Birmingham Fair's June 2023 Arts & Culture Round-Up!
A regular non-exhaustive snapshot of creative events we've found going on in Birmingham this month...
1
Soho House and Blakesley Hall Reopen with Blood & Fire: Our Journey Through Vanley Burke’s History Exhibition
FOKA WOLF: WHY ARE WE STUCK IN HOSPITAL? (The Exchange) until 17th
We Don't Settle: Poetry Jam Live! (Symphony Hall)
STARS - AN AFROFUTURIST SPACE ODYSSEY (Old Rep)
2
Digbeth First Friday (multiple venues)
Open Studios & The Growing Project Sale (Grand Union)
Sonic Signals and God-Pocket (Eastside Projects)
Nela Milic Wedding Bellas (Centrala)
Free Jazz Fridays: Daisy Houlder (Symphony Hall)
UK Games Expo (NEC) until 4th
Community Fun Day (Burbury Park, Newtown)
Midlands Air Festival (Ragley Hall) until 4th
3
Burger Fest (The Bond, Digbeth)
Fighting Spirit Film Festival (The Mockingbird)
Community Open Day (Lifford Reservoir)
Walkspace 23: Opening Night Party (Artefact, Stirchley)
Birmingham Art Zone: Art Festival (Gunmakers Arms)
4
MAC Arts Market (Midlands Arts Centre)
Highbury Hall Craft Fair
Still Walking: Relics of New Street
Dancing Out (Compton Verney, Warwick)
8
B-Side Hip-Hop Festival (multiple events) until 14th
Birmingham Design Festival (The Rep) until 9th
Fatt Butcher: Tw*ts (Old Joint Stock Theatre) until 10th
9
Fight the Power: How Hip Hop Changes The World Special Screening (Part of B-SIDE Hip-Hop Festival) (Birmingham Hippodrome)
Free Jazz Fridays: Maddy Coombs Trio (Symphony Hall)
10
Wolverhampton Pride
Balsall Heath Second Saturday (multiple events)
Zine-Making Workshop with Rachael House (Grand Union)
Birmingham’s Craft & Flea (Custard Factory)
Windrush Tapestry Project (Old Print Works)
BAR4BAR Cypher (Suki10C)
Supersonic Kids Gig: ICHI (Symphony Hall)
Growing Up Green Festival (Highbury Orchard)
Breakin', poppin', lockin' and Hip-Hop Battles: Prelims & Qualifiers (Part of B-SIDE Hip-Hop Festival) (Arcadian Car Park)
All Styles & Waacking Battles: Prelims & Qualifiers (Part of B-SIDE Hip-Hop Festival)
Frequency Summer Festival (Luna Springs)
50 Years of Hip-Hop Block Party (Thorp Street)
FLUXCON: 50 Years of Hip-Hop (Part of B-SIDE Hip-Hop Festival) (Birmingham Hippodrome)
Lark in the Park (Manor Farm Park, Northfield)
SPASMS AND SAVAGERY; 30 YEARS OF DOWNWARDS (Centrala)
Tin Tent Festival (Rock N Roll Brewhouse)
11
Dance Championship Finals (Part of B-SIDE Hip-Hop Festival) (Bullring)
Kings Heath Artisan Market (York Road)
12
Force of Nature Exhibition (Birmingham Botanical Gardens)
13
Collage Club Social (The Steam Room, Harborne)
Windrush Caribbean Film Festival: Young Soul Rebels + Shantaye’s World (Midland Arts Centre)
16
Craig Charles’ Funk and Soul House Party (The Mill)
Free Jazz Fridays: Cherise & University of Birmingham Jazz Orchestra (Symphony Hall)
Moseley Food Fest (The Village, Moseley)
17
Stirchley Community Market (Stirchley Baths)
Celebrating Sanctuary: Refugee Week Family Festival (Midlands Arts Centre)
Amok: Experimental Performance and Music (Artefact, Stirchley)
Pop Lovers Summer Outdoor Festival (Luna Springs)
Paperdolls Summer Market (Custard Factory) until 18th
Sinfonia of Birmingham in Barnt Green
18
Still Walking: 666 Places in Birmingham That You Shouldn’t Miss (Black Sabbath Bridge)
20
VERVE Open Door: Poetry Event for all (The Hive Cafe & Bakery)
Ex Cathedra’s Summer Music By Candlelight (St Paul’s Church) (until 21st)
22
First Songs in the Orchard... with B'Opera (Castle Bromwich Hall Gardens)
23
Hannah Sawtell: Useful Tools (Centrala)
24
Bournville Village Festival
Earth Markets (Martineau Gardens)
Congolese Independence Day Celebration 2023 (Midlands Arts Centre)
‘Parade – The Giant Wheel’ by Autin Dance Theatre (Walsall Arboretum)
25
Harborne Carnival
Vegan Market and Garden Party (Castle Bromwich Historic Gardens)
The Flapper Summer Market
26
Birmingham Settlement Neighbourhood Futures Festival 2023 (Edgbaston Reservoir) until 1st July
29
Birmingham Indian Film Festival 2023: New Brit-Asian Shorts (Midlands Arts Centre)
30
Friday Lates: Your City, Your Story (Wolverhampton Art Gallery)
Free Jazz Friday: Birmingham Jazz Orchestra (Symphony Hall)

