Crystal Dynamics Official - The Known Issues and Workaround Megathread
Hi all, Meagan here – I’m the Sr. Community & Social Media Manager at Crystal. Threads move fast on Reddit and often there are multiple reports on the same issue. We realized that not everyone may see when we respond to individual threads and are hoping to resolve that with this sticky post! We are scouring social media, Discord, and Reddit for your bug reports and feedback, but think a little context on what’s happening behind the scenes could help. But first, I want to say that we hate bugs as much as you do. Although a lot of the issues below happen infrequently within the scope of the entire player base, your experience is our top priority, and each of you deserve the best possible experience we can deliver. HOW WE GATHER BUG REPORTS If you aren’t familiar with bug reporting or Quality Assurance protocol, to solve complex bugs, we have to reproduce them first. This means recreating the exact circumstances that triggered the bug, which allows us to put protections in place and keep it from happening again. This process requires that we gather data from players, and then use that data to solve the puzzle. We are gathering information on bugs/crashes many ways:
From automatic platform reports: If you encounter a crash and your console prompts you to report a problem, please do! This information gets sent to us and is SUPER helpful, as it tells us what you were doing at the time of the crash. It’s easier for us to then pick out trends and address them!
Customer Support: Customer support reports are our second-best bet for gauging volume of issues and getting more information to help reproduce and resolve them. You can get in touch with our support team here: support.square-enix-games.com
Social Media: Social media gives us a great viewpoint into high-level bugs/issues individuals are facing, but it isn’t idea for one-on-one communication and information gathering. This is why we direct people on social to customer support, unless it is a known issue & we can quickly message a workaround. That being said, we have our community team and members of the dev team scouring social, reddit, discord, and more every day to gather and consolidate reports
Internal Testing: With the absence of our usual playtest lab due to the work-from-home environment, employee testing was incredibly important these past few months, and it was super cool to see everyone use their free time to rally behind bug-busting marathons. We’re still constantly playing our game and using it as an opportunity to surface bugs, tune, and optimize.
With this in mind, if you have a bug to report, there are some tips to help us get a clear picture of what bug/issue you are reporting. The more specific you can be, the better!
Platform & Region of Play
Headline/Summary of issue (Crashed. Froze. Cap has googly eyes)
Hero
Mission
What Happened (tell us what you were doing just before and when the issue happened)
Screenshot or Video (if possible)
If Multiplayer related, please also include power level and number of players in your Strike Team
When we surface a bug or bring in reports from Customer Support or Social Media, we prioritize them by severity and frequency, create our own internal strike teams with representation from all subject matter experts, and get to work to resolve it! INITIAL TROUBLESHOOTING If you encounter a bug that is keeping you from enjoying play, the best bet is to reload the last checkpoint. This will often resolve issues. If that doesn't work, fully exiting the app and reloading the game is the suggested next step. If the issue persists, we have implemented a backup save function: Backup Save: Available in the Settings menu, this feature backs up your save files. Your progress will be saved every hour. If you run into any issues with a corrupted save file, this can potentially help retrieve and revert to a different save file. Please note: This may not work for everyone, and will not address issues with save files that existed prior to this patch. KNOWN ISSUES AND WORKAROUNDS Here is the current list of our top priority known issues and when applicable, workarounds. We will update the status field with new information as we have it! UNABLE TO ACCEPT VILLAIN SECTORS
Presentation: Missions show up as already completed and do not refresh, which does not allow users to accept new ones in order to play them, causing them to miss out on rewards.
Status [9/18]: Actively investigating.
MISSION CHAINS NOT COMPLETING
Presentation: Some Mission Chains are not completing properly when all requirements are met. (Example: Reigning Supreme)
Status [9/19]: Actively investigating. Try advancing any other Mission Chain by a single step. This will trigger an auto-complete of the incomplete Mission Chains and rewards will be issued.
MISSING WEEKLY MISSION CRASH
NOTICE For the time being we suggest you hold on refreshing Weekly Missions if you see one missing.
Presentation: For those seeing a missing Weekly Mission, refreshing it would result in a crash.
Status [9/19]: We are actively investigating.
THE MISSION “INTERROGATION ANXIETY” CANNOT BE COMPLETED
Presentation: Rarely this presents as an inability to continue in the mission Interrogation Anxiety due to not being able to interact with specific characters.
Status [9/6]: We are actively investigating.
VARIOUS PS4 TROPHY BUGS
Presentation: Reported issues with an array of trophies, including: Former Glory: Complete the “Iconic Avengers" mission chain Old Fashioned Beat Down: Complete HARM Challenges I to V The Best Defense: Defeat any 20 different enemy types Tentative Peace: Complete 15 Villain Sectors Gold Star Success: Complete 100 assignments Holding it Down: Complete 30 War Zones at Challenge III or higher rating
Status [9/18]: Fixed several known issues around PS4 Trophy bugs. We are actively investigating the remaining.
UNLOCKED OUTFITS REVERTING TO LOCKED STATE
Presentation: This presents to some players in two ways:
1) This presented as costumes that were previously unlocked through campaign progress - such as the Stark Tech outfits - reverting to a locked state. 2) This presented as costumes that were previously unlocked through online play - such as Hero Challenge Card rewards, pattern drops, and faction vendors - reverting to a locked state
Status [9/19]: Most of these have been fixed, but there are some that haven't, including Iron Man's Iconic Outfit.
VARIOUS SKILL POINT BUGS
Presentation: Some characters are either missing a Skill Point or have an extra one.
Status [9/19]: We are actively working towards a fix.
COMMUNITY CHALLENGES NOT UPDATING IN REAL TIME
Presentation: While progress is not appearing in-game, it is still being tracked on our end.
Status [9/5]: We are working to optimize the system and implement a fix so that players can see their combined progress in real-time!
Potential Workaround: N/A
MATCHMAKING ISSUES
V1.3.0 addressed several matchmaking issues. We are still working on improving this more.
RESOLVED ISSUES
CHARACTER DUPLICATION/SWAPS ON GOLDEN GATE BRIDGE
Presentation: This presents as a rare bug with late-game campaign players, where they are loaded into the Golden Gate Bridge as the wrong character.
Status [9/8]: This should be resolved - if you encounter this bug, please contact customer service so we can continue to investigate.
CHALLENGE CARD POINTS NOT UNLOCKING
Presentation: Hero Challenge Cards were not reflecting points earned through daily or weekly challenges.
Status [9/5]:Resolved: We have fixed an issue where Hero Challenge Cards were not properly reflecting earned points. We are also in the process of retroactively granting lost points, although this process may take several hours to complete. Thank you for your reports!
Reminder: Do NOT buy from 3rd Party Marketplace Seller on Ebay/Amazon/Newegg (unless you want to pay more). Assume all the 3rd party sellers are scalping. If it's not being sold by the actual retailer (e.g. Amazon selling on Amazon.com or Newegg selling on Newegg.com) then you should treat the product as sold out and wait.
Below is the compilation of all the reviews that have been posted so far. I will be updating this continuously throughout the day with the conclusion of each publications and any new review links. This will be sorted alphabetically.
NVIDIA says that the RTX 3080 is the gaming card and the RTX 3090 is the hybrid creative card – but we respectfully disagree. The RTX 3090 is the flagship gaming card that can also run intensive creative apps very well, especially by virtue of its huge 24GB framebuffer. But it is still not an RTX TITAN nor a Quadro. These cards cost a lot more and are optimized specifically for workstations and also for professional and creative apps. However, for RTX 2080 Ti gamers who paid $1199 and who have disposable cash for their hobby – although it has been eclipsed by the RTX 3080 – the RTX 3090 Founders Edition which costs $1500 is the card to maximize their upgrade. And for high-end gamers who also use creative apps, this card may become a very good value. Hobbies are very expensive to maintain, and the expense of PC gaming pales in comparison to what golfers, skiers, audiophiles, and many other hobbyists pay for their entertainment. But for high-end gamers on a budget, the $699 RTX 3080 will provide the most value of the two cards. We cannot call the $1500 RTX 3090 a “good value” generally for gamers as it is a halo card and it absolutely does not provide anywhere close to double the performance of a $700 RTX 3080. However, for some professionals, two RTX 3090s may give them exactly what they need as it is the only Ampere gaming card to support NVLink providing up to 112.5 GB/s of total bandwidth between two GPUs which when SLI’d together will allow them to access a massive 48GB of vRAM. SLI is no longer supported by NVIDIA for gaming, and emphasis will be placed on mGPU only as implemented by game developers.
So there we have it. The RTX 3090 delivers - at best - 15 to 16 per cent more gaming performance than the RTX 3080. In terms of price vs performance, there is only one winner here. And suffice to say, we would expect to see factory overclocked RTX 3080 cards bite into the already fairly slender advantage delivered by Nvidia's new GPU king. Certainly in gaming terms then, the smart money would be spend on an RTX 3080, and if you're on a 1440p high refresh rate monitor and you're looking to maximise price vs performance, I'd urge you to look at the RTX 2080 Ti numbers in this review: if Nvidia's claims pan out, you'll be getting that and potentially more from the cheaper still RTX 3070. All of which raises the question - why make an RTX 3090 at all? The answers are numerous. First of all, PC gaming has never adhered to offering performance increases in line with the actual amount of money spent. Whether it's Titans, Intel Extreme processors, high-end motherboards or performance RAM, if you want the best, you'll end up paying a huge amount of money to attain it. This is only a problem where there are no alternatives and in the case of the RTX 3090, there is one - the RTX 3080 at almost half of the price. But more compelling is the fact that Nvidia is now blurring the lines between the gaming GeForce line and the prosumer-orientated Quadro offerings. High-end Quadro cards are similar to RTX 3090 and Titan RTX in several respects - usually in that they deliver the fully unlocked Nvidia silicon paired with huge amounts of VRAM. Where they differ is in support and drivers, something that creatives, streamers or video editors may not wish to pay even more of a premium for. In short, RTX 3090 looks massively expensive as a gamer card, but compared to the professional Quadro line, there are clear savings. In the meantime, RTX 3090 delivers the Titan experience for the new generation of graphics hardware. Its appeal is niche, the halo product factor is huge and the performance boost - while not exactly huge - is likely enough to convince the cash rich to invest and for the creator audience to seriously consider it. For my use cases, the extra money is obviously worth it. I also think that the way Nvidia packages and markets the product is appealing: the RTX 3090 looks and feels special, its gigantic form factor and swish aesthetic will score points with those that take pride in their PC looking good and its thermal and especially acoustic performance are excellent. It's really, really quiet. All told then, RTX 3090 is the traditional hard sell for the mainstream gamer but the high-end crowd will likely lap it up. But it leaves me with a simple question: where next for the Titan and Ti brands? You don't retire powerhouse product tiers for no good reason and I can only wonder: is something even more powerful cooking?
When we had our first experience with the GeForce RTX 3080, we were nothing short of impressed. Testing the GeForce RTX 3090 is yet another step up. But we're not sure if the 3090 is the better option though, as you'll need very stringent requirements in order for it to see a good performance benefit. Granted, and I have written this many times in the past with the Titans and the like, a graphics card like this is bound to run into bottlenecks much faster than your normal graphics cards. Three factors come into play here, CPU bottlenecks, low-resolution bottlenecks, and the actual game (API). The GeForce RTX 3090 is the kind of product that needs to be free from all three aforementioned factors. Thus, you need to have a spicy processor that can keep up with the card, you need lovely GPU bound games preferably with DX12 ASYNC compute and, of course, if you are not gaming at the very least in Ultra HD, then why even bother, right? The flipside of the coin is that when you have these three musketeers applied and in effect, well, then there is no card faster than the 3090, trust me; it's a freakfest of performance, but granted, also bitter-sweet when weighing all factors in. NVIDIA's Ampere product line up has been impressive all the way, there's nothing other to conclude than that. Is it all perfect? Well, performance-wise in the year 2020 we cannot complain. Of course, there is an energy consumption factor to weigh in as a negative factor and, yes, there's pricing to consider. Both are far too high for the product to make any real sense. For gaming, we do not feel the 3090 makes a substantial enough difference over the RTX 3080 with 10 to 15% differentials, and that's mainly due to system bottlenecks really. You need to game at Ultra HD and beyond for this card to make a bit of sense. We also recognize that the two factors do not need to make sense for quite a bunch of you as the product sits in a very extreme niche. But I stated enough about that. I like this chunk of hardware sitting inside a PC though as, no matter how you look at it, it is a majestic product. Please make sure you have plenty of ventilation though as the RTX 3090 will dump lots of heat. It is big but still looks terrific. And the performance, oh man... that performance, it is all good all the way as long as you uphold my three musketeers remark. Where I could nag a little about the 10 GB VRAM on the GeForce RTX 3080, we cannot complain even the slightest bit about the whopping big mac feature of the 3090, 24 GB of the fastest GDDR6X your money can get you, take that Flight Sim 2020! This is an Ultra HD card, in that domain, it shines whether that is using shading (regular rendered games) or when using hybrid ray-tracing + DLSS. It's a purebred but unfortunately very power-hungry product that will reach only a select group of people. But it is formidable if you deliver it to the right circumstances. Would we recommend this product? Ehm no, you are better off with GeForce RTX 3070 or 3080 as, money-wise, this doesn't make much sense. But it is genuinely a startling product worthy of a top pick award, an award we hand out so rarely for a reference or Founder product but we also have to acknowledge that NVIDIA really is stepping up on their 'reference' designs and is now setting a new and better standard.
This commentary puts the RTX 3090 into a difficult spot. It's 10 percent faster for gaming yet costs over twice as much as the RTX 3080. Value for money is poor when examined from a gaming point of view. Part of that huge cost rests with the 24GB of GDDR6X memory that has limited real-world benefit in games. Rather, it's more useful in professional rendering as the larger pool can speed-up time to completion massively. And here's the rub. Given its characteristics, this card ought to be called the RTX Titan or GeForce RTX Studio and positioned more diligently for the creatoprofessional community where computational power and large VRAM go hand in hand. The real RTX 3090, meanwhile, gaming focussed first and foremost, ought to arrive with 12GB of memory and a $999 price point, thereby offering a compelling upgrade without resorting to Titan-esque pricing. Yet all that said, the insatiable appetite and apparent deep pockets of enthusiasts will mean Nvidia sells out of these $1,500 boards today: demand far outstrips supply. And does it matter what it's called, how much memory it has, or even what price it is? Not in the big scheme of things because there is a market for it. Being part of the GeForce RTX firmament has opened up the way for add-in card partners to produce their own boards. The Gigabyte Gaming OC does most things right. It's built well and looks good, and duly tops all the important gaming charts at 4K. We'd encourage a lower noise profile through a relaxation of temps, but if you have the means by which to buy graphics performance hegemony, the Gaming OC isn't a bad shout... if you can find it in stock.
Summarizing the GeForce RTX 3090's performance is simple -- it's the single fastest GPU on the market currently, bar none. There's nuance to consider here, though. Versus the GeForce RTX 3080, disregarding CPU limited situations or corner cases, the more powerful RTX 3090's advantages over the 3080 only range from about 4% to 20%. Versus the Titan RTX, the GeForce RTX 3090's advantages increase to approximately 6% to 40%. Consider complex creator workloads which can leverage the GeForce RTX 3090's additional resources and memory, however, and it is simply in another class altogether and can be many times faster than either the RTX 3080 or Titan RTX. Obviously, the $1,499 GeForce RTX 3090 Founder's Edition isn't an overall value play for the vast majority of users. If you're a gamer shopping for a new high-end GPU, the GeForce RTX 3080 at less than 1/2 the price is the much better buy. Compared to the $2,500 Titan RTX or $1,300 - $1,500-ish GeForce RTX 2080 Ti though, the GeForce RTX 3090 is the significantly better choice. Your perspective on the GeForce RTX 3090's value proposition is ultimately going to depend on your particular use case. Unless they've got unlimited budgets and want the best-of-the-best, regardless of cost, hardcore gamers may scoff at the RTX 3090. Anyone utilizing the horsepower of the previous generation Titan RTX though, may be chomping at the bit. The GeForce RTX 3090's ultimate appeal is going to depend on the use-case, but whether or not you'll actually be able to get one is another story. The GeForce RTX 3090 is going to be available in limited quantities today -- NVIDIA said as much in yesterday's performance tease. NVIDIA pledges to make more available direct and through partners ASAP, however. We'll see how things shake out in the weeks ahead, and all bets are off when AMD's makes its RDNA2 announcements next month. NVIDIA's got a lot of wiggle room with Ampere and will likely react swiftly to anything AMD has in store. And let's not forget we still have the GeForce RTX 3070 inbound, which is going to have extremely broad appeal if NVIDIA's performance claims hold up.
