dec 31, 2023
Creator 40646 Daffodils Dec 31, 2023
Disney 10777 Mickey and Minnie's Camping Trip Dec 31, 2023
Disney 30646 Moana's Dolphin Cove Polybag Dec 31, 2023
Disney 40521 Mini Disney The Haunted Mansion Dec 31, 2023
Disney 41168 Elsa's Jewellery Box Dec 31, 2023
Disney 43187 Rapunzel's Tower Dec 31, 2023
Disney 43189 Elsa and the Nokk Storybook Adventures Dec 31, 2023
Disney 43194 Anna and Elsa's Frozen Wonderland Dec 31, 2023
Disney 43196 Belle and the Beast's Castle Dec 31, 2023
Disney 43197 The Ice Castle Dec 31, 2023
Disney 43198 Anna's Castle Courtyard Dec 31, 2023
Disney 43199 Elsa's Castle Courtyard Dec 31, 2023
Disney 43202 The Madrigal House Dec 31, 2023
Disney 43204 Anna and Olaf's Castle Fun Dec 31, 2023
Disney 43207 Ariel's Underwater Palace Dec 31, 2023
Disney 43208 Jasmine and Mulan's Adventure Dec 31, 2023
Disney 43209 Elsa and the Nokk's Ice Stable Dec 31, 2023
Dots 30560 Pineapple Photo Holder & Mini Board Polybag Dec 31, 2023
Dots 41801 My Pets Bracelet Dec 31, 2023
Dots 41802 Unicorns Forever Bracelet Dec 31, 2023
Dots 41803 Extra Dots series 8 Dec 31, 2023
Dots 41805 Creative Animal Drawer Dec 31, 2023
Dots 41806 Ultimate Party Kit Dec 31, 2023
Dots 41807 Bracelet Designer Mega Pack Dec 31, 2023
Dots 41947 Mickey and Friends Bracelets Mega Pack Dec 31, 2023
Dots 41948 Cute Banana Pen Holder Dec 31, 2023
Dots 41950 Lots of DOTS - Lettering Dec 31, 2023
Dots 41951 Message Board Dec 31, 2023
Dots 41957 Adhesive Patches Mega Pack Dec 31, 2023
Dots 41959 Cute Panda Tray Dec 31, 2023
Dots 41960 Big Box Dec 31, 2023
Dots 41961 Designer Toolkit - Patterns Dec 31, 2023
Dots / Disney 41963 Mickey Mouse & Minnie Mouse Stitch-on Patch Dec 31, 2023
Dots / Disney 41964 Mickey Mouse & Minnie Mouse Back-to-School Project Box Dec 31, 2023
Dots / Harry Potter 41808 Hogwarts Accessories Pack Dec 31, 2023
Dots / Harry Potter 41809 Hedwig Pencil Holder Dec 31, 2023
Dots / Harry Potter 41811 Hogwarts Desktop Kit Dec 31, 2023
Duplo 10411 Learn About Chinese Culture Dec 31, 2023
Duplo 10872 Train Bridge and Tracks Dec 31, 2023
Duplo 10882 Train Tracks Dec 31, 2023
Duplo 10930 Bulldozer Dec 31, 2023
Duplo 10938 Dinosaur Nursery Dec 31, 2023
Duplo 10944 Space Shuttle Mission Dec 31, 2023
Duplo 10948 Parking Garage and Car Wash Dec 31, 2023
Duplo 10949 Farm Animal Care Dec 31, 2023
Duplo 10955 Animal Train Dec 31, 2023
Duplo 10956 Amusement Park Dec 31, 2023
Duplo 10964 Bath Time Fun: Floating Red Panda Dec 31, 2023
Duplo 10966 Bath Time Fun: Floating Animal Island Dec 31, 2023
Duplo 10968 Doctor Visit Dec 31, 2023
Duplo 10972 Wild Animals of the Ocean Dec 31, 2023
Duplo 10973 Wild Animals of South America Dec 31, 2023
Duplo 10974 Wild Animals of Asia Dec 31, 2023
Duplo 10977 My First Puppy & Kitten with Sounds Dec 31, 2023
Duplo 10978 Creative Building Time Dec 31, 2023
Duplo 10979 Wild Animals of Europe Dec 31, 2023
Duplo 30648 Whale Polybag Dec 31, 2023
Duplo / Disney 10899 Frozen Ice Castle Dec 31, 2023
Duplo / Disney 10960 Belle's Ballroom Dec 31, 2023
Duplo / Disney 10962 Buzz Lightyear's Planetary Mission Dec 31, 2023
Duplo / Holiday 10976 Santa's Gingerbread House Dec 31, 2023
Duplo / Marvel 10963 Spider-Man & Friends: Funfair Adventure Dec 31, 2023
Friends 30633 Skate Ramp Dec 31, 2023
Friends 30634 Friendship Flowers Polybag Dec 31, 2023
Friends 41443 Olivia's Electric Car Dec 31, 2023
Friends 41677 Forest Waterfall Dec 31, 2023
Friends 41696 Pony-Washing Stable Dec 31, 2023
Friends 41697 Turtle Protection Vehicle Dec 31, 2023
Friends 41699 Pet Adoption Café Dec 31, 2023
Friends 41703 Friendship Tree House Dec 31, 2023
Friends 41704 Main Street Building Dec 31, 2023
Friends 41705 Heartlake City Pizzeria Dec 31, 2023
Friends 41707 Tree-Planting Vehicle Dec 31, 2023
Friends 41708 Roller Disco Arcade Dec 31, 2023
Friends 41711 Emma's Art School Dec 31, 2023
Friends 41712 Recycling Truck Dec 31, 2023
Friends 41713 Olivia's Space Academy Dec 31, 2023
Friends 41714 Andrea's Theatre School Dec 31, 2023
Friends 41715 Ice Cream Truck Dec 31, 2023
Friends 41716 Stephanie's Sailing Adventure Dec 31, 2023
Friends 41717 Mia's Wildlife Rescue Dec 31, 2023
Friends 41718 Pet Day-Care Center Dec 31, 2023
Friends 41719 Mobile Fashion Boutique Dec 31, 2023
Friends 41720 Water Park Dec 31, 2023
Friends 41721 Organic Farm Dec 31, 2023
Friends 41722 Horse Show Trailer Dec 31, 2023
Friends 41729 Organic Grocery Store Dec 31, 2023
Friends 41732 Downtown Flower and Design Stores Dec 31, 2023
Friends 41733 Mobile Bubble Tea Shop Dec 31, 2023
Friends 41741 Dog Rescue Van Dec 31, 2023
Friends 41742 Cat Hotel Dec 31, 2023
Friends 41743 Hair Salon Dec 31, 2023
Friends 41751 Skate Park Dec 31, 2023
Friends 41758 Friends Advent Calendar 2023 Dec 31, 2023
Harry Potter 30435 Build Your Own Hogwarts Castle Polybag Dec 31, 2023
Harry Potter 30651 Quidditch Practice Polybag Dec 31, 2023
Harry Potter 75968 4 Privet Drive Dec 31, 2023
Harry Potter 75979 Hedwig Dec 31, 2023
Harry Potter 76386 Hogwarts: Polyjuice Potion Mistake Dec 31, 2023
Harry Potter 76398 Hogwarts Hospital Wing Dec 31, 2023
Harry Potter 76399 Hogwarts Magical Trunk Dec 31, 2023
Harry Potter 76400 Hogwarts Carriage and Thestrals Dec 31, 2023
Harry Potter 76401 Hogwarts Courtyard: Sirius's Rescue Dec 31, 2023
Harry Potter 76403 The Ministry of Magic Dec 31, 2023
Harry Potter 76406 Hungarian Horntail Dragon Dec 31, 2023
Harry Potter 76408 12 Grimmauld Place Dec 31, 2023
Harry Potter 76409 Gryffindor House Banner Dec 31, 2023
Harry Potter 76410 Slytherin House Banner Dec 31, 2023
Harry Potter 76411 Ravenclaw House Banner Dec 31, 2023
Harry Potter 76412 Hufflepuff House Banner Dec 31, 2023
Harry Potter 76418 Harry Potter Advent Calendar 2023 Dec 31, 2023
Holiday 40426 Christmas Wreath 2-in-1 Dec 31, 2023
Holiday 40522 Valentine Lovebirds Dec 31, 2023
Holiday 40523 Easter Rabbits Display Dec 31, 2023
Holiday 40570 Halloween Cat and Mouse Dec 31, 2023
Holiday 40571 Wintertime Polar Bears Dec 31, 2023
Holiday 80110 Lunar New Year Display Dec 31, 2023
Holiday 80111 Lunar New Year Parade Dec 31, 2023
Holiday / Creator 30584 Winter Holiday Train Polybag Dec 31, 2023
Holiday / Creator 30642 Birthday Train Polybag Dec 31, 2023
Holiday / Creator 30643 Easter Chickens Polybag Dec 31, 2023
Holiday / Icons 10293 Santa's Visit Dec 31, 2023
Icons 10265 Ford Mustang Dec 31, 2023
Icons 10266 NASA Apollo 11 Lunar Lander Dec 31, 2023
Icons 10273 Haunted House Dec 31, 2023
Icons 10276 Colosseum Dec 31, 2023
Icons 10289 Bird of Paradise Dec 31, 2023
Icons 10290 Pickup Truck Dec 31, 2023
Icons 10292 The Friends Apartments Dec 31, 2023
Icons 10299 Real Madrid - Santiago Bernabéu Stadium Dec 31, 2023
Icons 10497 Galaxy Explorer Dec 31, 2023
Icons 76989 Horizon Forbidden West: Tallneck Dec 31, 2023
Icons / Modular 10255 Assembly Square Dec 31, 2023
Icons / Modular 10270 Bookshop Dec 31, 2023
Icons / Modular 10278 Police Station Dec 31, 2023
Ideas 21325 Medieval Blacksmith Dec 31, 2023
Ideas 21326 Winnie the Pooh Dec 31, 2023
Ideas 21329 Fender Stratocaster Dec 31, 2023
Ideas 21337 Table Football Dec 31, 2023
Jurassic Park / World 76943 Pteranodon Chase (4+) Dec 31, 2023
Jurassic Park / World 76945 Atrociraptor Dinosaur: Bike Chase Dec 31, 2023
Jurassic Park / World 76947 Quetzalcoatlus Plane Ambush Dec 31, 2023
Jurassic Park / World 76948 T. rex & Atrociraptor Dinosaur Breakout Dec 31, 2023
Jurassic Park / World 76950 Triceratops Pickup Truck Ambush Dec 31, 2023
Jurassic Park / World 76956 T. rex Breakout Dec 31, 2023
Lightyear 76830 Zyclops Chase (4+) Dec 31, 2023
Lightyear 76831 Zurg Battle Dec 31, 2023
Lightyear 76832 XL-15 Spaceship Dec 31, 2023
Mario 30509 Yellow Yoshi's Fruit Tree Polybag Dec 31, 2023
Mario 71406 Yoshi's Gift House Dec 31, 2023
Mario 71413 Character Packs Series 6 Dec 31, 2023
Mario 71414 Conkdor's Noggin Bopper Dec 31, 2023
Mario 71415 Ice Mario Suit and Frozen World Dec 31, 2023
Mario 71416 Lava Wave Ride Dec 31, 2023
Mario 71417 Fliprus Snow Adventure Dec 31, 2023
Mario 71418 Creativity Toolbox Dec 31, 2023
Marvel 10781 Spider-Man's Techno Trike (4+) Dec 31, 2023
Marvel 10784 Spider-Man Webquarters Hangout (4+) Dec 31, 2023
Marvel 10790 Team Spidey at Green Goblin's Lighthouse (4+) Dec 31, 2023
Marvel 30652 Doctor Strange's Interdimensional Portal Polybag Dec 31, 2023
Marvel 76187 Venom Dec 31, 2023
Marvel 76193 The Guardians' Ship Dec 31, 2023
Marvel 76206 Iron Man Figure Dec 31, 2023
Marvel 76207 Attack on New Asgard Dec 31, 2023
Marvel 76208 The Goat Boat Dec 31, 2023
Marvel 76209 Thor's Hammer Dec 31, 2023
Marvel 76211 Shuri's Sunbird Dec 31, 2023
Marvel 76212 Shuri's Lab (4+) Dec 31, 2023
Marvel 76213 King Namor's Throne Room Dec 31, 2023
Marvel 76214 Black Panther: War on the Water Dec 31, 2023
Marvel 76215 Black Panther Dec 31, 2023
Marvel 76216 Iron Man Armory Dec 31, 2023
Marvel 76225 Miles Morales Figure Dec 31, 2023
Marvel 76230 Venom Figure Dec 31, 2023
Marvel 76242 Thanos Mech Armor Dec 31, 2023
Marvel 76253 Guardians of the Galaxy Headquarters Dec 31, 2023
Marvel 76255 The New Guardians' Ship Dec 31, 2023
Marvel 76267 Marvel Advent Calendar 2023 Dec 31, 2023
Minecraft 21164 The Coral Reef Dec 31, 2023
Minecraft 21170 The Pig House Dec 31, 2023
Minecraft 21172 The Ruined Portal Dec 31, 2023
Minecraft 21177 The Creeper Ambush Dec 31, 2023
Minecraft 21180 The Guardian Battle Dec 31, 2023
Minecraft 21181 The Rabbit Ranch Dec 31, 2023
Minecraft 21183 The Training Grounds Dec 31, 2023
Minecraft 21184 The Bakery Dec 31, 2023
Minecraft 21185 The Nether Bastion Dec 31, 2023
Minecraft 21186 The Ice Castle Dec 31, 2023
Minecraft 21188 The Llama Village Dec 31, 2023
Minecraft 21190 The Abandoned Village Dec 31, 2023
Minecraft 30647 The Dripstone Cavern/The Stalactite Cave Polybag Dec 31, 2023
Miscellaneous 40174 LEGO Chess Dec 31, 2023
Miscellaneous 40382 Birthday Set Dec 31, 2023
Miscellaneous 40393 LEGOLAND Fire Academy Dec 31, 2023
Miscellaneous 40584 Birthday Diorama Dec 31, 2023
Monkie Kid 30656 Monkey King Marketplace Polybag Dec 31, 2023
Monkie Kid 80008 Monkie Kid's Cloud Jet Dec 31, 2023
Monkie Kid 80030 Monkie Kid's Staff Creations Dec 31, 2023
Monkie Kid 80032 Chang'e Moon Cake Factory Dec 31, 2023
Monkie Kid 80033 Evil Macaque's Mech Dec 31, 2023
Monkie Kid 80034 Nezha's Fire Ring Dec 31, 2023
Monkie Kid 80035 Monkie Kid's Galactic Explorer Dec 31, 2023
Monkie Kid 80037 Dragon of the East Dec 31, 2023
Monkie Kid 80038 Monkie Kid's Team Van Dec 31, 2023
Monkie Kid 80039 The Heavenly Realms Dec 31, 2023
Ninjago 30649 Ice Dragon Creature Polybag Dec 31, 2023
Ninjago 71757 Lloyd's Ninja Mech (4+) Dec 31, 2023
Ninjago 71760 Jay's Thunder Dragon EVO Dec 31, 2023
Ninjago 71761 Zane's Power Up Mech EVO Dec 31, 2023
Ninjago 71763 Lloyd's Race Car EVO Dec 31, 2023
Ninjago 71765 Ninja Ultra Combo Mech Dec 31, 2023
Ninjago 71766 Lloyd's Legendary Dragon Dec 31, 2023
Ninjago 71767 Ninja Dojo Temple Dec 31, 2023
Ninjago 71768 Jay's Golden Dragon Motorbike Dec 31, 2023
Ninjago 71769 Cole's Dragon Cruiser Dec 31, 2023
Ninjago 71771 The Crystal King Temple Dec 31, 2023
Ninjago 71772 The Crystal King Dec 31, 2023
Ninjago 71774 Lloyd's Golden Ultra Dragon Dec 31, 2023
Ninjago 71775 Nya's Samurai X MECH Dec 31, 2023
Ninjago 71776 Jay and Nya's Race Car EVO Dec 31, 2023
Ninjago 71777 Kai's Dragon Power Flip Dec 31, 2023
Ninjago 71778 Nya's Dragon Power Drift Dec 31, 2023
Ninjago 71779 Lloyd's Dragon Power Spin Dec 31, 2023
Ninjago 71781 Lloyd's Mech Battle EVO Dec 31, 2023
Speed Champions 30657 McLaren Solus GT Polybag Dec 31, 2023
Speed Champions 76900 Koenigsegg Jesko Dec 31, 2023
Speed Champions 76901 Toyota GR Supra Dec 31, 2023
Speed Champions 76910 Aston Martin Valkyrie AMR Pro and Aston Martin Vantage GT3 Dec 31, 2023
Speed Champions 76911 007 Aston Martin DB5 Dec 31, 2023
Speed Champions 76912 Fast & Furious 1970 Dodge Charger T Dec 31, 2023
Star Wars 30654 X-wing Starfighter Polybag Dec 31, 2023
Star Wars 75288 AT-AT Dec 31, 2023
Star Wars 75292 The Razor Crest Dec 31, 2023
Star Wars 75300 Imperial TIE Fighter Dec 31, 2023
Star Wars 75301 Luke Skywalker's X-wing Fighter Dec 31, 2023
Star Wars 75309 Republic Gunship (Ultimate Collector Series) Dec 31, 2023
Star Wars 75312 Boba Fett's Starship Dec 31, 2023
Star Wars 75317 The Mandalorian & The Child Dec 31, 2023
Star Wars 75318 The Child Dec 31, 2023
Star Wars 75320 Snowtrooper Battle Pack Dec 31, 2023
Star Wars 75322 Hoth AT-ST Dec 31, 2023
Star Wars 75323 The Justifier Dec 31, 2023
Star Wars 75324 Dark Trooper Attack Dec 31, 2023
Star Wars 75326 Boba Fett's Throne Room Dec 31, 2023
Star Wars 75327 Luke Skywalker (Red Five) Helmet Dec 31, 2023
Star Wars 75329 Death Star Trench Run Diorama Dec 31, 2023
Star Wars 75330 Dagobah Jedi Training Diorama Dec 31, 2023
Star Wars 75332 AT-ST (4+) Dec 31, 2023
Star Wars 75334 Obi-Wan Kenobi vs. Darth Vader Dec 31, 2023
Star Wars 75335 BD-1 Dec 31, 2023
Star Wars 75336 Inquisitor Transport Scythe Dec 31, 2023
Star Wars 75338 Ambush on Ferrix Dec 31, 2023
Star Wars 75339 Death Star Trash Compactor Diorama Dec 31, 2023
Star Wars 75342 Republic Fighter Tank Dec 31, 2023
Star Wars 75343 Dark Trooper Helmet Dec 31, 2023
Star Wars 75366 Star Wars Advent Calendar 2023 Dec 31, 2023
Technic 30655 Forklift with Pallet Polybag Dec 31, 2023
Technic 42096 Porsche 911 RSR Dec 31, 2023
Technic 42107 Ducati Panigale V4 R Dec 31, 2023
Technic 42111 Dom's Dodge Charger Dec 31, 2023
Technic 42117 Race Plane Dec 31, 2023
Technic 42118 Monster Jam Grave Digger Dec 31, 2023
Technic 42122 Jeep Wrangler Dec 31, 2023
Technic 42123 McLaren Senna GTR Dec 31, 2023
Technic 42125 Ferrari 488 GTE 'AF Corse #51' Dec 31, 2023
Technic 42127 The Batman - Batmobile Dec 31, 2023
Technic 42128 Heavy-Duty Tow Truck Dec 31, 2023
Technic 42131 Cat D11 Bulldozer Dec 31, 2023
Technic 42132 Chopper Dec 31, 2023
Technic 42133 Telehandler Dec 31, 2023
Technic 42134 Monster Jam Megalodon Dec 31, 2023
Technic 42135 Monster Jam El Toro Loco Dec 31, 2023
Technic 42137 Formula E Porsche 99x Electric Dec 31, 2023
Technic 42139 All-Terrain Vehicle Dec 31, 2023
Technic 42140 App-Controlled Transformation Vehicle Dec 31, 2023
Technic 42144 Material Handler Dec 31, 2023
submitted by Clay_Bricks to Legoleak [link] [comments]


