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I just hit 5,000 subscribers this morning, my channel has been up for almost 13 months. Here is my obligatory post...

I uploaded my first video on July 29, 2019
I got approved for monetization on December 16, 2019
I hit the 5,000 sub mark this morning (August 24, 2020)
I am not going to rehash on all the advice you've seen on this sub a million times. I will just try to say what I believe is important
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Snow Angels are illegal where I live.

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My town is in one of the north western states- which, if you know anything about the north east, means snow like... six months out of the year. To make things worse, my town is approximately in the middle of bumfuck nowhere. We deal with it about as well as every other tiny north western town, which...
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Well, all you need to know is that there's a town up here that is literally based around a prison. That's it. That's the whole point of the town. Pretty much just to house the people who work there.
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It's pretty dismal sometimes.
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So you'd think, given the lack of other things to do, they'd embrace all the types of winter entertainment. And you wouldn't be wrong! Snowmen are an art form in my town. Ice sculptures get pretty competitive. Taboganing and sledding are Big. Deals.
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But snow angels are illegal.
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In fact, I didn't even know they were a thing until I saw someone doing it in a film one time. I was over at a friend's house, and they had an older cousin visiting from out of town. She'd brought the tape with her- it was one of her favorites. She thought we'd love it. She saw Harry and I staring at the t.v. in confusion and laughed at us.
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"What, you've never seen a SNOW ANGEL?" She asked us mockingly. I don't think it was malicious. I think she was just teasing the way some people do. You know the whole 'kids these days' trope that every generation thinks they invented. We both shook our heads and she climbed to her feet, gesturing for us to follow her while she suited up to go outside. She got as far as falling on her back in the yard- us following her like ducklings- before my friend's dad came running out of the garage yelling at the top of his lungs.
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I'd never heard Harry's dad yell like that before. Ever. And I've never heard him raise his voice since. Scared the beejesus out of all of us, including Harry's cousin. He sent Harry and I inside and I didn't hear what he said to her, but she was as white as a sheet by the time he was done. They came back in afterwards and Harry's dad called mine to come pick me up.
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Harry's cousin never came to visit again, but I never forgot. I knew there was something wrong with making a snow angel, I just never knew WHAT.
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Harry and I never discussed it. We went back to sledding and snow forts and never said a word. We both knew that something big had just happened, but neither of us were old or mature enough to really take any meaning from it.
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Nearly a decade passed before we thought of it again.
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Harry and I were both pretty average looking kids. Neither of us had a whole lot going on to give us any kind of social edge, so dating in our very small high school- where the boys out populated the girls by something like seventy five percent- was pretty much a crap shoot, and neither of us was interested in the male half of the population.
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So when Harry formed a crush on Melissa, we both kind of knew it was doomed. I was his best friend, though! It was my job to be supportive- so I didn't say anything. Like. At all. I didn't know the first thing about being a wing man, but I did hesitantly suggest that Harry might get Melissa's attention by doing something 'cool'. Which, in teenage boy, translates to stupid and/or dangerous.
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Unfortunately, Harry took that advice to heart.
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God how I wish I could take those words back now.
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It was late-October and it was already snowing pretty regularly. Nothing bad yet, but more than just a light dusting. Halloween fell on a Wednesday that year, so the weekend before a few of us got together for a kind of preemptive party. We'd basically turned it into an excuse to party the whole week. We were out at Harry's new house- his dad had recently built a really nice new place outside of town. It was kind of isolated, but it also had a hot tub, so.
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And anyway, the isolation worked in our favor. Nobody was liable to file a noise complaint or a curfew violation on us way out here.
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The irony is, Harry's dad had actually given us permission to have a little get together as long as we promised to be responsible. I guess it was because Harry was kind of going through a hard time, what with his mom having left and all.
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It was a full moon that night. It wasn't snowing, but it had that morning. There was still a pretty thick carpet of it all across the lawn. There were eight of us. Four boys, four girls. Harry and myself, Melissa, her best friend Joan, her little sister Nicole, and their boyfriends, Travis, Hunter and Chad. Melissa and Nicole were in the hot tub with Chad and Travis, while Joan and Hunter and Harry and I were playing pong on the deck.
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Harry and I were losing. Pretty badly, actually. Travis was mocking us from the hot tub, his arm around Melissa.
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"Nice shot, asshole." He commented after one of Harry's swings had gone wild. The ball tapped impatiently across the deck, careening off into the snow beyond. Harry made an impatient sound. I could tell Travis' comments were starting to get under his skin. His jaw was clenched and I could visibly see him holding back his temper as he marched down the steps to collect the ball.
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"Come on." I hissed at Travis under my breath, "Quit being a douche-"
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Travis opened his mouth, most likely to say something nasty, but before he could get the words out I heard Harry call out-
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"Hey Melissa, want to see something cool?"
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We all turned expectantly just in time to see Harry pitch backwards into the snow with his arms splayed out.
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"Oh yeah, real cool, turd money." Travis jeered, "You fell down! Way to go. I bet your mom is real proud."
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"What did you just say?" Harry stopped mid-snow angel. We all kind of fell silent for a second. Even Melissa looked shocked. She pushed Travis' arm away and scooted to the other side of the tub, giving him a look of disgust.
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"Too far, Travis." She muttered. Maybe he knew it too. I'd like to think he was going to apologize, but Harry was already getting up and Melissa was leaning out of the tub- trying to change the subject, maybe- and asking Harry what he'd done and then we all heard it. None of us seemed to know what it was at first. It was... hard to recognize. A short, sharp sound as if someone had just been socked in the gut.
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You know that sound you make when you've gotten the breath knocked out of you? It was like that.
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"It's a snow angel." I said into the silence afterwards, trying to tell myself that it was just one of those weird sounds that came out of the woods sometimes.
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"Oh." Melissa furrowed her brow.
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"Hey, I think I've heard of those." Hunter put in, "One of the kids from Moore got arrested for making one in town square after the game. His parents had to come pick him up."
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"Let's google it! Inside-" I was quick to suggest, but then the second sob interrupted me before I could get further than a few steps toward the house.
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"What was that?" Joan asked. Harry finished climbing to his feet and stooped to pick up the ping pong ball.
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I didn't hear whatever Harry's response was. I was too busy looking. Frozen in place. Riveted by the sight of the single, pale hand draped across the edge of the snow angel's 'wing'. This time we all heard the wail. And knew exactly what it was. The identical looks of confusion and fear that flickered across all of our faces gave it away.
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"What the fuck?" Travis said.
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"Oh my god!" Joan shrieked.
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"Harry!" I yelped. I don't have any conscious memory of crossing the deck. I blinked and suddenly I was there, leaning over the railing and grabbing him by the shirt. Hauling him away from the snow and toward the steps. Meanwhile, an ethereal vision was rising out of the snow angel as if it were rising on a pedestal. Blonde hair coated in frost. Pale skin mottled with blackened spots. Blue lips bowed back in a grimace of misery.
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She was wearing a gray robe. It crackled brittlely as she climbed from her knees to her feet.
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"What the fuck, what the fuck, what the fuck-" Travis was wheezing a new mantra somewhere behind us.
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"GET IN THE HOUSE." Someone else yelled. I held Harry's arms, helping him climb over the railing. We raced into the house hand in hand, a frenzy of splashing and screaming going on around us. I sprinted as far as the couch. Before Harry dropped my hand and went back to lock the glass door. Nicole and Joan huddled against the far wall, sobbing softly. Melissa ran to the kitchen. Travis hovered near the window, staring in shock.
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"The fuck is that?" He squealed. I wanted to cover my eyes, but I couldn't help but look. I was drawn to that face. The look of terror and pain on it. I could still hear the sobbing through the glass as it tottered unsteadily to the steps and began to drag itself up onto the deck. It- she- moved so wrong. So stiffly!
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"Oh god." Harry muttered beside me. I managed to glance at him, only to see him looking back at the snow. Not the THING, but the place it had come from.
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There was another hand edging out of the snow angel. This one wrinkled and shriveled.
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"We have to get out of here," Melissa came out of the kitchen carrying a kitchen knife, "We have to get back to town and call the police." Harry's place was brand new. The landlines hadn't been hooked up yet.
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"Yeah." I agreed.
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"Just one problem." Harry put in, lifting a hand and singling out the keys and phones sitting out beside the hot tub. Travis' keys. Joan's and Nicole's too. We all shared a look, because that only left two cars. My beaten up suburban, which barely had heat- not normally a HUGE problem, since I was typically DRESSED while inside it, but given that half the party was still soaked from the hot tub and wearing only their bathing suits...
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And Melissa's coupe. Which would barely fit four people, even if they sat on each other's laps.
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"Fuck." Hunter yelled.
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"I don't think we have a choice." I ran my fingers through my hair, "Just grab some coats and blankets and let's go. Hypothermia has to be better than whatever is going to happen when she-"
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"They." Harry interrupted quietly.
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I didn't bother to respond to that. I just dug my keys out of my jacket and headed to the door. I heard the others scrambling to grab what they could and following.
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As soon as I was out the door I heard the howling. Not like wolves- like people. More than one, just... screaming. I sprinted down the driveway, half aware that I ought to have waited. I ought to have given the others more time to get ready, but some part of me just knew that every second we wasted was a step closer to death- and I wasn't kidding when I said our chances were probably better for recovering from hypothermia.
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Out of the corner of my eye I saw Melissa and Travis make it to her car, Nicole right behind them. Chad, Hunter, Harry and Joan were hot on my heels. I didn't have to bother to unlock the doors. My suburban predated electronic locks, and the town was so small that normally I didn't bother locking them all individually. We scrambled in so hard that it rocked. The old shocks squealed and squeaked in protest. I dove into the driver's seat and slammed my key into the ignition, ignoring the seat belt and everything else while the others dragged themselves in and hauled the doors shut behind them.
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I didn't do a head count before peeling out. That came back to me later. It was a miracle no one got left behind. If they had it would have been my fault.
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I still feel guilty about that.
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I saw them coming around the corner of the house in the rear view mirror. Not my friends, but the corpses. I was full on panicking. Each heartbeat felt like a punch to the ribs. My breath felt like razor blades. I was so, so sure that I was going to puke as swung onto the highway- already doing eighty before we'd done a half mile. Joan was still sobbing in the back seat- Hunter was crying too. I think I would have joined them if I hadn't been too busy shaking.
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"Does anyone have a phone?" Chad asked. It was a great idea- I glanced at him in the rear view mirror and saw him covered in the old blanket I kept in the truck bed. His hair was trying to frost. He had a cellphone in his palm. I started to ask what was wrong with it when Joan chimed in-
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"Yeah, but no bars."
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"I'm going straight to the police station." I said. Being that I was the one driving, nobody else had much say in it.
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"What if they don't believe us?" Joan whispered.
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"They're going to." Harry said woodenly, staring straight ahead, "They made them illegal for a reason."
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"Why didn't they TELL US?" Hunter demanded. Nobody answered. I guess nobody had an answer.
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It was a tense, long period of silence- during which I checked the rear view mirror a dozen times. Not just checking for weird, frozen zombies, but for headlights.
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Where was Melissa's car? My old Suburban couldn't have been that much faster.
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My palms were sweating and prickling on the steering wheel. I tried not to think about it- or draw attention to it- the last fifteen minutes into town. Part of me was HOPING to get pulled over by a cop, but as was typical, there was never one around when I wanted one to be.
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I kept looking for them, even as we barreled into town and into the safety of the slushy gray parking lot of the sheriff's department. I nearly drove right through the front doors. The whole car lurched from the force of that stop, but I hadn't even slammed it into park before the others were scrambling out the doors and pouring into the station like a biblical flood of half-frozen, half-dressed teenagers.
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Everyone was talking at once. I was the last in- keeping one eye on the window and the road while the others babbled at Olly, the receptionist. He was a nice old man in his fifties, at least, and I could tell he understood about zero of what was being said. Until Harry stepped forward and put his hands on the desk, anyway. Everyone else finally stopped talking.
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"I made a snow angel." He stated. Calmly. Factually. If it weren't for how pale his face were and how tight his bloodless lips had become, I would have thought he WAS calm.
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Olly's face fell. His chair clattered as it rolled back, allowing him to stand up.
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"I'll go get the sheriff." I knew then that it was every bit as serious as we thought it was. We hadn't imagined any of it. It wasn't some case of... mass hysteria or something.
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"There's something else." I added, pausing to look at the window- hoping to see Melissa's car pulling in at the last second. It never did.
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"I haven't seen Melissa, Travis or Nicole since we left the house."
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Olly's expression turned more grave, if that was possible. The Sheriff was Melissa and Nicole's father.
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He turned and hustled to the back faster than I've ever actually seen him move before. There was a tense moment. A hushed exchange of words and rising voices, and then Sheriff Basket came striding down the hallway, bigger than life. He was a massive wall of a man, and all of us had always been a little intimidated by him. He'd never been mean, exactly. He was just stern. Quiet. Had a direct, down to earth way of dealing with things and usually that involved as few words as possible.
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"How many where there." Case in point.
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I didn't understand what he was asking, at first, but Harry got it straightaway.
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"Two, but I think a third was climbing out when we left."
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I watched Olly getting some emergency blankets and jumpsuits out of the back for the others. For Chad, anyway. Hunter, Joan, Harry and I were all more or less dressed. Olly passed me a blanket anyway. I mumbled a thank you.
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"What did the first one look like?" The sheriff demanded.
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"It was a woman!" Joan shouted. Her voice sounded reedy and thin. I thought maybe she was on the verge of hyperventilating.
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"She had on this dress... thing." Chad added, more subdued, "And she was blonde, I think. It's hard to remember."
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"She was pretty." Hunter whispered, sinking into his blanket and the wall at the same time, "She looked so sad."
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The sheriff looked visibly relieved, but his face was still tight with stress and concern. He looked gray, actually. His skin, his hair, even his eyes. I didn't blame him. I was only a teenager myself at the time, but already I could sympathize- the terror he must have felt, knowing his kids were out there. In danger. Not knowing if he'd arrive in time, or what might have befallen them.
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"It could be worse." He muttered to himself- I don't think we were meant to hear.
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"You kids stay here. Olly, call their parents. You lot were at The Olsen place, right?" He pinned us with a severe look. I nodded. I'm pretty sure the others did too. I heard one or two meek 'yes sir's, "Your parents can explain when they get here." Those last few words were so clipped and bitten off that I could hear his teeth click on some of the syllables.
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I, for one, wasn't about to argue. I wanted to see my mom and dad more than anything in the world in that moment. I was still young enough that for me they represented the epitome of safety. Nothing bad could happen to me when my parents were there, in my adolescent mind. They were still invulnerable giants. The axis upon which the world turned.