In Summary: this card is a real giant, especially at higher resolutions, because even if the lead over the GeForce RTX 3080 isn’t always as high as dreamed, it’s always enough to reach the top position in playability. Right stop of many quality controllers included. Especially when the games of the GeForce RTX 3090 and the new architecture are on the line, the mail really goes off, which one must admit without envy, whereby the actual gain is not visible in pure FPS numbers. If you have looked at the page with the variances, you will quickly understand that the image is much better because it is softer. The FPS or percentiles are still much too coarse intervals to be able to reproduce this very subjective impression well. A blind test with 3 perons has completely confirmed my impression, because there is nothing better than a lot of memory, at most even more memory. Seen in this light, the RTX 3080 with 10 GB is more like Cinderella, who later has to make herself look more like Cinderella with 10 GB if she wants to get on the prince’s roller. But the customer always has something to complain about anyway (which is good by the way and keeps the suppliers on their toes) and NVIDIA keeps all options open in return to be able to top a possible Navi2x card with 16 GB memory expansion with 20 GB later. And does anyone still remember the mysterious SKU20 between the GeForce RTX 3080 and RTX 3090? If AMD doesn’t screw it up again this time, this SKU20 is sure to become a tie-break in pixel tennis. We’ll see. For a long time I have been wrestling with myself, which is probably the most important thing in this test. I have also tested 8K resolutions, but due to the lack of current practical relevance, I put this part on the back burner. If anyone can find someone who has a spare 8K TV, I’ll be happy to do so, if only because I’m also very interested in 8K-DLSS. But that’s like sucking on an ice cream that you’ve only printed out on a laser printer before. The increase in value of the RTX 3090 in relation to the RTX 3080 for the only gamer is, up to the memory extension, to be rather neglected and one understands also, why many critics will never pay the double price for 10 to 15% more gaming performance. Because I wouldn’t either. Only this is then exactly the target group for the circulated RTX 3080 (Ti) with double memory expansion. Their price should increase visibly in comparison to the 10 GB variant, but still be significantly below that of a GeForce RTX 3090. This is not defamatory or fraudulent, but simply follows the laws of the market. A top dog always costs a little more than pure scaling, logic and reason would allow. And the non-gamer or the not-only-gamer? The added value can be seen above all in the productive area, whether workstation or creation. Studio is the new GeForce RTX wonderland away from the Triple A games, and the Quadros can slowly return to the professional corner of certified specialty programs. What AMD started back then with the Vega Frontier Edition and unfortunately didn’t continue (why not?), NVIDIA has long since taken up and consistently perfected. The market has changed and studio is no longer an exotic phrase. Then even those from about 1500 Euro can survive without a headache tablet again.
RTX 3080 was heralded by many as an excellent value graphics card, delivering performance gains of around 30% compared to the RTX 2080 Ti, despite being several hundred pounds cheaper. With the RTX 3090, Nvidia isn’t chasing value for money, but the overall performance crown. And that is exactly what it has achieved. MSI’s RTX 3090 Gaming X Trio, for instance, is 14% faster than the RTX 3080 and 50% faster than the RTX 2080 Ti, when tested at 4K. No other GPU even comes close to matching its performance. At this point, many of you reading this may be thinking something along the line of ‘well, yes, it is 14% faster than an RTX 3080 – but it is also over double the price, so surely it is terrible value?’ And you would be 100% correct in thinking that. The thing is, Nvidia knows that too – RTX 3090 is simply not about value for money, and if that is something you prioritise when buying a new graphics card, don’tbuy a 3090. Rather, RTX 3090 is purely aimed at those who don’t give a toss about value. It’s for the gamers who want the fastest card going, and they will pay whatever price to claim those bragging rights. In this case of the MSI Gaming X Trio, the cost of this GPU’s unrivalled performance comes to £1530 here in the UK. Alongside gamers, I can also see professionals or creators looking past its steep asking price. If the increased render performance of this GPU could end up saving you an hour, two hours per week, for many that initial cost will pay for itself with increased productivity, especially if you need as much VRAM as you can get.
As with any launch, the primary details are in the GPU itself, and so the first half of this conclusion is the same for both of the AIB RTX 3090 graphics cards that we are reviewing today. If you want to know specifics of this particular card, skip down the page. Last week we saw the release of the RTX 3080. A card that combined next-gen performance with a remarkably attractive price point, and was one of the easiest products to recommend we've ever seen. 4K gaming for around the £700 mark might be expensive if you're just used to consoles, but if you're a diehard member of the "PC Gaming Master Race", then you know how much you had to spend to achieve the magical 4K60 mark. It's an absolute no brainer purchase. The RTX 3090 though, that comes with more asterisks and caveats than a Lance Armstrong win on the Tour de France. Make no mistake; the RTX 3090 is brutally fast. If performance is your thing, or performance without consideration of cost, or you want to flex on forums across the internet, then yeah, go for it. For everyone else, and that's most of us, there is a lot it does well, but it's a seriously niche product. We can go to Nvidia themselves for their key phraseology. With a tiny bit of paraphrasing, they say "The RTX 3090 is for 8K gaming, or heavy workload content creators. For 4K Gaming the RTX 3080 is, with current and immediate future titles, more than enough". If you want the best gaming experience, then as we saw last week, the clear choice is the RTX 3080. If you've been following the results today then clearly the RTX 3090 isn't enough of a leap forwards to justify being twice the price of the RTX 3080. It's often around 5% faster, sometimes 10%, sometimes not much faster at all. Turns out that Gears 5 in particular looked unhappy but it was an 'auto' setting on animation increasing its own settings so we will go back with it fixed to ultra and retest. The RTX 3090 is still though, whisper it, a bit of a comedown after the heights of our first Ampere experience. To justify the staggering cost of the RTX 3090 you need to fit into one of the following groups; Someone who games at 8K, either natively or via Nvidia's DSR technology. Someone who renders enormous amounts of 3D work. We're not just talking a 3D texture or model for a game; we're talking animated short films. Although even here the reality is that you need a professional solution far beyond the price or scope of the RTX 3090. Lastly, it would be best if you were someone who renders massive, RAW, 8K video footage regularly and has the memory and storage capacity to feed such a voracious data throughput. If you fall into one of those categories, then you'll already have the hardware necessary - 8K screen or 8K video camera - that the cost of the RTX 3090 is small potatoes. In which case you'll love the extra freedom and performance it can bring to your workload, smoothing out the waiting that is such a time-consuming element of the creative process. This logic holds true for both the Gigabyte and MSI cards we're looking at on launch.
There’s no doubt that the $1,500 GeForce RTX 3090 is indeed a “big ferocious GPU,” and the most powerful consumer graphics card ever created. The Nvidia Founders Edition delivers unprecedented performance for 4K gaming, frequently maxes out games at 1440p, and can even play at ludicrous 8K resolution in some games. It’s a beast for 3440x1440 ultrawide gaming too, as our separate ultrawide benchmarks piece shows. Support for HDMI 2.1 and AV1 decoding are delicious cherries on top. If you’re a pure gamer, though, you shouldn’t buy it, unless you’ve got deep pockets and want the best possible gaming performance, value be damned. The $700 GeForce RTX 3080 offers between 85 and 90 percent of the RTX 3090’s 4K gaming performance (depending on the game) for well under half the cost. It’s even closer at 1440p. If you’re only worried about raw gaming frame rates, the GeForce RTX 3080 is by far the better buy, because it also kicks all kinds of ass at 4K and high refresh rate 1440p and even offers the same HDMI 2.1 and AV1 decode support as its bigger brother. Nvidia likes to boast that the RTX 3090 is the first 8K gaming card, and while that’s true in some games, it falls far short of the 60 frames per second mark in many triple-A titles. Consider 8K gaming a nice occasional bonus more than a core feature. If you mix work and play, though, the GeForce RTX 3090 is a stunning value—especially if your workloads tap into CUDA. It’s significantly faster than the previous-gen RTX 2080 Ti, which fell within spitting distance of the RTX Titan, and offers the same 24GB VRAM capacity of that Titan. But it does so for $1,000 less than the RTX Titan’s cost. The GeForce RTX 3090 stomps all over most of our content creation benchmarks. Performance there is highly workload-dependent, of course, but we saw speed increases of anywhere from 30 to over 100 percent over the RTX 2080 Ti in several tasks, with many falling in the 50 to 80 percent range. That’s an uplift that will make your projects render tangibly faster—putting more money in your pocket. The lofty 24GB of GDDR6X memory makes the RTX 3090 a must-have in some scenarios where the 10GB to 12GB found in standard gaming cards flat-out can’t cut it, such as 8K media editing or AI training with large data sets. That alone will make it worth buying for some people, along with the NVLink connector that no other RTX 30-series GPU includes. If you don’t need those, the RTX 3080 comes close to the RTX 3090 in raw GPU power in many tests.
NVIDIA’s GeForce RTX 3090 is an interesting card for many reasons, and it’s harder to summarize than the RTX 3080 was, simply due to its top-end price and goals. The RTX 3080, priced at $699, was really easy to recommend to anyone wanting a new top-end gaming solution, because compared to the last-gen 2080S, 2080 Ti, or even TITAN RTX, the new card simply trounced them all. The GeForce RTX 3090, with its $1,499 price tag, caters to a different crowd. First, there are going to be those folks who simply want the best gaming or creator GPU possible, regardless of its premium price. We saw throughout our performance results that the RTX 3090 does manage to take a healthy lead in many cases, but the gains over RTX 3080 are not likely as pronounced as many were hoping. The biggest selling-point of the RTX 3090 is undoubtedly its massive frame buffer. For creators, having 24GB on tap likely means you will never run out during this generation, and if you manage to, we’re going to be mighty impressed. We do see more than 24GB being useful for deep-learning and AI research, but even there, it’s plenty for the vast majority of users. Interestingly, this GeForce is capable of taking advantage of NVLink, so those wanting to plug two of them into a machine could likewise combine their VRAM, activating a single 48GB frame buffer. Two of these cards would cost $500 more than the TITAN RTX, and obliterate it in rendering and deep-learning workloads (but of course draw a lot more power at the same time). For those wanting to push things even harder with single GPU, we suspect NVIDIA will likely release a new TITAN at some point with even more memory. Or, that’s at least our hope, because we don’t want to see the TITAN series just up and disappear. For gamers, a 24GB frame buffer can only be justified if you’re using top-end resolutions. Not even 4K is going to be problematic for most people with a 10GB frame buffer, but as we move up the scale, to 5K and 8K, that memory is going to become a lot more useful. By now, you likely know whether or not the monstrous GeForce RTX 3090 is for you. Fortunately, if it isn’t, the RTX 3080 hasn’t gone anywhere, and it still proves to be of great value (you know – if you can find it in stock) for its $699 price. NVIDIA also has a $499 RTX 3070 en route next month, so all told, the company is going to be taking good care of its enthusiast fans with this trio of GPUs. Saying that, we still look forward to the even lower-end parts, as those could ooze value even more than the bigger cards.
Still, the performance offered by the RTX 3090 is impressive; the Gaming X is 53% faster than RTX 2080 Ti, 81% faster than RTX 2080 Super. AMD's Radeon RX 5700 XT is less than half as fast, the performance uplift vs the 3090 is 227%! AMD Big Navi better be a success. With those performance numbers RTX 3090 is definitely suited for 4K resolution gaming. Many games will run over 90 FPS, at highest details, in 4K, nearly all over 60, only Control is slightly below that, but DLSS will easily boost FPS beyond that. With RTX 3090 NVIDIA is introducing "playable 8K", which rests on several pillars. In order to connect an 8K display you previously had to use multiple cables, now you can use just a single HDMI 2.1 cable. At higher resolution, the VRAM usage goes up, RTX 3090 has you covered, offering 24 GB of memory, which is more than twice that of the 10 GB RTX 3080. Last but not least, on the software side, they added the capability to capture 8K gameplay with Shadow Play. In order to improve framerates (remember, 8K processes 16x the pixels as Full HD), NVIDIA created DLSS 8K, which renders the game at 1440p native, and scales the output by x3, in each direction, using machine learning. All of these technologies are still in its infancy, game support is limited and displays are expensive, we'll look into this in more detail in the future. 24 GB VRAM is definitely future-proof, but I'm having doubts whether you really need that much memory. Sure, more is always better, but unless you are using professional applications, you'll have a hard time finding a noteworthy difference between performance with 10 GB vs 24 GB. Games won't be an issue, because you'll run out of shading power long before you run out of VRAM, just like with older cards today, which can't handle 4K, no matter how much VRAM they have. Next-gen consoles also don't have as much VRAM, so it's hard to image that you'll miss out on any meaningful gaming experience if you have less than 24 GB VRAM. NVIDIA demonstrated several use cases in their reviewer's guide: OctaneRender, DaVinci Resolve and Blender can certainly benefit from more memory, GPU compute applications, too, but these are very niche use cases. I'm not aware of any creators who were stuck and couldn't create, because they ran out of VRAM. On the other hand the RTX 3090 could definitely turn out to be a good alternative to Quadro, or Tesla, unless you need double-precision math (you don't). Pricing of the RTX 3090 is just way too high, and a tough pill to swallow. At a starting price of $1500, it is more than twice as expensive as the RTX 3080, but not nearly twice as fast. MSI asking another $100 on top for their fantastic Gaming X Trio cooler, plus the overclock out of the box doesn't seem that unreasonable to me. We're talking about 6.6% here. The 6% performance increase due to factory OC / higher power limit can almost justify that, with the better cooler it's almost a no-brainer. While an additional 14 GB of GDDR6X memory aren't free, the $1500 base price still doesn't feel right. On the other hand, the card is significantly better than RTX 2080 Ti in every regard, and that sold for well over $1000, too. NVIDIA emphasizes that RTX 3090 is a Titan replacement—Titan RTX launched at $2500, so $1500 must be a steal for the new 3090. Part of the disappointment about the price is that RTX 3080 is so impressive, at such disruptive pricing. If RTX 3080 was $1000, then $1500 wouldn't feel as crazy—I would say $1000 is a fair price for the RTX 3090. Either way, Turing showed us that people are willing to pay up to have the best, and I have no doubt that all RTX 3090 cards will sell out today, just like RTX 3080. Obviously the "Recommended" award in this context is not for the average gamer. Rather it means, if you have that much money to spend, and are looking for a RTX 3090, then you should consider this card.
Let's be clear: the GeForce RTX 3090 is now the fastest GPU around for gaming purposes. It's also mostly overkill for gaming purposes, and at more than twice the price of the RTX 3080, it's very much in the category of GPUs formerly occupied by the Titan brand. If you're the type of gamer who has to have the absolute best, and price isn't an object, this is the new 'best.' For the rest of us, the RTX 3090 might be drool-worthy, but it's arguably of more interest to content creators who can benefit from the added performance and memory. We didn't specifically test any workloads where a 10GB card simply failed, but it's possible to find them — not so much in games, but in professional apps. We also weren't able to test 8K (or simulated 8K) yet, though some early results show that it's definitely possible to get the 3080 into a state where performance plummets. If you want to play on an 8K TV, the 3090 with its 24GB VRAM will be a better experience than the 3080. How many people fall into that bracket of gamers? Not many, but then again, $300 more than the previous generation RTX 2080 Ti likely isn't going to dissuade those with deep pockets. Back to the content creation bit, while gaming performance at 4K ultra was typically 10-15% faster with the 3090 than the 3080, and up to 20% faster in a few cases, performance in several professional applications was consistently 20-30% faster — Blender, Octane, and Vray all fall into this group. Considering such applications usually fall into the category of "time is money," the RTX 3090 could very well pay for itself in short order compared to the 3080 for such use cases. And compared to an RTX 2080 Ti or Titan RTX? It's not even close. The RTX 3090 often delivered more than double the rendering performance of the previous generation in Blender, and 50-90% better performance in Octane and Vray. The bottom line is that the RTX 3090 is the new high-end gaming champion, delivering truly next-gen performance without a massive price increase. If you've been sitting on a GTX 1080 Ti or lower, waiting for a good time to upgrade, that time has arrived. The only remaining question is just how competitive AMD's RX 6000, aka Big Navi, will be. Even with 80 CUs, on paper, it looks like Nvidia's RTX 3090 may trump the top Navi 2x cards, thanks to GDDR6X and the doubling down on FP32 capability. AMD might offer 16GB of memory, but it's going to be paired with a 256-bit bus and clocked quite a bit lower than 19 Gbps, which may limit performance.