2023.06.01 21:04 PrimaryPositionSEO No Tie-Fighters - Max 4 per person

No Tie-Fighters - Max 4 per person submitted by PrimaryPositionSEO to funny [link] [comments]


2023.06.01 21:00 DiscoverDurham Things to Do in Durham this Weekend (Jun 1-4)

Check out our full Durham events calendar.
If you'd like to add an event to our calendar, submit an event here. Please check with the event organizers to see if events change due to weather. Have a great weekend!

June Featured Events

53rd Annual Bimbé Cultural Arts Festival at Rock Quarry Park
1776 at DPAC
PLAYlist Concert Series: Raíces, Rutas, y Ritmos at Durham Central Park

Venue Weekend Schedules

Events at The Carolina Theatre
Events at The Pinhook
Events at Motorco Music hall
Events at The Fruit
Live Music at Blue Note Grill
Events at Moon Dog Meadery
Live Music at Sharp 9 Gallery
Events at Arcana
Events at Rubies on Five Points
Events at Durty Bull Brewing Company
Live Comedy at Mettlesome
Events at Boxyard RTP
Events at Glass Jug Beer Lab in RTP
Events at Glass Jug Beer Lab in Downtown Durham

Local Sports

Durham Bulls Home Stand at the Durham Bulls Athletic Park
Running of the Bulls 8K at Historic Durham Athletic Park

Thursday, Jun 1

Thirsty Thursdays at Dashi
Vinyl Night with DJ Deckades at Gizmo Brew Works
Boulders & Brews Meetup at Triangle Rock Club - Durham
Trivia Night w/Big Slow Tom at Clouds Brewing Brightleaf Square

Friday, Jun 2

Tasting at Ten at Counter Culture Coffee
Garden Printing: Cyanotypes and Hammered Flower Prints on Fabric at Duke Campus Farm

Saturday, Jun 3

Durham Farmers’ Market at Durham Central Park
South Durham Farmers' Market at Greenwood Commons Shopping Center
parkrun Durham at Southern Boundaries Park
Hayti Walking History Tour at Hayti Heritage Center
Nasher Community Celebration at the Nasher Museum of Art
MAKRS Pop-up at Durham Central Park
Crafternoons at Gizmo Brew Works
Beaver Queen Pageant — Once Upon a Wetland... at Duke Park

Sunday, Jun 4

Al Strong Presents Jazz Brunch at Alley Twenty Six
Art-n-Soul Market at Mystic Farm & Distillery
Public Tour at Duke Chapel
Trivia at Navigator Beverage Co.

Running Art Exhibits

upstART Gallery: A Jim Lee Project at Pop Box Gallery
Exhibit at 21c Museum Hotel
“Extra-Spectral” at the Durham Art Guild Truist Gallery
Donna Stubbs, Featured Artist at 5 Points Gallery
Chieko Murasugi & Renzo Ortega at Craven Allen Gallery
Spirit in the Land at the Nasher
Andy Warhol: You Look Good in Pictures at the Nasher
Art of Peru at the Nasher
submitted by DiscoverDurham to bullcity [link] [comments]


2023.06.01 21:00 Charanguera I love San Francisco and have a more nuanced perspective on the problems it faces

I suppose this post is more for people who might be curious about what is going on from an informed perspective and / or are wanting to understand the problems we face.
I have worked at the Hall / in criminal justice in SF for 20 years. I am not particularly political, being a person more interested in understanding things than my own opinions, at least these days. I read police reports, talk to judges and cops and DAs and defense lawyers and defendants - and I have for all of these years. I was here when Kamala waged her "war on drugs" that followed the national movement.
The problems we face right now are not unique to SF, although there are aspects that make them unique. Optics, for example. The TL abuts the financial district and most people that live here have to cross market and see the blight. Not true in LA, where you have to go to skid row to see the same. Also, this city has always been a beacon or a draw. California in general, but SF beyond that. Our services, or the perception of services here. But also, the flavor and reputation of this city, and I am not talking about "soft on crime" reputation that seems to be the obsession of the right. More and more, it's clear that the narrative of a "failed city" is one that feeds conservative politics.
Property crime follows drugs and adapts t technology. The drug problem that we have in SF - again, not unique, but it's breadth is greater because of those factors mentioned - is a reckoning that is much, much larger than this city. It's not just fentanyl, but meth too. Meth has been around for a long time, but the advent of fentanyl has really created more meth opportunities, too. Why? Because these are drugs that do not require a natural resource. They are made with chemicals. Chemicals sent from the east and combined in Mexico - and because they can be created with ubiquity (because of the lack of limitation of natural resources / need to geographically move such distances) - can enter into the US in millions of veins instead of the larger arteries we saw before. The average arrestee these days has EXTRAORDINARY amounts of fentanyl and meth on them, like 100 and 50g, respectively.
The other issue is the supply of dealers. SFPD has long had a federal grant that pays a lot of money to cops to set up "buy-bust" operations. They do them in the TL, our visible, open-air drug market that caters to street-level users who can't afford a roof to sell or use under. This is not politics, this is factual. Back in the day, cops were frequently arresting users who would "break off a piece" for $20 or so to sell to them. Not anymore.
We have always had a lot of immigrant drug sellers, but *nothing* like we have these days. Largely from Honduras, El Salvador and Guatemala, these folks ride what they call the "death train" or "la bestia" up through Mexico to get to border towns where they pay to be smuggled across. Mothers place their teenaged sons on the train, so nicknamed for the extraordinary violence that accompanies the ride. People are notoriously robbed, raped and killed on la bestia. They do so, not because they are bad mothers, but because life in many of these small towns is controlled by gangs. Gangs that were actually started in California prisons and became transnational after the deportation of the paroled prisoners returned there. That's how Mara Salvatrucha, the most dangerous gang in the world, started.
The cartels have started to run the coyote business that is responsible for getting people across the border. So that if you make it across Mexico to a border town and have the ~$1500 to cross, you are dealing with another dangerous situation - which often results in the trafficking of those who have paid to get across. The drug sellers you see in the TL are often victims themselves. And again, I am not pushing politics, I am just explaining what is factual. The reckoning is already happening on our courts.
I know that there are people who have a "lock em up" attitude and think this issue can be controlled by incarceration. But it can't, at least at the level of SFPD and local courts. For law enforcement to impact this problem, it will require the intervention of the federal government for their resources - and going far higher up the chain. Arresting street-level dealers and incarcerating them one at a time is not going to create even a dent; there are more kids crossing to take their place everyday.
Again, not politics: this is about how to address the issue. Surely, yes, you can displace homeless. Many point to the idea of sharing the problem. Makes sense. Soooo many of our homeless, drug addicted are coming from other places where their tax money doesn't have to house and feed them. But ultimately displacement is moving the problem around. On the property crime / user side, we need to have better resources dedicated to treatment. More money in research. Property crime will continue to be rampant so long as the drug use is as high. We have very antiquated programming, although it's getting better.
THANK YOU FOR COMING TO MY TED TALK. I get exhausted reading all of the misinformed comments on here. I am not a bleeding heart. I think our in-fighting about Brooke versus Chesa versus SFPD versus blah blah blah is a distraction from the fact that we are dealing with something with much larger dimensions than we ever have and we need to see it for what it is. Oh and another thing, the changes made by Chesa (which is substituted for progressive prosecution) had VERY LITTLE to do with any of the policies around things we actually see. That's why things are the same, even though confirmation bias has people wanting to see that they have changed. SF is ground zero for a reckoning, it'll be happening no matter how people want to perceive it.
But it's the best city in the whole world, so take that!
submitted by Charanguera to sanfrancisco [link] [comments]


2023.06.01 20:54 rlnjkm Is LISK a Bisexual Sadist Sexual Serial Killer?