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I watched in silence as he checked his revolver and then went to the munitions room and came back with a shotgun and a box of shells. He walked out into the night without even a nod in our direction. His eyes were already on the road. He looked to me like a man going to war. As if he weren't sure he was going to come back, and was prepared to accept that.
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Resigned, but also determined.
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"Come on, kids." Olly spread his arms and herded us all toward the back of the station, "Let's get you warmed up. If any of you have a working phone, now's the time to go ahead and call your parents- it'll be better coming from your number than the police station's. Those of you who don't- sorry." He joked and pointed an ominous finger at the payphone on the wall and the stack of quarters beside it.
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He was a nice old man- had kind of a beardless santa vibe- but it was hard to ignore the tightness in his voice. And around his eyes.
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Poor Olly. He had to be pushing sixty. He'd been working in the sheriff's department since I was a kid. Sometimes he came to help provide 'security' at events in town. He'd never been anything but cheerful and friendly. Seeing him so pale made me feel...
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Helpless.
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What we'd seen at Harry's house still hadn't completely sunk in yet. A part of me thought that I was going to wake up any second, and that it would all turn out to have been a bad dream. All around me the others were calling their parents. I heard phones ringing. A couple had already picked up. Voices were cracking. Muffled sobs and sniffles filled the open office space.
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I looked aimlessly between desks for a little while, my brain not quite having caught up to the idea I should be doing what they were all doing. Eventually my gaze drifted to Harry, only to find him looking back. It struck me then that he didn't have anybody TO call. His mom was... well, he couldn't call her, and his dad was probably still on the plane.
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Which meant he didn't have anybody but me.
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"I guess we should call mom and dad." I tried to smile, fumbling my cell out of my pocket, "They'll be pissed if they're the last ones to know." Internally I cringed. Why had I said that? Especially after literally just thinking he couldn't call HIS dad?
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Harry only nodded.
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My mom picked up on the second ring. I called her first because I figured she'd be the least likely to yank my ass through the phone to chew me a new one. I needn't have bothered, it turned out.
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"We're on our way." She said before I could even say hello, "Stay put." And then she hung up- but before she did I heard keys jingling in the background and the car starting up. Cellphones were notoriously unreliable in my town. A text could be sent and hang in limbo for a week before arriving at it's destination. Calls often just failed to connect.
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I glanced down at the phone in my hand and up at Harry, running my fingers over the glossy screen.
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"They're on their way." I reported. Harry just nodded again.
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My house was only twenty minutes away from the station on a bad day. My parents made it in seven. I guess that's where I got my lead foot from.
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Joan and Chad's parents made it first- but only by a few minutes. Both sets swarmed their respective offspring. There was a lot of scolding and fussing and anxious questions. I couldn't help but think they looked like pre-schoolers. Small and lost and wide-eyed despite their ages. Maybe it was because I was feeling like one myself. Just a small kid on a big playground.
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Woefully out of my league.
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And then my parents came rushing through the door. Mom's coat was barely on- unfastened and hanging off of her as she stormed in. Dad's boots were untied. They looked like they'd dropped everything and run to come get me, and I was so grateful for it. It was the most loved feeling I think a person could have. Dad rushed to me, but mom paused mid-step and diverted to Harry.
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I wasn't jealous. I was weak-kneed with gratitude. Trust my parents- the ADULTS- to know how to make right the things I didn't have the tools to fix myself. I learned a lot about empathy and maturity that day, watching my mom fuss over Harry as if he was her own. He'd been my best friend since childhood. He'd practically grown up in our house, and I in his. My parents were the closest thing he had to his own in that moment. Maybe better, knowing his parents like I did.
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She checked him over like the other parents were checking their kids. Hands and face, arms and neck.
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"Thank god you're okay." Dad said, catching me up and squeezing me like I was nine again. I squeezed him right back, fighting tears.
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"They didn't touch you? You're alright?" Mom was asking Harry. All he could do was nod, I assume. His eyes were suspiciously bright.
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"It's okay," Mom said, giving him the same kind of hug dad was giving me just then, "It's going to be okay."
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"Melissa and Nicole were in the other car." Chad half yelled. I know he was talking to his own parents, but all of them stopped and looked at one another- sharing the look of horror and tense gratitude. How awful, but thank god mine are alright.
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"Olly said you'd explain when you got here." I wiped my eyes on the back of my sleeve and looked up at my father's face. His blue eyes were haunted and unhappy, but he nodded once.
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"Yeah. I guess it's time. Normally we tell the graduating class after the ceremony..."
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Mom looked up. They met eyes for a little while. I imagine they were searching for the words- for a good place to begin.
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"Why didn't anyone explain BEFORE?" Joan demanded, "Why didn't anybody warn us?"
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"Let's just- let's start with the most immediate problem." My dad suggested when no one else spoke up, "Tackle one thing at a time. First of all, what did the first thing through look like?" I don't know if it occurred to the others, but it struck me that this was the second time we'd been asked- and both times it had been the first question, after asking if we were okay.
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"She was blonde, and pale. And wearing a weird dress. She looked like she was in pain." I supplied, anchored by the presence of my parents.
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It seemed to me that every adult in the room heaved a little sigh of relief.
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"That's good. I mean, it's not great, but it's better than it could be." Mom muttered, wandering over to the pile of blankets on the desk and absently gathering one. I watched her bring it over to Harry to drape around his shoulders, fussing with the way it hung until there were no wrinkles to smooth out anymore.
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"We'll start with that, then." Dad took a deep breath, "We call her the Angel. That's what our grandparents called her. I assume that's what THEIR grandparents called her. Of all the harbingers, she's the least violent. She'll lead the people behind her to the nearest, most easily accessible source of heat. Once they're all thawed they'll... go away again." As dad explained I absently rubbed my chest- it hurt, like I'd pulled a muscle.
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Harry looked up, expression going from numb and distracted to suddenly upset.
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"Melissa's car. Amy's heat doesn't work, I- they must have-"
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Dad looked grim, but nodded.
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"It's possible. Especially if the doors to the house were locked. The good news is they won't have hurt the others unless they tried to stop them. The bad news is, if the car stops running or the heat quits, they'll go back to trying to get into the house."
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Everyone took a minute to digest that.
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"So... all they want is to get warm?" I asked hesitantly.
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"Yeah." Dad nodded, "But only if the harbinger is the Angel."
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"O-kay-" Chad looked up at his parents, "But what ARE they?"
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"As far as we can tell," Chad's mom was the school nurse- a petite blonde lady with a 'Can I speak to your manager' haircut, but as sweet as could be- answered this time, "They were people. People who used to live here at some point. People who... died. In the cold."
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"Then there can't be that many, right?" Joan suggested hopefully. It was a hope I didn't realize I shared until that moment. Surely one or two frozen zombies were a lot better than a horde, though.
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"Dozens, at least forty." My own mother put in. She gave Harry a little squeeze and looked at me apologetically.
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"I'm sorry honey. There's other's... but they don't all come at the same time, usually. It all depends on the harbinger, like we said. Usually it's no more than eight or nine at a time, but sometimes, when the shepherd comes through-"
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"The who? The WHAT?" Travis cried, his voice warbling a high, awkward note that I thought he'd left behind in middle school.
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"Harbingers are-" Dad rubbed his fingers together, obviously searching for the words, "They're like the leaders. Only one comes through at a time. They're the first out through the gate when it's open- when a snow angel is made. Some of them, like the Angel, are mostly harmless. Mostly. There's four that we know of. Four that we were told about. Her, the Shepherd, the Prophet, and the Hermit."
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He walked away from me while he spoke, folding his hands behind his back and pacing over to the desk and from there to the window.
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"The Angel comes with eight or nine others, who are mostly peaceful. They'll smash doors and windows if they have to, but so long as they're left alone and you don't attempt to harm them they're harmless. They'll find the nearest source of heat and stay there until they're all... warm... again."
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I didn't want to think about that too hard. I hoped it was more... supernatural than it sounded, because the way he put it made me think of a bunch of warming corpses in a room, and that made my stomach churn.
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"The Shepherd is one of the worst. They- he, we think- comes through with all of the followers. And he's not content with just them, either. He hunts down anyone he can find when he comes through and will drag them out into the cold to die and join his herd. He sends the others, too. If he ever gets through the only thing to do is start the siren and get to the bunkers around town, and then pray that the barricades last until dawn."
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I started to shake just thinking about it. Imagining it was... it made me feel cold from the inside out. I shared a look with Harry, knowing he felt the same way. How close we'd all come to THAT. What he had to be feeling knowing that he'd almost let THAT through.
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"Then there's the Prophet. She won't outright hurt you, but if she finds you she'll... it's hard to explain. She puts people to sleep, in a way. Mesmerizes them with a song- and when you're under, apparently you have visions. Of the past. Of things that happened in this town." Compared to the Shepherd that sounded like a fuckin' cakewalk.
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"But you're there until she's done with you. Which could be hours. And wherever she catches you, which might be out in the cold, or in the shower, or-" He left the rest up to imagination, "Her followers put out lights. They pull down electric lines and will smash lamps."
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Okay. That sounded less ideal, but still a whole lot better than the zombie-murder Woodstock.
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"The Hermit is the worst, though." My dad looked at Hunter's parents and then Joan's, and finally sighed like he didn't want to be the one to say the words.
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"They come alone, and unlike the others they won't vanish at daylight. They keep hunting, keep killing, following the people of the town no matter where they run until a sacrifice is made. Our parents thought that might have been where the new harbingers come from. Sacrifices to make the Hermit go away."
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"That's horrible!" Joan gasped. I cringed too. It was awful to think about. Deliberately selecting someone you knew, someone who you LIVED with to go die. And then making that happen! Killing them in the worst way I could imagine.
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How did you even begin?
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"But it's just the Angel this time." Hunter said, his voice shaking.
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"Yeah," My dad nodded, "She should be gone by morning."
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So that was it, then. We just had to make it to morning, and then everything would be okay. Right?
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It wasn't, though. In fact, I can confidently say that was the beginning of the end- the slow roll into the destruction of the town, and the majority of the people who lived there.
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For a time it was quiet. A few of us managed to fall asleep, either in the padded benches of the holding cells or in the chairs lined up against the walls. I was still wide awake, watching the windows with Harry and clutching a cup of hot cocoa for warmth. The hands of the clock barely seemed to move, and then-
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With a pop and a crackle, the dispatch radio came to life.
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It was the sheriff. I didn't understand the codes he was using, but I got the gist of it pretty good from everything that was said between.
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Multiple 123s, more units required. Send medical and the blasters.
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After that it was a flurry of voices and sirens. Orders were being shouted. Sirens blared. Olly sat behind his desk and closed his eyes. His lips moved silently, tracing the words of some prayer. I reached for Harry's hand, but the look in his eye- he was practically on the moon. So far away I couldn't reach him.
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We both knew that it was going to be bad.
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We didn't know HOW bad until one of the other officers started talking.
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"We've got two injured juveniles in route to the hospital. Clear the roads, provide escort where possible."
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Only two?
​
"We've got eyes on them. Eight. Angel is missing, repeat, the Angel is missing. One victim unaccounted for. All units respond." It went on like that for a while. The noise woke up everyone who'd managed to fall asleep. One by one we gathered at the window, watching for the flashing lights as they sped like shooting stars down the main road toward our tiny, provincial hospital.
​
Wondering who was inside. And if they'd make it.
​
Eventually the noise from the radios died down to chatter back and forth between officers sweeping the woods. I gathered bits and pieces, but no more. Something about a set of bare footprints heading into the woods. Something else about a second, fresher set of tracks behind. Both vanished near the pond. The search went on, but nothing else important was said.
​
Eventually the first blush of dawn touch the sky. We watched it rise, Harry and I, side by side, as the first of the officers returned to the station- muddy and disheartened. The adults gathered in a huddle with them. I wasn't meant to overhear, but my ears had always been sharp. Like the radio, now in person, I caught snatches that were just enough to paint a picture.
​
'Travis and Nicole'
​
'Broken arm. Severe frostbite. Should recover.'
​
'Melissa. Missing. Old lake. Angel.'
​
They told the rest of us a barely edited version of events a few hours later. Travis and Nicole had been found outside Harry's place. Travis had a broken arm. Both he and Nicole had pretty bad frostbite and were suffering from hypothermia, but were expected to mostly recover.
​
Melissa was still missing. They thought the Angel's flock had mobbed the car while Nicole was still getting in. Melissa had gotten it started, but hadn't driven away immediately because her sister wasn't fully inside yet. Travis had taken the passenger seat, and Nicole couldn't get in past him, he was too big-
​
Well, the delay was enough for the heater to get started. The dead had converged on the heat, and when Travis tried to fight back they'd tossed him aside like an old newspaper.
​
Melissa must have run. She didn't know what we'd just been told. She probably thought they were being attacked. I mean, that's what I would have thought- did think. But in the end, I guess it doesn't really matter why she ran into the woods. They never did find her. We all went home, one by one. Harry's dad came home on the next plane, but, understandably, Harry didn't want to stay in that house anymore.
​
They moved away a couple of months later. Not long after Nicole and Travis finally got out of the hospital. Travis ended up losing the arm- the frostbite combined with the break made it impossible to save. They tried, but in the end there was nothing to be done. Nicole recovered physically alright. She lost a few toes and a finger, but the real damage was psychological. Losing her older sister like that... the way it all went down.
​
She was never the same.
​
The rest of us got together after graduation. The same 'party' where the town's secrets would originally have been explained to us. It turned out there were a few things we still hadn't been told.
​
"I just don't understand why anyone lives here at all," Joan was saying to Mr. Harkman, our former math teacher- for pretty much our entire lives. The town wasn't big enough that we really needed more than one or two. There were rarely more than thirty kids per grade. I was standing by myself under a pennant banner, watching the flecks of light from the disco ball swim around the floor.
​
She was going off to college next spring. So was I. I think we all were, except Nicole and Travis- and Hunter, I think. He'd decided to stay behind. Or maybe he couldn't afford college. I don't know, I never thought to ask.
​
"Most people do leave." Mr. Harkman sighed, "I think we all tried to escape at one point or another."
​
"Escape?" Chad, who'd been over in the corner beside Hunter and a couple of other kids from our grade, lifted his head to ask. By then the story of that night had spread to every kid in our tiny high school, regardless of grade. I can't help but think that was a good thing.
​
"Well why'd they come back, then?" Joan demanded heatedly in the same moment. Her face was flushed, her eyes glittering.
​
"Your parents didn't tell you?" Mr. Harkman looked surprised, and then just sad, "I'm sorry. I guess I can see why. The thing is, you can leave the town just fine- until you have kids. And then... the town pulls you back. Things happen. You lose your job, you have an accident, your plane or bus gets rerouted. You black out and wake up back here, in town, with your kid. It's inevitable. If you try to leave, you end up here again."
​
A hush fell over the room. I don't know if they were thinking the same thing I was, but my very first thought was-
​
I'm never having kids.
​
Poor Harry. If only anyone had told HIM.
submitted by Themascura to nosleep [link] [comments]