I am 53 years old, have a combined $210,000 annual income, live on Long Island, NY, and work as a Project Coordinator
First, I'm sorry this is so long. Second - please be nice. We have debt, bad habits, and are Catholic. So if any of those things are going to get you spun up, just skip this one. Section One: Assets and Debt Use this section to explain your current financial picture at large. Everything here is joint – “M” and I have been married 22 years and we’ve had “smashed money” that whole time (and really for about a year before that). Retirement Balance (and how you got there): Approximately $500,000 in a variety of IRAs and current 401(k)s. Equity if you're a homeowner (and how much you put down and how you accumulated that payment). Bought our house in 2001 for $239,000 with 20% down (some aggressive saving and a gift from each of our parents). We refinanced, took some cash out for some home repairs, and reduced it to a 15-year loan in 2009 – our current equity would be about $195,000, but similar homes in the neighborhood are listed at $475,000-$525,000, so if we ever sell, we’re probably coming out ahead. Savings account balance: $6,000 Checking account balance: $6,500 Credit card debt (and how you accumulated it): I hope you’re sitting down. Approximately $40,000. Yes, you read that right. How we accumulated it? The house is 90 years old and constantly falling apart, so we’ve had to charge things that needed to be done (some we wanted to have done, but some – like the time our oil burner stopped working in December – were needs). We had two dogs with numerous medical issues – I don’t want to calculate what they cost me, but they each had surgeries that were about $5,000 (each), plus other chronic and acute medical issues. And yes…for a while, we were doing and buying things we probably shouldn’t have (not bad things, just vacations, clothes, and non-essential home improvements) So…when I’m 100 and greeting people at Wal-Mart, I’ll at least have some good memories. That said, I can’t tell you the last time I used credit – if we can’t afford to pay cash, we don’t do it (and I say that fully realizing most people would feel that I shouldn’t do anything). Student loan debt (for what degree): None – my husband went to the military and then to work after high school and I went back to community college later in life and paid as I went. Anything else that's applicable to you: If my ex-husband dies before me, I’ll have about $6,000 in a money market that he must have forgotten about. When we divorced, he was supposed to liquidate all those accounts and give me half. He was an accountant and a SOB, so I never knew exactly what we had, but what I got seemed accurate (it paid for furniture, my wedding to M and part of this house, so I was OK with it). Lo and behold, a couple years ago, I found out we still have this money market account in both names. I tried to find him so we could liquidate/split it, but he’s missing. I get the statements here now, and the good part is he’s older than me, so I’m holding out hope he predeceases me and it will be mine. Section Two: Income Income Progression: I've been working in my field for a year and a half, my starting salary was $100,000. I did a salary story with the entire progression – long story short, I’ve made more, and I’ve made less, but this is probably about the average of the last five years. My husband has been at his job for 14 years – he started there making around $75,000 and now makes $110,000. They usually give him a $10,000 bonus at the end of the year, but are always crying poverty if people ask for a raise. Prior to that, he worked for a company that paid very well and he had a 15-minute commute, but he got out one step ahead of their bankruptcy. Main Job Monthly Take Home: Me: $5,152 J: $6,230 Side Gig Monthly Take Home: M is paid $1,300/month by our parish for serving as Youth Minister. Any Other Monthly Income: $16.00 I get quarterly dividends on stock I was given when I was born (I may not have been born into money, but apparently my grandparents had friends who thought this was a good baby gift). The last few were around $50, so I divided by 3. Section Three: Expenses Rent / Mortgage / HOA fees (please specify how you split it if living with a partner): $3,043, which includes the property taxes and homeowner's insurance Savings contribution: $500/month without fail (my bank transfers $100 if we get over $500 in, so once each paycheck and once when we put the church check in). More if I feel the savings needs a boost. Debt payments:
Credit card #1: $350/month (this is about twice the minimum)
Credit card #2: $375/month (minimum payment)
Credit card #3: $200/month (minimum payment - this is the next one getting whacked when #1 is paid off)
Donations: OK – anyone who isn’t screaming because I owe $40K is going to start now.
$300/month to the church in the “collection basket” (it’s electronic, but same diff)
$100/month to the church building fund (last year of a five-year pledge, thankfully – if I hadn’t promised to pay it, I wouldn’t)
$25/month to Habitat for Humanity
$20/month to Citymeals on Wheels
~$50/month to various other charities
~$100/month in food for the church food drive (we don’t have a food pantry, but collect food every week and anyone from the neighborhood can come take some. The rest is donated to several food pantries and soup kitchens in the Diocese).
As far as volunteer hours, M and I both teach Religious Ed. I'm on the Parish Council and co-social media manager of the parish (basically, I schedule Facebook). M also videotapes the 5:00 Mass and the children’s worship message each week and uploads it to the parish YouTube channel.
Electric: $110 Gas (stove/hot water): $50 Oil: $250/month in the winter Wifi/Cable: $179 Cellphone: $252 for both of us (I get mine expensed except $26 for my phone payment) Subscriptions:
$.99/month for iCloud Storage
$545/month for life insurance for both of us, plus $202 quarterly for the life insurance policies we took out when we bought the house
$17/month for NY Times online
$10.86/month for Ring video doorbell
$12.99/month for Netflix
$9.99/month for Spotify (I think M gets reimbursed for this, because he has it for Youth Ministry)
$119/year for Amazon Prime (yes, I know, I am an awful person)
Car payment / insurance: $295/month for my car (leased). My husband is driving a 10-year old car that is paid off. $128/month for auto insurance Lawn care: $50/month Commuting: Now that we’re in COVID times, I’ve been buying a 10-trip off peak railroad ticket every five days for $78.75. Pre-COVID, M and I each bought a monthly ticket for $270, and I took the subway most days for an additional $100/month. I fill up the car about once a month (~$36) and M fills his about every other week (~$70/month) Saturday, September 26, 2020 7:45 am: Up and at ‘em! I get up, get coffee, check emails and social media and start the day. 8:00 am: M leaves the house for a long list of errands, the payment for which will be shown below. I put in a load of laundry and discover…a leak! There is a large pipe between our powder room sink (which I used when I woke up) and the outside world that runs through the basement and is apparently leaking. Yay whee. If you get one thing from this diary, let it be these words of wisdom – don’t buy an old house! No beautiful feature is worth the aggravation! I get the water (I hope it’s water) cleaned up, a load of laundry in, take a shower, do some picking up around the house, get dressed in a Rangers t-shirt and cut off distressed jeans, do my makeup (Olay microsculpting serum and Miracle Blur over the bottom of my face, pink, gray, and violet eyeshadows, a swipe of foundation under my eyes, black eyeliner, black mascara, and dark brown eye pencil. This is standard everyday makeup for me and will be repeated each day. I put volumizing mousse in my hair and blow dry it (also routine). In the meantime, M gets a haircut ($30 including tip), sets up the video equipment at church, goes to CVS for passport photos that he needs for an application ($18.87), and goes to the religious goods store for a book of the Liturgy of the Hours ($42.31). He is starting formation for the diaconate (the process of becoming a Deacon in the Catholic Church) today, and they said he’ll need that book. He also needs the photos for his application, and he stops at the bank for two money orders – one to send with the background check request and one for his high school transcript ($26). On the way home, he picks up breakfast (brunch?) for us – classic New York BEC, SPK (bacon, egg, and cheese on a roll with salt, pepper and ketchup) for him and egg whites, turkey and swiss cheese on a whole wheat wrap for me ($10.78), as well as cigs for him and vape cartridges for me ($36). The washing machine isn’t causing any additional leakage, so I move the wash to the dryer and start moving the winter clothes from the portable closet in front of the leaking pipe upstairs (they’re not wet, but we’re going to have to move the closet when the plumber comes). After eating the egg sandwiches, we get changed for deacon class – I look like a good church lady in black slacks, a black and white flowered shirt with a black tank underneath, and black sandals with a chunky 2.5” heel. M goes with the classic golf shirt and dockers. While we’re getting changed, he mentions he needs new underwear, so I whip out the phone and order him some ($18.64). 6:30 pm: Home from deacon class and Mass and the groceries show up! I ordered them yesterday, but I don’t think the charge went through till today, so here goes. Asparagus, broccoli, celery, bananas, cucumber, lime, grape tomatoes, peaches, carrots, potatoes, spinach, lettuce, zucchini, frozen burgers, ground turkey, chicken breasts, whole chicken, fried chicken and a pot pie for J’s lunches, yogurt, sugar free pumpkin spice creamer (YES! I’ve been looking for it for weeks!), milk, heavy cream, OJ, k-cups, frozen green beans, cauliflower rice, stuffing mix, microwave rice, cake mix (the good ones were on sale), chicken broth, potato chips, and trash bags. Spent $154.95 including delivery, saved $14.50 (very low for me), tipped the delivery guy $10. 7:00 pm: After putting away all that food, what do we do? If you guessed order dinner, you’d be right! I don’t cook on Saturday unless we’re having company. We order from a new taco place – three each and “Mexican wings”. The wings were meh, but the tacos ranged from good to outstanding. $53.78 including tip. After dinner, M starts post-production of the Mass video and I do some laundry, watch the NASCAR race and the hockey game, and play games on my iPad. Remember, you’ll be old someday too! 11:00 pm: I go to the basement to pick up laundry and remember I wanted to order a new garden flag (this isn’t as random as it sounds – all my seasonal decorations are stored in the basement). I have had a cart set up for days with two garden flags ($6.99 each) and four magnetic mailbox covers for my parents for Christmas ($11.99 each) – they’ve talked about having a different one for each season, and I saw them when I was looking for a garden flag. Total with tax and free shipping: $61.94. I love Christmas and generally spend way too much on gifts so I’m trying to start shopping before December and at least spread out the pain. We went to a crafts fair a few weeks ago and I picked up a few things and now I’ve got this done – go me!! 12:30 pm: The hockey game is over (2 OT!) and I go to bed. M is napping waiting for his video production to finish. Daily Total: $463.27 Sunday, September 27 7:00 am: The alarm goes off – ugh. It’s the first day of Religious Ed (virtual, but I have to do a 9:45 zoom with my 4th graders). Coffee, social media, shower, dress, makeup. Put on a black eyelet dress because we’re going back to church today so M can videotape First Communion. Do the usual makeup/hair thing. 10:30 am: My 4th graders are great and we’re ready to roll (M has on a shirt and tie in honor of the First Communion), and we’re off to Mass. Drop off the food I bought for our food pantry last week and help him video. Of course, the kids are adorable! 12:00 noon: We’re starving after church, so we stop at our favorite local pizza place on the way home. Get a variety of slices for $22.62, including a tip (we’re getting it to go, but I’m tipping everywhere, because I know restaurants have been hurt badly by the pandemic. These folks are in NYC and still haven’t opened inside dining.) 1:30 pm: Ate, ran more laundry, changed into the jeans I wore yesterday and a Yankees t-shirt and call the nail place. Of all my expenses, nails are probably the most non-negotiable – I’ve been getting my nails done for 40 years, and when I couldn’t do so during the lockdown, I was miserable. They can take me right away, which makes me happy. 3:00 pm: All 20 nails done – gel on the fingers and a regular pedicure with callus removal ($75 plus $15 tip = $90). I went with an autumn theme and got copper on the fingers and bronze toes – the nail polish looked in the jar like it would match the toes, but it doesn’t. Stop at CVS for eye cream (Olay for tired eyes) and mascara (L’Oreal Voluminous) - $27 with coupons. M asked me to pick up cigs on the way home, so I do, as well as vape cartridges, which I don’t technically need yet, but it will save a trip later in the week ($36). 3:30 pm: While at the nail place, I saw that one of our favorite local restaurants had a fire, which consumed an entire block of restaurants and small businesses. The Chamber of Commerce is doing a GoFundMe, and I donate $25 to the cause - $28.75 including the charge. I also notice that the weekly charge for my church donation went through ($75). 11:30 pm: Took a quick nap (the highlight of my week every week), put some fall decorations out, had our family Zoom call, laundry, got the end of the winter clothes moved upstairs, had dinner (roast chicken, stuffing, mashed potatoes, and roasted asparagus), made an apple crisp (I’m not a huge dessert person but M is and I like making desserts, so it works), watched baseball, football, the NASCAR race, and basketball, and took a quick shower. Bring a Light & Fit Toasted Coconut Vanilla yogurt (the best!) to bed, finish my book (“Next Stop, Chancey”) and find the next in the series on my iPad – I’ve read them all before, but I’m in the mood for something cozy, especially after reading about the Current Occupant’s taxes – ugh!) , and turn off the lights around midnight. Daily Total: $279.37 Monday, September 28 6:45 am: I work from home M/W/F and so I can sleep in. Relatively speaking, anyway. Get dressed in a sleeveless top and shorts (despite the fall decorations, fall nails, and roast chicken/apple crisp, it feels rather summery out there), do makeup, have some coffee and scroll through emails/socials, move yet another load of laundry (I’m trying to get it all done before the plumber comes), find the number for the plumber and give it to M to call, get the trash out, and boil some eggs for breakfast this week. I’m sitting in front of the computer by 8:15, which is ok (technically, my hours are 8:30-5:30 – it’s usually more like 8:30-6:00, and on WFH days, starting at 7:30 is not unheard of). M drops off the car at the shop – I think I forgot to mention this, but he mentioned yesterday that when he was driving around Saturday, there was a grinding noise when he backed up. More joy to come, I’m sure. 9:45 am: I hear M on the phone with the garage – apparently, they can get a used part and do the job for $450. Not great, but it’s better than it might have been! He works from home basically every day except when he has to see customers, but thankfully we’re separated enough that we can hear each other but it’s not intrusive. 10:30 am: Between cursing at people on the phone, M calls the plumber and I grab some cheese and more coffee! I’d tell you about my job, but honestly, it’s not worth talking about. Basically, I go to meetings, take notes on meetings, and send follow-ups (I do other things, but that’s most of it). When I get off my 11:00 am meeting, I’ll find out when the plumber is coming. You guys are getting a much more exciting week than I expected! 12:30 pm: What a miserable day – it seems like everyone is annoyed! Take a break to eat a slice of leftover pizza and a Diet Coke (M finishes some rotisserie chicken from last week). He says the plumber may come today to look at the situation but can’t do the work till tomorrow. 6:00 pm: Keep my head down and get some work done in the afternoon and knock off for the day. Run downstairs and make dinner – “tacos” with strips of beef grilled with Korean barbecue sauce, shredded cabbage, cheddar cheese, pineapple salsa, cucumber slices, and lime inside warmed tortillas. Delicious, if I say so myself! 7:30 pm: I get on a Zoom faith sharing meeting and M gets on a Zoom religious ed class. 11:59 pm: Contemplated Sunday’s Gospel with my small group, watched Tampa Bay win the Stanley Cup, took a shower and set clothes out for tomorrow, and off to bed. M picked up the car after Religious Ed. Daily Total: $450.00 Tuesday, September 29 5:45 am: Ugh. Up and out – I’m wearing a green dress with a black jacket and have black slingbacks in my bag. I have to walk 30 short blocks and five long blocks once I get off the train, so I’m traveling light. I used to take the subway to my office, but since COVID, I try to limit that as much as possible. 