So, hear me out on this one.
My daughter, lets call her Samantha, is 12 years old and still hasn't incorporated proper hygiene into her daily routine. Now let me be clear, I love her with all my heart, but I cant deal with people who smell like booty stank. She hasn't showered in 3 weeks, and because we live on a farm she likes to roll around in the mud and becomes extremely dirty. Her hair, which resembles ramen, is absolutely disgusting, and her face went from beautiful to ugly af.
She refuses to listen to my constant beckoning with her, which has caused strain between our relationship. It's so much to the point where I have stated over 9000 times (Haha meme) for her to improve her hygiene or I'm forcing her to sleep in the mud. I've never had the heart to do this, until recently.
My daughter came back from whatever the hell she was doing with faeces running down her leg and smells like pure urine. I decided I have had enough with her shenanigans and am now forcing her to live outside until she decides to become a more civilized young lady.
However, the consequences this had on my sex life is immeasurable. I, 56f, haven't had sex in 5 days because of this, with my husband (21m). He said, I'm not going to risk impregnating you if you decide to treat my child like an animal.
This is not the effect I had intended, and now my sexlife is dry.
AITA for kicking my daughter out of the house because she smells like booty stank?

It’s pure, horrific-ass fucking baby animal torture… and for what?
Veal is not that fucking good.
Like steak is good.
Pork ribs are good.
Waygu beef is real dead-assington fucking good!
But veal? It could never be delicious enough to be okay to create the way that we do it.
That is pure, unadulterated, highly corrupt and disgustingly deplorable human husbandry practice.
How the fuck do people feel okay doing that?
You must have to dehumanize yourself I think and presume: hurt your own heart and mind and soul by dulling it enough to do that for a “living”.
You already have cows on your farm, you do not need to make veal to make a living; You have other options in terms of processing and selling their meat. You can treat those baby boy cows, usually snatched from their necessary mama at 3 days old no less, and their mothers and other cattle there with respect and kindness and humanely slaughter them after letting them have some bit of life to enjoy our there in your picturesque, pastoral fields of green with Berkshire mountainous backdrops. A lovely scene tarnished with harm and abuse and truth-be-told hate. And worse than hate, which is technically not the opposite of love, but the thing that is: apathy.
Sorry, not sorry. Never sorry. Bite my shiny metal ass if you disagree.
It is so fucking sick and twisted to torture little baby cows like that.
You know their traumatized and utterly distraught and frantically upset/worrying/desperately frustrated mothers must cry for them relentlessly just as those poor, doomed baby cows whine and cry for help in their, sunless, windowless, uncomfortable prison. Tortured for the purpose of us having one more style of beef meat to consume.
And then to put salt in the wound, they milk those human-caused post-partumly depressed and dejected mothers of their stolen baby boy’s precious milk. He won’t be using it and there’s humans who want it. And humans just fucking take whatever they feel like, without a care in the world beyond their own wretched mouths and stomachs. We aren’t going to hell. We created hell, and we are demon beings playing within it. We could create heaven, but gosh man what about the pure selfishness and entitlement?! Let’s do that instead, eh 😒?
How do the owners and workers sleep at night?! I wish nothing more than to haunt their dreams I deftly and artistically-with-macabre turn into ruthless nightmares, Freddy Krueger style, until they stop this business. Nightmares where they are the kidnapped and stolen and tortured baby cows. These stupid farming bitches need to learn empathy somehow, mang. I hate knowing they are getting away with this and other animals creatures here, or maybe even the alien watchers visiting, are observing humans doing this. And this is what we get associated with to these other creatures watching us do this. It makes me feel a red hot anger and spiteful ness with a blazing, radioactive strength of 10,000 blue suns, towards my own kind. Somebody needs to stand up to us and put the kibosh on our nasty, mean-spirited bullshit. !>Maybe this is where those aliens come in clutch, fingers crossed there.!<
^{Because I’m almost dead-ass ready to go to prison to take a stand against my own kind.}
We don’t deserve nice-ass things like ethically sourced meat even, because we are greedy and gross and do not have standards or self-control apparently. We don’t know when to stop, apparently.
👏🏻We 👏🏻don’t 👏🏻need 👏🏻shit-ass 👏🏻veal
and
we shouldn’t compromise our morals
for that
twisted,
gluttonous,
heartless
bullshit.
Selling our souls
and
crumbling our moral foundations,
littering
our own personal
mental side of the street
with
that
heavy, bad karma? Not worth it. The baby cows deserve better.
Anyways, if I end up bombing the shit outta that farm and destroying those baby cow torture boxes beyond repair…. Would any of y’all help post my bail and donate to a go fund me for legal fees and a good lawyer lmao?
I’d look to PETA for help, but they steal and kill family pets so fuck them corporate cunts, too.
So I’ma need y’all to donate what you can.
Or maybe, just like idk mang… remind me I have charity to do and going full Armageddon on that veal farm would prevent me from doing that future charity work.
But fuck, I can’t sleep at night sometimes thinking about those baby cows 😭💔.
We are a stain of a species on this otherwise beautiful planet, real talk.
We are full of sin we refuse to acknowledge as such, worrying about non-sin like it somehow matters more. We’re fucking dumb and delusional and dastardly and despicable. This planet deserves hominid caretakers, but too many of us absolutely do not deserve this planet.
I hope people stop eating veal and stop being cruel with their consumption 😔😢🥺.
Keep your side of the street clean
or
suffer
as much as the ones whose suffering
you cause
or are ignorant to.
Your choice. I know what mine will be…
^{^(fantasizing all day about bombing that veal farm and tying the owners and workers there to chairs while I slap them in the face a few rounds with a smelly, rotten, rough-scaled fish. Beat them up a bit to remind them of how to act lol.)}
Maybe I’ll just settle for tagging their street facing property with a big ole ”we actively torture baby cows here” and putting up fliers around that town about that farm and what they do and how veal is made. Education is empowerment and!< change !< is!< catalysted, after all.