Debunking some more Star Wars wank

You know who I hate? People who talk about Star Wars on the internet.
For some reason the way Star Wars fans phrase their posts just fucking bugs me. They type like it's a college thesis, like they're a Star Wars intellectual, like people will think they're cool for their deep knowledge on the EU lore. I see this everywhere, in WhoWouldWin threads, in the comments of posts on here, even in the comments of my Star Wars RTs. There's always those one or two people who draft up a fucking essay, and the worst part is they always get their facts wrong while still speaking with that trademark air of false authority. They either mix canon and Legends or just use fan theory bullshit. God, I just hate people who talk about Star Wars on the internet so fucking much.
Anyways, time to talk about Star Wars on the internet. I finally got done with this: the sequel to my last post about Legends wank. If you're wondering about what "Legends" is or why I hate Legends wank so much, just read that last post, it covers it all in the intro.
Last post I focused on Palpatine, but this post doesn't really have any theme, still focusing on Dark Side stuff though. Speaking of my last post, I've actually updated it with new material, so go read it again if you want. I reference it a bit in here so you might want to do that to get context.
Before getting into things, I want to address some criticisms of the last post.
And that was the only criticism. Yeah, I guess that's a sign I did pretty well last time, because the Legends wank crowd just fixated on the one point I made that relied on WoG to ignore the entire thread instead of actually trying to come up with any actual rebuttals. Honestly I think it's a bit funny, cause I'm willing to bet my mother's life that if tomorrow George Lucas came out and said "mmm, every Legends Jedi is an MFTL multiverse buster," the same type of people who complain about using that piece of WoG would be tripping over each other to update the VSBW profiles first.
But okay, let's talk about WoG. If you don't know what WoG is, it stands for Word of God, and people use it to refer to something an author says about their story outside of the context of that story. Think of J.K. Rowling saying wizards shit on the floor and use magic to clean it up on Twitter. It wasn't in a book, but the author said it. That's what WoG is.
Personally, I think WoG should be judged on a case by case basis. This is how most battleboarders look at WoG, and I disagree with this mindset, I accept it more based on who's saying it and how much sense it makes with the presented material. I stand by using Tom Veitch's statements about Force Storms in my last post and still find them completely 100% legitimate, since he's the sole author of the Dark Empire story and his statements make the story make more sense instead of less. He also said it was the intended explanation when the comic was being released. I do, however, understand some people's trepidation when it comes to accepting WoG, which is why I've included other points about Force Storms in the post to outline why, even if you toss out WoG, they're still not applicable in most combat scenarios and don't scale to his other Force abilities.
I learned my lesson though, and I won't be using any WoG in my Legends wank posts again. Not because I think using WoG is wrong to do, no, I just don't want the whole post to be ignored because of one point. So yeah, that's my piece on WoG, not gonna say any more about that. Onto the actual thread.

The Claim: Darth Nihilus is a surface wiper

When someone comments "Legends is crazy bro," they usually like to tack on a few examples of "crazy" Legends characters. Abeloth, Grandmaster Luke, the one Sith that was immortal, etcetera. Because of the Obi-Wan Death Battle, he's become a recent favorite for this - I can't tell you how many times I've seen someone say "Obi-Wan can open a black hole with his mind!" because of that garbage fucking video. But a perennial favorite of the "Legends is crazy bro" posters is Darth Nihilus, an intimidating black-cloaked villain from the Knights of the Old Republic series.
From the way people talk about this guy, you'd think he's the Legends version of Galactus, a guy who flies around the galaxy eating planets and shitting out supernovas. Of course, as with all Legends characters, he is drastically, drastically oversold.
Saying Nihilus "eats planets" is misleading. He doesn't suck up the entire mass of a planet into his mouth, he uses a special Force Drain technique to consume the Force energy of the population of a planet, which causes collateral damage for unspecified reasons. Though it's said/implied he's done this numerous times, we only see Nihilus actually do this once to a planet called Katarr, in a flashback scene in a comic. It's shown to cause widespread ruination and reduce people to skeletons.
This is a good feat, sure, but the calc people toss around for it has more inflation than DeviantArt. A Narutoforums calc claims that he's outputting 727.586 petatons here. Or, as Death Battle would put it, 54 TRILLION HIROSHIMAS.
Just look at the assumptions being made. It assumes that Katarr was obliterated to the point where it was a flat ball of dust and all the oceans were evaporated, based on the end of the comic where you can see it through the windows of Nihilus's ship and it's shown as a featureless ball. But this can be explained as the ship having moved further away from the planet to the point where you can't see any detail on it in the time between him wiping the planet and going down to pick up his disciple from the place. It's said to be days later in a text box, so for all we know he could've travelled to a completely different planet in that time. The comic obviously doesn't accurately draw Katarr to scale anyways, so it being depicted as a flat ball in the last pages is probably just artistic license anyways, if it's the same place.
If that wasn't enough, we actually see what the surface of the planet looks like after the wipe, and check it out - there's still some shattered buildings around, ruined trees, and what looks like a still-standing tower in the background. I don't think those would be there if all the mountains were reduced to atoms and all the oceans were evaporated as the calc claims. So the 727 petatons number can be safely chucked in the dumpster.
Look, I'm obviously not gonna say Nihilus can't surface wipe with his Force Drain. It's pretty explicit from the comic. But what I am gonna say is that nobody scales to it, his other powers don't scale to it, and it's also just kinda irrelevant.
Before I cover those though, I just have one last thing to talk about: there's actually a debate on whether or not Nihilus's Force Drain is the thing that causes the damage when he "eats" a planet.
It mostly comes from this one encyclopedia entry for him which says that he drew "more and more power from worlds that he blasted into ruin" while traveling on his special ship, the Ravager. So the "blasting" comes before the "drawing," or draining. Basically people use this to say that what Nihilus actually does is destroy the surface of planets with the Ravager's weaponry and then sucks the Force out from the people on it after.
It's interesting, and the comic can actually line up with this idea if you read it a certain way. Honestly, a draining ability causing random explosions is pretty weird if you ask me, and the bystanders we see during this explosion seen don't really look like they're getting their Force drained. The depiction of his draining power is also off, in the game we see it's an orange energy bolt. No random explosions, no creeping black shadow. So it's possible the destruction we see in the comic is thanks to the Ravager firing on the colony, and the Force Drain happened after off-panel.
So yeah, I see why people think this could line up. But there are, of course, things that contradict this. Visas, Nihilus's disciple and survivor of the attack says that the destruction of Katarr wasn't done with a ship and the KOTOR Campaign Guide conflicts with this too, since it said he wiped out the life on the planet "using the Force."
So yeah, it's probably not the ship blasting thing. Just wanted to clarify that, cause I knew people would ask. From here on out I'm going with the regular interpretation.