7:45 am: Off the railroad and walk uptown. I actually don’t mind the walk, because when I WFH, I walk very little – at the beginning of the lockdown, I had a nice walking routine, but lately the work seems to start the minute I wake up, so walking to work takes care of getting in those STEPS! I forgot my boiled eggs and I’m starving, so I end up buying an egg sandwich. $5.43 12:30 pm: Because I only go to the city twice a week and I have to walk uptown with all my work stuff, I don’t bring lunch often (pre-pandemic, I used to bring breakfast and lunch every day, but I also took the subway). Decide to run to Pret and my boss and co-worker both ask me to pick something up. Of course, no one (including me) has anything but a $20, so they both say they’ll get me next time. I get my favorite chicken parm wrap and a Diet Coke. $32 12:45 pm: I look at my personal email and discover that J’s car registration needs to be renewed. Hop on the DMV website and take care of that. $158.50. I also realize I never took out the sausages for tonight’s dinner and call M to ask him to do so. He mentions the plumber has still not shown up. 5:45 pm: Leave a little early to get to the Fed Ex office and make my train home. I’m a little later than I’d like to be and it’s raining, so I get the subway, which is thankfully empty, reasonably clean, and quick. $2.75 7:15 pm: M picks me up at the train station and mentions that he was so busy working that he didn’t take the sausages out. He asks me what I want to eat and we end up at Wendy’s. Cheeseburger, fries, and (surprise, surprise) a Diet Coke. He gets the same thing, but bigger. $19.75 11:30 pm: Avoid the debate by watching the Yankees pound the Indians. Usual routine (plus ironing a shirt for J, because he has to go to a customer tomorrow) and off to sleep. I’m up to Book 3 in the Chancey series, for those keeping score. Daily Total: $218.43 Wednesday, September 29 5:30 am: Double ugh. Woke up to use the bathroom and couldn’t get back to sleep, so here we are. Get dressed (long-sleeved Yankees t-shirt, straight leg jeans), do the face, have some coffee, and try to avoid the fact that my boss sent me an email at 11:00 pm last night looking for changes to a document, which I said I would do today. Get the trash out, pick up a little around the house, and get to work by 7:00. OH, and despite the lack of plumber and his lack of general motivation, M moved the plastic closet…in front of the washing machine! Glad I bought him underwear, because I won’t be doing laundry any time soon. Now I’m wondering if he looked at the menu (I am an obsessive meal planner and post it on the fridge weekly) and that’s why he didn’t take the sausages out – he’s avoiding zoodles! He can run but he can’t hide – I have zucchini and I’m going to spiralize it sooner or later! 8:00 am: The document my boss needed is out, the agenda for our 9:00 am meeting is done, the morning emails are sorted (for now), and I got a link to our parish survey up on the Facebook page, so I make an egg and cheese on a tortilla and eat at my desk. 12:50 pm: Wednesday is conference call hell – I have recurring calls every Wednesday at 9:00, 10:30, and 11:30, and the added fun today of a 10:00. There’s also a webinar every Wednesday that I try to tune into. Grab some chips and a Diet Coke and go check it out. 2:15 pm: Still no damn plumber, but I’ll let M worry about that when he’s home tomorrow. My garden flags arrived, so that’s good. Hoping to get out and put the pumpkin one out before it gets dark, but the way today is going, that might not actually happen. However, I realize I never put dinner in the crockpot. Luckily, it only takes 3-4 hours on high, so I take care of that. It’s Tuscan Chicken with sun-dried tomatoes and spinach. By 2:30, I’m back at my desk with another Diet Coke and hard at it. Nightmares of rescheduling meetings, missing documents, etc. 6:45 pm: Still at my desk! OK, I took some time to send an email to the parish webmaster about the survey, update this, and read the R29 money diary of the day. But overall, I’ve been working with no apparent end in sight – I could easily be here all night, but I won’t be because (a) I’m falling asleep at my desk and (b) I have a 7:30 Religious Ed teachers meeting. Hopefully I won’t fall asleep during that. Make a list of things for my boss and I to review tomorrow and finish prepping dinner. 7:15 pm: Dinner was delicious – we had the chicken with rice for M and cauliflower rice for me, sautéed broccoli, and a basic salad (bagged spring mix, cherry tomatoes, cucumber). Now off to Zoom! 11:45 pm: The Yankees game is still on, but I’m showered, my clothes are set out for tomorrow, and I’m fading. Turn off the light and hope for a win. Daily Total: $0.00 (bet you didn’t see that coming!) Thursday, October 1 5:45 am: You know it…ugh. Get up, coffee, very quick scroll through the Yankees score/e-mail/social media. Get dressed in a black v-neck sweater, black and gray plaid skirt, and black jacket (not the same one I wore the other day). Am grateful the skirt fits – I gained some weight and am trying to resist buying clothes. Make sure I have the right shoes in my bag – I’m wearing high-heeled gray suede Mary Janes today. 8:15 am: At my desk and ready to go – I remembered to bring 2 hard-boiled eggs today, which I eat with coffee while looking through emails. 12:30 pm: Call after call after call, but I have a half-hour to eat. Run to the fancy buffet place that just re-opened for 2 meatballs, brussels sprouts, broccoli, salad, and the inevitable Diet Coke ($15.75). Manage to eat before my 1:00 pm call – go me! 3:30 pm: Leave to go to a job site and pick something up that has to be shipped to Italy. Something that's almost as tall as me, but thankfully not heavy. Taxi down there because I’m in a hurry and I can get reimbursed ($14.04, including tip), expensed. 4:00 pm: I get a cab to the Fed Ex office – thankfully the first one I see is a minivan, so I fit in just fine ($12.74, including tip), expensed. 5:30 pm: Well, that was harder than it needed to be – the Fed Ex office I went to didn’t have a box that would fit the item, so they suggested another Fed Ex office about 6 blocks away, so I had to walk through midtown Manhattan carrying an object almost as tall as me (it's 5' long and I'm 5'3" tall) while dodging oblivious people. Thankfully, the other office had my box, and they were super-sweet and helpful, but it took them forever to get it done. Bought the box and bubble wrap, which will be expensed (I brought the Fed Ex label, but I don’t remember the account number) ($43.54). Get a nice early train home, though! 6:45 pm: Wow, we’re eating when I’m usually getting the train! Cheeseburgers, tots (tater for J, cauliflower for me), green beans, and vinegar coleslaw with the end of the shredded cabbage. Get the kitchen cleaned and the dishwasher run and settle in to watch the Jets – I’m not holding out much hope, but you never know! 11:30 pm: I’ve showered, set out clothes for me and M (he’s seeing customers tomorrow), I prepped for Youth Group, which I’m leading because he’ll be working, and the Jets are winning, so I decide it’s time to sleep. Up to Book 5 of the Chancey series. I find series usually go downhill after about the third or fourth book, but I’m not sure what I feel like reading, so here we are. OH, at some point M must have gone to the convenience store, because there are vape cartridges on the table ($36). Daily Total: $122.07; $70.32 expensed Friday, October 02, 2020 6:00 am: Wake up, grab coffee, find out the Jets lost after all, do the morning e-mail/social media scroll. Leaving early to deal with that work errand has left me with a ton of stuff to do, so I get dressed (long-sleeved v-neck gray t-shirt, white tank because the v-neck is halfway to my belly button, dark wash skinny jeans), put out the trash, peel two hard-boiled eggs, and head to my desk. 12:30 pm: As always, call after call after call. Plus a bit of aggravation when my boss asks me at 10:30 for an agenda for the 11:00 call, which I sent him at about 7:30, and which he returns at 10:59 with the formatting looking like nothing on earth. Yay whee! And a project was mentioned that he forgot to tell me I’d do. So in case I thought I’d have nothing to do (that never happens on Fridays), that’s not happening. Anyway, between calls, I run downstairs for the lunch of champions – a Hot Pocket and a Diet Coke. Just that kind of day. 6:15 pm: Realize I have to run Youth Group at 7 and I haven’t even done my haimakeup. Get that done, heat up some frozen cauliflower rice/broccoli/cheese combination and add some leftover chicken. With a green salad on the side, surprisingly yummy. 8:15 pm: I am not a good youth leader…couldn’t get anyone talking about the subject of the day, which I thought would be a good one. I did make them laugh a few times, so that’s something. M is going to have some expenses because he went to see customers today, but I don’t know what they are and his company will reimburse him, so I’m just leaving them out. Daily Total: $0.00 This is the Week That Was: Food + Drink: $326.06 Fun / Entertainment: $108 (if people can put drugs in as entertainment, I’m putting our nicotine in) Home + Health: $61.94 Clothes + Beauty: $165.64 Transport: $638.03 (some of it will be expensed) Other: $234.47 Lastly, reflect on your diary! How do you feel about your spending? Was this a normal week for you? Has this inspired you to make changes or has it given you a “wow I’m doing pretty good” confidence boost? Is there anything you’re actively working on? No need to answer any or all these questions but just use this space to write any thoughts you have! This was a fairly normal week except for the car breaking and needing to be registered – we're saving some now that we WFH more because M will not bring food from home, but I used to bring breakfast and lunch at least four days a week. I know we should make changes, but I also know we don’t want to – honestly, if you looked at the way I lived 15 years ago, I’ve made a lot of changes already. We’re working on the credit cards – I’ve gotten rid of several already (paid off, not just moved balances around) and we don’t use them at all anymore (I can honestly say I don’t remember the last thing I charged). The bad news is that M’s car is on its last legs, and so I see car payments in our future. Hopefully, he’ll get something used – we have my car when we want to look good going somewhere (mine isn’t super-fancy, it just wasn’t hit by a bus and full of stuff for his job). OH, and the plumber still hasn’t shown up! But that will be for next week’s expenses.
My First 6 Months in IT - What to expect in YOUR Journey - Featuring advice on CVs/Resumes, Interviews, Certificates and training, and how to handle being laid off.
My Experience in IT after 6 months, What Can You Expect? Hi all, I recently read a on r\ITCareerQuestions about being frustrated with all of the posts asking for help. This in part, is a response to that. Fair warning – this is going to be a long one (slightly over 5000 words), strap yourself in or get out while you can, you have been warned! I have tried to break it up into sections, so feel free to skip to parts that interest you. I will happily answer all questions, PLEASE feel free to DM me. I will help anyone with resources that I used, and advice on best career pathways. Who is this post for? I think this post is going to be for you if you fit into any of the following categories. If you are looking to break in to IT and you haven’t even taken your first step, if you have been studying for certificates and you want to know if it is all going to be worth it (is there a light at the end of this tunnel). Maybe you want to know what your first 6 months in IT are going to be like. Maybe you want realistic salary expectations and you don’t want to ask a salesman or the guy driving an expensive car. Maybe you have been a lurker on this thread and you’ve seen all the conflicting advice. Perhaps you have sent out 400 job applications and had no bites. Maybe you have had 20 interviews and no one has given you a chance. My point being there are many steps you need to take to take your “first step” or to get your foot in the door. If you are someone who is taking any one of those steps, I do recommend reading this. My Journey, two jobs, one lay-off, sleepless nights, a global pandemic and an incredible wife. When I was 28, I decided I wanted a stable and steady career. Something I didn’t have to fight 30 other younger and hungrier people for. To put this into context I once applied for an entry level market research position and I don’t mind telling you that interview experience was something I wouldn’t wish on my worst enemy. I hadn’t applied myself at university, I studied Biology, something I had no passion for and the competition in scientific research was something that you would never survive without passion. I was always exceptional at exams/learning/studying, to that end I was first in my year at university for exam results. And for that great honour I was awarded a £1000 cash scholarship prize. And being an irresponsible student I spent the entire thing (and some student overdraft) on my very first PC. I spent hundreds of hours watching Linus tech tips, and Jays2cents and how to build a PC. I was hooked, I built that PC, booted her up, and realised…. I still want to watch build videos. I genuinely found out that I loved learning about hardware. I didn’t know that about myself. I know I see a lot of backstory posts asking for help that all say “I am tech savvy, I am the techy one in the family” etc etc. So, I think these people know what I mean. By the way if you are worried that being the “techy one” isn’t valuable then you are dead wrong. It means you can learn technologies quickly and interact with user interfaces with ease. These are going be all you do for a long time in IT. You will have many user interfaces thrown at you that are custom to your company, but more on that later. Well, unfortunately, years pass me by while I take a job in biology I have no passion for, I didn’t hate my job, I got to work at a university helping students with disabilities cope with every day life. But I didn’t feel excited or driven. And then one day I was watching the UK version of the apprentice, absolute trashy TV at its finest for those that don’t know what it is. It is a competition in which people present a business plan to a billionaire and that billionaire decides if the business plan has legs. So I am watching this guy with perfect quaffed hair and teeth that would blind you, (you know the type, he works is sales and thinks the world would collapse without him) and he is pitching a Cyber security recruitment company. And he has the leading experts in the country critiquing him, and I heard the same thing over and over. IT is desperate for people, for every 10 roles in IT security, there are only 1 or 2 qualified people. I have to admit I got a little excited, nervous excited. I did something that changed my life. I googled it and made a phone call. That’s right, I spent all of 2 minutes before I was on the phone to a salesman. Let me tell you, if I could go back in time a slap myself for buying in to this pitch I would. “The average person in IT security in the UK earns £72,000”, Booom, I am hooked. You are telling me I can earn £72K and they will be desperate to have me? I won’t have to compete? It won’t be a dog fight… Where the hell do I sign up? Well spoilers for what is to come later, but no, I didn’t end up as CIO of a small company making silly money in year one. So, what were they offering me and what did it cost me? I signed up for a course that included a Microsoft Technical associate (MTA) in server fundamentals and an MTA in security fundamentals. I signed up for a Comptia certificate in Network+ and in Security+ and finally an EC council certificate in ethical hacking, called CEH. All for the price of around £3000. “Not bad” I told myself for a £72K/year job. “Not bad” I told my wife (who supported me through every single step). So, when did I first begin to have doubts? That is easy, I remember it like it was yesterday. I had this awful procrastination habit (I bet almost ALL of you do it too) I would google jobs for whatever certificate I was going to study. For me, this was the CEH. A simple “CEH Jobs” search was almost all I ever googled back then. And there were hundreds of them, decent pay too. And then one day I saw it “we are looking for real candidates, no offense to those with a CEH”. It was like a punch to the gut, but worse as my heart raced with fear. What the hell did they mean?! It was at this point I realised I might be in trouble. I am sure a lot of you feel that way now. Have I just been swindled by a Nigerian prince who just needed my bank details so he can transfer me my millions? Well yes and no. Yes I had been swindled by the promise of £72K, and yes I had been swindled by the CEH, it is one of the most expensive certificates you can get and it does make you look like an idiot to anyone in field. But no, I had not been swindled out of a career just yet. I kept my head down and I nailed my first ever certificate and I have to admit, it was the hardest things I ever studied. I would say that knowing hardware helped a bit with the server fundamentals certificate, but only for about 5-10% of the learning objectives that were focussed on hardware. The rest was like information overload. I had to learn about how servers worked and communicated. I had to learn Microsoft’s branding too, which is a feat of its own. But I did it, I finally got an IT certificate. I powered through my security MTA full steam ahead knowing I could achieve it with hard work and consistency. And that is when things got interesting. I began studying for my network+, and let me tell you, I fell in love. I began feeling like the curtains were being drawn on the way the world worked. I understood how if I sent an email, that email was carried across the country to my friends and family. However, the instructor kept saying the same thing over and over. “And if you take a CISCO course you will learn all about it”. I mean if I had a £ for every time she said it…. Well, I did it again ladies and gentleman. I went back to the same person who sold me my snake oil. And I asked if they did CCNA courses. Of course they did, for the cool price of £800. What the hell I thought, the CCNA is a “real” certificate finally. Finally, I won’t feel worry and despair at the thought of this all being in vane, because I, Jacob Smith will be a network engineer. The course was mediocre, and I found myself frustrated, so I did the unthinkable. That is right, I spend £10 on an Udemy course. I mean obviously it was going to be terrible. You would have to be an idiot to think a £10 course could be better than an £800 one. Well Neil Anderson spared no time showing me the error of my ways. His course was phenomenal. I bought the course for the first half of the CCNA, then I bought the course for the second half, and then I thought why the hell not, its only £10, I will buy the course that comes as whole package just to support him. This is the lesson I learned that day. A person can sell their 20 hour course for £10 if they know it is good enough. And then they can make more money than the predator who sells their course to desperate people for thousands. Let’s skip forward a few months. It is the last hour of the last day in which I can sit the CCNA before they retire it and change it completely. The exam went amazingly, and for those