Is LISK a bisexual sadist serial killer; grooming, attacking and murdering both men and women and why do few people really want to consider this?
A reasonable case for this can be made with just allowing one’s perspective to see all of the overarching evidence and challenge law enforcement’s one dimensional, myopic and hastily put together narrative.
As stated many times before, SCPD believes “Asian Male” to be an outlier, a surprise to LISK, who being all heterosexual, beat this person to death in a fit of rage. On the surface, this is a plausible assessment; that is, if there weren't any other males found in proximity (location and time), to female victims, or found in some sort of female clothing. How does that align when SCPD also has a keen eye on Andre Jamal “Sugar Bear'' Issac, going so far as to incorporate a link to the Gilgo News website, and “owning” the case, despite their torso being found in Arverne, in a female bodysuit and skirt?
The link, or links?
As my research progressed, using my map, it became rather obvious to me that there was something more going on than the narrative suggests. The list of male victims I’ve compiled are not conclusive and there could very well be any number of reasons and tons of other POI’s, but if “Asian Male” and Sugar Bear and the Manorville Males are in LISK’s orbit, then so too are the men I will introduce below.
SCPD, subsequently and consistently has denied any link between the three murdered males found in Manorville, 2000, 2003 and 2012, despite being in relative proximity to Jessica Taylor and Valerie Mack (who were also found along Ocean Parkway in the Gilgo Beach area).
But, is this accurate?
Not by a long shot…..here is why…
What if LISK selected both women and men, to moderately groom and ultimately murder?
Before I get to that, I wanted to thoroughly look at Sexual Serial Killers in general. Many SK’s are compulsion killers- driven towards certain criteria and/or opportunities, but predominantly, sexually driven:
There are precedents of bisexual serial killers:
Serial killers have many overlapping traits, which seem like MO’s to the average person, but this is actually not the case. Each known serial killer is wholly unique and while there are some similarities, it is foolish to try to relegate any one of them into a box of characteristics and call it expertise, or “definitive”.
LISK clearly has a female “preference”. Petite, 5’-5’5”, 100 -110 lbs., hazel/green eyes. The “attributed” LISK Victims all share these characteristics. (Side note: less than 5% of the world’s population has hazel eyes, in the US, it’s closer to 18%). The narrative here is that it was easier to “control” smaller, lighter women, but not necessarily the case. Eye color preference is a derivative of paraphilia and may represent for LISK, a catalyst, rooted in his childhood or early developmental experiences or fantasies.
With the males we see a different trend, notably because males tend to be larger overall. But the methods of their deaths have some consistency.
For now, I will focus on just the time frame of 1990-2016. I will add background where relevant. To be fair, some of the criteria I used is lacking depth and is tenuous, however, for example, at that time, it was well known that a male wearing one earring is representing themselves as gay in many circles, whereas nowadays, it is not.
Also notable:
Here is a more detailed list that incorporates both attributed and possible victims:
Connectivity Avenues:
It appears that victims who worked the streets were dismembered, compared to escorts who advertised online, (assuming the same for FIJD, Peaches).
Sources and Links:
SEXUAL SERIAL MURDER AND DEVELOPMENTAL THEORY
RETURN OF FLEET WEEK
EYE COLOR PREFERENCE AND PARAPHILIA
HAZEL EYES
MALIGNANT SEX AND AGGRESSION: AN OVERVIEW OF SERIAL SEXUAL HOMICIDE
ISRAEL KEYES
REDDIT CROSSPOST
REVISITING 10 UNSOLVED LGBTQA+ MURDERS IN DC
MAP
submitted by rlnjkm to LISKiller [link] [comments]