Recently while rereading Way of Kings I came across Sigzil's description of Babatharnam and its unusual governmental system. This triggered my imagination and what began as an errant thought became a few hours of silent reasoning on how such a system would work. By the end of it I had essentially written a short essay and thought I might as well share my thoughts in case some of you would find it interesting. English isn't my first language so there might be some errors in the text but I'm reasonably sure it's readable. I hope you enjoy.
​
​
Using the few sentences we get in the books we can construct some of the traits of the political system of Babatharnam both normally and under the Monavakah dynasty.
The country has an elected monarch figure called ‘most ancient’.
The criteria for becoming most ancient is age.
Theoretically anyone can become ‘most ancient’
The Monavakahs have usurped the system and within it have placed members of that family on the throne for 50 years.
Thinking carefully these four facts tell us a lot about the society of Babatharnam.

1. Who gets to rule.

In the books Sigzil specifically mentions that everyone gets a chance to rule if they’re old enough. Everyone is however an enormous pool that could encompass the entirety of Roshar so we are probably safe in narrowing that down to only those born in Babatharnam: the Babath.
This leaves multiple possibilities for how people and their age are tracked. To keep it simple I will describe two possibilities, the latter of which I think is much more likely.
First there is the possibility of a centrally run institution that tracks the age of all those born in Babatharnam. This system would make governance work exactly as Sigzil makes it seem and gives equal opportunity. To me it’s unlikely that this is the way the system works however. Setting up and running such an institution would undoubtedly be done by the country’s elite, who would be heavily incentivised under any circumstance to reduce to pool of potential rivals for the throne. The easiest way to go about this would be to count as few people as possible and so such an institution would be underfunded and neglected.
The second option is the one I consider more likely. I suspect the ruling elite of Babatharnam leave proving a candidate’s age up to the individual and their family. In this situation each family that puts forward a member keeps their own detailed records and proofs of their members ages (as well as a large amount of fabricated evidence discrediting their rivals). In practice then Babatharnam would select its rulers from a small set of aristocratic families who likely also dominate all the other governmental positions (which also indirectly makes it so that whoever becomes ‘most ancient’ later in life has a background in governance).
​

1. Power sharing.

Power sharing between the ‘most ancient’ and the aristocratic families, more than anything else, has to be part of the system. Successions are always a time of stress on any governmental system and this is especially so if the ruler wields a lot of power and authority compared to others (for a real world example think of how much more smoothly the transfer of power goes in diplomatic systems compared to dictatorships). By definition the extremely elderly rulers of Babathranam are very likely to die not long after assuming their throne so in practice their terms will only be a few years long. Not only does this mean they wouldn’t have the time to consolidate power any gathered power is sure to be lost quickly over the course of the frequent successions.
Because successions are frequent the process for such occurrences would need to be extremely smooth. If the position of ‘most ancient’ is too much of a prize then infighting is sure to grind the system to a halt very quickly and may even mean frequent civil wars. More than anything I think such a system wouldn’t be kept around but would be quickly replaced with something more stable.
Having Babatharnam be an essentially aristocratic system with the ‘most ancient’ as a ‘first amongst equals’ rather than an absolute monarch would solve many of the issues I described. It would provide continuity in policy despite the monarch changing every few years and also greatly reduce the potential damage senility could do to the system (I will get back to this). This aristocratic council (let’s call it that) with the ‘most ancient’ at its head would probably rule with an eye towards consensus rather the ‘winner takes it all’ voting approach we are familiar with in western democracies. This would further decrease division and is also seen in many real world societies that used to rule based on seniority (specifically in Africa).
​

1. a tangent on the geography of Babatharnam.

More than all the other parts this section is fanfiction. Given Babatharnams location on Roshar: squeezed between mountains and tropical seas on the windward side of the high storms (and presumably also regular rain), it’s probably covered in rainforests.
To my mind then Babatharnam would be divided into an amount of agricultural cores of medium to large size interspersed with tribes that practice cultivation of the forest, hunting and gathering. I don’t think there would be many smaller farming villages as significant labour is needed to clear the rainforest for use in agriculture. I suspect these separate centres all have their own version of a ‘most ancient’ (let’s call them ancients) with each centre being in some way subordinate to the largest city whose ruler is the actual ‘most ancient’ (probably Panatham although I personally like the idea that the city with the oathgate has since become only a minor settlement).
In theory the ‘ancients’ of these centres could become ‘most ancient’ but in practice I suspect these too are mostly barred from the position. Realistically even with the significantly reduced pool of candidates there would still be a handful of suitable people of similar age in the area surrounding the central metropolis alone. These would be preferred over similarly aged people from further afield and an outside family would probably need to push their candidate heavily if they wanted to put them on the throne.
The aristocratic council of the metropolis would over the course of a few weeks come to a consensus on which candidate will be the next ‘most ancient’ with the other potential candidates accepting the ‘clerical errors’ that made them think they were older. All the candidates combined would form a pool for the succession going forward. After reaching consensus a succession preference is established and the candidates considered take turns being ‘most ancient’ until all are dead after which the system repeats and families put forwards new candidates.
This way the system further cuts down on the potential instability caused by frequent succession. Probably most of the candidates put forwards die before they become ‘most ancient’ but the time between potentially volatile successions is in this way maximised.
​

1. civic tradition and the Monavakah dynasty.