interested I used Neil Anderson’s course, and Boson netsim and boson exsim for the tools. I am done. I have finally sat the last certificate I am going to sit before I start applying for Jobs. I no longer want the CEH as I know it will just make me look bad and I don’t want to commit the hours required to learn something that will hurt me. Advice on Resumes/CVs I fire up google again and waste no time typing “professional CV templates”. Wow, CVs look incredible these days, look how pretty I can make my application. I have dedicated sections for skills, work experience, school etc. Here is lesson number two, and more important than you realise. Do NOT use these templates ever. Every recruiter that you send your CV to has some sort of CV filter on it. These CV templates are terrible for a number of reasons. Firstly, the format cannot be read by the CV filter, it doesn’t know what it’s looking at so it just bins it. If you are using one and you have sent hundreds of applications and had no bites, then I strongly recommend you read this part and do what I did. Secondly, these templates are designed for people with work experience and skills. Unfortunately that wasn’t me, I was breaking in to IT. This meant that the focus of my CV HAD to be biology, there was no way to change this. My CCNA was at the bottom of my second page under “other”. So if by some divine intervention my CV did get through to a recruiter, there was no way they would ever read I had 5 certificates. I had some of the worst and most sleepless nights of my life for the next 2 weeks. I applied to 20-40 jobs a day and heard nothing. Not a peep. It is at this point my beautiful wife lets slip that her sister is in IT recruitment. Mixed emotions is an understatement, I bounced between desperate joyous relief and utter disbelief that at no point did she think to mention this. Here is what I learned. You are not applying for a social media job, you are not applying for a graphic designer job. A recruiter reads a hundred of these a day and there is nothing that annoys them more for IT people than a fancy looking CV. Put this CV in black and white, have literally nothing but words. Don’t even break the page up with horizontal lines. Put everything IT related at the top, have a strong and promising professional statement. Focus on your certificates, focus on your lab experience. And cram that CV full of skills that you know about. You want something like this in there. DHCP, DNS, IPv4, IPv6, AD, NTFS, Switching, Routing, Wireless, STP, RIP, OSPF, EIGRP. Hyper-V, VMWare. Windows 7/8/8.1/10, Windows Server 2008/R2, 2012/R2, 2016, 2019. iOS, MacOS, Android. This along with your certificates, your goals and your passion. Along with (briefly) anything transferable from other non-IT related jobs, I am talking about customer service, high stress jobs and time sensitive roles. These skills will be valuable but they should be secondary and again I cannot stress this enough, make it brief. Your education, and non-IT related jobs should make up a small portion of the CV that follows at the end. A recruiter is going to pick your CV up and see your skills, see your certificates and personal statement and then just put it down and give you a call. I doubt they ever get to the part where you describe what working at Pizza hut was like. Round 2 of applying for jobs Once I rewrote that CV (annoyingly I had already applied to a lot of the jobs in my area with my poor CV) I sent it out. The difference was life changing. I got a call back the next day actually I got three call backs the next day. Over the next 2 weeks I got roughly 12 recruiter calls, I got three interview offers. I did 2 interviews and got offered to the next stage. The first was with a large corporate company with 1000s of employees. They IQ tested me and they told me that I would be drug tested at my interview. This was a huge red flag to me. I have never done drugs and nor would I want to. But if these people are going to greet me at the door with a mouth swab, then I hate to think what working for them would be like. I turned down their offer for a second interview. Instead I went to interview at a nearby (well not nearby 90 mile round trip commute) MSP. This was mid-March and I have never enjoyed an interview experience more in my life. The culture was very much this is a place where we have a laugh and you will love working for us. I didn’t have any red flags at the time, I just was so pleased this was all finally happening for me. We joked about football, we talked about hobbies, some IT related questions, typical interview stuff. He even joked we had a bromance going on and said, and I quote “F**k me, you know an interview is going well when its been over and hour and you haven’t noticed”. Honestly, I think my older age was an advantage here, I was 30 at this point and I am at a stage in life where I am able to hold a conversation well without being nervous or self-conscious. There are obviously going to be downsides to being 30 and starting out too, but I was happy this worked in my favour. I got a full day and a half of training (sitting behind a guy and watching him work), okay some red flags cropped up at this point. The people here didn’t seem to care very much, nor did they know a huge amount. The way the cases distribution worked was everything went to 2nd line, and they trickled down anything they didn’t want to 1st line and they pushed up what they needed to, to 3rd line. So, I got all the “my webcam isn’t working” calls, which was fair enough, I was grateful to have the job. But I had nothing in my queue that I thought “omg I have no idea what this is”. That might sound like a good thing, but it is the worst thing that can happen to your career. How are you supposed to learn how to install SSL certificates if you never have a case for it? Well I doubt it is any shock to any of you crazy enough to still be reading, but I after a mindblowing 14 days, I was put on furlough (not sure if Americans have this, but it means temporarily laid off). It seriously makes you question why they hired someone that they laid off 14 days later, but that follows with the “everything is a laugh” attitude I suppose. I spent the first half of April not knowing (but having a bad feeling) what was going to happen next. And then our prime minister announced the first extension of the lockdown. And when I woke up the next morning I had been completely locked out of all my accounts and I had a “whatsapp” message waiting for me. You read that correctly, Mr fun and games decided it was appropriate to give me bad news over whatsapp. He told me he really liked me and to look out for a message from him when this all blows over, as I will be the first person they call. But he had to let a lot of staff go permanently. I spent all off April preparing for this, but it still didn’t help me through what this felt like. Try and imagine working your ass off for 18 months to begin a life you never once dreamed was possible, to have it given to you and then taken away in the space of a month. I was let go on a Friday and I didn’t sleep a wink that whole weekend. I did get a phone call from my recruiter which I thought was nice. But it turns out they were only calling me because the company that let me go were claiming it was because of poor performance. They didn’t want to pay the recruitment fee, and they were willing to damage my reputation and relationship with the recruiter. However, it turned out to be the best thing that happened to me. Them refusing to pay the recruitment fee, drove my recruiter to immediately look for a job for me. It is Sunday afternoon that same weekend and I get a call saying “I have an interview lined up for you tomorrow, can you make it?”. I could not believe what I was hearing. I have an interview lined up and I may not even miss a pay day? I felt like crying. But what was that he said? I must have misheard, did he say it was for tomorrow? That’s right, after having no sleep and being in a state of emotional and physical exhaustion I now had less than 24 hours to prepare for a job I had no idea about. How to prep for an interview I worked my arse off. I learned everything I could about the company, I read their testimonials, I studied their customers, I looked at the solutions they provided. I like to have all my certificates with me, along with copies of my resume. I like to have prepared questions to ask the interviewer. I like to have a separate document that I can pass to them with all of my documentation from my labs. (this obviously means you have to document all your labs). I dressed as smartly as I could and gave it everything I could. I watched youtube videos of typical helpdesk questions, I learned the tricks to the questions they ask, e.g. The owner of your company says his printer is broken at the same time you get a call from a customer saying all 200 staff have lost connection to the internet. What do you do? The trick is to communicate with your team, with a team you can do both at the same time. These videos are an amazing tool to prep with and they give you really good answers that you don’t have to think too hard about. They also take away some of the nerves. So how did it go? Well of course I just didn’t sleep. I mean who would have been able to sleep after what I had been through. I thought about postponing it but I still went for it. I can’t begin to describe the difference in management style. This man was a manager, he was an IT professional with 25 years experience, and he had owned, ran and sold his own successful MSP. It was both refreshing and worrying. He expected nothing of me, he didn’t really care about my technical knowledge. I didn’t know this at the time, but it was because everyone at this company was driven and knew their stuff. Everyone held 10+ certs and had years and years of experience. This was a different company, with serious people and incredible opportunities to learn. I thought I had bombed, I was tired and a little defeated. But I got a second interview, and with sleep was able to completely turn it around. I turned my weaknesses in knowledge into opportunities to ask my manager to showcase his knowledge. I was far more engaged and I was offered the job at this far more serious role for the same money I was originally on and I cut my commute in half (well technically I am work from home). What to expect from a serious MSP? At my new company, cases come in to 1st line and you are expected to work on everything, and only after you have exhausted your ability can it go up to second line. It is also worth noting the main difference between the two companies is that the first one only provided services for their customers and they had monthly rolling contracts. My current company is a cloud provider and they host all of their customers infrastructures and endpoints, as well as having 1-3 year contracts (much harder to pull out of during a pandemic) it didn’t hurt that a lot of their customers are hospital related. I have been at my new company now for 4.5 months and learned more there than I could have ever learned at the first company. I put my money where my mouth is. It wasn’t long before my first manager called me and offered me my old job back. This time with a 33% pay increase. I flat out told him no (respectfully of course) but firmly. It was a lot more money than I am on now but that wasn’t the point. I would not want to stymy my career by working at such a poorly managed company. In the UK, they could have just left me furloughed (it wouldn’t have cost them anything) and I would have received 80% of my salary. But they terminated me and then expected me to come back? I wasn’t going to repay my new manager’s act of saving me from that hell with disloyalty (I know loyalty can be looked down upon in this sub, but that is how I was raised). What can you expect in your first 6 months? Enough about me, let’s look at you. Let’s look at what you can expect. You can expect that certificates can take between 2-6 months each depending on how much time you dedicate to them. You can expect your first job to pay a little more than minimum wage. However, most places now pay for your training, pay for your exams and give extra time to study during work. You can more than likely expect your first job to be helpdesk. You can expect to have to apply to hundreds of jobs to get your first one. However, if you follow my previous advice you should be getting call backs from recruiters at a minimum. If not, then it will be your CV that needs to change. If you want to be successful you will have to sacrifice. I get up 3 hours before my shift and I study. Every single day, and I work longer on weekends. I offer every single time someone needs to stay late or come in early. I often stay late after work finishes to tidy up cases and prepare for the next day. I work through every single lunch. The reason for this is because I take twice as many cases as the other person that started 3 months before me, lets call this person “anon”, anon is my direct competition and he drives me to be the best I can be. The results of my hard work are that I am sitting my exam in half the time that Anon will take (honestly I doubt he will take it when he says). I have closed more cases than him and he has been at the company for 7.5 months vs my 4.5 months. I was asked to go to site to setup a switch for a customer (twice) over anon. I have been “selected” by my manager to work directly with on a fileserver project. It looks like he has taken me under his wing (which I highly recommend, if you can get someone to teach you that is half as smart as my manager then do it). I have had multiple people tell me they notice how engaged I am during meetings, and how well they think I am doing. I have had a number of times a 2nd line ask me if I want to be shown something that typically only goes to 2nd Line. I have learned that hard work, determination and a willingness to learn does not go unnoticed. What are some of the negatives to expect? But it isn’t all fairytails, there are downsides too. I don’t spend as much time with my wife or doing the things I like. I feel guilty if I watch a film instead of study. If you take twice as many cases you are going to make at least twice as many mistakes. Making mistakes is normal, and you have to learn from them, but if you take them to heart like me, then you are going beat yourself up twice as often. Ultimately, the sky is the limit, how hard you work will depend on you and what drives you. I have my foot in the door and I have no intention of taking my foot of the gas anytime soon. If you think that once you get your foot in the door that the hard part is over, then that simply isn’t the case I am afraid. How to give yourself the best opportunity in your career (tips no one tells you). I push myself out of my comfort zone many times a day. I do this so that these things become my comfort zone. I notice how often my manager trusts me to do something that he wouldn’t normally let a 1st line support engineer do. You can expect to have a highly stressful working environment. You are going to have many fires to put out at the same time, and you need to organise yourself so it doesn’t overwhelm you. I think something that no certificate teaches you, or that I have yet to see, and it is easily the most important thing I have learned, is to have a to do list. First thing in the morning, before you do anything, fire up notepad or onenote and write down everything you have to do in that day. It doesn’t have to be in order, just get writing. And then anytime you complete a task look at notepad and start working on the next thing. Also, if anyone asks you to do anything ever, fire up notepad, and write it down. You can be albert Einstein himself, and you are going to forget to do a good chunk of that stuff if you write it down. And remember, you are going to make a lot of mistakes, but forgetting to do stuff is a terrible mistake to make and can be easily avoided. If you have to stop someone mid flow because you realise they are telling you to do a multistep thing, then stop them and fire it up and ask them to start again. Annoying but better than having to call them later and ask them to say it all again, or worse just forget it. You can expect a relatively thankless job. There will always be those people who remember to thank you and make you feel like you are appreciated, but more often than not you will get someone who the second the thing works, they want off the phone. Get used to goodbyes being a tad rushed/awkward. You can expect that you will need a lot of help. But try to be smart and kind about it. Try speaking to those people about things in which you don’t ask for help and ask them about themselves. Develop relationships that are meaningful. Also, try and vary the people you ask for help from, don’t take advantage of someone because they are polite and never let you know that inside they are frustrated because they too have a big to do list. Spread your help out and try and make up for the fact you are going to be a big inconvenience by offering to help in other ways. Make the coffees, make the teas, offer to take dogsh*t menial tasks that need doing. These sorts of things are good way to pay it back to someone that you won’t be able to help technically. Advice to avoid serious mistakes. Always think about what you are doing. Always. Is this something you should be doing? Is this something that needs approval? is this something you should check with someone first? Checking with someone is not the same as asking for help and it has saved my ass more times than I can count. Don’t be the person that causes a service outage because you didn’t check if something is right. It may feel obvious, it may make you look dumb. But if I was to be shown 100 tasks and asked what my gut tells me is the “proper protocol” for each one, I would get most wrong. Don’t try and guess what is best for the customer or company policy. This is what I like to call good old-fashioned Arse-covering. It covers yours and your employers. Those £72K jobs exist. And people do them. You could be one of them, but it will take years of dedication and sacrifice. If that sounds like you, if you can be driven, passionate and determined then nothing will stop you. Thank you for reading. If you are crazy enough to still be reading this, then thank you. I wish you all the luck in the world. TLDR: Hard work and self-belief pays off. Nothing is going to stop you except YOU.