2023.06.01 19:03 trumpetcrash Lobo #20 - John Constantine

Lobo #20 - John Constantine
<< l < l > l >>
Author: trumpetcrash
Book: Lobo
Arc: John Constantine [#1 of 1]
Set: 85
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PREVIOUSLY ON LOBO: After a galactic goose chase to find a man with a bounty on his head for his stolen time travel technology, Lobo discovered that the time travelling technology was a hoax and that he had no way to travel into the past and erase his despicable self. To make matters worse, Scapegoat – demon and his best friend – told him that he’d manipulated Lobo at birth to turn him into an unstoppable brutalization machine in order to help destroy the Divine – and Heaven – in the coming Revolution. Scapegoat, in an attempt to pry Lobo away from emotional and Earthly misgivings, instructs one of his demonic underlings to kill Lobo’s daughter, Crush. She’s bene on her homeworld of Earth for several weeks, scrounging around the streets of Gotham, but if she’s going to have a chance at surviving this demon attack, she’ll need some help…
Most people would expect a renowned demon-slayer’s breakfast to contain eyeballs or tentacles or something else that would make your average Earthling peel away in disgust, but these people overestimate the strength of John Constantine’s culinary palette; at the time that this tale took place, he started every day with a quarter of a box of Captain Crunch.
His demonic consort, Ellie, mentioned it every morning that she ate with him. “The mighty Constantine, eating cereal made for children.”
John, usually not completely dressed by breakfast-time (or lunchtime, for that matter), would shrug and flaccidly insult her own choice of calamari-kabobs.
One morning, though, there were no insults. John’s Captain Crunch went unsullied and Ellie just nibbled at her squid without committing to any particular bite. The air was heavy – not with sulfur as in Hell, but with the shadows of secrets – for several minutes.
Eventually, John spoke. “You haven’t been quite the same since I took ol’ Swampy and that alien to kill Negral,” he said. “Is his death still bothering you?”
Her red irises flashed up to John. “Of course not. I said I wanted to turn over a new leaf, and I meant it. I’m not sick of do-gooding yet, John. After all, variety is the spice of life.”
John nodded as if he hadn’t heard it a hundred times before. He returned his gaze to his breakfast bowl, but not before saying, “Anything interesting happening in the ol’ demon world today?”
“You’ve said “ol’” without the “d” twice now, Johnny boy. You feeling okay over there?”
“No misdirection, please. I just want to stay up to date in the demon world. That’s all. No fights.”
“You want to stay up to date, so you keep using the word ‘old’…”
John knew Ellie was hiding something but didn’t think he could get it out of there, so he just sighed and started to chew with his mouth open.
Smacking, his mother had called it.
It affected Ellie almost as much as it affected John’s mother. Her spine clenched, her eyes widened, and her nostrils flared.
“John–” she began. “You know I don’t like it when you chew with your mouth open.”
“I think I remember that.” John twisted his face in mock concentration while Ellie fumed. “But I also recall that I get pissy when people who I work with keep secrets from–”
“John, don’t be such a ba–”
She would’ve called him a “baby” and moved onto progressively worse insults if it wasn’t for the shriek of John’s cell phone. It wasn’t the phone in his pajama pants pocket that he would’ve happily ignored a call on, but the phone that was ceremoniously hung on the motel basement’s dingy wall with glorious Command Strip technology.
It was the emergency phone.
John left his Captain Crunch behind as he leapt out of his seat and towards the wall. He opened the phone, expecting it to be a costumed superhero or his friend Chas or maybe even his sister; instead, it was the voice of a burly alcoholic.
“Constantine.”
“Lobo,” John realized aloud. “To what do I owe the pleasure?”
“A demon named Scapegoat is orchestrating the final battle between Heaven and Hell,” he said simply. “And he wants to kill my daughter, who’s on Earth. You need to stop him.”
John cast a glance backwards at Ellie, who just smoldered.
“Where, Lobo?”
Gotham seemed more alien to Crush than outer space could ever hope to be.
Outer space was more colorful and more obnoxious than Gotham, but it didn’t seem as dangerous. Sure, there were entities of unbelievable power lurking on that forbidden moon or right behind that nebula, but they were too big to have the effect of a rusty shiv pecking at your ribcage. Space lacked the stench that Gotham entrepreneurs could bottle up and sell on the interstellar black market as a tool in any amateur torturer’s toolkit.
Despite it all, though, Crush couldn’t quite pull herself away.
She came to Gotham first to help fight the vampire hordes. She did her part and saved some people despite seeing terrible things. After getting her parents back to their land she should’ve gone back to L.E.G.I.O.N., back to her surrogate family, but she was too morbidly intrigued by Gotham to return. It felt like something that her father would’ve loved – the kind of thing that was in her blood. The kind of thing that was evil, demonic to the most extreme vector. The kind of thing she shouldn’t have gotten herself mixed up in.
She never did, really. She stayed out of the local vigilantes’ sights and did a little do-gooding work on the side. A few drug dealers had been locked up because of her. She tried to try booze – sure, she’d had a can of beer here and there back home, but she didn’t really want to even do that again now that she’d seen her father – and couldn’t bring herself to drink it.
That’s when she knew she was ready, when she was sitting at the bar and felt with absolute certainty that she’d never sit at one again off the clock. She stood up and turned away from her untouched drink, her chest slightly more swollen with self-confidence than before.
That’s also when she saw the demon.
At first, she thought that there was a tall, straight-backed man in a heavy black cloak coming to take her just-vacated seat. She shuffled slightly to the left to make way, but the man didn’t follow through the channel. That’s when she realized that his face wasn’t just dark-skinned, but fuzzy and humming too.
His face was moving, as if it was made of a hundred little–
Crush yelped a bit when the first centipede shot out of the cloak and onto her uncovered left bicep. The little thing squealed and tried to sink its pinchers into her muscle until her right arm came up to swat it. It burst with a small pop, but by the time it was dead there were three more skittering on her and more spraying everywhere else in the bar.
The crowd around her started to scream and rush for the exits. Crush heard one or two people holler, “It bit me!”, and saw at least three fall to the floor, but she couldn’t tell if it was because they were bit or because other people toppled them over and trampled over them in the rush to escape. Crush just knew she had to get the bugs on off her; she ran her hands over her arms and neck and she leapt into the air and landed behind the bar counter, momentarily out of sight of the centipede-man.
Crush had no idea what the centipedes’ bites would do to a Czarian, but she wasn’t hankering to find out.
The gap between the bar counter and the wall was lined with bottles of booze and sinks and drinkware and everything else that normal bar operations required. Crush was trying to figure out if she could use any of it when the shifting face appeared over her. A buzzing, claw-ended hand reached over the counter for her, coming for her face. It dropped insects that she hit away in mid-air with one hand as the other reached for her gun. Before she could grab it something else reached over the counter and yanked the demon away from her. She puzzled as she checked the cartridge in her gun and raised it.
Someone was dueling with the creature now, someone with oily gray skin and with the head of… a fish? This confused Crush more than anything else. Why was a walking fish trying to save her? She shook the questions from her head and shifted the gun to the right, aimed firmly at the bug man. Then something insidious flashed in her right ankle, and with a scream the gun fired and shot a blast of energy into her attacker. She couldn’t see the effect, though, since the sudden pain in her leg sent her rolling over the bar counter and onto the ground neck-first.
When she was next awake her vision of the bar, with the fish (no, shark) man bound to a bar-stool by a rope of skittering centipedes, was tinted red. Something in her leg was jerking back and forth, moving her flesh and muscle and bone and drinking her blood. It felt as if it had been happening for hours, but perhaps it was only seconds.
The man – no, the thing – in the cloak stood a few feet away, ominous and silent except for the chittering bugs that made up his form. She wanted to ask it why it had done this, why it was hurting her, who the shark-man was, but she was too busy screaming in pain.
The pain started to travel up her leg, and she thought that she might die.
Then there was a flash of light and there was a fourth person – being, at least – in the room. This one was a human man and a shaggy caramel-colored beard that matched the tousle of hair atop his head. He looked like a detective in the dingy trench coat he donned, and he held something in front of him that Crush couldn’t make out due to her pain-induced convulsions.
“Beelzey, Beelzey,” the man tittered. “Working with crawly critters now, are you?”
“My name is Beelzebub.” Its voice was like a hum that came from nowhere in particular. “Johnny.”
“John Constantine,” the man sighed. He raised what had been in his hand to his mouth, and Crush’s stomach sunk when she saw it was just a cigarette and not some weapon.
“Connie.”
“Whatever. I’m here to stop you from killing her –” he waved a finger towards Crush. “And… whatever the Hell that shark thing is.”
“I don’t have the charm to kill that thing,” hummed Beelzebub. “It was just a nuisance.”
“Who gave you the charm to kill the girl?”
Crush thought she might’ve seen a centipede curl into a smile on Beelzebub’s face, but a fork of shooting pain ripped her attention away from it.
“That is not of your concern, mortal.”
“Then it’s a good thing I’m concerning myself with it.” Constantine pulled something else out of the pockets of the trench coat. “I think that you were given your charm by someone who shouldn’t’ve been giving it to you. I think that if I crush this rock–” he flashed a ruby pinched by his pointer finger and thumb – “that you and your buddies are screwed out of luck for the time being. Shall we try it?”
The buzzing got louder and something deep and evil started to howl in denial, but before the centipedes suddenly flying through the air could reach Constantine, he crushed the little gem between the folds of his palm. Suddenly the cloaked figure and all the centipedes – including the one in Crush’s leg – were gone.
After an indefinite period of time, Crush awoke with a little splash of water on her face. Constantine had laid her out on the pool table. Her mouth started to form into a question, but Constantine interrupted.
“Beelzebub tried leading a rebellion a couple millennia ago, and now he’s chained to the will of his hellish superiors. Apparently there’s a bit of a shakeup going on, though, since a low-ranking demon named Scapegoat was able to get him onto our plane of existence.”
“Scapegoat?” Her leg still burned.
“Apparently one of your dad’s old drinking buddies. Don’t give me that look, I’ll explain when we get back to the compound. You’ll be safe there, at least for a time.”
Crush was too weak to argue, so she just nodded and tilted her head to the other figure over the pool table. “Who’s that?”
The aquatic beast chuffed a few words.
“According to police databases, his name – designation, really – is King Shark. He’s a mutant that says a man who smells just like you broke him out of jail a few months ago. Says he’s in your debt.”
“That’s… that’s…”
“I know.” Constantine reached down and grabbed her shoulder. “Deep breath, now, okay? This’ll only take a minute.”
Crush found the motel – or whatever they called these things in Britain – unsanitary; she didn’t believe in staying overnight at a place where you have to check for cockroaches before you commit to each step.