Nobody scales to it

Nihilus is routinely pointed out as being an absolute oddity among the Sith and Force users in general. He's not even a regular being: he's a "Dark Side aberration", he's been called a living wound in the Force. His souped-up Force Drain is pretty well defined as a unique ability to him thanks to his specific origin and biology, and tons of Sith Lords have unique powers of their own. So scaling other Force users to his feat isn't really something you should do. I don't even think Palpatine could replicate this: sure, he could replicate any other of Nihilus's feats based on statements, but I don't know why he could use his super special wound in the Force "Lord of Hunger" Force Drain power.
Saying that anyone who isn't a living wound in the Force powered by pure overwhelming hunger could replicate his special Dark Side hunger-fueled Force Drain just lacks any sort of sound basis and doesn't work either objectively or narratively.

His other powers don't scale to it

Sure, Nihilus can suck out people's Force energy on a planetary scale, but it's not like he can put that power behind a Force push or something. I think this is pretty obvious but I feel the need to point this out because of the "VSBW model of damage output scaling."
This is a term I just made up for that thing VSBW does, you know, that thing. A witch could have two spells - shooting fireballs and making a big storm in the sky. VSBW will take how many biggatons it takes to make the storm, then claim her fireballs hit with the same force, when the best feat for the witch's fireballs is one lightly singing cardboard. It makes no sense to me because the fireball and the storm are obviously two separate things, so conflating them makes little sense.
But of course, people will say "well, all his abilities are powered by the Force, so they should all be equivalent." Short answer, fuck off. Long answer, no, there's tons of Force users in Legends and canon that have like a specific "gimmick." Yarael Poof's gimmick in Legends is that he's good at illusions, as an example. Others are specifically talented at using the Force to make cold mist, or specifically talented at telepathy, or psychometry, or mind reading, or whatever.
It's very, very well established that people can be better with certain Force powers than others. And once again, Nihilus's whole gimmick is that he's got a super special Force Drain he can use to suck the Force energy out of people. He's literally called THE LORD OF HUNGER. So saying "yeah his super special Force Drain damages a planet's surface, so he can do that with a Force push" is fucking dumb.

Kinda irrelevant

So his other powers don't scale to his Force Drain, hope you get that by now. So, outside of being useful for sucking out another character's Force energy in battle - which is a powerful move, believe me - his Force Drain's range is pretty much irrelevant. Sure, it can work on a pretty massive scale, but that doesn't really matter if he's just fighting one person. I'm not saying Force Drain isn't a good power against other Star Wars characters, just that the scale of it doesn't matter when people generally just put characters in one-on-ones on WhoWouldWin-type sites.
It also doesn't matter if he's not fighting someone from the Star Wars universe, since logically they wouldn't have any Force in them for him to suck out. Yes, his Force Drain affects more than just Force users, but everyone in Star Wars has Force in them, even planets have Force in them - this is pretty consistent, they say this kinda stuff in the movies. So Nihilus's Force Drain is only really relevant when you match him up against another Star Wars character.
But people like to equate stuff like life energy or ki or Force or chakra or Reishi or souls or whatever in battleboarding just to make things fair, so I guess that point is up to personal interpretation / the rules someone lays out in a thread.

Verdict: Only with a Force power that no one else scales to, that's unique to him, that his other powers don't scale to, and that's mostly irrelevant in a standard WhoWouldWin scenario.

The Claim: Vitiate is a surface wiper

There have been plenty of online Star Wars games over the years, but Star Wars: The Old Republic is easily the most popular. The main threat, as I understand, is this evil Sith guy with like 20 different names: Tenebrae, Valkorion, the Sith Emperor, whatever. Most people just call him Vitiate, as will I in this post.
I don't really care for MMOs, so I never really got into SWTOR despite being a Star Wars fan. My only exposure to it has been through research for these Legends posts, and I have to say, it looks just as boring as any other MMO. I also just kinda hate every aspect of its design, but that's neither here nor there. This is a battleboarding post, and the big thing every "Legends is crazy bro" poster talks about from SWTOR is Vitiate's planet-wiping ritual.
Yep, it's a ritual. Yeah, that word alone makes things pretty open-and-shut. Force rituals don't really scale to other abilities or Force users for obvious reasons. This particular ritual really doesn't scale, cause it requires - wait for it - the death of eight thousand Sith Lords to pull off. Sure, it wiped out all life on the planet it was performed on, a place called Nathema, which yeah, that's impressive. It worked by sucking all the Force out of the planet, which made Vitiate immortal and much, much stronger in the Force than he already was. It's a good ritual, not challenging that. But eight thousand Sith Lords is definitely not something Vitiate has on hand at all times.
There's some other stuff I could mention about this Nathema ritual, like how it also took ten fucking days and required some kind of computer named Zildrog which killed all the Sith Lords or something, but I really don't have to. You see, nobody gives two shits about the Nathema ritual. That's right, I just wasted your fucking time talking about it.
Here's the answer you'll get if you say "Vitiate's stuff is rituals" to your average Star Wars battleboarder.
While yes, the ritual on Nathema required the sacrifice of thousands, his later feat on the planet Ziost was done completely with his own power and was NOT a ritual. So, in summary, Darth Vader could TOTALLY blow up a planet bro!
So, let's talk about the Ziost wipe. The Ziost wipe, despite what people may claim, is still pretty obviously a ritual. Let's first explain the situation, I'm gonna be doing this in bullet points.
Yeah, the argument people use here is that Vitiate can did the wipe alone without any ritual sacrifice because he was weakened beforehand, then got back to his standard level of power by slaughtering people on Ziost, then right as he was at that level did the wipe. Honestly, I don't know where people get the idea he did it right when he was at full strength. At the end of the missions on Ziost which you spend fighting those he's mind controlled, you actually go back to the space station place that serves as a mission lobby. During the time the player is there, it's clear Vitiate still has people under mind control and is still killing to increase his power. I can't find any indication of canonically how long the gap is between you leaving the planet and you getting the signal that the planetary wipe is happening, or if Vitiate did it right after getting back to full power. I might just be missing something, so let's just go with the assumption that he did the wipe right as he got back to full strength.
Remember when I said Force users have gimmicks in Legends? Well, Vitiate's is rituals, pretty much. That and being a body-hopping spirit. He uses rituals for a ton of shit, rituals are kinda his thing. Here's the evidence Ziost was just another use of the ritual, even if he did it of his own power. More bullet points.
Some people try to say that this Codex entry disproves the idea that Ziost was a ritual. This is because it uses the word "but" while talking about rituals, separating the Ziost wipe from rituals as being its own different thing. This is not the greatest of arguments cause we see how the Ziost wipe works and I think it's pretty clearly supposed to be the same ritual Vitiate's famous for. The "but" here is more likely separating the "whispered rumors" nature of the previous planet-wiping events to the "clear display" of the Ziost ritual. The fact that they talk about an address to the Galactic Republic right after points to that. Honestly, it's how I read it the first time I saw it, this other interpretation didn't even cross my mind.
So yeah, it's a ritual. He can maybe activate it of his own power after the Nathema amp, but still, it's a ritual - very clearly its own thing with its own purpose and means of being performed. There might be some differences in the execution of Nathema and Ziost, but the practically identical outcomes show that the same principle is at play. And again, the ritual is more akin to a planetary Force Drain like what Nihilus does than some sort of planet-killing death wave. So let me address the same points as I did for Nihilus here.

Nobody scales to it

Saying that people can scale to a ritual is weird to me, but I guess you could say that if another Sith got their hands on the information of how to perform the ritual, they could do it, which would be a form of scaling. Sure, that works out to me I guess, but they probably wouldn't be able to do it of their own power like Ziost. Vitiate was only able to after doing it the first time, which permanently amped his power to a massive degree. They'd have to do the eight thousand Sith sacrifice first.

His other powers don't scale to it

Yeah this is just kinda obvious, Vitiate doesn't rip the crust off of planets with telekinesis or whatever, the ritual is what he does.
Honestly I don't get why people think you can scale Force powers to other Force powers at all. Like, what if a Force user only showed the ability to mind control people. Would you calc how many joules of energy it takes to mind control someone to determine how much they could hypothetically lift with their telekinesis? What if they only ever used Force lightning? How would you get the power of their mind control from that, would you take the wattage or something? Do you see why I think this is weird?

Kinda irrelevant

Since this is basically a weird version of Force Drain - works by sucking the Force out of the victims and the planet - just refer to the Nihilus section I guess. The funniest thing here is that, since planets in other verses wouldn't have Force in them to be drained out, you can argue that if you dropped Vitiate on real life Earth he wouldn't be able to surface wipe it. Kill everyone on the planet over time, sure, but not suck its Force out.

Verdict: Only with a Force power that his other powers don't scale to and that's mostly irrelevant in a standard WhoWouldWin scenario.

The Claim: Darth Bane is a surface wiper (feat. the thought bomb)

I'm gonna try and make this one brief. It's less complicated than those two doozies we just had to cover, so yeah. Remember the thing I joked about in the last post, "Darth Bane's world-crushing strategy?" Well, it turns out it's actually referring to a ritual that Darth Bane came up with.
Once again: ritual. Already it doesn't scale to anything, be that other Force users or Darth Bane's other abilities. It's a pretty uncomplicated ritual too, basically a bunch of Sith just sit together criss cross applesauce and channel their energy to make a storm that burns down a forest.
Apparently some people think this is surface wiping for whatever reason, which I don't understand. This ritual was intended to burn down a forest to force some Jedi out of hiding and is noted as being similar to and weaker than the thought bomb ritual, another ritual that involves a bunch of Sith joining together to do a thing.
Not going to say too much about the thought bomb as it's pretty complex, but it fucked up the ecosystem of the planet it was performed on, sucks up the spirits of Force users, and is a suicide attack. Otherwise, it's similar to the other ritual here with the Sith needing to join together to do it. Read the Wookieepedia page if you want to learn more. So Bane's ritual is explicitly weaker than that, despite his boast while performing it that he's going to "kill a world."
Also once again, we have an inflated Narutoforums calc. Sheesh, lots of Star Wars discussion on a forum for an entire different series.
The issue here is that the calc assumes the ritual covers half the planet when it stopped at the edge of a forest. It's also a bit wonky cause they made a lightning storm that burnt down the forest, it wasn't just some kind of direct energy blast or whatever. Trying to get a number out of the ritual is just kinda pointless anyways. It was cut short, so we didn't see its full power, and it's explicitly noted as being weaker than the surface-level thought bomb ritual. Plus, as we know from other Legends material, Force users combining their powers is multiplicative and not additive, so you can't even divide it by the people present or whatever.

Verdict: Only with a ritual that involves a bunch of Sith joining power.