What's the worst you've seen, or heard of? After years of dealing, I've got some doosies. Sadly, not all of them have happy endings. 1) Casino regular versus a casino novice (possible an online player, hard to tell). Flop comes Q-10-6, two diamonds. Regular bets, novice calls. Turn is another 6. Regular checks, novice announces a bet of $300. Regular calls. It happens that the novice's stack was $316, so he had only $16 left. The river is another blank -- I think a 5 -- and the regular checks. The novice bets his last $16, and the regular pauses, looking sheepish. He says, "This sucks. Obviously I don't want to fold for $16 but I missed everything" and turns his K-J of diamonds face up. Before I can say anything, the novice player laughs and says "That's funny, I've got the same thing" and turns over K-J offsuit. The regular says, "I call." Novice says, "wait, what?" The applicable rule here was that in our cardroom, when two players were heads up, they were permitted to show their opponents one or both cards. The regular's showing his hand did not constitute a fold, though he clearly knew his opponent might think he was folding. The result was unfortunate. I called the houseman over immediately, and he explained the rule to the novice player -- that neither of them had folded, action was still live, and the bet was still to the regular player. The regular player had called, so the pot was split. The regular player was strongly cautioned not to pull that shit anymore, but in this case, the rules were unfortunately in his favor. 2) This one will make some people angry. I didn't witness it, tragically, but heard about it from coworkers the day after. It's at $1/$2 NLH, but there are two players with massive stacks, and they've been goading each other all night. They reach a flop heads up with over $400 in the pot already, and one player (we'll call him Alan) announces a $600 bet and pushes in his remaining six stacks of red $5 chips. He still has two white $1 chips that remain sitting on his cards, and a lot of people can probably already see where this is going. The dealer announces "$600 all in." The remaining player (call him Bruce) has him covered by about $150 or so, and says "I call." The dealer says "All in and call, action complete" (this dealer is sort of fresh out of poker training, so she's trying to do everything she was taught to do in terms of announcing play, but she's not at all prepared for what's about to happen), and deals out the turn and river. It happens that Alan had a flush draw and missed, while Bruce has top set. However, Alan has called the houseman over. "I wasn't all in, I don't know why she dealt the river. I still have these $2 I was going to bet." Alan is arguing that there should have been action on the turn, that the river was dealt early and should be washed back into the deck, and a new river dealt. The applicable rules here are several. The procedure if a dealer erroneously reveals the flop, turn or river before action is complete is to wash those cards into the deck and re-deal them. It's also a rule that a player can be considered "all in" while still keeping back a single $1 chip to protect his cards, however this rule applies to only a single chip. Alan had two chips. Theoretically, action should not have been complete. However, there's a third rule that's sort of deep in the binder, that states that players have a responsibility to make the dealer aware of any mistake in the action they notice in a timely manner. This rule exists for situations where, for example, the dealer doesn't realize a player still has cards and allows him to stay in a hand without calling a bet. The dealer (mistakenly) announced Alan's $600 bet as an all in, and mistakenly declared action complete. Alan had opportunities to correct her and did not. The result here was tragic. The houseman either didn't know or didn't remember to implement the rule placing responsibility on Alan to correct the dealer. As such, the houseman ruled that the $2 still were live, and that Alan had the right to bet the turn. The river was re-washed, a new river was dealt, and Alan made his flush, winning over $1600 he should not have. A memo was later issued to houseman clarifying that what should have happened is Alan should have been declared all in and not allowed to bet the $2, and should have been counseled against angle-shooting. "Do we believe," the memo asked, "that if the player had made his flush on the river, he'd still have demanded that the card be redrawn so he could bet his $2?" 3) This is a story where I'm the villain, although I consider the other player the real villain. I was playing $1/$2 NLH in a 10-handed ring game, I was seat 1. Seat 9 was wearing headphones and would occasionally drum on the table, which was annoying. More annoying is that he didn't bother to follow the action and the dealer had to work to get his attention when it was his turn to act. The dealer was polite and didn't say anything, but I wasn't working, so it's not my job to be polite. I told the Seat 9 "please, take your headphones out, you're slowing the game down." Seat 9 said "I'm allowed to wear these." I said, "Sure, but you're not following the action and you can't hear the dealer." Seat 9 says, "I can follow the action just fine, shut up and worry about yourself." Okay, fine. A few hands later, I call Seat 9's raise from the big blind with K-5 suited. This was not a good play. The flop came K-9-4 and I bet something like $25, about 2/3 of the pot. Seat 9 doesn't even wait for me to finish my bet before he's throwing a chip in to call. The turn comes a queen. I check, Seat 9 bets $60, and I call. I'm worried I'm beat here. The river comes another king, but it's the third heart as well. I check, and Seat 9 bets another $80. I can't fold for such a small bet. I turn to the dealer and say, audibly, "I call." Then I quickly push my entire stack -- roughly $500 more -- into the middle. Seat 9's got his head phones in and didn't hear me say "call," or hear the dealer say "call," louder, and tosses his cards into the muck before anyone can stop him. When he realizes what happened, he calls the houseman, complaining that he'd mucked a straight because he thought I'd raised. The applicable rule here was that when two actions contradict each other, if one action happened first, it's considered binding, and if it can't be determined which happened first, verbal is always binding. In other words, when I said, audibly, "I call," I was committed to the call, and pushing more chips didn't mean anything. Showdown had been reached at that point, and Seat 9 could have tabled his cards. Once the cards had been mucked, they could not be retrieved. There was discussion about whether my misrepresenting my action by pushing the chips forward should be punished in the same way as if I had misrepresented my hand, but there's no such rule. Further, given that everyone else at the table heard both me and the dealer say "call," the houseman determined that Seat 9 was at fault for misunderstanding. (He'd apparently been at it for quite a while with the headphones and had annoyed multiple dealers already, so the houseman had little patience for him and wasn't about to make a special exception for him -- it was his choice to ignore all audible instructions from the dealer.) The result was that the pot was pushed to the best hand that was tabled -- mine. The houseman made it very clear that I'd better not pull that shit again, though. When I put $40 of Seat 9's money in the tip jar, though, all seemed to be forgiven. Any of you guys have any live casino angle-shooting stories?
Musician with a decade long panic disorder no longer has panic attacks.
Hello fellow crazy people! (just kidding.) I’ve had quite a long history of panic disorder, and now that I’m on the other side of it, I wanted to share my thoughts on the subject in the hopes that at least one person can benefit from my experience. If you’ve done an exhaustive amount of research on panic attacks in an effort to rid yourself of them, as I did, then I probably won’t share any revolutionary magic trick that you’ve never heard of before. (sorry about that). However I did find some solace in a few reddit posts that I related to when I was suffering, so hopefully this can serve as that for someone. I imagine that this will be a very long post, so for those that aren’t looking to read some schmuck’s whole life story, I’ve categorized my thoughts as followed:
My personal history of panic disorder. This is not to satisfy my insatiable need to talk about myself, but rather to detail what I dealt with so that you might relate your own struggle to mine.
My progression of approaches to how I eventually “beat” panic attacks, and why I annoyingly put “beat” in quotes
3.Summary/explanation (perhaps the most helpful part if you’re a TL:DR person)
Quick tips for in the moment of a panic attack
Resource recommendations eg. books and articles.
*disclaimer: My progress was made without the use of medication or therapy. I want to be clear, that I am not taking the stance that someone suffering from panic disorder can’t or shouldn’t benefit from these things. In fact it’s possible that I would have healed quicker had I used these resources. 1.) I am a professional orchestral musician, and for close to 10 years, I would have a panic attack on stage for about 95% of the performances that I took part in. Most of those 10 years were during my college years, and the last couple were once I was in a professional orchestra. In school I would have a performance approximately every 2 or 3 weeks, sometimes more sometimes less, and as a professional I have performances at the very least once a week. That totals hundreds of panic attacks over a 10 year period. In that time, I also would occasionally have panic attacks in other situations, but I primarily suffered from them on stage. I share this to emphasize that you can be very deep in panic disorder, and still make it out panic free. My panic disorder started when I was a senior in high school. I was scheduled to play a solo with my youth orchestra, where I am standing at the front of the stage with the orchestra playing behind me. During one rehearsal, I was standing up front, when I started to feel somewhat sick. I didn’t want to disrupt the rehearsal so I didn’t say anything, but the sick feeling only got worse. Along with feeling somewhat sick, I also started to freak out a bit and get tunnel vision. I had to ask the director if I could sit down, at which point he was shocked to point out that I was super pale. I sat down, feeling sick, freaked out, and now super embarrassed as this was all happening in front of my orchestra mates. Finally, after a few minutes, I had to excuse myself to the bathroom where I promptly and violently threw up. I had food poisoning. While some could have had a brief incident of food poisoning and moved on with their lives, my brain decided to turn that moment into a decade long panic saga. That rehearsal put the thought in my head, “what if that happened during a concert??”. For the next 10 years every time that I was on stage, this thought would come to mind, which would start a bouncy spiral which anyone browsing this subreddit is most likely familiar with. On stage, any little body sensation was magnified accompanied by the thought of “o shit it’s happening”. Since you’re likely to be anxious while on stage performing anyway, there are plenty of nervous body sensations to attach this thought to. Soon my mind expanded it’s repertoire of increasingly horrific scenarios to taunt me with: “What if you pass out on stage??”. “What if you just lose control of your body and scream something really loud during a soft passage of the music???”. “What if you get so nervous on stage that you have a heart attack on die on stage?? your heart is beating really hard, it could happen. They would have to stop the whole performance just for you if you died!” And finally the worst one, “you can’t keep living like this. You picked the wrong career and ruined your life.” A non panicked person can read those ideas as a bit silly but in the moment of panic, as you surely know, they are very real. My level and duration of panic during performances would vary a bit each time, which actually added to the stress of them. Not knowing what would come that night was quite daunting. A lot would depend on where I was seated on the stage. During a panic attack, I often found myself looking where the stage exit was and constantly accessing whether or not I needed to leave or if I could rough it out. Being seated in a way that would make exiting more difficult often led to stronger attacks, whereas the attacks would sometimes be more mild if I was seated very near the exit where leaving might not make that big of a scene. My symptoms included profuse sweating, racing heart, shortness of breath, tunnel vision, and most noticeably a barrage of thoughts mostly centered around whatever terrible thing I was surely moments away from experiencing. These could last anywhere from a couple of small bursts (small maybe 5 minutes increments throughout the performance) to essentially the entire performance ( a couple of hours with a 15 minute break in the middle. Afterwards I would feel sweaty, exhausted, and completely defeated. I felt like a fraud among my fellow musicians who had a complete, calm, control over their nervous systems (actually not true), and very often felt hopeless against this mountain of a problem that I had been battling for so long with seemingly no end in sight. It’s now been a bit over a year and a half? (hard to tell in Covid time) since I’ve suffered from a panic attack on stage, and I’m actually confident that I won’t suffer from one in the future. 2.) For the first several years, maybe 5 or so, I didn’t even acknowledge that I was having panic attacks. I just told myself that I got really nervous on stage and that I needed to work on that. I certainly didn’t tell anyone else about it. I wanted to be the cool, calm and collected one on stage, and the fact that I was the farthest thing from that humiliated me. I didn’t realize that this attitude was a big contributor to my problem until much later. I eventually told my parents that I was having a problem with “freaking out” on stage sometimes, but I still didn’t let on just how consistent this “freaking out was” until much much later when I finally accepted what was happening to me, I was having panic attacks. This acknowledgement was step one in getting over them. So now I was about 5 or 6 years into having panic attacks, and I was determined to beat this monstrous thing. I read countless online articles about panic attacks and how to overcome them, as well as posts on support boards from fellow sufferers This was *sort of* step 2 in recovering. I now knew that I was suffering from a problem known as panic disorder, and during the actual attack I was able to recognize it and say to myself “I am currently having a panic attack”. In my research, I also learned quite a bit on what is happening to my body in a panic attack. The most helpful fact that I got from my reading was this: if you’ve experienced multiple panic attacks, you’ve probably already gone through the worst symptoms. In other words, whatever you’ve experienced in previous panic attacks, it won’t get worse for future panic attacks. Your body is reacting in a set way, and will continue to react in this set way when prompted by panic. This was a big improvement from before when I was just “freaking out” and anything could happen. I now was dealing with a documented disorder that I had some knowledge and understanding about. The only problem was that I was still having them! Thanks to my plentiful googling of panic attacks, I understood that my “brain was trained for threat detection against saber toothed tigers except now there aren’t any saber toothed tigers but my brain doesn’t know the difference blah blah blah”, but I was still having these fucking panic attacks and they were uncomfortable as hell!! I could recognize that I was just having a panic attack, but the scary scenarios that I was terrified of were still on the table. “I might be just having a panic attack, but what if I panic so much that I throw up, or pass out or (insert other fate worse than death here)?” Just knowledge wasn’t enough. I was now about 7 or 8 years in, and I was still having panic attacks at the same regularity. I needed a strategy or technique to apply if I was ever going to defeat this thing. At this point, I was also dealing with new opponents in anxiety and depression brought on by some other big life changes. I became a regular in my library’s self help aisle and was always in the middle of some book on mental toughness or stage fright, determined that I was just a couple pages away from solving this bear of a puzzle. As I was learning a multitude of techniques from these books, I realized that in a weird way, my consistency of panic attacks was an advantage to my overcoming them. Rather than being randomly struck by them at different points, I knew that at 7:30 pm that night, I would have a panic attack on stage. This meant that I could plan out a strategy ahead of time, try it out, and then learn and adjust from that strategy for the next time. Further still, I opened up a word document entitled, “Panic attack journal” where I would enter the date, the strategy I had for that night’s concert, and then how it went afterwards. Every so often I would have a performance with no panic what so ever. I would joyfully write that I thought that I had overcome this terrible saga in my life, only to try and apply the same strategy the next night and be met with the same familiar freak out. Looking back on my journal, my favorite entry is a simple one: “03/12/18 Strategy-focus on your left big toe every time you feel like a panic attack is coming on. This proved successful in the last performance. Result- thought that I was going to die the whole time, go fuck yourself.” Nevertheless, I believe viewing my panic attacks as opportunities to grow rather than strictly fearing them was the third step in my overcoming them. This self help searching naturally brought me to the field of mindfulness and meditation. I had dabbled with meditation before as it’s commonly brought up in the world of orchestra auditions, but had never committed to it fully. I decided to dive in fully and commit to meditating every day. In addition to practicing, I shifted my reading more to books on this subject and found myself very deep in trying to understand the concepts behind meditation, as I found the subject to be applicable not only to this problem, but many other aspects of my life that I wished to improve: performance, happiness, focus, etc. I had a few experiences experimenting with meditation that are extremely interesting that keep me meditating to this day, but as a very impatient person, I was very frustrated with my perceived lack of progress on the panic attack front. Side note- I did actually find a meditation that I could do before concerts that consistently eliminated panic attacks. I say that this is a side