The room they materialized in was sparsely decorated. There was a folding table, a few chairs to go with it, and some rudimentary appliances (coffee maker, microwave, etc) which sat atop a counter on one side of the room. Sitting at the table was a slender, evil-eyed woman with billowing red-and-black hair. When Constantine and his tagalongs first appeared, she looked pissed, but after seeing both Crush and King Shark, her expression turned to one of confusion.
“What have you gotten yourself into this time?” she tittered. “Is this the girl you’re supposed to return to her father?”
“Actually, Ellie, he wanted me to hold onto her and keep her safe until the war’s blown over.” John sauntered over to the table and took a seat, not bothering to guide Crush or her aquatic guardian. “So we’re gonna build a little compound right here.”
The woman – Ellie – rolled her eyes. “You think we can hide out from a cosmic war in the basement of this shitty place?”
“The battle will take place in some part of space far, far away, and you know how these battles go. No one will really win, nothing will really change. Let them measure their dicks for all I care. Besides, I used up quite a few favors getting the girl – Crush – out of a bind with Beelzebub. Best to lay low for a couple weeks.” He finally turned towards Crush and King Shark. “Help yourself to whatever’s in the fridge. There’s a room for each of you over there.” He pointed towards a hallway that sprouted out of the eastern wall.
“Well… thank you.” Despite her timid timbre, Crush really meant it. King Shark echoed with his own thick and rubbery “Thank you.”
“Are either of you hungry? It’s still breakfast-time here in England, but Ellie makes a mean grilled cheese, and if you don’t like those we might be able to find–”
“No thank you.” Crush put her hand up. “I’m just going to go lay down for a few. Thank you, again.”
“Be sure to shake the bedsheets!” John called as she sulked down the hallway. King Shark followed, but had the good sense to enter a separate room from hers. “There might still be bugs in them!”
Crush sighed a heavy sigh, for she was starting to think that this place was going to make Gotham look luxurious.
That night, John ignored Ellie’s soft, nimble hands and her puckered lips.
“We have guests, Ellie,” he groaned softly into her ear, for they were still tangled up in each other under the bedsheets. “I can’t believe I’m saying this, but it’ll have to wait.”
“When did you become so prudish?” She twisted herself out of their twist and sat up on her knees. “It’s just an overgrown fish and a moody alien.”
“That moody alien is a moody teenage girl, Ellie. I don’t give a damn about the shark, but I feel weird–”
“John, you have sex with a demon every night. I think you’ve passed weird.”
John took a big breath of a sigh and brought himself up to look Ellie in the eyes. “Ellie, you’ve treated me like an annoyance all day. Why should I go out of my way to please you right now?”
“Because I’ll make you feel good too.” The invisible tongue of her pleasure started upon John’s neck, but he mentally swatted it away.
“The truth, Ellie. Something’s been bothering you.”
Her arms folded across her chest (not just to display annoyance, but also to accentuate her bosom), and she huffed and puffed in a way that the average mortal would incorrectly assume was improper for a demon.
“Ellie…”
“Fine.” Her face twisted up into something… crooked. “The other night, I was visited by a demon. Don’t get that look, we didn’t do anything. He summoned me to take part in the Revolution; apparently that Scapegoat guy really is amassing an unholy army to defeat the growing Divine army. And they want me in it, John. The want me in it.”
John tried not to draw back, tried not to show her he was scared. “What did you say, Ellie?”
Her face pinched. “That I’d think about it.”
“So you haven’t been on the outs with me because you’ve been regretting sending me to kill Negral?”
Hesitation betrayed her. “John, I –”
“Ellie… you’ve been doing so good, you’ve been acting like a real –”
“A real what, John?” she snapped. “What is it that you want me to be?”
His hands found hers, brought them closer to his chest. “The best possible version of yourself, Ellie. And how can you be that if you participate in the battle that might end the universe?”
“I’m a demon, John. Maybe it’s about time you get that through your skull.” Her voice was hard; she took her hands away, rolled off the bed, stood up. “I’m not chained to your mortal universe like you are.”
John followed her off the bed. “Are you sure about that, Ellie? Can you really mean that, now?”
When Ellie finally did speak, it was accompanied by a single drop of brimstone rolling from her eye.
Crush had spent her first day in the motel basement falling in and out of sleep before allowing the tides of drowsiness to submerge her until the British sun rose the next morning. She readied herself in her room and sauntered into the storage-area-turned-living-quarters – she still had to ask John and Ellie why they were staying at the bottom of a motel – and found it deserted. No matter; she took out her phone (the Terran one she could only use on Earth) and caught up on all the trends that she’d missed while with L.E.G.I.O.N. or fighting crime in Gotham. She expected that social media would feed her relief, but really, it just made her feel useless.
She was ready to find a way out of the basement when a figure emerged from the east-bound hallway: John Constantine. He looked as shaggy as always, but there was something about him – maybe the gauntness of his face and twitch of his fingers – that made him seem even less put-together than usual. Crush attempted a smile at him, but his eyes passed over it vacantly.
“Where’s Ellie?” she found herself asking, thinking the name of his lover would brighten him up. “You said she makes a mean grilled cheese.”
John, who’d found the coffee pot, let his hands fall away from the machine and turned towards her, knife-marks in his eyes. “She’s not going to be here for the foreseeable future.”
“Oh.” Crush cursed herself for bringing her up and cursed herself doubly when she realized that her mouth was asking, without her permission, “Why?”
“She had… other matters to attend to. A war to wage that I cannot be a part of.”
“Okay.” Crush vaguely wondered if this had to do with Beelzebub and the fact that her father had pissed someone off enough to try and kill his daughter. The idea of her father getting wrapped up with religious factions should’ve been comical, but she just couldn’t bring herself to laugh. “When am I –”
“You’re not getting out,” John said shortly, throatily. “Not until the Revolution’s been fought.”
“The Revolution?”
John, who had turned his back towards Crush and his trunk towards the coffee pot, now whirled around and barred his teeth. “The cataclysmic battle between Heaven and Hell that your father’s old friend has been planning for longer than you can fathom, the battle that, if the demons win, could spell subjugation for everything born for the rest of eternity! So, yes, we are staying inside my bubble!”
Crush had not been prepared for such a brutish, outright, emotional assault. It was more of a shrapnel-stuffed grenade than a tactical missile, in all honesty, but it was still frightening. She had the fortitude not to twitch, but on the inside, she squirmed.
“Sounds like the type of thing that we fight, then. Save the universe and all.”
Crush saw fire in John’s eyes; the fact that fire, so symbolically red, turns blue when hot enough explained why Crush could not make out the sheen over his irises and coronas.
“I have the place locked down with magic,” John said tightly. “Here we stay.” He snatched the coffee machine, unplugged it from the wall, and tore off to his room amid his billowing trench coat. Crush looked after him, wistful for something unknown, and sighed.
Eventually King Shark came out, helped himself to some of the popsicles in the freezer, lamented the lack of fish in the fridge to the best of his limited vocabulary’s ability, and sat next to Crush. She was bored of social media and sought to teach King Shark cards instead. The cribbage board proved too complex, as did any form of trick-taking game or even solitaire, but he was able to learn Go Fish quite well – as soon as he realized that one wasn’t supposed to eat the cards, despite the game’s name.
John darted in and out of the general living quarters for several days. Crush could never establish a conversation with him. She looked for any sign of spiritual warfare, but besides the tame terrorism and do-gooding of everyday life, couldn’t find anything.
One time, when he was grabbing a beer, King Shark asked about Ellie too. John gave him the same scarred look he’d showed Crush – although not as cutting as that one – and said, “That’s up to her, now. We can simply wish her the best.”
It wasn’t until the fifth or sixth day – Crush was losing track of time with only Go Fish to mark its passage by – that Crush was able to start a real conversation with him.
“Can you let me use my interstellar phone?” she repeated several times when he was grabbing a bottle of beer from the fridge. “I need to tell the team at L.E.G.I.O.N. that I’m okay.”
“You’ll tell them where you are, or that the Revolution is coming. That isn’t okay.”
Crush moved her hulking frame in between him and the hall to his room. “Why not? Don’t you want something to do something about it?”
John shrugged. “I’ve been doing things for a lotta years, sister.” He was mildly intoxicated. “Time to take myself out of the mix.”
“Ellie’s up there, isn’t she?” It was a bold assertion on Crush’s part. “And she’s on the other side. And you don’t want to fight her.” Nothing on his face, just alcohol-carved stone. “You don’t have to, Mr. Constantine, but you have to let me out.”
“And me,” grunted King Shark from somewhere behind them.
“And the King,” amended Crush.
For a moment she thought John would break, but then she found herself flying ass-over-teakettle and saw John stepping over her and into his room.
She and King Shark numbly discussed breakout plans, but she didn’t know the first thing about magical charms, and even if he did, he probably wouldn’t have been able to communicate it.
It was a surprise when, on the seventh morning, she woke up blinking the sun’s rays away.
“I didn’t think I had a window…” she grumbled sleepily before she pulled herself up and pulled herself into consciousness. “We’re outside!” She and King Shark really were deposited on the lawn of the motel.
John stood over them, neither smiling nor glowering. “I’m guessing you have a ship somewhere?” Crush nodded. “Safe travels. I won’t be able to transport you again. It’s a rather limited power, but it’s also a long story.”
Crush kept nodding as if she understood. “My ship seats three.”
“Then you two will have room to pick someone up along the way.” Now he smiled, but it was a sad one.
“Why are you doing this, John?” asked Crush, now standing and staring into his eyes. “Refusing the battle, I mean.”
“Because… I might love her, Crush,” he said. “And frankly, I don’t know how to deal with it. I’ve loved people before, but no one else is like her. I… it’s easier this way. I’m more of a screw-up than I let on, Crush, and you don’t want me screwing you and your father and whoever else you freaks accumulate up. No feelings.”
Once again, Crush nodded as if she meant it. “No hard feelings. Goodbye, John.”
“Bye, Crush. Tell your father I said hi.”
“I will.” Crush started walking then, not letting herself look back. King Shark followed obediently, although he did look back. He looked all over. Crush found his curiosity somewhat amusing, and idly wondered how he’d do in space, and how he’d do when fighting the hordes of demons that surely laid in their path…
NEXT TIME: The epic four-part “Lobo the Czarian” begins. We shift our perspective back to our favorite damned bounty hunter as he prepares himself for the battle of a lifetime and grapples with the realization that his lifelong friend and mentor Scapegoat had groomed him to be a tool of demonic destruction for his whole life. The next five months will be wild ride, folks, so buckle up! Thank you all for making it this far into not only this issue but this series, and if you only started reading Lobo midway through its run, I’d recommend going back through all of the earlier issues before reading “Lobo the Czarian” because it’s going to be a bit of a victory lap over all of this bounty hunter’s lore and what-have-you. See you all next month, and till then, stay safe and keep on readin’.
submitted by trumpetcrash to DCFU [link] [comments]