Returning to the text we know that this system isn’t working as intended at the moment because the Monavakah dynasty currently reigns. This is another point we must consider thoroughly. Through what is said we know that despite being in power for 50 years (so long that most people alive in Babatharnam were probably born during Monavakah reign) they must still pay extreme lip service to the old system and are forced to eliminate rivals of a similar age.
The fact that they still need to do this, despite holding onto enough power to subvert the system for 50 years, means there is an extremely ingrained belief that the ruler must actually be the oldest person in the country (in reality from among the elite). This leads me to belief that the Monavakahs and their dynasty are either a never before seen development or a very rare occurrence. This is because a system like the one I’ve described can’t be shelved for multiple dynasties at a time and still be expected to hold such sway that assassinations are necessary.
If multiple dynasties had succeeded each other without long periods of non-dynasty rule then the elective part of the system would long ago have eroded away. Instead the system would’ve adapted to the ‘most ancient’ being the oldest person within the dynasty (meaning assassination of rivals wouldn’t be necessary).
Assassination itself also requires further attention. Realistically a society can’t function if it for 50 years consistently eliminates it’s most experienced people. More than lacking experienced leadership such a situation would drive capable people away in droves leading to a severe brain drain. More than likely the system thus needs a way for a family (or an individual) to declare themselves unfit for the position of ‘most ancient’.
I suspect such a function would’ve originally served to prevent senile people from becoming ‘most ancient’ (see I got back to it), while in the new system it serves to declare that you won’t challenge the Monavakah dynasty. For this to work the declaration has to be irreversible while only being an internal family decision. If someone could be declared unsuitable from outside the family then assassination would be unnecessary as the Monavakahs would be able to declare their rivals unsuitable. Equally the reverse would also be true as the other aristocrats could then declare the Monavakah ‘most ancient’ unsuitable as a sort of vote of no confidence.
With such a clause in the system rule in Babatharnam could still function while also preserving the need for assassination and exile described in the text.
​
In summary.
Babatharnam was originally ruled by a council of elderly aristocrats led by the ‘most ancient’, their ‘oldest’ member. The authority of this role greatly depended on the person themselves and ranged from figurehead to first amongst equals. Usually a new ‘most ancient’ would be chosen from among the oldest aristocrats within the dominant metropolis with aristocrats from further afield only being considered if significantly older than the candidates locally available (because of the strong civic tradition).
Within recent memory the Monavakah dynasty has seized power. Likely they were originally chosen through consensus and the first of them served an unusually long term as ‘most ancient’ allowing them to centralize a lot of power. When they died either by luck or careful design the next ‘most ancient’ was also a Monavakah. This pattern continued while the Monavakahs more and more put members of their family in positions of power. All the while rivals from other families were either assassinated or exiled on trumped up charges. Those families committed to the old system went into hiding in other agricultural cores, stirring up unrest, while those less ambitious continually declare their most senior members unfit to serve as ‘most ancient’ allowing them to still fulfil other important roles.
The Monavakahs share power within the family much the same way as was done when multiple families vied for the position of ‘most ancient’ and for the same reasons. I suspect that if things go unchanged the Monavakah dynasty eventually becomes either an accepted hereditary monarchy or various factions within the dynasty split along ideological lines into new houses that essentially return Babatharnam to its original non-dynastic state.
​
​
​
That is all. In any case I hope some of you got a kick out of it. I'd love to hear thoughts on it and where some of you might disagree with me.

So I read this manga (not manhwa), MC is a villainess, who got married to a Duke or marques. This guy is in love with other girl, but due to the MCs father he had to marry MC. MC is not interested in the marriage so she wants to get divorce. Her father is a evil guy who got married to MCs mother's family to get fame and is kind of an underworld mafia. He wants MC to give birth to Duke's child so that he can take over the Duke's domain. The MCs husband has a nephew 2-3 yr old who thinks of MC as his mom and MC takes super good care of her. MC is super competent, she takes care of the domain and house, can do farming etc. She's good at childcare (mostly nephew) because of her father. He used to kidnap children and so MC had to take care of all those kids. She just wants to get away from her father and is cool with the Duke and his lovers relationship.Had this book marked in gold beta server but you know the shitshow going on with the server. Please help with the title.

I have always wanted a giant breed dog. Always been obsessed with them. When I finally had the money to care for one, I had to contend with the fact I had small children.
I did my research, and Great Danes and Irish Wolfhounds came out on top for being gentle giants. I picked an Irish Wolfhound.
My dog just turned one. She's 100+ lbs and towers above my 6' husband on her hind legs. I've never counted on genetics to keep things peaceful. It's ALL training. My kids treat my dog with respect and she knows she can trust me to stop them if they get crazy. If the dog gets hyper, or they want to play with her; we go for walks, play fetch, use treats to do her obedience tricks, separate either a hyper puppy or a hyper kid before they beef each other up to psycho crazy mode. This works. This has been the best dog I've EVER owned.
However. It bugs me how people want to intentionally antagonize her. It's one thing on walks, because that's outside her territory and I assume I just need to train her to deal with it. (I'm about 80% successful, so far.)
But today, my son had a friend over who immediately started slapping her in the face and started laughing at her mock snapping at their arms, and then slapped her in the face and ran away... my dog got excited and chased him and by sheer momentum accidentally knocked them down. I had to scold my dog an separate them. Told the kid that we don't roughhouse with the dog.
Minutes later, she went to lay down on my bed and they started slapping her again. She jumped off the bed, tail wagging, ready for a new friend....this kid GRABBED HER BY THE NECK and tried to throw my dog to the ground. They weigh like 60 lbs at best and my dog, stepped on their foot trying to get away, and the kid cried out in pain.
I rushed over to check on them, but they said they were not hurt. I told them that they can't play with my dog like that, and they said they live with big dogs; it's okay...🙄
I'm kind of frustrated at this point. It was my choice to get a giant dog, and I don't want my children's social life to suffer because of that.
But on the other hand, my giant dog is amazing with my two year old. She can walk her on a leash and make her do all her tricks. If my dog gets the zoomies, my dog is just as careful of not knocking her down as my toddler is as giving her a clear path. Even a BABY gets it.
I can lock my dog in her crate, which I sometimes do if I have guests that are afraid of big dogs. But she seems to understand the difference. If someone who is scared and ignores her completely comes over, she acts like she's just taking a nap. But if someone mistreats her, and I put her away just because she's bigger, she gives the saddest doe-eyes and whimpers. If I let the dog out, she picks right back up.
It's like once you tell my dog you want to rough house, she won't drop the point. I've had to tell my other child's friends this before they listen , but this one kid just seems to want to slap and choke my dog.
I'm about to ban this kid from my house. Thoughts?