note because I was hesitant in including this meditation here because this isn’t actually how I eventually overcame my panic disorder. This meditation would eliminate my panic attacks for that night, but I would have to do it every day, otherwise the attacks would return. While this meditation would clear up my panic on stage, I ended up feeling very “off” and not myself the rest of the time, which scared me a bit and made it hard to continue practicing this meditation. Looking back, I now understand why I felt so “off” from this meditation, and I do encourage anyone suffering to try it and see if it helps them. If you also feel a bit weird after doing this meditation, I promise that that feeling will go away eventually. The mediation is simple and as follows: -Sit in an upright but comfortable posture. I would do this at the foot of my bed or a chair. -Close your eyes and try to settle any obvious tension that you have in your body. -When ready, deliberately silently think something verbal to yourself. For me, it would be reciting the alphabet. Do this for about 30 seconds or so. Pay attention to “where” in your awareness you are hearing this -Once you are done reciting the alphabet or your favorite Nickelback song or whatever, keep your attention on that same spot in your awareness where you were hearing it. -Just wait for another thought to pop up. This is the trickiest part of this meditation. You are going to want to “reach out” and try and think something yourself or make something happen. Just waiting for a thought to come up on it’s own is actually more difficult than in sounds. I often found myself reminding myself to “not reach out” or “let it come to you”. These are of course thoughts themselves, but they did help get me in the right mental spot. -Eventually, you might notice that a thought comes up, seemingly without your authoring it. It might not even be a clear concise thought, for me it often just felt like mental activity rather than a sentence or something. When you feel a thought come up without your creating it, you are in the right spot. Just sit in that perspective, and watch the mental activity do it’s thing without you having to do anything about it. This might last anywhere from a few seconds to a few minutes. For me, this was often accompanied with some relaxing of muscles, but not always, so don’t expect any relaxation to occur. -When finished, take a few moments to look around the room and reorient yourself to your surroundings. This is not a required step, but I found it to be nice to ease out of the meditation, rather than just jump off the cushion and back into life. -I would sometimes use a timer for this, sometimes not. It was less about how long I sat, and more about getting into that state of mind. Sometimes I could find that state within 30 seconds, other times after several minutes, other times I couldn’t find it at all. The key factor in this was my willingness to just sit there and wait for a thought, and not reach out and try and make any thing happen. Feel free to message me your experiences with this if you’d like to talk about it as I won’t cover it any more in this post. After reading countless books spanning the subjects of eastern meditation, sports psychology, and various western therapy methods, I started to notice a few commonalities, the most obvious one being the idea of acceptance. Particularly emphasized in meditation and ACT (acceptance commitment therapy), in relation to panic attacks, this is the idea of fully embracing and allowing the panic to be there and theoretically, the panic will subside on it’s own. Now if you’ve listened to my ramblings thus far, then you’re probably pretty desperate to get rid of your panic attacks, and thus have probably already heard of this concept of acceptance, and then might be annoyed that you’ve read all this way just to hear the same solution that you’ve heard before. I say this because that person was me. I had heard so often that accepting my panic was key to me overcoming it, and yet I just couldn’t do it. I would go into a performance thinking “ok, just accept the panic, and then it will go away. That’s all you have to do, just accept that it’s there, and it will go away”. Of course what would happen is I would step on stage, put on my acceptance armor, and when the panic showed up, would freak out that my strategy wasn’t working. Not very accepting was I? This is the stage that I bet a lot of people get stuck on. They read that acceptance is the key to moving past panic, but are still unable to accept in the moment. The bad news is that, I’m not actually entirely sure how I was able to get to the moment of acceptance that I did. It might have been the daily meditation. It might have been just hearing that acceptance was the answer over and over again. It might have just been luck. The good news is that it might only take one true moment of acceptance to get over years of panic, at least that’s what it took for me. The performance was not unique from any other, I was sat somewhat in the middle, so escape would be somewhat difficult and embarrassing. I had suffered from panic attacks for nearly 10 years now and wasn’t really sure what to do about them. In fact I sort of didn’t care any more. Everything I tried so far failed to get rid of them, but on the bright side maybe I didn’t have to. Interestingly enough, for someone who was terrified to throw up or pass out on stage every performance for 10 years, neither of those things had happened to me yet. I was tired of fighting this whole thing. Somehow during that performance, I truly didn’t care if I had a panic attack or not. I had played enough performances under panic where I knew that I could make it through, so why bother putting the effort into preventing one? That performance ended up being one of the most bizarre, but transformative experiences of my life. About 5 minutes into the performance, the usual panic symptoms arose. My vision narrowed, my heart beat increased, thoughts of doom and demise flashed through my mind. There was a difference this time though. This time, I took no involvement in any of these symptoms. Even my terror filled thoughts seemed to flash in front of me and then subside without my ever having created nor got rid of them. In fact, I saw the entire cycle of a panic attack come up to it’s fullest most terrifying height, and then subside, all seemingly without trying to adjust or get rid of it. It felt as thought the panic attack was all happening on a movie screen separate from me, rather than happening to me. In that moment, it all felt so impersonal. The weird thing about this performance was that it didn’t feel like the big victory that it was. I hadn’t applied a long thought out strategy and vanquished my decade long nemesis. I hadn’t done a special meditation before the performance and made myself immune from panic. I didn’t even go into the performance with a plan to “accept it fully” so that I could transcend it. Rather, I just did absolutely nothing about it. And yet since this performance, I haven’t suffered from a single panic attack. This leads me to what I believe to be the most important point in this whole post. So important that I will bold it and underline it. You will stop caring if you have a panic attack, before you stop having them. In other words, any solution that you have against panic is only fueling them. All the solutions that you have tried to your problem, are actually the problems themselves. 3.) Now, I recognize the frustrating paradox that is created here. One might take this advice and try to “allow” the panic to be there as hard as they can, only to be frustrated when this strategy doesn’t work. Again, I don’t know exactly how I was able to overcome this paradox and arrive at a point of true acceptance, but I have some theories: Change the priority that panic has in your life. In my moment of acceptance and since then, the idea of a panic attack has gone from this big scary thing that needs to be conquered, to at most a somewhat annoying thing that might arise. The idea of a panic attack now feels like it’s at the same level as the idea of an itchy nose. I’d rather not have either of them, but I don’t really spend any energy trying to prevent an itchy nose. While I’d prefer not to have an itchy nose, I don’t actually care all that much if I get an itchy nose. Which is a great segue to repeat my important, bold, underlined point: You will stop caring if you have a panic attack, before you stop having them. Again, lessen the priority that panic attacks have on your life. If you make them the main focus of your life, then they will be the main focus of your life. Changing this relationship with panic might feel impossible right now. It might feel like panic is controlling your life, and the idea of not fighting it tooth and nail might feel like something that you can’t do. I would suggest committing to this acceptance as much as you can for a month and see what happens. Give up the fight for a month. If it doesn’t get any better, than you can go back to fighting and you’ll know that acceptance doesn’t work for you, but I suspect that you’ll be surprised in your ability to care less about your panic attacks. I also think that my meditation practice helped me strengthen this accepting muscle. There are plenty of resources for meditation available online and on phone apps. I’ll detail what I used below. Meditation is relevant to acceptance in that you will be keeping your attention on an object which will often times be the breath. You will inevitably get distracted by something. You then accept that distraction’s presence and return your attention to the breath. This is a skill that can be improved through repetition and that very is relevant to accepting panic: You notice the signs of panic, accept their presence, and return to something more important. Finally the last tip on acceptance of panic is to try and have some humor with it. I used to approach my panic as a evil nemesis: weapons in hand, ready for trial by combat. In my moment of acceptance and today, I see it as an annoying neighbor that might show up on a bad sitcom. “O ya there’s panic, look at him go, what an idiot”. I said that I haven’t suffered from a panic attack since my moment of acceptance, but I have had the symptoms come up a couple times since then (maybe 3 or 4 times in 1.5 years, each one less intense than the last). While the symptoms would come up, I didn’t suffer from them as there was no fight to be had. I just saw them come and go as I would that itchy nose or annoying neighbor would, and commented on how silly it looked as it did. The steps of my recovery that I’ve outlined in this post are as followed. In my experience, each step is necessary in order to get to the next one 1.) Recognition of what’s happening: I’m having a panic attack. 2.) Knowledge of what’s happening: This is what a panic attack entails. 3.) Seeing your panic attack as an opportunity to grow: What happens when I try this? 4.)Applying acceptance: Let it all happen. You’ve got better things to think about. As I mentioned, I haven’t suffered from a panic attack for over a year, after having them consistently for almost a decade. I’m confident that I wont suffer from one in the future, not because I don’t think one will arise, but because I don’t really care if it does. (although the symptoms of panic really don’t ever arise anymore anyway). I still have some work to do. Years of performing with panic has left a negative feeling associated with performing that I’m still working on, although it’s steadily getting better. I still deal with with symptoms of depression and anxiety, although I feel like what I’ve learned with panic attacks applies with these feelings so I am very hopeful for improvement here. Lastly, I strangely feel somewhat grateful for having gone through what I did, and I hope you will too. I now feel like I have a sort of vaccination against panic, which is a valuable thing during these uncertain times. I feel like I’m able to handle stressful situations easier than ever before, and there is a huge sense of accomplishment in overcoming something that for so long felt impossible to overcome. If you have any questions about my journey (I hate using that pretentious word in this context, but I can’t think of a better one) please feel free to comment or send me a message and I’ll try to get back to you with as honest of a reply as I can. Thanks for reading this far, or at least skipping until this point. Please know that however long you’ve been dealing with symptoms of panic, a panic free life is not far away. Or maybe I have absolutely no idea what I’m talking about, but give it a try. 4.) I wanted to include a section on brief tips for in the moment of a panic attack. I want to encourage sufferers to always try and lean towards the route of acceptance as this is the road towards freedom, but also recognize that applying this knowledge is not always possible in the moment, especially for particularly bad panic attacks, so I wanted to include small tips that have helped me in the moment. -As I mentioned earlier, If you suffer from regular panic attacks, recognize and reinforce the idea that you’ve probably already experienced the worst thing that will happen to you. I never threw up or passed out on stage, but even knowing that, every time a panic attack came up, I thought that maybe this would be the exception. After learning how panic attacks work, you realize that if something hasn’t happened in previous panic attacks, it’s not gonna happen in future ones. A body that is accustomed to routine panic attacks is going to react in routine ways. Usually the worst part of a panic attack is not knowing how bad it will get. Remind yourself that you’ve already experienced the worst of it before and were fine. This reminder is critical in moving towards acceptance. -Shift your attention, particularly to the 5 senses. This is a common technique, but it’s common because it works. Your panic is no more important than the other things in your awareness, yet you give it all your attention simply because it demands that you do. Simply put your attention on other immediate senses. I found success with senses that aren’t immediately obvious. Can you feel the sensations in the second knuckle of your left ring finger? How about your right nostril? Putting at least some of your attention somewhere else in your immediate awareness takes some of the strength away from your panic and it will eventual shrivel on it’s own. -Your panicking because you’re not breathing and you’re not breathing because your panicking. Check in with your breath. Chances are it’s shorter than normal. See if you can lengthen it a bit, particularly the out breath. For extra credit, see if you can feel every molecule of air flowing in and out of you for just one breath. I found that exhaling through slightly pursed lips was a good way to lengthen my exhalation as well as make the sensation of breathing easier to follow. -This one is a little weird and might only apply when you’re by yourself, but give it a try. When panicked, balance on one leg. If that’s too easy, try it in the yoga tree pose. If that’s too easy, then try it in yoga tree pose with your eyes closed. If that’s too easy then go teach a yoga class. I was skeptical about this when I first heard about it, but was pleasantly proved wrong. Your brain only has so much attention it can use at a time. When panicked, we usually put the majority of our attention on the panic and what we’re panicked about. Balance takes a certain amount of attention to achieve and so you’ll find your mind almost magically settling in order to achieve equilibrium on one foot. -Talk to someone. Anyone. This is easy to do when you’re with a close friend who might know about you’re panic disorder, but harder to do if you’re in a store with a bunch of strangers. You’ll most likely be self conscious, thinking that everyone can see this psycho losing their mind in the sock aisle, but most likely you look completely normal. Like putting your mind on another sensation or balancing, engaging in a conversation will take attention points away from the panic and panic needs attention points to survive. Plus you might make a friend. Probably not but do it anyway. 5.) Here are a few resources that I found myself coming back to and that I still reference today: Ten percent happier books, apps and podcast- There are a ton of meditation resources out there now but ten percent happier has been my go to. It’s an organization spear headed by Dan Harris, a skeptical journalist who has his own experience with panic attacks and now is a strong proponent for meditation. I first read his book by the same name, then went on to download the company’s meditation app, and am now a regular listener to their podcast. I’ve dabbled with most meditation apps out there, but am drawn to ten percent happier mostly because I find Dan to be the most relatable figure in the field. As a very secular, non spiritual person, I am often turned off by some of the seemingly put on serenity and “foo foo” of other spiritual teachers. Dan’s book is a great gateway into the world of meditation, for someone like me that has no desire to deal with metaphysical claims but just simply wants improve their mind. His app continues in this vein. The app also includes meditations and talks from many different teachers, so your chances of finding someone’s voice whom you relate to are good. The Happiness Trap by Russ Harris- I find this book to be the best “self help book” that I’ve ever read. It is essentially a break down of the steps in ACT (acceptance commitment therapy), but is done so in a very easy to understand way. It reads as a sort of user manual for handling difficult emotions, and does so in a very relatable voice. This book is mostly geared towards dealing with symptoms of anxiety, which while different than panic, I find the approach to be transferrable. This is one of the only books that I made sure to go out and buy after reading it from the library, as I wanted to keep referencing it later. Anything by Dr. Claire Weekes- Claire Weekes was an Australian Dr. that wrote several books on the subject of anxiety and panic. As her books were written in the 60s and 70s but read with the same understanding of books of today, she is considered a pioneer in the field. I personally have her book “Hope and help for your nerves”, but I think reading any of her books or listening to any of her talks on youtube are beneficial. She had a remarkable way of simplifying what can so often feel like such a complex problem. This guy’s post: https://www.reddit.com/Anxiety/comments/61hi78/things_i_have_learned_about_anxiety_and_how_to/ I’m not sure why, but I found this reddit post to be very encouraging to me. So much that I bookmarked it and revisited it several times. It’s a well written story of someone overcoming a strong anxiety disorder, more challenging than what I went through. It also inspired me to put what I’ve learned out on the internet, just in case someone might be encouraged as i was. I don’t know how to end reddit posts.