Well, since I just covered a number of "surface wiping feats," let's go back to my first post and gather together all the surface wiping Force user stuff, shall we?
  • Palpatine's Force Storms - Even ignoring the WoG which says Palpatine can't make Force Storms of his own volition, they don't scale to his other abilities and are completely irrelevant in most combat scenarios. If he tried using one in a normal fight, he'd almost 100% kill himself with it just due to its sheer size and erratic nature. So it's only really good as some kind of weird suicide attack.
  • Random unnamed Sith Sorceress's ritual - Requires an obelisk to be built and several centuries of prep time, so it obviously doesn't scale to her other abilities and is completely irrelevant in any combat scenario I can think of. Also, this killed her.
  • Nihilus's Force Drain - Pointed out as being unique to him, clearly doesn't scale to his other abilities, and the "planet wiping range" of this power is completely irrelevant in most combat scenarios.
  • Vitiate's first ritual - Requires eight thousand Sith Lords worth of sacrifies.
  • Vitiate's Ziost feat - Still a ritual, even if he can activate it on his own now. Doesn't scale to his other abilities and the "planet wiping" trait of this ritual is completely irrelevant in most combat scenarios.
  • Darth Bane's ritual - Requires planning and multiple Force users joining together (which we know is multiplicative and not additive, so no one involved can scale), so it's completely irrelevant in most combat scenarios.
  • Thought bomb ritual - Same as above, except it's also a suicide attack.
Well, looking at it, it seems pretty consistent to me that you either need a lot of outside assistance or some sort of super special gimmick power which is completely irrelevant to combat to surface wipe in the Star Wars galaxy. To be clear here, when I say "combat" I'm talking about a 1v1 scenario you'd usually see on a battleboarding site.
So, yeah. Saying something like "Force users can surface wipe with some abilites" is technically true, but very dishonest and misleading, cause there's like... literally 3 Force users, Palps, Vitiate and Nihilus (talking about "mortals" here, not space gods or whatever) that you can argue can reliably surface wipe without any external help. Even then, they're not using raw Force power or telekinesis to do it, they're using super special gimmick powers that aren't really that relevant in a fight.
Oh, and let's talk about who those 3 are. Nihilus is literally a Dark Side aberration whose entire gimmick is that he can drain planets, and Vitiate and Palpatine have both been called the strongest Dark Side user ever. Trying to say whatever random Force user has surface wiping power cause Vitiate or Palpatine or Nihilus exist is just fucking stupid, especially cause they have to use special gimmicks to do so.
I feel like people get the wrong idea about what I'm trying to prove with debunking Legends shit. I'm not trying to say Legends is anemically weak or anything, I'm not trying to say it's the weakest setting in existence, I'm not trying to say Legends Jedi couldn't tear apart a soggy piece of paper. Legends Force users are still strong, they're just not strong like Dragon Ball Z characters are - their strength doesn't come from planet busting laser beams or whatever, it comes from stuff like powers that bypass conventional durability, mental manipulation, and other forms of "hax." I know every battleboarder wants their favorite series to be just like DBZ, but that just isn't how Star Wars is.

The Claim: CANON PALPATINE IS MFTL+++!!!!1!!

That is not a joke, people fucking believe this. I bet you weren't expecting to see canon wank make an appearance in this post, but I saw this and I just had to comment on it. It's even from The Rise of Skywalker, the movie where Palpatine is constrained to a giant mechanical baby chair for the majority of the run time.
Here's the calc and here's the quote used from the canon expanded novelization. He's apparently 2000 times faster than light because he sent his spirit to Exegol to inhabit his new clone body before the events of TROS. Cause y'know, he was a clone in that movie, they never actually explained that in the movie itself I don't think.
Yeah, this is sounding awfully familiar, isn't it? Gotta say, 2000 times FTL seems small when compared to the outlandish number for the equivalent feat from the other post. This is because the calc-er decided to go with a timeframe of 24 years, based on the first appearance of Snoke. This is actually pretty clever thinking, props to the guy who did this. But, if they had just read 1 sentence further, they would've known that Palpatine was in his clone body before his old one even hit the bottom of that giant shaft. It's written a little oddly, but it's pretty clear that's the implication - there's no mention of any time spent wandering space or whatever, just a straight jump from his old body dying to jolting awake in his new one.
So, does this make the feat even better since the timespan's shorter? Well, I think you can guess the answer - this is pretty clearly just him warping his spirit over to his clone body. I'm not going to repeat the same arguments I made for the other spirit warp feat, I'm just going to repeat that I don't understand why people use this kind of shit at all.
Like, if you go with the "hurtling through space for 24 years at 2000c" interpretation what do these people think was going on during all that time? Seriously, I have so many questions if we go with this version. Here's just a few:
Was Palpatine screaming and laughing evilly as his spirit shot through space at MFTL speeds? Was it instantaneous for him or did he feel every hour? Was he at risk of getting sucked into a black hole? Or hit with a supernova? Was he doing ghostly loop de loops around solar systems for kicks? Is it like the Google Chrome dinosaur game where you have to dodge cactuses and birds, but with celestial bodies? Did every asteroid he dodge give him 10 bonus points on his score? Would he get hurt if he slammed into an asteroid? Did he have to eat or sleep? Did he stop by Dex's Diner to pick up a wampa burger on the way to his clone body? Did he have to take bathroom breaks to spirit pee? Did he fly by Leia and Han's house to scare baby Kylo Ren in the cradle? Was that what made him evil? Was he really bored after year 10, or did he enjoy it the whole way through? Was he playing Mario Kart Tour on his Force spirit iPhone to pass the time? Or was he playing a more "old man" game, like solitaire or sudoku? Did he know where he was going? Did he need a map? Or did he have one memorized? Could he have run in with other Force spirits just floating around? Did he have an awkward conversation with ghost Obi-Wan or ghost Yoda? Did he have to then fight them on the spirit plane to keep them from warning Luke? Was it like an awesome extra-dimensional battle where they shot ghost lasers at each other? Oh, what if he took the wrong Force spirit exit and ended up on Naboo? Could he have possessed someone else, like something other than his clone body? Was there a wacky mixup where he accidentally ended up in the body of a Gungan cause his old man eyes mistook it for his clone body? Did he spend a month or two in that Gungan body because he grew attached to the previous owner's wife and kids and enjoyed being back on his home planet? Did he have to have awkward Gungan sex with the wife to keep up the charade? Did he see the effects of the wars he caused on the Gungans and start to feel bad and regret the whole Sith thing? Did he have to then remind himself what he was doing and throw himself down that big shaft in the Naboo power plant Darth Maul fell down so he could get his soul out again? Or did he just commit suicide by booma sling to the temple? Was he emotionally scarred after that? When he did get back to his clone body, did he send money to the Gungan family to make sure that they were being taken care of? Did he secretly deliver a present to the little Gungan children's doorstep on Life Day? Did they open the door just as he was able to flee down the corner? Did the children, still grieving their father's death, catch sight of the back of his robe and ask their mom who that old man was? Did she look wistfully after him, shaking her head and saying she didn't know, but that she felt there was something familiar about him?
Honestly, this should be a fucking Disney+ series, this sounds entertaining as hell. You could call it "Dude, Where's My Clone?" and appeal to the stoner demographic. Or, perhaps, go in a more dramatic direction: "Star Wars: Soul Searching." Any way you slice it, a galactic roadtrip with a senile Sith spirit sounds like it could be really fun. Get on it, Dave Filoni.
Anyways, I don't really get why people think Force spirits have to travel anywhere at all. Remember how Obi-Wan died on the Death Star, then his spirit showed up on Hoth in Empire? Was he like, already there? Did he know through the Force Luke would need him there in a few years and start jogging over at a brisk 20,000c at the end of the first movie? How about his trip from Hoth to Dagobah? Or over to the forest moon of Endor?
When Force spirits show up - you know, how they fade into a scene - is that them popping out of lightspeed? Yeah, I really don't think so, they can just teleport I'm pretty sure. Well, "teleport" is probably not the right word, but you know what I mean.
Oh, here's another question: what about projections? Like how Luke sent a Force projection over to Crait in Last Jedi. Was his projection moving MFTL to get there in time or something? Does that mean canon Luke has MFTL reactions too? I think Yoda did the same thing in Rebels or something. Does that mean...
Wait. I should stop giving these people ideas.

Verdict: lol no.

The Claim: "The ability to destroy a planet is insignificant next to the power of the Force."

Jesus Christ, what am I doing? Why do I have to make an argument against this? Why do people use this?
I bet you think this is some kind of joke, but no, I see people use this statement all the fucking time. Fucking Death Battle used it in a Q&A, oh God, shoot me please let this nightmare end, I pray for death every day and it never comes. Either people use the original version Vader said in the original Star Wars or the version from the Dark Empire endnotes which upgrades it to being an entire system instead of just a planet.
First off, I'd like to point out that the Dark Empire endnotes version of the statement isn't specifically being said about Palpatine. The wording is "he said this during the time when he served the Emperor," not "he specifically said this about the Emperor." This is like basic reading comprehension, I learned this shit in kindergarten, but people misread this shit all the time and say "yeah Vader was talking about the Emperor." No he wasn't, learn to read.
Second, I seriously don't think that the VSBW crowd that brings this line up have even watched Star Wars or understand it at all. I'm willing to bet most have only seen the Dark Empire version posted around and don't know that the line is from the movie.
I'm certain about this because there are much better lines to wank. Obi-Wan says that the Force "binds the galaxy together" in the original movie. Does VSBW not know about this? Of course they don't, the only Obi-Wan quotes they know are fucking unfunny prequel jokes. If they did know about it every single character would be a galaxy buster because "they can control the Force which is a galaxy-binding energy." It's not too far from how they jerk off Yarael Poof.
Here's the thing: the ability to destroy a planet is insignificant next to the power of the Force. We see this in the movie. Luke Skywalker was only able to destroy the Death Star after he accepted the Force and let it guide him during the trench run. If it weren't for the Force, he wouldn't have made the shot. The Force allows him to overcome the planet-destroying Death Star. At the risk of sounding pretentious, that's kinda the fucking point.
The Force is higher than material things, it's not just something Jedi use to lift things into the air, it's literally their religion. It's a religion for the Sith, too, that's why Darth Vader's saying that in that scene. It's the same thing as a Christian person saying "God is mightier than all."
Taking this claim at surface level is the exact same thing as taking Admiral Motti's claim about the Death Star being the "ultimate power in the universe" at surface level. Sorry VSBW, gonna have to slide Palpatine down from a multi solar system buster to a sub-planet buster, he can't be higher than the Death Star. Move Abeloth and Grandmaster Luke and the Mortis trio and everyone else down too. Motti just said that the Death Star, which can only bust planets, is the "ultimate" power in the universe, so nobody can be higher. I'm sorry, I don't make the rules.
You know, it probably seems like I've been going hard on Legends wank, but honestly it's quite the opposite. I've been generous. I've given this shit the benefit of the doubt at every opportunity, and not once in this post or the post before have I used the "this is just a statement" argument. Even though a lot of this shit is just fucking statements.
Jerec with the Valley of the Jedi being able to blow up solar systems? Just a statement, we never see this.
The Sith Meditation Sphere being able to blow up stars? Just a statement, we never see this, the only guide that says this recaps the story incorrectly. It was the Sith Corsair ship that blew up the star in the comic, not the Sphere.
Wutzek being able to blow up solar systems? Just a statement, we never see him do anything like this.
And this? This is the definition of "just a statement." If you use this scene to say Jedi can blow up planets, you are a fucking moron, full stop.