2023.06.01 19:00 Muangthong200 What are the best places for South Asian men?

I'm a non South Asian world traveller that interacted with many South Asian people from India, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, and Nepal. And having grown up in Thailand and having lived in the Philippines, Laos, and Australia, as well as visiting many other countries I can confidently state that if you're South Asian (meaning from India, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, or Nepal) Australia is probably the worst country for you, other Anglosphere countries seem to be similar. I'd heard many bad things about the treatment of South Asians in Thailand but I was pleasantly surprised by my own experiences. South Asians are supposed to rank bottom in Thailand behind Thais, other Asians, whites and blacks but from what I've seen personally getting women (for free) is effortless for good looking South Asians. I think that by far the main factor in this is my friend's appearance which could be described as facially above average with a slim, muscular build. My friend is also seen as a farang rather than a "khaek" though he have been asked if he was an Indian on occasion (to which I can truthfully say no!).
The Laos and Philippines was a similar experience though South Asians did get somewhat more attention there in normal places like malls and the streets than my South Asian friends do in Bangkok, perhaps due to the relative lack of younger foreigners like South Asians in these countries. Having said that I think my South Asian friend would do better there if he a white or East Asian guy of similar looks. Serge Kreutz of the asiatour website told me that the best place for younger South Asian men is Guangdong in China, specifically Guangzhou, I've yet to test this. I've also heard that being South Asian or Arab looking can be an advantage in Indonesia which has strong Indian and Islamic influence especially if you're relatively light skinned and have a Bollywood star look.
Regarding non-Asian places I've never really tried the scene there apart from Australia but I assume most non Asian countries even non anglosphere western countries are better than Anglosphere countries like Australia.
Any South Asians or otherwise knowledgable people here want to add their thoughts?
submitted by Muangthong200 to SouthAsianMasculinity [link] [comments]


2023.06.01 18:37 R420R77 Random thoughts of a dying man.