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[The Extramundane Emancipation of Geela, Evil Sorceress at Large] --- Chapter 27: A Lovely Breakfast and An Exchange of Rings (Comedy Fantasy)
Synopsis:After hoodwinking Darkos, a holy priest, into escorting her back to her castle, Dark Enchantress Geela has one item left on her list: revenge on her ex-husband. With a confused Darkos in tow, she sets out. However, Geela isn't the only one with secrets. And Barney isn't the only old enemy who's about to get a visit. Index ||| Previous Chapter ||| Next Chapter (and the start of arc 2)!!! Patreon ||| TalesByOpheliaCyanide To say the pair had been drained by their adventure would be an understatement comparable to the one Darkos had heard upon emerging from the catacombs. He’d had ‘a lot to explain’ the same way Geela needed a nap. Her nap wasn’t pleasant, either. It was one of those feverish three day naps that was punctuated by sips of tea and broth and water provided by concerned parents. “Mama, I don’t like orange tea,” she’d once mumbled upon waking from a delirious dream about krakens eating her feet while swimming at the beach with her cousins. It wasn’t until the tea was sitting sulkily in her stomach and she’d rolled back over, pressing a wetted cloth to her face that she realized she’d called Rakette ‘mama’. This flung her into a dream about her mother scolding her for summoning void imps during equinox festival, a dream far more stressful than the kraken one (especially since she hadn’t summoned the damn imps). Once she heard voices murmuring above her. “She’s been like this for days… She’ll never get better.” “Give her time, don’t give up on her now.” Except Geela couldn’t tell if it was real, a dream, or a memory. “...it’ll take her like it took her sister.” Geela rolled over in bed, whimpering, and pressed the pillow over her head. She needed sleep to recharge but too many parts of her soul had been overstretched. “It might be better to—” “She’s still alive!” “Won’t be long now.” “Geela, how are you feeling?” If this was a memory, and reaching back into the recess of her addled brain she could find some semblance to a yearly corn fever that ravaged the town’s young for some six years in a row, then it couldn’t touch her now. It was just a dratted memory. “Geela?” The voice that spoke now was a soothing presence to her ears. A man’s voice but not her father or uncle. A cool hand pressed to her cheek. “Last time this happened she was out for almost 24 hours.” “Well girl did mind control a thousand villagers,” Arthius said. A dream for sure then. Darkos’s parents weren’t ones for compliments. “Good to know she can’t just nilly willy hypnotize a whole town without some form of payback.” “Mom! She saved our skins.” The woman’s voice, Rakette’s, trailed off, muttering something about a mountain and opals. “Sorry about her,” Darkos’s voice whispered. “I doubt you heard that but she’s just rattled.” She felt a newly cool cloth press against her forehead and smiled in her sleep. No more memory, no more dream. Just her faithful Darkos. The next time Geela woke, her hair, face, and clothes were so damp she’d thought maybe someone had gotten tired of her occupying their bed and had doused her with a barrel of water. She was reminded briefly of Darkos flopping a lily pad at his dad for the better part of ten minutes before just pouring water on the man. Maybe he’d learned. But then she sat up and found that it was likely just her fever breaking. Finally. One day Geela would find a way to make over exerting herself less… unpleasant. Really though, the lasting damage here would be whatever nonsense she’d muttered in her sleep. Had she really called Rakette ‘mama’? No, surely that was just a fever dream. She would never. — “Of course, I was always ‘mom’ or ‘mommy’ to Darkos, so it was funny hearing ‘mama’. And imagine not liking orange tea!” Geela sat at the breakfast table, sulking over a breakfast of eggs and bacon, smiling up at her. Yes, smiling. Like she was seven. “Don’t be embarrassed, dear. It was sweet.” “You know I’m older than you, right?” Geela scowled and flipped her bacon upside down. Childish, yes. But at least it reflected how she felt. Darkos bustled back from the kitchen with a delectable smelling pan of cinnamon rolls and the promise of something sweet brightened Geela’s mood a bit and she smiled up at him. “Geela! Your bacon is frowning.” He looked so alarmed at this development that Geela couldn’t stop her sweet ‘please give me cinnamon rolls’ smile from turning to a laugh. “Mom did you give Geela sad bacon?” Rakette peered at the plate, concerned. “I would never have.” “Just give me a damn cinnamon roll,” Geela said, stifling another snort of laughter. “Made them myself,” he said. “Extra icing—” “Darkos,” scolded his mother. “Hey. We saved the town. We deserve extra icing.” “Still.” She planted her hands on her hips. “It’s not healthy. Arth?” “They did just save the town,” he said, eying the rolls like a shark stalking an injured dolphin. Rakette sighed. “I suppose you did just save the town.” Geela fully agreed and soon her fingers were covered with the sugary glaze. Darkos may cook his steaks a bit well done and he may overcook his eggs and don’t get her started on his burnt chicken but he made a mean cinnamon roll. Perhaps even meaner than her still miffed bacon. It was nice, having a domestic breakfast, even with Darkos’s parents. And she didn’t mind playing with her food a bit, because as Darkos mentioned, she deserved it. He did too. It had been a hell of a day for the both of them, really for the whole village but, while Geela cognitively could sympathize, she really didn’t care too much about them. Right now she was focused exclusively on boosting the two of them back up to normal, or as normal as could be achieved so soon after the Alerion kerfuffle. “So what’s next for the two of you.” Arthius slurped down a third egg and Geela shuddered just slightly. Unlike his son, Arthius ate his eggs so raw that a rooster could probably have still made a chick out of it. “Two more Alerion villages to liberate,” Geela said. “Jungle and Arid,” Darkos said, munching down on his own borderline powdered eggs. He poured some tomatoey sauce over top of them and Geela shuddered more now. She loved tomatoes but the sugary paste was already an affront to her senses. Seeing them on top of Darkos’s dried eggs... “Neither are too far and with Malevelo gone—” “Presumed,” Geela said, collecting herself. “He astrally projected to take control of Leoth but we don’t know for sure his soul perished when the crystal was destroyed.” “Right. What would happen then? Would he just snap back to his body? Like, how does astral projection work?” “Well, void beings tend to need to possess a mortal entity in order to do much here physically. They can jump from body to body.” She bit into a piece of toast, polishing it off in two bites. “However, with the way the children of Noire possessed their hosts at the moment of conception, they’re pretty locked into that body. It gives them the bonus of not needing void energy to recharge; they just recharge the way humans do. It also does allow them some extra-body travel but that’s more limited. Give and take.” Darkos nodded but stared rather inquisitively at his fork full of sausage. “Huh. And that’s something that’s hard to do, the astral projecting? Like you couldn’t accidentally do it.” “The average person, no. That’s very challenging stuff if you aren’t predisposed to it. I can barely do it.” She lifted a shoulder in an unconcerned shrug. Astral projection was nasty stuff without anchors. It was miserable and disorienting. “Why?” He shook his head quickly, smiling. “Just trying to figure out if Malevelo could have zipped back to his body.” “If he did, he’d be comatose. Destroying his crystal like that would ruin him. Likely, if he survived, he just hopped back to the void, which is irritating but not terrible. It means Noire has to siphon power to bring him back or otherwise he’s pretty useless.” Darkos nodded. “So he’s like, in timeout.” Geela choked on her hashbrown, as the image of Noire lording over the Void Realm while Malevelo’s soul sulked in some corner floated in her mind. “Yes,” she sputtered, wiping tears from her eyes. “Yes, he’s in timeout.” She stared out at the remains of the breakfast feast the four (mostly Geela) had devoured. Dabbing away mashed potato from her face, she very pleasantly smiled at Arthius. “Breakfast was lovely, by the way. Thank you.” “I’m glad you enjoyed the hash browns,” Rakette said. “You were asking for them while sleeping I think. Something about being a potato princess, so I tried to incorporate that into the meal.” Geela lifted her chin, refusing to let the jibe slow her down. “Nobody makes potatoes like the Farm Region does. But they were passable.” Darkos sprung to his feet to start clearing away dishes. Geela let him, crossing her fork and knife over her plate, signifying that she would not be finishing the remains of her meal. Good hearty food was exactly what she needed to replenish and she felt like, maybe after another nap, she could consider leaving. “What’s after taking out the Alerion cults?” Rakette asked, joining Darkos with the cleaning. “Move on to the next child of Noire,” Geela said. “A little bird told me that the Celestial City might be a good place to go.” Geela glanced back at Darkos, who was merrily splashing away in the sink as he washed, before grabbing Rakette’s sleeve and pulling her close. “Who did you say sent you to Sunnyville?” she asked, her voice a hiss. “Professor Elle, head of the Realms Studies Department.” She looked at Darkos. “You think she might be involved?” “I’m not sure but it is awfully suspicious that she sent you here. It’s either her or… what did you say the priestess’s name was?” Rakette’s eyes grew wide. “Lune would never.” “Just like Malevelo would never?” “What are we whispering over?” Arthius asked, poking his head in on the two women. “Geela thinks that the head of the Realms Studies Department sent us here intentionally, to put,” she dropped her voice to barely audible, “Darkos in Noire’s sights.” “Didn’t work very well, did it,” Arthius said, which was a fair point. If the goal was to send Darkos to Malevelo, something had really broken down. “True. But I can also see where the communications may have broke down. We took a vacation at the Beach Region before heading to Sunnyville—” Geela held up a hand, cutting Rakette off. “You took a vacation? Your priestess tells you that your son is a void spawn that needs immediate attention and you take a vacation before running away?” “Well.” Rakette crossed her arms. “It was the last one we knew we’d ever get to take. And we didn’t expect Dark to be born so early so we had to spend some extra time nursing him back to health.” “Yeah, all told it probably took us a year when we said six months,” Arthius said. “So it’s possible that if someone did tell the cults we were coming, too much got messed up on our travels.” Geela’s nose wrinkled but she couldn’t say anything to that. For once, he was right. This had probably saved Darkos from being immediately delivered to Malevelo. She sighed. “Well alright then, you probably did the right thing. I still need a word with the academy’s Realms Studies Department. I don’t trust the head. How would she have even heard of Sunnyville?” “Promise, Eve’s not a bad person,” Arthius said. “And she literally knows every town on file. Of course she’d know.” “Well, I’ve heard ‘not a bad person’ a lot recently. So excuse me for being suspicious.” “Mom! Where’s the—what’s got you all so huddled?” The group broke apart like magnets, all inconspicuously turning to something else. “Just discussing where we’re going next. After the cults. Your parents are concerned I won’t take care of you.” Darkos shuffled over to clear the last of the plates. “I’ll be fine,” he said, grabbing Geela’s plate. “Made it this far—Geela, you didn’t finish your eggs! And your bacon! It's angry! It has eyebrows now!” — It didn’t take the pair long to pack up their belongings the next day. They hadn’t brought too much and Geela’s bag ate most of it. Darkos’s parents pushed a good deal of food on them, which was very kind, even though Geela was beyond done mentioning it. Darkos could thank them for her. She was tired of them. It was shortly before their final lunch there that Rakette pulled Geela aside, a motion that had become familiar if not miserable. “Look,” the woman started and Geela was already over the conversation. “Darkos has been through a lot at—” “I know. I already know. He’s talked a bit about it, about how this whole thing is harder than he thought it would be.” It had cracked her heart just a little to see him sitting on his bed, arms wrapped around his knees, chin tucked in. He’d struggled to find a way to phrase ‘killing people and dealing with grief is a lot more taxing than taking out your monster pets ever was’ without making Geela think less of him and it hurt just a little to watch. “He’s a hardy guy. He’ll be fine.” “Geela,” she said, and now her voice was more urgent. “I just wanted to say that… I don’t like you. Don’t respect your work or the things you’ve done to good folk just to inflate an already massive ego.” Geela considered this. “Well I don’t at all enjoy your company and if it weren’t for the fact that your son is better than we both deserve, my plans for this village would have been renovating it to about two inches high and very sooty.” Rakette’s eyes narrow, an odd reaction given she instigated the insults. “Anyway. I wanted to make that clear. I will, however, put up with you at Darkos’s request.” Geela’s fingers trailed along the window sill, scraping up dirt under a nail. “Charming. Well, dear, I’ll be sure to withstand your boorish nature should he ever convince me to come back up here.” “Well he’d best! And when we come down to… wherever you’ve set up, I like to think we’ll be damn beter houseguests than you’ve managed to be.” She straightened her shoulders, gazing at Geela haughtily. “First of all,” Geela wiped off her dirty finger on the bright yellow curtains, “I can’t imagine ever wanting you to visit my home. Maybe Darkos could convince me. Maybe. He’d have to have a damn good argument though because two,” she started scraping the dirty out from under her nail using a knitting needle that lay on the chair by the window, “I couldn’t imagine you’d be a better houseguest.” She smiled sweetly. “Fortunately, i don’t see us encountering each other again for a long time, so—”” “Oh don’t pretend. You may have him fooled but he still is a good enough son to invite us.” “Invite you?” “I saw him give you that ring before the invasion.” Geela blinked. “The one—” “And I’ve seen the one on his finger now.” “The what?” All of Rakette’s absurd… well Geela couldn’t even rightfully call it an argument. More like ramblings. Perhaps even a racket. But it all went out the window as Geela’s shoulder tensed. “He’s got another one?” she asked. “Which ring? Was it green? I swear if he’s got the hydra heart…” Rakette stared at her, outrage dripping from every pore. “Oh I bet you just have dozens, don’t you.” Her fists balled “Fine. As if you don’t know. It was the little sapphire one, the one on his pinkie finger.” Geela’s face flushed so red so fast she thought she might pass out. She rounded on Rakette so fast the curtain in her hand ripped. “How in the hell How in the bloody, ever living, all evil hell…” She groaned as the picture floated in her head. Oh Darkos. Stupid, clueless Darkos. She forced a smile at Rakette. “I’m sorry. Or at least, pretend that I am. I’m sure that, to anyone else, what you’re trying to say is terribly important, but I need to rescue an engagement ring.” Rakette’s lips flopped open but Geela had no further time and swept from the room to chase down Darkos. Of course Darkos had that ring. Of course he did. Some two and a half years ago, the day Geela left her castle on a head-clearing tirade, was the last time she’d worn that stealth garb. It had also been the last time she’d worn her engagement ring. Oh, she’d contemplated burrowing to the core of the planet to melt it in the fiery inferno of whatever was down there, but she ended up shoving it in her pocket to deal with ‘later’. ‘Later’ was supposed to be that night when she got back to her castle. But instead of flopping in and draping herself over her favorite chaise, she’d found a large dragon that no longer responded to her safe words. So ‘later’ turned into after she found someone to escort her home. And that went just swimmingly. So ‘later’ finally became now. Geela hadn’t given Barney much mind recently but now her stomach twisted. She rounded the corner to find the dazzling sapphire still on his pinkie. The sparkling thing, once the crowning jewel of a frumpy nightshow patron, now sat on the little finger of a dopey ex-priest who couldn’t have looked more out of place with it on if he’d tried. How had she missed it? Maybe Darkos was rubbing off on her. She forced a smile to cover how she shook at the unwanted memories. “Darkos, sweetheart, that ring…” “Oh! Oh man.” He facepalmed, actually smacking his face with his hand. “Second time I forgot.” He grinned, a bit abashed. “It was super helpful though. I’m getting better at using artifacts though. You wouldn’t believe how much I bashed Malevelo. I collapsed a cavern on him.” Geela’s lips went tight. “Right. You collapsed a cavern.” “I think it was an ice bolt. It got all scummy in the void air though but it was enough to blow up the dire crystals and that gave me a way out.” Geela stared at Darkos, brain clunking through this in record slow time. Darkos had just blasted a metric ton of void energy out of his pinkie finger, thinking he was using, what, ice magic from Geela’s engagement ring? Darkos was also staring by now, his face probably mirroring hers in sheer blank stupor. Finally Geela forced a smile. “That’s just dandy. Happy for you.” Good job, Geela. Very convincing. He nodded. “Ok. Right, well, anyway, here it is back.” He pulled the delicate band off his finger. “Thanks, by the way. For giving me something defensive. For a sec down there I thought I was screwed. I did like the forcefield one better though. Ice magic is draining.” Great, and now Geela felt like a shitty friend. She examined the ring, stomach sinking as her heart skipped a bit the way it did when Barney first slid it on her finger. God she needed to get a grip. "How about..." She fumbled in her bag before withdrawing the old force-field ring he’d used in Haymaker, "...you hang onto this. It's already attuned to you and I shouldn't leave you entirely undefended." His face brightened like a school boy's as he pulled the old ring on. "Awesome." "Alright." Geela clapped her hands and looked around the two. "Alright, this looks good. Let’s grab some lunch before heading out. You ready to go?” For a moment he looked like he might contest. “Next village, you do the sharing. I don’t want to be anywhere near it.” “Given. It won’t be nearly as hard without Malevelo being a driving force and with one of the crystals shattered, so this—” she gestured at the general air “—won’t happen again. I am not possessing another town.” “Don’t like it?” “Hypnotized worship drains you, it doesn’t invigorate you. It’s like… eating spoiled food. It tastes alright and you feel like you’re eating but the next thing you know, the whole meal is on the floor, plus the last few and…” She looked up where Darkos’s face had gone a tad green at the metaphor. She tried again. “It’s like writing a book and someone says they’ll publish you but ask for money instead of paying you. It looks good to someone who doesn’t know better, but it drains you more than it pays you. You just end up more broke.” Darkos nodded, hopefully getting it. “Alright. Actually I suppose that makes sense. Ok so no possessing groups and I get to hide when you tell everyone the…” he trailed off, face clouding for a second before he shook his head, forcing a smile. “...bad news.” “You’re going to be ok,” she said, voice dropping to a softness she didn’t love using but knew reassured him. “And you’re saving them. Remember that.” “Ok. And you… You’ve got that.” She tipped her head at him, at the guilless look in those big brown eyes, and smirked. “Yes Darkos. I will tell them all the horrible horrible crap Noire has done to their families. You can ride off free.” “Are you sure—” “A thousand percent.” There simply was no good reason to even contest this point but Darks seemed to need the reassurance. “Ok. Ok, just making sure. I want to feel good about taking out Noire. Not all weird and bad. I feel like that’s been a lot of the successes. Weird and bad. Sinistrina choking on the sandwich and then obviously telling all the villagers that bad stuff but even, like, there was this little priest down in the catacombs and she was so scared and confused and hurt, physically hurt, and I just took advantage of that to—’ “To what? Did she die?” “No! Geela!” He looked aghast at the suggestion. “She broke the crystal!” Geela shrugged, really not seeing the point. “Honestly, with the exception of breaking the bad news, I don’t see what’s the problem.” “I feel like I’m going bad. Like too bad. Like evil. Like… like maybe…” He stared at his boots. “Like me?” Geela asked. “Oh, Darkos. I would never have felt guilty over the things you’re fretting over. Does that help? I didn’t slowly slide down this path. I started down here.” It was kind of interesting, lying to Darkos about this. Maybe it was a half-lie. She’d never been the most affectionate child but she hadn’t started out heartless. That came later. Yet here she was, totally guilt-free about lying to her friend about why he shouldn’t be worried about becoming her, because she was always evil. “A little bit. Actually a lot. Sometimes I worry that I’m going to turn evil or something.” Geela just rolled her eyes and grabbed her bag. “Evil people don’t worry about turning evil. They just are. Now, is there more morosity to moon over, or are we ready to go?” “I think… no, I think I’m good. Thanks, Geela, again.” He smiled, for real this time, and nodded. “Alright then. Let’s make like a tree and leaf.” Geela turned this pun over in her head but before she could speak, Darkos hoisted his bag on his shoulder. “It was nice to be at home but I need to get out of this place. Need to get back on the road, see something new.” Technically ‘make like a tree and leaf’ did make more sense than how she’d always heard it but it made her question how many puns she may have butchered in the past. But Darkos was staring at her intently so she filed this away for the future, slipped her satchel over her shoulder, and tossed a long golden lock over her shoulder. “Wonderful,” she said. “Let’s say our farewells and then head out. We’ve got some cults to destroy.” And there's your third chapter for the week! I don't have too many updates except to thank you for your overwhelming support onRoyal Road. I started the day at 11th on trending and ended it on 8th. One more rank and we're on the front page, so don't let up that momentum! (To give you an idea of the power of trending, in one week Geela got 200 new followers.) I've got the next couple chapters already written and my beta writer is already super excited about them. SPEAKING OF WHICH if you haven't checked out Vren'sFractured Songat this point, you're just insane because it is so good. Seriously, this me leading the horse to water because you'll want to drink this up immediately. He's done an amazing job being my ultimate, near-24-hour sounding board for Geela so go give him a read. You won't regret it! See you Monday! Have a nice (long if applicable) weekend!!
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