Verdict: Please, please, please fuck off with this shit.

submitted by 76SUP to CharacterRant [link] [comments]

Bet use of clip art in a job poster

Bet use of clip art in a job poster submitted by surlysir to funny [link] [comments]

Long Time Star Trek Fan Finally Watches Voyager: Season six episodes 10-15

Are you ready for 3 days of Voyager in one post?
Pathfinder: GUYS IT’S BARCLAY! And they’re wearing the new DS9 uniforms. They were in Message in a Bottle as well but I’m just making up for entirely missing it in DS9.
Oh my God is Tom finally going to talk to his dad? Admiral Paris is visiting Barclay’s station, while he’s trying to contact them.
It’s funny in his simulation that Chakotay and B’Elanna are wearing Maquis clothes. I couldn’t see if Tom had two pips or just one. (Update: Nope, he’s got both!)
This was a TNG episode. I mean obviously it wasn’t but it might as well have been. It would have made more sense. Also I forgot how uncomfortable Barclay makes me. But I really liked Paris’s dad and I liked the moment Paris heard his dad over the com. His dad was trying to be professional, and trying not to give this project favouritism, but that’s his son. And I think we’re seeing some development where as Tom spends time away from his dad, he starts to wonder if everything was as bad as he remembered it. In the One Small Step episode Tom talked about his first flight. I see a lot of growth there but it’s slow and subtle and makes me miss home a little which is hard to do.
Barclay still very clearly has addiction problems and just because he was right doesn’t make any of that okay. Or any of the whole breaking into a government lab and using equipment to shoot particles into a wormhole. And guys, there are so many wormholes in Voyager. Microwormholes, unstable wormholes, wormholes that move at one end, you name it. So many supposedly rare phenomena and they all seem to connect the alpha quadrant and the delta quadrant and we have some oddly certain way of figuring that out. I’m just sayin’...
Not my favourite episode, kind of awkward and creepy, 4/10.
Fair Haven: I heard that people didn’t like this episode. Now, I don’t know anything Irish culture but I recognize that this was probably a massive misappropriation of it. Certainly, the Doctor’s use of religion was insensitive. But that said, when you get past this, the episode was a joy to watch. The doctor was funny and light, there was a science fiction story behind Janeway’s love story, and I liked the message. She realized that it was unfair for her to make changes to design a perfect lover because no human would ever not have flaws. Just to be clear, that doesn’t excuse cultural appropriation. They could have easily told this same story using a man from a far off planet. Neelix could have helped Tom write the protocol for some vacation planet he had been to once.
The doctor’s conversation with Janeway was quite beautiful. And the fight in the bar when Tom realized what had happened was pretty funny. I know some of us had a conversation about power dynamics and how it’s difficult for the doctor to form a romantic relationship with the crew because their lives actively depend on him. I suppose the same applies to Janeway. I actually personally don’t see a problem with her getting together with someone like Chakotay or Tuvok- I don’t think the power dynamics of the ship would change much and I don’t think either is the type to say, “You just agree because you’re sleeping together.” But it would be much more complicated with pretty much any other crewman.
Blink of an Eye: if Voyager can’t break orbit how the hell would a rocket make it Voyager? Not to mention they’re going to have WAY worse problems when they get there but they don’t know that. I bet their technology is going to be shockingly compatible, isn’t it? Yep they docked right to Voyager and the door popped right open.
Well, honestly that’s not any of the problems I thought they were going to have.
I liked this episode a lot. I loved the idea of watching a space race. I wish Chakotay had been a little more involved. But the concept was so sweet. The sky ship was both worshiped and feared, divided a population, and drove their development. Of course it was the ultimate cultural interference. But it was an accident, and it was also a lovely little shove in the right direction.
Virtuoso: awe can the doctor sing for them? This is so sweet! It’s his dream.
I love listening to him do opera. Do you guys know if he did all his own singing? It’s genuinely beautiful. I didn’t love his rendition of “I’ve Been Working On the Railroad,” but his opera is phenomenal. His recital is adorable and then we got Harry Kim and the Kim Tones which was a low effort name but I’m smiling so much. I liked the jazz too.
“I’m an engineer, not a costume designer.” I liked Torres a lot in this scene. I thought she had a good personality without going over the top or being too aggressive.
“This isn’t sabotage, Seven. It fan mail.”
This was the right amount of awkward for me. It wasn’t as grandiose as the episode where the doctor imagines being a command hologram. It was mildly uncomfortable, he was clearly making a mistake, but it wasn’t so unbelievably conceited he had girls fighting over him. He just wanted to do what he loved and the attention went to his head. We got some lovely singing, some great strict Janeway, and some humor.
Memorial: interesting choice to see Seven comforting Neelix. It’s cute to continue to see the parallels between her and Naomi.
Awe B’Elanna was finally being all cute and sweet and not the other way around and Tom was having a straight up bad time. Also can we just take a minute to acknowledge that Tom was a COMPLETE ASS before he was even affected by the memories? GOD. You have a lifetime to watch Tv. You can take two seconds to catch up with your girlfriend after she missed you for two weeks.
The cave they’re crawling in looks like one of those cutaways in a museum to show how rocks form.
Uh... why send the members of the crew who are most affected by this down to the planet’s surface? 39 crew members are affected. That means that over 100 aren’t. Including 7! Did anyone stop to think about how dangerous that was for a second?
I disagree with the final decision here. Janeway decided to process this grief in her own way. But the way she did that forced all other 38 affected crewmembers to attempt to process it her way, too, and you guys know where I’m going with this- that’s not her decision to make. I personally think they should have done nothing, maybe put up a warning buoy if anything. There are so many other ways for a story to live on. It is in their memories now, and their logs. Surely other ships have passed by in the last three hundred years. It’s not for us to decide that they even WANTED it to last longer. Surely they knew it wouldn’t go on forever. I wish they had discussed some of those other ways people can remember things. And I disagree with Janeway’s argument that this is like any other battlefield memorial. It is not. You don’t relive the battle of Gettysburg when you visit. You don’t play the role of someone committing war crimes while you’re there. And you don’t go if you don’t have the mental health to handle it. This was compulsory because they happened to be passing through. It led Neelix to hold a little girl hostage with a phaser. Harry nearly stopped breathing in a Jeffries tube. Janeway hallucinated for two hours. It has the potential for real physical harm. If something happens to the warning buoy that Voyager put out there, people are going to experience the full force of what happened there...
Tsunkatse: The play fight between Tom and Harry was adorable. That whole scene was a lot of fun.
I think the doctor needs to stop treating social learning as school. At first it made sense. It doesn’t anymore. Now there should be more of Seven doing what she wants to and not worrying about doing everything perfectly right.
Guys I would have gone to see the alien bugs, just for the record.
OH MY GOD THAT’S DWANE JOHNSON.
I wanted to see Tuvok coaching her from his bed. He’s a martial arts expert. I like to see character details like that reiterated and replayed.
Seven’s hair is gorgeous in this episode. I don’t love her super tight french twist. I like the wispies. I have learned how to do one of Janeway’s simpler styles but with less volume. I did her french twists down into a half up low ponytail thing with a clip. Cheers to anyone who knows which one I’m talking about from that weird little tangent.
Chakotay just said, “Tom,” when he wanted Tom to man the security team and expected Tom to know what that meant.
This was a fun episode. I liked Seven’s struggle and I liked Tuvok’s lesson for her at the end. I also think it added another layer of complexity that Seven got a situation where the person she was supposed to kill wanted her to. That’s a whole other argument in itself. What if Voyager hadn’t rescued them?
submitted by MrPotato2753 to voyager [link] [comments]

r/AviationMemes' First-Ever Inaugural Reddit Amateur Extreme Logo Design Challenge & A380 Memorial Candlelight Vigil - Sponsored by Lockheed Martin®

ATTENTION ALL USERS:
It has come to our attention that the lack of a flashy logo is now considered 'unprofessional' and 'boring' and "what the fuck are you guys doing, even Beriev has that corny-ass swishy thing that looks like a stock clip-art from Powerpoint 1998???"
Well, if you nerds would take a 5-minute break from watching porn BRRRRRRRRT compilation videos all day long, maybe we can fix that.
I'm proud to announce: AviationMemes*' First-Ever Inaugural Reddit Amateur Extreme Logo Design Challenge & A380 Memorial Candlelight Vigil* - Sponsored by Lockheed Martin®
Think you've got what it takes to create the perfect piece of art for this subreddit?? A mind-blowing icon or banner image that conveys the spirit and elegance such an upstanding community?!?
Submit it in a comment below!
Requirements:
Other notes:

"But why should I let you lazy freeloaders use the art that I poured my own blood, jet-A, and tears into???"

Good question! The winners of this contest will each be granted a custom user fair of their choice! Estimated equivalent prize value: $1499 USD (or one 737-MAX8, depending on your conversion rate)
Good luck, have fun, and may the best most-popular art win!
submitted by headphase to aviationmemes [link] [comments]

The GawrGuraGate Conspiracy, a comprehensive list for the curious and skeptical

Introduction

This post is supposed to be a comprehensive list of all things related to the Senzawa = Gura conspiracy, or as some have started calling it: GawrGuraGate. If you have any doubts left, hopefully this list will convince you. I'm trying to make the list as comprehensive as possible so I'll try to provide sources for every claim I make.
If you think this sort of thing will negatively impact Gura/Sen, I want to inform you that there are multiple vtubers whose previous personas are known, some of them are even active on them still. It actually doesn't appear to impact them all that much as long as their real identity isn't at stake. I have asked the mods of this subreddit for permission to post this and I've gotten confirmation from them. If Senzawa herself ever expresses that she doesn't want this information out there, I trust that she'll take it up to them and they will take care of the situation.
I do want to make this clear:
So long as the connection between Gura and Sen doesn't compromise her real life identity, discussing this stuff is fine in my eyes. Still, if either account starts getting harassed with this I won't hesitate to take the post down myself. I'm making this because I enjoy playing detective, not because I have malicious intent.
​

How to contribute

I'll be updating this list with new information if you leave a comment, send me a dm, or if I come across it myself.
However, if your "evidence" is a clip of Sen's voice I probably won't add it. For most people Gura and Sen's voices are the primary reason for believing the conspiracy, but at this point there's so many different clips that I can't possibly list them all. With this list I try to focus more on other stuff. Only if you can get two nearly identical clips side by side it might be interesting to add, in any other case it probably isn't very significant.
​

The List

Debut stream thumbnail

The thumbnail of the debut stream [1] contains a very transparent overlay of an image from Kirin J Callinan - Big Enough in the top left, which may be a reference to Senzawa's country road video thumbnail [2].
The overlay could also just be a joke about the "a" meme that Gura started the stream with, since the song goes like AAAAAAAAAAAAAAA.
On the other hand the answer might very well be both, as it is suspicious that the image is from the same scene as the one used in the Senzawa thumbnail, where Gura could have used any other scene from the same music video. There's a good chance she simply used the same image she still had laying around on her computer.
Whatever the reason, Gura knows her memes and how to hide them in plain sight.
​

Similar interests

Senzawa's favourite game genre is horror, as she states on her twitch about page [3].
The "More about senz" link on her twitch page no longer works, but it used to mention she likes salmon and karaoke [4].
In a stream now archived on BiliBili [5], at 10:13 she mentions her favourite colour is blue.
All of these are things Gura tells about herself in her debut stream.
​

Senzawa's avatacharacter

Senzawa's avatacharacter is based on Kuina Natsukawa from the anime Hinako Note.
The anime features a scene in which Kuina is seen scaring the main character with a shark hand-puppet and also later while dressed in a shark costume very reminiscent of Gawr Gura's design. During the scene Kuina also says "shaaaark" in the same way Gura likes to do [6] 0:21.
Senzawa's channel banner used to feature an image of Kuina dressed in the afformentioned shark suit [7].
Kuina's character is always really hungry and there are many moments where her stomach growls, something Gura is really sensitive about as she explains in her debut stream [8] 15:10. Senzawa also has tummy growls, we know because she tweeted about it [9]. I personally think it's very likely that this is one of the reasons, if not the primary reason, why Senzawa chose this character to represent herself.
​

Da Vinky

Senzawa's twitter is still active and on Sept 15th (and again on Sept 19th) she liked a tweet [10] of a video in which "Da Vinci" is pronounced as "Da Vinky". 4 Days later on Sept 23rd Gura used the same joke/mispronunciation in her Totally Accurate Battle Simulator stream [11] 1:05:20 , [11] 1:18:19.
u/RainePaine posted a video showing both the tweet and the Gura clip [12].
​

Kinda sus follow

Senzawa's twitter follows a person that makes Gura fan art.
u/ampicillinstat posted a screenshot of @hitsukuya tweeting Gura fanart, at the top of the tweet it mentions Senzawa follows the account [13]. At the time of this post she still follows the account [14].
​

The voice, but you probably heard it yourself already

I'm only putting a few things here.
  • The entirity of the bilibili stream [5], her speech mannerisms are especially similar there.
  • Senzawa doing karaoke and laughing all Gura-like [15] 1:07.
  • Personally, the first clip that convinced me was crunchy roll, take me home [16] 0:54.
​

The Purge

Senzawa's twitch got purged it seems. Vods and pretty much everything else just got deleted a month or two before Hololive EN launched.
It's unclear whether she personally wanted to delete it or if it's simply a requirement in her contract. My bet is on the contract considering she didn't delete her Youtube channel or any of the videos on it. Her twitter is also still up and even semi active [10].
​

Art style

In the 2nd collab stream [17] 26:55 Gura can be seen drawing a face very reminiscent of a thumbnail Senzawa used for Old Town Road [cover], which becomes clear when you compare them side by side [18].
​