Well, I guess I should start at the beginning the majority of all stories tend to start. I was born in Detroit, Michigan in the month of June 1977. I was soon adopted and never met my biological family but have been told that I have two biological sisters, Karen, and Xinea as well as two brothers named Robert, and Jerry(perhaps Gerry I suppose). My mother is Patricia Bray, and my alleged father is Carl Ambers according to the adoption records that I found after the death of my adopted mother, Opal in 2001; I was a grown man by then. I was adopted by Opal and Frank Smith(we will say) in 1978. Somehow they knew my biological mother but that connection was never revelled to me. Opal was one of 17 children who grew up on a mountain somewhere in West Virginia. I was told that her father killed himself in front of her and her siblings when she was less than 10 years old. He was a coal miner and was injured in some type of accident and left unable to work with 19 mouths to feed; hard to fathom but for the love of God why in front of the children? Regardless of his reason this event left a lasting impact upon his 9 year old daughter that would ripple throughout space and time with the force of an atomic bomb; to this day that act and subsequent reaction linger. Opal was a devout Pentecost, Southern Baptist, or whatever similar religion she felt; not exactly sure. She was once a member of the People's Temple church in the early days when they were in Indianapolis (circa 1953-54). She left the church when the new leader, a man by the name of Jim Jones took over and began to allow people of other races into the fellowship; Opal being a woman of God as well as a devout racist left the church. They would later commit forced suicide in Ghana by drinking cyanide laced drinks at the end of machine guns. Opal was a small woman and she had many older brothers. She spent her developmental years fatherless, emotionally wrecked, and on a mountain with those brothers; I do not wish to even imagine what that must have been like, but one thing is for certain; she grew up mean and she knew how to fight, how to hurt a person, and how to use her 4' 11" 120lbs to do damage. Her temper was short and she was fast to react in a violent physical nature. She was married to Frank who was from Kentucky. Frank ran a laundry delivery service, smoked cigars, and loved pro wrestling. He was already in his forties when I was adopted as was Opal. Frank was amazing to me as a young child but as time went on he became isolated and didn't much bother with anything other than work. Looking back it is obvious he was terribly unhappy but that is unfortunately the theme of this story. I also had three adopted sisters that we shall call Kay, Mary, and Carry. All of whom were already 10 and older once I was brought into the household. The six of us lived in a two bedroom single bath home on the south side of Indianapolis. My earliest memory is literally the day that they brought me to their house; you may think that is crazy, a child less than a year old having a vivid memory but I swear to you I do. I remember being brought into the kitchen and being placed into a high chair with a pack of saltines....then a bath and to bed. For the first few years it seemed that we had a happy, perfect family. Frank made good money and so Opal stayed home and managed the house while watching me. I remember how nice she was at first but that would soon change, everything changed. The early eighties were a rough time economically and it showed. The stress of life really brought out the mean in Opal, she would fly off the handle in a millisecond flat. I was a very advanced child for my age and by pre-school I could count to 1000, read children's books myself, and I knew all my shapes and colors beyond the standard "circle, square, blue, red". My adopted parents were not very well educated and I think they were taken aback by the rate at which I absorbed information. It could not possibly be that this child simply has a thirst for knowledge and an ability to process things; it must be DEMONS...yep, folks, demons. From the time I was maybe 3 until I stopped speaking to Opal circa 1999 I was repeatedly told that I was "FULL OF DEMONS" as well as the everpopular"YOU ARE GOING TO HELL FOR _________" Now you can add whatever you wish to that blank up there because she sure did. I was going to hell for running in the house, catching insects, not going to bed on time, throwing rocks, playing with sticks, you name it, and he'll was fucking terrifying. I was taken to churches where people preached that the devil was not among us , but inside of us all!!! and as I watched them shake and scream and yell it honestly scared the shit out of me. Being a developing child and being told you are possessed by creatures from hell may have a lasting mental effect. Like many kids I began to rebel against and since I was full of demons I began to act accordingly. Things in the household spiraled downward like a toy boat circling an open drain. Opal was becoming aloof and isolated, coming from her bedroom only to cuss, complain, and rage. After the first few times getting my ass or face slapped up I learned to shut my mouth but unfortunately my older adopted sister Mary never got that lesson. She was about early high school age when I was adopted but I do not remember either of my two oldest sisters going to school at all. She like rock music of the time, she didn't dress appropriately, she was loud, and she did not listen to anything she was told. She was a typical teen girl in the 80's until she snuck out one night and some men snuck PCP into her drink. She had a bad reaction and seized, they just dumped her from the car onto a cold, dark Indianapolis street corner in the middle of a ghetto where she lay until found. She was rushed to the hospital where she died and was revived many time; luckily she lived, but she had went without oxygen and it left her with some mental impairment. She never really progressed past a teen mentality. I do not know if it was shame at her sneaking out with men and being discovered or the lingering mental illness but Opal had a fire for her like no other. They once had a shouting match over what Mary was wearing and after a few minutes Opal picked up an old golf wedge club that I had found and began to beat her savagely. I counted at least 30 shots before I got the courage to jump in from of her; I was maybe 8 years old. The following years would show a pattern of such actions with all four of us occasionally getting it but Mary and myself got the brunt of things...there were hot off the stove spatulas to bare skin, broomsticks, rake handles, and even the cast iron skillet with hot oil still inside. My father, having been introduced to Opal's violent nature knew better than to intervene, choosing to withdraw all together of the situation. Left to free rein Opal never missed an opportunity to abuse physically, or verbally. I remember being perhaps 9-10 years old and being as my parernts were way older I dressed like I was from the 60's,. Opal had since went to work at a metal polishing factory and I was left to the daily care of three teenage, adopted sister with no clue about basic hygiene so I smelled terrible and the stress of my violent home life had put weight on me other kids fucked with me hardcore. I had had a terrible day at school; my pants had ripped and all the other kids were laughing and calling me fatass and such literally all day long. So I get home finally and I totally break down into hesterical crying fits to which my "mother" responds to be yelling "BOY!!....WHAT IS ALL THE NOISE ABOUT!!?!" and through tears and in broken English I struggled to explain the events of the day and how all the kids said I "stink and that my clothes were trash and that I was too fat!!" and her caring response was to look me dead in my eyes and yell to me "YOU ARE FAT AND I AM NOT BUYING YOU NEW CLOTHES UNTIL YOU LOSE SOME WEIGHT!!" This event would truly cast a demon of hatred and anger deep into my soul that I would struggle to shake for the next 20 or more years. The next day at school, on recess a group of slightly younger children began to gather around me and began the usual verbal and physical harassment. As they had a few days previous they were attempting to set me up for that trick where one person gets down in a dog-like pose behind you while you are distracted and once in place the other push you over and everyone has a grand old laugh at your expense while you struggle to get your fat ass off the ground and get your wind back but that day I was not playing that shit and so when the little fucker ducked down behind me I immediately swung around with my right foot and landed a vicious snap kick directly to his eye socket; the sound of it breaking echoed the playground followed by painful wailing. It felt good to hear, it felt good to see the fear in the eyes of his friend's eyes, to send a message that I was no longer their victim or anyone else's for that matter. I started skipping school, vandalizing, petty theft, shoplifting, and anything other than wholesome which got me arrested for stealing CD's and Transformers from K-Mart. L.L. Cool J.....funny the shit you value when you look in retrospect. The ride home from the juvenile center on East 21st street was a long one and I was petrified of the beating that awaited me as new and different ways and items to beat the fuck from me danced in my head like those fucking sugar-plums from that stupid Christmas Song. When we finally got back to our house in Fountain Square I was directed into the kitchen where a length of 2/4 about 2 foot long waited on the kitchen table. Opal from behind me yelled out "BOY!!" which was what I was always referenced as as if I had no fucking name and when I did a 180 she belted me across my face with a hard right fist, but unlike every other time she hit me I did not scream out, cry, or even flinch from the blow. This further infuriated her and so she struck my face again to the same result, and again, and again until I firmly grabbed her right wrist at which point she immediately hit me with a hard left and I subsequently grabbed her left wrist. I was about 175lbs if not more and my strength overpowered her ability to strike me and when she realized that she could not move and seen in my eyes that this was not going to happen she began to scream "LET GO OF ME!!" to which I replied "I am going to let you go and when I do you are not going to fucking touch me in any way!!"...I let go, and defeated she walked away. After that she offered no real support other than a place to sleep. I began to steal clothing from people's clotheslines and after wearing the same pair of shoes for so long that my feet are literally deformed, I took a pair of Nikes off of someone's porch. Over the next few years I would have many more legal troubles, assaults, thefts, arsons until the State of Indiana stepped in and made me a ward of the state. I was sentenced and sent to a place called Glen Mills Schools in Concordville, Pennsylvania. It was supposed to be a fresh start and a chance to better myself and I was able to get my HSE, learn computer aided drafting, and I got to compete in powerlifting as well. It was the first time in my life I had seen a dentist even; I was 15 years old and finally I felt hopeful and happy; that would soon change.
If you would like to hear more please leave a comment or like. I also appreciate any feedback about my writing as I am not a professional in any way but always looking to improve my craft. If you made it this far; you are greatly appreciated.
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2023.06.01 18:34 Shot_Security2853 TBT: Trolleybuses lining up on East Hastings Street for the Grey Cup; 1966

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2023.06.01 18:27 AttakTheZak [DISCUSSION] Why Are We In Ukraine by Layne & Schwarz - Part 2: How To Poke A Bear

Introduction

This is part 2 of the research/discussion series on the wonderful article Why Are We in Ukraine? by Schwarz & Layne. This is a continuation of the previous post, which you can find HERE. Given the relative success in finding and sourcing most of that first portion, I'd like to continue with the series to the next section of the article. If you are interested in participating, please comment below with any relevant points of evidence that addresses portions of the article. I'll be regularly updating this post with points to help future visitors to better navigate the article and the discussion below.
I look forward to seeing you all in the comments!