What is Rock, Paper, Shotgun?
Rock, Paper, Shotgun (RPS) is a PC-gaming focused site based in the UK that was started in 2007. It has the usual gaming site content – Top 5/10/50/100 lists, publisher or developer press releases dressed up as news, reviews, previews, press event reports, a podcast, and – important to this story – a comment section below articles where gamers and capital-G Gamers, left-wing and right-wing alike, can find unity in complaining that their favourite was inappropriately placed in the aforementioned Top 5/10/50/100 lists.
(Fun fact: one of the co-founders of RPS was Kieron Gillen, who has since worked on Uncanny X-Men, Young Avengers, Marvel’s Darth Vader, and co-created Doctor Aphra.)
Of note, RPS bucks the generally apolitical nature of gaming sites by being quite openly left-wing. Though it generally isn’t a feature of many articles, it does show up on occasion, and not always in the best light. For instance, this article that has an unusual bone to pick with Rainbow Six Siege having a female hostage in the E3 demo. Despite Tom Clancy himself having a reputation as a conservative, and that’s pretty evident in his fiction, the Rainbow Six series has been unusually progressive in having women fighting terrorists alongside the men since the inception, and Siege was no exception. It was actually quite rare in the ‘90s that a woman not named Lara Croft was involved in the action alongside the boys, so it does seem like an article about Rainbow Six’s treatment of women is more about having a bone to pick.
(Editorial note: I do not believe a person’s identity is political. Some people do. There’s a saying that applies to capital-G Gamers – “There are two genders: male and political.” Often when they decry keeping politics out of video games, it’s directed at any sort of inclusion. So, the political slant on this is just to point out that left-wing people are generally pro-trans and right-wing people are generally not. Spoiler alert, this is a discussion about trans people.)
What is wargaming?
Within gaming, there are genres. Wargaming is one of them, and quite niche. Within the genre, there’s a diverse spectrum of passion. Some would consider themselves wargaming fans if they played and liked the Total War series. More hardcore wargamers would vehemently disagree and look down their nose at a game that has giant men standing on a world map; in their minds, wargaming is the domain of the chit and NATO symbology – a whole other language where a rectangular with an X through it represents an infantry unit, and the number of Xs or Is above the rectangle represents its size from XXXXX being army group, XX being division, II as battalion or I as company. (Give me hexes or give me death!) But in general, it’s operational (think the Italian campaign of WWII), strategic (the invasion of Sicily the Allies), or tactical (taking a specific town in Sicily with a regiment), and generally turn-based but occasionally real-time. You won’t find Age Of Empires in this genre, for instance.
Wargaming is not exclusive to the digital space either, and it’s just as likely to be played around an enormous table with intricate landscapes, pushing 8mm, 15mm or bigger pieces, usually hand-painted, and rolling dice. They’ll have a hefty rulebook in hand to consult how many dice you roll and what sort of success you need in order for your British mortar team to successfully knock out the German machine gun nest on the rooftop. Warhammer 40K is the most famous example, but that’s a single guy per base; the deeper wargames have a single base representing a squad or platoon stuck together to move as a group.
(The more hardcore have taken on the moniker grognards, a reference to old soldiers and specifically the original Imperial Guard that fought under Napoleon at Waterloo.)
What’s The Flare Path?
Among the contributors to RPS was one named Tim Stone, who started writing for the site as soon as it was founded. (I cannot use anonymity, so the usual sub rules apply about leaving people alone; Tim’s still writing and in order to engage with this drama, we have to link articles that clearly have his name on them.) There’s a distinction between staff and contributors; staff were full-time employees of the business, whereas contributors are just freelancers who pop in and out. He was not a run-of-the-mill writer who would guzzy up press releases, Tim only had one ongoing feature called The Flare Path with a supplemental Friday Foxer. Though he started out doing little comics under the title Strafe Left, he moved on to reviews and features before creating the regular feature The Flare Path in 2011.
The title The Flare Path is a reference to the lights that outline runways, allowing aircraft to take off or land at night. And that is a pretty good summation of the feature, because Tim’s focus was exclusively on wargaming and simulations, which could mean directing squadrons of aircraft to take off for a mission, or yourself piloting a plane to a gentle landing guided by the flare path. Every Friday, you would just as likely find an article about a game where you drive a train in rural England as you would a wargame where you command Roman legions in that very same countryside. Among the regular features were A2Z articles, where Tim would have short snippets for each letter of the alphabet, with Q often necessarily “Quick tea break” due to the infrequency of that letter showing up. For instance, a new ARMA game might be A, then teasing a review of Battle Brothers is B, and so on, just a fun way to wrap up a lot of short bits of news that don’t have enough meat for a full article.