Rythm games

Senzawa's early tweets mention Project Diva [19], Taiko No Tatsujin [20] and Rhythm Heaven [21]. Gura has Taiko and Rhythm Heaven listed in her debut stream [8] 26:15. Gura has also mentioned that Project Diva was her first rhythm game [uncertain].
Gura also has Muse Dash listed in the debut stream and Senzawa also follows the Muse Dash devs (@PeroPeroGuys) on Twitter [14].
​

City pop shark

In the BiliBili stream [5], on 19:40 Senzawa mentions she likes the city pop music genre. Ride on time, the song Gura sings in her debut stream, is a city pop song. During the stream she calls herself "city pop shark" [8] 2:38.
​

Similar streaming assets

The background Senzawa used for the BiliBili stream [5] consists of a dotted pattern that fades out. Gura uses a nearly identical pattern in the bottom right and top left of her streams [22].
​

Shark fact/word of the day

The BiliBili stream [5] features a "word of the day". I'm not sure if she used to do this every stream (I'd assume so), but it's kinda similar to "shark fact".
​

Sources

[1] Debut stream thumbnail Gura
[2] Country Road thumbnail Senzawa
[3] twitch.tv/senzawa/about
[4] More about senz poster
[5] Bilibili Senzawa stream
[6] "shaaaark"-scene, Hinako Note
[7] Senzawa channel snapshot, featuring shark banner
[8] Debut stream Gawr Gura
[9] Stomach growls tweet by Senzawa
[10] twitter.com/sensenzawa/likes
[11] TABS stream 2, Gawr Gura
[12] DaVinky side by side video by u/RainePaine
[13] Screenshot of @hitsukuya tweeting Gura fanart by u/ampicillinstat
[14] twitter.com/sensenzawa/following
[15] Karaoke stream Senzawa, I want it that way
[16] Crunchyroll, take me home
[17] Hololive EN 2nd collab stream, Kiara's channel
[18] Gura drawing and Senzawa thumbnail comparison
[19] Tweet about Project Diva
[20] Tweet about Taiko No Tatsujin
[21] Tweet about Rhythm Heaven
[22] Dot pattern comparison
submitted by SanianCreations to Senzawa [link] [comments]

Zombie Roo

The capital of Australia is a funny place.
To begin with, it’s not Sydney: no blue harbour or sparkly Opera House. It’s not even Melbourne, with pencil straight laneways and good coffee. Canberra was built as a brand-new town just over 100 years ago, when neither city could agree which should be capital. It resides its own territory, a cauldron of scrubby bushland and grazing pastures bordered by the Brindabella mountains. The suburban districts stretch leisurely across the region, separated from each other by wide stretches of green (or in times of drought, sickly yellow). The small metropolitan hub is dotted around a beautiful man-made lake, famous for its blue algae problem and herpes-stricken carp.
It’s a great place for young families and public servants, terribly dull for everyone else. But we do have great art galleries and museums, and an annual flower festival. So Canberra is none the less a popular weekend visiting spot and has its fair share of national and international visitors.
And for the latter group, the thing that sticks out most about our bush capital are the kangaroos.
Kangaroos are instantly symbolic of Australia – the wiry, lean marsupials embodying much of the world’s perceptions of our country. We don’t keep kangaroos for pets, I’m afraid, or ride to work in their pouches (and for Australian farmers they are outright pests, gobbling up green grassy fields before the slow cows can get to them). But in Canberra – a big country city sprawled out with plenty of green space – you really do see plenty of kangaroos in the wild. And it’s charming, for the most part, especially when they’re hanging out in clusters on some posh golf course. Or you catch a mob of them bounding away in the distance at the local park.
What’s less charming is when they’re dead beside the road.
“This is the most awful place I’ve been in my life!” my cousin Cathy wailed. “That’s like, the sixth one since I got here”
“I know,” I said, eyes on the road, “It’s the drought. You get used to them.”
“I don’t want to get used to them! How can they just leave them there like that…oh God!”
I carefully swerved to avoid yet another meaty carcass. Poor old Skippy.
“Well, there is a rumour they’re deliberately left as a warning to drivers. You know, look carefully, don’t speed. A big roo can totally wreck your car.”
I tuned out as Cathy ranted about how disgraceful it was. I had done that often in the last few days, since my English cousin came to stay with us.
When she mentioned animal cruelty, however, I prickled.
“No one wants them to suffer. There’s a hotline for injured roos, some environmentalist group, WIRES I think.”
Cathy sniffed. “Have you ever hit one?”
“No, thank God.”
“What would you do if you did?”
“Call the hotline of course.”
Thankfully by now we’d reached our row of plain townhouses, tucked away in an unremarkable suburb. It’s not the inner-Sydney terrace Jason and I used to dream of buying, but hey, it’s home. Things were cramped with Cathy staying with us, but she was family. I was glad she was finally travelling.
I had taken time off work to show Cathy the sights, as they were. Once she got over her roadkill aversion, it didn’t go too badly. Over the next few days, we dutifully ‘did’ the Australian Museum, National Art Gallery and War Memorial. Went to the top of Black Mountain Tower. But after the first week I could sense her restlessness. The evenings at home were also becoming tedious, and I knew Jason was crying out for some alone time.
So on Friday I made the decision to bring Cathy to my after-work drinks. They’re nothing fancy, we just troop down to the half-heartedly Irish themed pub on the corner. I had been off all week too so was a little keen to hear what gossip I’d missed (it was that kind of workplace, I’m afraid).
It ended up being a very bad decision, something I always felt guilty about, for two reasons:
  1. I introduced Cathy to my workmate Bryce.
  2. It was me who drunkenly took her phone and added the number of WIRES animal rescue
The night had started well. Cathy had charmed my work mates, as expected – she might complain a lot, but she was also smart and pretty, with an infectious giggle after a few glasses of Moscato. Plus, her accent. “A classic English Rose” Bryce purred.
Bryce was our unlikely office Lothario. Short and weasel featured, with black hipster-rimmed glasses too big for his face. He had an astonishing track record of sleeping with female members of staff. (“How does he manage it?” I had exclaimed to Jason after last year’s Christmas party, where Bryce had openly pashed the head of finance. Jason had shrugged and said with a grin, “some guys just keep asking until someone gives them a yes.”)
I’d warned Cathy a short man with thick black glasses would most likely hit on her (her response had been “meh, it’s been a while”, so I wasn’t too worried about her). I did pull her to the ladies room with me after I noticed Bryce circling, and heard her accept his offer of a ride home.
“Be safe, ok?” I whispered (although by this point I was rather gone, and it was probably more of loud mumble). Cathy rolled her eyes.
“Don’t worry ‘Mum’ I’ll be safe. He hasn’t been drinking.” That’s another unusual thing about Bryce – he doesn’t drink alcohol. If he doesn’t score he’s actually quite good natured about driving everyone home.
“Bryce,” I slurred as we returned with drinks to our table. “Please drive safe with my cousin. Look out for roos.”
Cathy signed and cosied up to Bryce, who slipped his arm around her. “Oh, don’t remind me of those poor, poor animals!”
“Melissa, I will defend this beautiful English Rose- (Cathy squealed as, I suspect, he grabbed her arse) with my life. And my high beam headlights.”
“It’s the kangaroos who need to be safe!” Cathy said. “Mel gimmie that number of the rescue people, you know, just in case.”
So that’s how I came to drunkenly google ‘roo rescue’ and find a website for Canberra Wildlife Information, Rescue and Education, aka WIRES. I took my cousin’s phone and added their number as a contact. And then, it was getting late, and Bryce and Cathy began making out at the table. I took that as my cure to leave and stumbled into a taxi home.
At 3.30am I was ripped from boozy slumber by pounding at the door. When Jason and I opened it, Cathy stood alone.
“Use your key bitch,” I slurred. She didn’t move, or even look at me, After a moment I realised she was shaking. Sober enough to become concerned, I dragged her inside and settled Cathy on the couch, shouting at Jason to make tea. Physically she seemed fine, not a hair out of place. But she was in shock. With a mug of tea in hand, Cathy began to explain what had happened:
“We had one more drink after you left, Mel, and then split. We didn’t leave the carpark for a while because you know – God it’s been too long since I pulled, even a chav like Bryce- but everything had closed by the time we started driving back here-
“Ewww,” I interjected, “you were bringing him back HERE?”
“Yes, of course, all my stuff is here. Anyway once we got out of town it was just so dark…how can you be in a capital city one second and then in the middle of nowhere, pitch black? We were coming up that big hill when it hopped in front of the car. We only saw it for a second…and then we hit it Mel…the noise, a crunching it was awful.”
Cathy started to cry. I passed her a tissue as Jason got up to make more tea.
“And Bryce,” she continued. “He was so freaked out. He didn’t stop for almost 10 seconds afterwards. He might not have at all if hadn’t been screaming at him to pull over.”
“Was he hurt?” I asked. “Were you? How bad was the car?”
Cathy shook her head. “We were OK, just freaked out. The car though, we got out to look and it had this massive dent in the hood. And blood Mel, and FUR…”
She was crying again. Poor Cathy. Such a sad ending to her fun night out: for herself, for Bryce and the kangaroo.
“I’m so sorry,” I said. “So Bryce dropped you home? He could have come in too, if he’d wanted.”
Cathy shook her head frantically. “I don’t know where Bryce is!”
“What?”
“They told me to go straight home, they’d find him.”
“Who?”
“The men in the suits, you know, WIRES.”
I stared at her and said, again, “What?”
“I called the number you gave me and they came. They had a helicopter and everything.”
I was beginning to question just how drunk Cathy and I still were. Jason returned with our tea, and glanced questioningly at me.
“OK Cath,” I said slowly. “Walk me through what happened. So you’d got out of the car and seen the big dent the roo made. What next?”
“We went back to see if it was alive of course!” Cathy said. “It was so dark… we had our phones as torches, but it was still so black. Bryce didn’t want to bother at first, can you believe it? Said we should just call WIRES from the car. I mean what if they needed to walk us through giving it CPR or something? To think I almost shagged him!”
Jason made a noise into his tea mug that sounded a lot like a snort. He met my warning glance with an innocently concerned expression. Cathy went on.
“After walking back for what seemed ages we saw it lying there. Oh God the poor thing! I can’t believe I was complicit in killing a beautiful Australian animal!”
“Bryce was driving” I soothed. “So. It was dead?”
Cathy hesitated as confusion, then fear crossed her face.
“Yes…I mean…at first.”
“What?”
“I mean we thought it was…it looked…bad. Messy,” she shuddered. “I was crying my eyes out so Bryce said to wait, he’d get a better look. I rang up that WIRES number you gave me. I’d just left a message when Bryce screamed,” her eyes brimmed with tears. “Oh God he really, really screamed!”
She froze. Jason and I exchanged glances.
“Cath?” Jason said gently. “What happened next?”
“He…he said it bit him.”
I laughed. It came out rude but the idea of a kangaroo nipping Bryce enough for him to scream was funny. That changed when Cathy added.
“All his fingers were gone.”
We stared. Cathy’s eyes were hazy, a little crossed. She was drunk, sure, but I was beginning to think this was more serious.
“Cath, are you sure you didn’t get knocked around when the car hit the kangaroo?” Around the head, I silently added. She shook her head slowly. “No….yes? That’s what the man said, it was why I had to take the pill. For my concussion.”
“What man?!”
“One of the WIRES people, of course. In their black suits. They arrived in their helicopter about 10 minutes after the dead kangaroo bit Bryce’s fingers off.”
“WIRES arrived…in a helicopter?”
I don’t know what the local wildlife rescue agency is like in your city, but I’m willing to bet it’s a lot like the one we used in Sydney. Kindly, retired hippy types – usually volunteers – who excel at getting possums out of your roof. Definitely not the men-in-black-types. I was beginning to wonder if I should get Cathy to a hospital, was it possible Bryce had put something in her drink? He’d never been known to do something like that… but this was getting disturbing.
“It got up,” Cathy droned on, her voice monotone. “The kangaroo. It wasn’t dead, you know? Even though its leg was broken and all these patches of fur was gone. Bryce was bent over, trying to stop the bleeding…I was just about to go and help him when the other roos appeared. From across the road. And it was crazy, I know they’re herbivores. but the way they circled him…it reminded me of those animals in a nature documentary…hyphens?”
“Hyenas.”
“Bryce staggered back…then ran off, into the… field I guess? Or bush? It was so dark. It could have been a cliff for all I know. But those kangaroos bounded after him. The others…they looked weird too. Kind of missing in pieces, but also covered in bits of rags…you know one of them actually looked like it was wearing a tie….
I took a deep breath.
“OK. So you hit a kangaroo and went back to check if it was OK. It was dead but suddenly came alive to bite off Bryce’s fingers. Who was chased by a mob of kangaroos, including one wearing a tie, into the night.”
Cathy beamed. “Yes! That’s it.”
“And then WIRES turned up,” Jason added. “In a helicopter. And gave you a pill.”
She was nodding enthusiastically. “That’s right. They said they’d look after Bryce and the Roo and not to worry. And then they drove me home.”
I got up. “OK Cathy, we’re going to the hospital.”
By the time Jason had pulled up to the emergency department, Cathy was fast asleep. One of the harried triage nurses came out to the car. Despite my insistence she’d been drugged, the nurse said there was nothing to worry about. Cathy’s pulse was fine, she was breathing OK, and there were no signs of a struggle. She gave us a mini lecture on alcohol abuse, then went back to the busy waiting room. I was fuming at the dismissal, but at 4am there didn’t seem much else we could do but go home. Jason and I managed to move Cathy to the couch, and I slept on the floor beside her. Just in case she woke up doing crazy shit or hallucinating more flesh-eating marsupials.
Morning came with one of the worst hangovers of my existence. Cathy, weirdly enough, didn’t even have a headache. She also had no recollection of what had happened since leaving the pub with Bryce.
“He must have dropped me straight home,” she said cheerfully. She was making a fry up for Jason and I, just the smell of which was enough to turn my stomach.
“It was pretty late,” I muttered. “And you were saying some weird shit. I thought, I don’t know, he gave you an LSD roofie or something.”
“It’s super nice of you to look out for me, but you know, I am a grown up Mel.” Her tone was pleasant, but clipped: she didn’t want to talk about it anymore. At the time I just assumed she was embarrassed, so I let it drop. Cathy seemed OK, but I certainly planned on cornering Bryce come Monday morning to find out what really happened.
But I never got the chance. Bryce wasn’t in on Monday, or Tuesday. On Wednesday, in our weekly team meeting, our manager announced Bryce had quit – he’d emailed a letter of resignation over the weekend, apologising for not serving his notice. Bryce had apparently got another job in Sydney that required him to start immediately. He’d packed up his room in a Braddon houseshare and driven up Sunday afternoon. Everyone was puzzled by the announcement. Later, the story was dismissed around the office watercooler as bullshit: he must have been about to get fired – finally, perhaps, a one-nighter with the wrong person.
It rattled me though. I kept seeing Cathy’s weird vacant gaze as she described him screaming, running into the darkness. I asked around but it turned out despite sleeping with half the female population of the office, Bryce didn’t have any real work friends. No one knew why he might have gone, or even perhaps cared.
I could have sworn he had a Facebook – surely there had been an incredibly vain profile picture of him with his hair styled, stupid thick glasses slightly ajar. But it was gone, as was his linkedin or any online presence I could find.
And WIRES? I never found that website again. It was missing from my search history, and from Google. I did find that Canberra doesn’t even have a local branch of WIRES, just a volunteer group called Australian Capital Territory Wildlife. Something tells me they don’t attend to sick koalas and injured wombats in helicopters.
Cathy decided to fly home that week. She hadn’t been sleeping well, shouting and screaming in her sleep. I don’t know how much of that night she remembered, but Bryce’s sudden disappearance seemed to be the final straw. I haven’t heard from her since she went back to the UK, apart from a brief thank-you-for-letting-me-stay email. Her Facebook page has since gone completely private.
I’m writing this all down, three months later, after a long walk around Mount Rogers Reserve. Even since Cathy’s strange night I’ve been stopping at one drink, trying to get a little heathier and more connected with the important things in life. Jason and I have begun a daily walk together, although this particular afternoon he’d been at work.
So I was alone when I saw them – halfway up the slope: a passing mob of kangaroos. I froze, always a little wowed by the bush-city experience of coming face to face with native creatures. But today, seeing kangaroos in the wild for the first time since that night, I felt a little chilled. Instead of lingering, I turned to go- then almost immediately swung back.
The kangaroos had moved on. But I swear on my grandmother’s grave that I saw, just before I’d turned my head, I saw-
I saw…I saw a kangaroo wearing thick black hipster glasses.
submitted by LEYW to nosleep [link] [comments]