Part 2: How To Poke A Bear

One early sign of this fundamental change was Washington’s covert, overt, and (perhaps most important) overtly covert interference in Russia’s affairs during the early and mid-Nineties—a project of political, social, and economic engineering that included funneling some $1.8 billion to political movements, organizations, and individuals deemed ideologically compatible with U.S. interests [1] and culminated in American meddling in Russia’s 1996 presidential election. [2] Of course, great powers have always manipulated both their proxies and smaller neighboring states. But by so baldly intervening in Russia’s internal affairs, Washington signaled to Moscow that the sole superpower felt no obligation to follow the norms of great power politics and, perhaps more galling, no longer regarded Russia as a power with sensibilities that had to be considered.
Moscow’s alarm over the hegemonic role America had assigned itself was intensified by what could fairly be characterized as the bellicose utopianism demonstrated by Washington’s series of regime-change wars. In 1989, just as the U.S.-Soviet global rivalry was ending, the United States assumed its self-appointed role as “the sole remaining superpower” by launching its invasion of Panama. Moscow issued a statement criticizing the invasion as a violation of “the sovereignty and honor of other nations,” but neither Moscow nor any other great power took any explicit action to protest the United States’ exercising its sway in its own strategic backyard. Nonetheless, because no foreign power was using Panama as a foothold against the United States—and thus Manuel Noriega’s regime posed no conceivable threat to America’s security—the invasion neatly established the post–Cold War ground rules: American force would be used, and international law contravened, not only in pursuit of tangible national interests, but also in order to depose governments that Washington deemed unsavory. America’s regime-change war in Iraq—declared “illegal” by U.N. secretary general Kofi Annan—and its wider ambitions to engender a democratic makeover in the Middle East demonstrated the range and lethality of its globalizing impulse. More immediately disquieting to Moscow, against the backdrop of NATO’s steady eastward push, were the implications of the U.S.-led alliance’s regime-change wars in the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia in 1999 and, twelve years later, in Libya. [3]
Although Washington presented the U.S.-led NATO bombing of Yugoslavia as an intervention to forestall human rights abuses in Kosovo, the reality was far murkier. American policymakers presented Belgrade with an ultimatum that imposed conditions no sovereign state could accept: relinquish sovereignty over the province of Kosovo and allow free reign to NATO forces throughout Yugoslavia. (As a senior State Department official reportedly said in an off-the-record briefing, “[We] deliberately set the bar higher than the Serbs could accept.” [3]) Washington then intervened in a conflict between the brutal Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA)—a force that had previously been denounced by the U.S. State Department as a terrorist organization—and the military forces of the equally brutal regime of Slobodan Milošević. The KLA’s vicious campaign—including the kidnapping and execution of Yugoslav officials, police, and their families—provoked Yugoslavia’s equally vicious response, including both murderous reprisals and indiscriminate military actions against civilian populations suspected of aiding the insurgents. Through a stenographic process in which “ethnic-Albanian militants, humanitarian organizations, NATO and the news media fed off each other to give genocide rumors credibility,” to quote a retrospective investigation by the Wall Street Journal in 2001, this typical insurgency was transformed into Washington’s righteous casus belli. [3] (A similar process would soon unfold in the run-up to the Gulf War.)
It was not lost on Russia that Washington was bombing Belgrade in the name of universal humanitarian principles while giving friends and allies such as Croatia and Turkey a free pass for savage counterinsurgencies that included the usual war crimes, human rights abuses, and forced removals of civilian populations. President Yeltsin and Russian officials strenuously, if impotently, protested the Washington-led war on a country with which Russia traditionally had close political and cultural ties. Indeed, NATO and Russian troops nearly clashed at the airport in Kosovo’s provincial capital. (The confrontation was only averted when a British general defied the order of his superior, NATO supreme commander U.S. general Wesley Clark, to deploy troops to block the arrival of Russian paratroopers, telling him: “I’m not going to start World War III for you.”) [3] Ignoring Moscow, NATO waged its war against Yugoslavia without U.N. sanction and destroyed civilian targets, killing some five hundred non-combatants (actions that Washington considers violations of international norms when conducted by other powers). The operation not only toppled a sovereign government, but also forcibly altered a sovereign state’s borders (again, actions that Washington considers violations of international norms when conducted by other powers).
NATO similarly conducted its war in Libya in the face of valid Russian alarm. That war went beyond its defensive mandate—as Moscow protested—when NATO transformed its mission from the ostensible protection of civilians to the overthrow of Muammar Qaddafi’s regime. The escalation, justified by a now-familiar process involving false and misleading stories pedaled by armed rebels and other interested parties, produced years of violent disorder in Libya and made it a haven for jihadis. Both wars were fought against states that, however distasteful, posed no threat to any NATO member. Their upshot was the recognition in both Moscow and Washington of NATO’s new power, ambit, and purpose. The alliance had been transformed from a supposedly mutual defense pact designed to repel an attack on its members into the preeminent military instrument of American power in the post–Cold War world.
Russia’s growing concern over Washington’s hegemonic ambitions has been reinforced by the profound shift, since the Nineties, of the nuclear balance in Washington’s favor. The nuclear standoff between the United States and Russia is the dominant fact of their relationship—a fact not nearly conspicuous enough in the current conversations about the war in Ukraine. Long after Putin, and irrespective of whether Russia is converted to a market democracy, the preponderance of each country’s nuclear missiles will be aimed at the other; every day, the nuclear-armed submarines of one will be patrolling just off the coast of the other. If they’re lucky, both countries will be managing this situation forever.
Throughout the Cold War, Russia and the United States both knew that a nuclear war was unwinnable—an attack by one would surely produce a cataclysmic riposte by the other. Both sides carefully monitored this “delicate balance of terror,” as the American nuclear strategist Albert Wohlstetter put it in 1959, devoting enormous intellectual resources and sums of money to recalibrating in response to even the slightest perceived alterations. Rather than attempting to maintain that stable nuclear balance, however, Washington has been pursuing nuclear dominance for the past thirty years.
Beginning in the early Aughts, a number of defense analysts—most prominently Keir A. Lieber, a professor at Georgetown, and Daryl G. Press, a professor at Dartmouth and a former consultant to both the Pentagon and the RAND Corporation—expressed concern about a convergence of strategic developments that have been under way since the dawn of America’s “unipolar moment.” The first was the precipitous qualitative erosion of Russian nuclear capabilities. Throughout the Nineties and Aughts, that decline primarily affected Russia’s monitoring of American ICBM fields, its missile-warning networks, and its nuclear submarine forces—all crucial elements to maintaining a viable deterrent. Meanwhile, as Russia’s nuclear capabilities decayed, America’s grew increasingly lethal. Reflecting the seemingly exponential progress of its so-called military-technological revolution, America’s arsenal became immensely more precise and powerful, even as it declined in size.
These improvements didn’t fit with the aim of deterring an adversary’s nuclear attack—which requires only the nuclear capacity for a “countervalue” strike on enemy cities. They were, however, necessary for a disarming “counterforce” strike, capable of preempting a Russian retaliatory nuclear response. “What the planned force appears best suited to provide,” as a 2003 RAND report on the U.S. nuclear arsenal concluded, “is a preemptive counterforce capability against Russia and China. Otherwise, the numbers and the operating procedures simply do not add up.”
This new nuclear posture would obviously unsettle military planners in Moscow, who had undertaken similar studies. They no doubt perceived Washington’s 2002 withdrawal from the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty—about which Moscow repeatedly expressed its objections—in light of these changes in the nuclear balance, grasping that Washington’s withdrawal and its concomitant pursuit of various missile defense schemes would enhance America’s offensive nuclear capabilities. Although no missile defense system could shield the United States from a full-scale nuclear attack, a system could plausibly defend against the very few missiles an adversary might have left after an effective U.S. counterforce strike.
To Russian strategists, Washington’s pursuit of nuclear primacy was presumably still further evidence of America’s effort to force Russia to accede to the U.S.-led global order. Moreover, the means that Washington employed to realize that ambition would justifiably strike Moscow as deeply reckless. The initiatives the United States has pursued—advances in anti-submarine and anti-satellite warfare, in missile accuracy and potency, and in wide-area remote sensing—have rendered Russia’s nuclear forces all the more vulnerable. In such circumstances, Moscow would be sorely tempted to buy deterrence at the cost of dispersing its nuclear forces, decentralizing its command-and-control systems, and implementing “launch on warning” policies. All such countermeasures could cause crises to escalate uncontrollably and trigger the unauthorized or accidental use of nuclear weapons. Paradoxically, mutually assured destruction provided decades of peace and stability. To remove the mutuality by cultivating overwhelming counterforce (i.e., first-strike) capabilities is—in another paradox—to court volatility and an increased likelihood of a grossly destructive nuclear exchange.
Since the nadir of Russian power in the decade and a half following the Soviet collapse, Russia has bolstered both its nuclear deterrent and, to a degree, its counterforce capabilities. Despite this, America’s counterforce lead has actually grown. And yet, U.S. leaders often act affronted when Russia makes moves to update its own nuclear capabilities. “From the vantage point of Moscow . . . U.S. nuclear forces look truly fearsome and they are,” Lieber and Press observe. The United States, they continue, is “playing strategic hardball in the nuclear domain, and then acting like the Russians are paranoid for fearing U.S. actions.”
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2023.06.01 18:18 uberc Get production dip everyday at same time

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2023.06.01 18:03 nelsonblaha Lack of police response to East Austin street party leaves neighbors frustrated

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