Another article type would see Tim break out of his usual Friday containment and run communal games, typically Combat Mission. Combat Mission is a WWII/Cold War turn-based tactics game where you’d queue up orders to your units that would then be executed for 60 seconds, during which the other side would be executing their own orders and you’d simply have to watch how your planning and preparation plays out. And it turns out, this is surprisingly adaptable to a group game – Tim would grid the map, lay out a scenario, identify the units and the objectives, and then people would comment below the article to give instructions. You could only move one unit in a turn and you had to be the first to claim that unit, but you’d say, for example, “I’d like to move 1st Squad to H3 and try to suppress the machine gun,” and Tim would take your comment and play it out. The next day, he’d do a little narrative report on who did what, where, and when, and what the enemy did in response, in a fun narrative way, even naming characters who pulled off particularly heroic or cowardly feats. Then he’d update the map, and the next turn begins.
Alongside his regular article, he’d also post a Friday Foxer. He’d have a variety of different games in the Foxer genre, and often rewarded correct answers with prizes – usually codes for games that developers gave him. One type was giving clues to a location and the readers would have to deduce where Tim was “standing” that fit all the criteria. Others were Catchphrase-like messages hidden in images that you’d need to decode, or a series of seemingly-unrelated images which had a theme that you’d need to identify.
I go on these tangents to emphasize that Tim had built himself a little community on RPS. While contributors did reply to reader comments in articles, Tim was often playing a game with readers, which endeared him to some people. Not only that, if you were interested in wargaming or simulations, any article on RPS about those genres was typically Tim’s domain. For a certain group, Tim was the only regular source of news on two niche genres, and the only reason to read RPS if the newest action game or looter-shooter didn’t appeal to you. There was and (spoilers) is nothing like The Flare Path and the Foxers on RPS, as far as actual engagement with the article itself through community wargames or puzzles.
Equally important, wargaming itself is niche enough that there are few others who do what Tim does. Wargaming.net is actually the name of the company who makes World Of Tanks, World Of Warships and others – ironically, none of which would qualify as wargames and would barely pass musters as simulations either. Wargamer has infrequent articles. The best podcast on the subject is Three Moves Ahead (which originally launched as the podcast for the now-defunct Flash Of Steel website), but the podcast is infrequent as well, is primarily focused on a single game per episode (though with comparisons made by the host or guests to other games), and has a bit too much focus on Total War or every single new Paradox DLC for Crusader Kings at the exclusion of more niche titles.
On a weekly schedule, Tim became a stable pair of hands, and was directing his community to support all sorts of up-and-comers who were otherwise ignored or neglected or just invisible to wider gaming press.
I also want to point out that there’s an often-unspoken ethical question at the core of wargaming as a hobby. To his credit, Tim often wrote about it, and would even avoid wargaming topics as a matter of sensitivity to significant dates. As players in this hobby, we are moving chits around that represent thousands of people and though nobody obviously dies, wargaming frequently deals with historical events and it’s something we need to be aware of. Tim would frequently muse in his articles or bring it up in interviews with developers – to paraphrase, what we’re doing for “fun” is essentially turning some very dark times in human history into entertainment, and to what extent should we be aware of that? Should we want to simulate “playing” as Germany to conquer Europe, which in the real world resulted in tens of millions of innocent and not-so-innocent people dying? It’s a tough conversation to have and Tim chose to engage with it, which probably put him offside with some of his readers, because it’s a topic that actually genuinely is bringing politics into gaming, unlike a lot of the gaming discourse.
A journalist is booted off a fictional radio for being a bit TERFy, resulting in a journalist being booted off a website for being a bit TERFy.
The inciting incident for this drama is an article posted in 2020 about a UK journalist who was one of several used by game developer Ubisoft to provide voiceovers for the video game Watch Dogs Legion. In the article, it is revealed that this journalist had in the past posted a 2017 The Times article titled “A man can’t just say he has turned into a woman.”
What is TERF? Trans-Exclusionary Radical Feminist, which probably spiked the Google charts more recently with The Author Who Shall Not Be Named. I will add this disclaimer, I am inferring things about Tim when I call him a TERF, and maybe I’m giving too much credit. I don’t know if Tim Stone is a feminist, so I’m giving the benefit of the doubt, and I wear that. The author of The Times article is a self-proclaimed feminist, and does claim to support trans right, but according to the RPS article, “(She) uses familiar hand-wringing about biological sex, transgender identification as a trend, and people with penises in women's changing rooms.” I’ll leave it up to your judgement whether you think either is an actual TERF or not.
In an unusual move, one Tim Stone showed up in the comments of the above article, and that’s the meat of this drama.
The Alamo but with TERFs.
The comments, as you can imagine, were completely chill since obviously “censoring” a “journalist” in a “video game” for “anti-trans views” outside of the game itself is just the perfect intersection of everything political on an internet forum possible. (The voiceover in the game was scripted by Ubisoft and was itself not an issue; they were choosing to remove the voiceover to remove association with the journalist based on their views.)
One user wrote:

there are diverse voices within RPS when it comes to games, genres, preferences etc but I would say (and i’d be prepared to be challenged on this) there is zero diversity in respect of political views and arguable groupthink and alignment particularly around trans issues.

To which Tim opined:

There's at least one regular RPS contributor who'd like to see the site show a little more respect for the gender critical position in the trans rights debate. Me.

He proceeded to link several articles, saying,

I agree with all those arguing for more constructive discussion and less name-calling in this debate.

And we’re off to the races.
One commenter wrote:

never mind 'gender critical' being an obvious dogwhistle, it boggles the mind that you think "trans rights debate" is an acceptable string of words in 2020
trans rights are human rights, this shit isn't a debate

And significantly, it wasn’t just site users who were chiming in. Another writer for RPS came in guns blazing:

The "gender critical position" is tired snivelling cowardice hiding behind Very Real Concerns while throwing shit at the people whose lives are routinely treated like an intellectual excercise. [sic]
I am frankly embarrassed [sic] to see you repeating such dogwhistling bullshit. The obviously lying "I am cancelling my subscription!!!" oafs in here are one thing, but this is just sad.

What the writer was alluding to was the typical capital-G Gamer response to anything political (and often something is only “political” if they don’t like it), namely “Get your politics out of my video games.” Often the corollary of that was “..or I’m getting out of your website.”
The inciting article is itself tame. Incredibly tame. As referenced earlier, it has the usual games journalism scent of just dressing up a press release. At the most judgemental, they referenced that the voiceover-providing journalist had “some pretty ugly opinions about transgender people” and “that’s decidedly not neat,” which is just the lovely understatement you get from British people. “This is a bit bothersome” was, I believe, repeatedly uttered during the Blitz.
I won’t bore with copying over more comments, but it gets quite heated – although Tim seems to remain quite collected in the comments, which does have an air that he isn’t aware of what kind of hornet’s nest he’s kicked. The most noteworthy exchange is between a user and Tim, where the user writes:

It is distressing that you think my rights as a trans person are subject to some sort of "trans rights debate," and that "gender critical" is anything but a dog whistle for the same transphobic rhetoric as I've always been subject to, but now behind a veneer of intellectualism and civil discourse.
This isn't a matter of left and right, it's a matter of respect for other human beings. Good to know at least one RPS writer has none for me.

And Tim’s response:

I have profound respect for you and your life choices.
I also believe that questions like "Should trans women be allowed to compete in female sports?" and "Should male-bodied trans women be housed in womens' prisons?" are worthy of debate.
To forbid all debate on "trans rights" and to seek to silence and cancel people who don't unquestioningly support one side of the argument seems horribly totalitarian to me.

If you were to take an unfriendly view of Tim, this might be it – calling a person’s transition a “life choice”, and then putting the question of trans rights up for debate, calling the desire not to debate someone’s human rights “totalitarian.”
In all, Tim would comment eight times, with his last being:

Some proposed trans rights clash with women's rights in certain areas. It is not bigoted to point this out or advocate debate so that compromises can be reached.

Overrunning the drop zone.
Five days later, the RPS Twitter account posts this tweet.

Trans rights are human rights. We strive to create an inclusive space for all people. Earlier this week, a freelancer used the RPS comments section to express views that failed in that goal. We will no longer be working with this freelancer or publishing their column.

And just like that, the flares are snuffed and Tim’s time at RPS comes to an abrupt end after 13 years of service.
The responses, I’m sure you can imagine, are the usual volleys from the usual battle lines. Left-wing and trans rights people are chuffed to bits, believing that an insidious TERF has been weeded out from RPS. They view his comments about bathrooms and sports as the usual dogwhistle, typical of the alt-right where the goal is to draw increasingly smaller circles to exclude trans people from one thing after another until they ultimately cannot exist in society. Gamers with a right-wing focus and wargamers (and those are not mutually exclusive) try to cancel culture RPS, many declaring that they’d never return to the site for this grave injustice. And for wargamers, that’s pretty easy; Tim was the only one catering to their genre appetite, and there literally was no reason to return without Tim. The most vanilla response was those who didn’t care about the comment section conflict at all and just wanted their dang wargaming news.
(The wargaming audience was not exclusively on the right-wing - the creator of one of the biggest wargaming podcasts showed up in the comments too, and took a distinctly anti-Tim and pro-trans stance.)
The last (spoilers, not really) article posted by Tim was a typical A2Z column, and became somewhat of a shrine to him. Of note, the very user to whom Tim gave his perhaps most damning response showed up:

Please don't assume Tim is a TERF. I was involved, and indeed in lots of was responsible for what happened on the other forum which i am devastated by.
I am trans and Tim replied in support of a view that i expressed! He shared some views and links to articles (including one from a trans blogger) that many people (including many trans people) would agree with. And even if they didn't, and Alison below articulates the position better than i could, its not like he went on an alt right tirade. This is a reasonable person making reasonable views very politely and and commenter whether they agreed with those or not has gained nothing from what happened subsequently, and we have all collectively lost something.

Flare Path fans were somewhat split. The most mild responses were critical of RPS for how they booted Tim out the door without a second chance; some were concerned that it’s not a great way to win allies and convince people. Throw in the usual snippets: “cancel culture” and references to “The Inquisition”, and a number of people saying their farewells to RPS. In an odd way – and I did it myself by calling this a shrine – the comment section really does feel like the man died, with some outright coming to, quote, “pay their respects”.
Of particular note, a user named hms_pepperpot shows up, and it looks like it’s Tim. I have no evidence to the contrary and the phrasing is close enough that I’m willing to believe it. But wait, Tim was posting as Tim Stone in the inflamed comment section, right? Yep, the divorce was so swift and decisive that they even blocked his access to his old username, or deleted it entirely – either way, he was in the comments to say goodbye under an alias.