Black Ops Story Speculation (Tape #5, 1981)

title correction: Black Ops Story Speculation (Tape #6, 1981)
Previous threads:
Tape 1 (1962-63)
Tape 2 (1968-69)
Tape 3 (1972-73)
Tape 4 (1977-78)
Tape 5 (1979)
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So….the teaser came out :D .
Obviously it’s Black Ops: Cold War, but I’m excited to see more little details revealed in this trailer. I might break it down in a different thread, but expect to see some details here too.
  1. I should’ve figured it’s a year closer to 1979. If the flashback narrative being hinted is legit, we would have more events closer to our ‘present’ day. I guess we won't get links to the SDI project OR the Challenger, but then we've got a lot of other interesting events already.
Before we dive in, a correction: I mentioned the chess pieces in the previous thread might link to characters dying in the story. Turns out they were just linked with the ciphers and puzzles, with one coming down each time a day’s cipher was solved (all of the pieces are currently down). It could still be a representation of lives being lost every era of the Cold War, but I’ll admit, I wasn’t paying complete attention to the cipher hunt besides the bunker discoveries.
Anyways, let's get into the final tape. Apologies if this thread comes later than before, but there's a LOT I had to unpack in this one.
So here we go. Again, we’re looking at common themes and individual stand-up clips, for any hints to the story. The full tape for reference.
And for one last time: If something glitches, pay attention!
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Finally, let’s get into one clip I skipped. One that's tied directly with our teaser trailer:
Yuri Bezmenov, our Soviet spy boy. Bezmenov was a Russian spy who was planted in India, until he found he disliked the Soviet’s suppression of intellectuals, and defected. He appears in Tape #6 at 15:40, during the series of clips of other Russian defectors and double-agents. His words speak for itself:
“The highest art of warfare is not to fight at all. But to subvert anything of value in your enemy’s country. Be it moral traditions, religions, respect towards authority and leaders, cultural traditions, anything. Put white against black, old against young, wealth against poor, doesn’t matter. As long as it disturbs society, as long as it cuts the moral fiber of the nation, it’s good.’
This is the context for so many of the clips. The strikes, the racial conflict, the protests, young people and economic problems. Maybe not ALL of them are directly caused by Soviets, but they must've nudged something to make them happen.
Coupled with other info in the trailer, I think our game's conflict is obvious: We have a Russian plot to destabilize the United States and its allies. The Russian agents are doing it through assassinations, sabotage, sleeper cells, and quite possibly mind control. We might even have American collaborators to allow this to happen.
Knowing Treyarch's games, this plot's going to be capped off with something explosive; something that could allow for a climatic battle with our characters. Black Ops 1 had the impending launch of Nova 6, Black Ops 2 had Raul Menendez taking over the drones, and Black Ops 3 had Corvus trying to spread a digital-mental computer virus.
Expect Russia attempting a knockout strike on America, and our characters trying to stop it.
---
Now, u/ParagonFury made a good thread about Yuri Beznemov. He has some legitimate criticism about Beznemov and his appearance in the trailer (mostly about how Beznemov isn’t as knowledgable as people make him out to be). But I want to highlight one statement:
The things Beznemov talks about and suggests the Soviets do to the US don't work in a country where people like Romney and Trump exist in the same party, or where someone like AOC and Biden can peacefully co-exist in the same party. The US is simply too massive, too diverse for that kind of strategy to work - you can sow chaos by following some basic psychology tricks, sure. But you'd need willing accomplices, AND another method of attack if you actually wanted to destroy a country like the United States.
I agree. You’ll need more than a few Soviet agents in order to do the stuff that Beznemov described. There’s a chance Treyarch will just handwave this for the sake of an exciting action thriller, but I think they’ll actually explain all these points.
The key words here are accomplices, and a method of attack.
1. MKUltra
This is the big one. In Tape 4, we’ve got a LOT of clips about the CIA’s mind control program, and in other tapes we’ve got a focus on emotional manipulation in the media, aggressive impulses, and mob behavior.
I’m certain we’re getting mind-control in this game. After all, it can make people follow orders en-mass (willing accomplices), and it’s a powerful weapon against any state (a method of attack). It also falls in line with Beznemov’s quote in the VHS tape: the highest art of warfare is to not fight at all. Why fight the enemy when you can just control them?
Now, this could just be a red herring. Maybe the CIA did try to experiment in mind control, but the experiments never panned out. But why the emphasis on a Truth Drug? Why the other mentions of Soviets trying to manipulate what Americans are saying, or their actions?
And this is a Black Ops game. We’ve had brainwashing in BO1, drone armies and future tech in BO2, and A.I.s stealing people’s bodies in BO3. Would it be that out of place to put in more mind control?
I guess it depends on how grounded in reality this game is. Treyarch might pull a Modern Warfare, with a more realistic game featuring less implausible tech or events. But will they really tone things down?
2. American Collaborators
Exactly what it says.
if Russia has a hand in mind control (maybe through co-opting MKUltra), I doubt they’ll rely on only mind-controlled Americans. There’s plenty of Americans in the Cold War who willingly helped Russia, like double agent Adrich Ames (who appeared in this tape).
We won’t just face Russians. We’ll be facing willing American collaborators, working with Soviets to create a hardline U.S. government, or just overthrow it altogether. It’ll be standard coup stuff, with either army battalions being co-opted, or we have armed rebels in the middle of cities (like the L.A. level in Black Ops 2.). Or it could be agents infiltrating government institutions, taking things over in silence.
And remember: Call of Duty is a game built on shooting waves of enemies coming at you. If we’re getting combat levels in America, it’ll be a little ridiculous to have a whole army of Soviets in the middle of the United States. If Treyarch wants the game to be more grounded (and seems like they’re doing that), they might have some Americans working with the Soviets.
Though I can think of ways they’d go around this. They could do raids like Modern Warfare 2019, where you have less Russians opposing you, but the gunplay is more tense and dramatic. It could add a stealth element that'll help the game’s covert tone.
…or they could just not care, like how MW3 has an army of terrorists setting up shop in London, or Black Ops 1 having a whole battalion of KGB guys in Hong Kong (without any political consequences).
I’m betting Treyarch’s will find a compromise. It’ll be an interesting change of pace, as the Russian enemies in CoD are getting a little stale. Not that Russia wasn’t a totalitarian government at the time (and now), but it'll spice things up.
--
That's all for now. I'll be making one more thread summarizing the possible contents of the game, but it's been a blast. Some people liked the ciphers, but this was the highlight of the teaser for me. Half the time, I felt like I'm uncovering an actual conspiracy, like I'm just a step away from morphing into Mailroom-Conspiracy-Charlie from It's Always Sunny. I think that's the excitement Treyarch meant to spark with this whole teaser campaign.
Thanks for all the support! I'm happy people were so interested in my analysis of these tapes. Also, thanks to u/Sageburner712 for his own threads, he put up some interesting details I missed. Look out for at least one more thread!
Any thoughts and speculation of your own? Let me know in the comments!
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(Also, thank you to Activision and Treyarch for the message! I hope this game turns out amazing; I'm definitely getting it when it comes out.
Also, if you're reading this: please make the game less than a bazillion Gigabytes. I'm saving disk space for Cyberpunk 2077, the only other game I can uninstall is Modern Warfare 2019, and I don't want Infinity Ward devs haunting me in my sleep. )
submitted by LunarRepubl1c to blackopscoldwar [link] [comments]

Win at Sports Betting - Sports Betting Tips - Sports ... Casino (1/10) Movie CLIP - A Hell of a Handicapper (1995) HD How to Make $300,000 Betting on Sports ...

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