Leaving RPS without being able to say a proper goodbye to you, the readers who have made my job such a joy this past thirteen years, has been one of the most depressing aspects of the last few days. Your enthusiasm was as important to The Flare Path's modest success as the complete creative freedom Graham afforded me. Thank you for making possible the happiest years of my working life.
While the Flare Path name is destined for the scrap heap, the concept and spirit of the column will hopefully live on. I'm planning to pick up pretty much where I left off early in the new year. An article devoted to the FP game jam entries will be amongst the first pieces I post. Of course, there will be foxers too.
To readers hurt by my words last weekend, all I can say is a heartfelt sorry - I didn't set out to wound and have no wish whatsoever to make the lives of trans people more difficult. To readers baffled by the comments that ended up costing me my job, I strongly recommend reading a thoughtful essay written by Sam Smethers, the CEO of respected British women's rights charity The Fawcett Society. Google 'Sex and Gender Indentity: Finding a Way Forward' and you should find it.
See you in 2021 I hope. Tim.

Of note, HMS Pepperpot is a reference to warship HMS Penelope. With Tim’s penchant for riddles and puzzles, it is not likely a coincidence that:

On wartime service with Force K, she was holed so many times by bomb fragments that she acquired the nickname "HMS Pepperpot".

Though Tim had some in agreement with his views in the inciting comment section, he was undoubtedly outnumbered and taking a lot of flak.
Napoleon’s exile on Elba.
Some time later, Tim would resurface on a new site of his own creation, Tally-Ho Corner. Very much The Flare Path with a new coat of paint, he would carry on with his regular columns on a weekly basis. The Foxers returned, as did A2Z and communal wargaming. RPS, for their part, did not seem to fight to keep the column to themselves. There was a small exodus as RPS had once been a PC gaming site with a wargaming/simulation column, to just a PC gaming site. Those with only an interest in those genres left; there was nothing for them anymore. An unknown number followed Tim to his new endeavour and made themselves known over there. Striking out on his own has costs, however, and Tim sells membership and banner space to those who wish to help out. He has made follow-up requests since Tally-Ho Corner started which would indicate that it isn’t a profitable venture; he says he only wants enough to support the site, and seems to be happy to continue for the love of the hobby. He has alluded to the site not breaking even, so you can infer from that what you want about the size of the Flare Path exodus. Like I said, it’s a very niche hobby, so even 100% of Flare Path readers might not constitute a large number. One of the posts with the most engagements is a community vote on the best PC wargames; two years old, it has 144 comments and a closed comment section, so you could probably extrapolate a rough guess on readers versus commenters to see how popular the site is.
Tim would make the occasional comment about his past misadventure, but generally seemed to just carry on. Others would fight for or against him in other corners of the internet, but publicly, Tim seemed done with the whole thing and happy to just get back to writing about games.
The most blatant reference was an A2Z at the start of this year. No longer than any other entry (remember, he’s filling out 26 entries in a week, they’re usually just snippets), the entry “P is for Pointless provocation” in its entirety:

If, after my bruising departure from RPS in 2020, I had decided to start work on a “cathartic” retro FPS about gunning down dogmatic ‘trans allies’, I hope someone – a friend, colleague, or family member – would have taken me to one side and said “Tim, WTF are you doing?”. Unfortunately, no-one seems to have urged Norwegian coder Sandra Moen to think again. If they had perhaps the nasty Terfenstein 3D wouldn’t have made it onto Steam.

Tim’s back, baby! But it’s not him! But it is!
In a strange, quite dickish move, an RPS writer recycled an old Flare Path to come up with “The 25 best simulation games on PC”, with the writer credited… even though it was copied from Tim’s 2015 article. Tim called it out in an A2Z, as “H is for Hire a new sim correspondent, you cheapskates”, and that really sums it up – they were not rewriting the list, rearranging it, or updating it, they were literally copying the original list over and slapping a new author’s name on it.
If you click the above link, you’ll see that the article now has Tim as the author, changed retroactively (again). That in itself added a new element of drama, as readers who showed up after the edit were surprised by a new article from Mr Flare Path himself. Though it says “updated” in 2022, the giveaway is that the comments are predominantly from 7 years ago, when it was originally posted. One commenter, who I’ll take at their word, seemed to be witnessing the Stalin-esque rewriting of history in real time:

Wow, I just saw that Tim Stone's name has been removed. He was there as author when I first saw it this morning, with a note about it being updated by someone else. Now his name has been fully removed as the original author. I don't know what to say, but it feels icky to rewrite history like that, very 1984.
Update - now it says article by Holly, Additional Contributions by Tim Stone. Still not accurate (seems to be the reverse or reality) but at least the original author's name is in there somewhere again.

(Not calling anyone over there a tyrant or communist or anything, merely referencing that infamous photo where people are removed one by one as they fall afoul of the Stalin regime. In this instance, taking Tim’s work and crediting to someone else, then crediting Tim in addition to the new writer, then finally just calling it a Tim article.)
People noticed that the “updated” tag was the last attempt to hide in plain sight, since there was nothing updated about the list. It was identical to the one posted by Tim in 2015. And the clue was that, according to RPS, no simulation game had managed to crack the list since 2015; the “youngest” game on the list was 7 years old (now 8), a title shared by Farming Simulator 15 and Train Simulator 15.
15, of course, being the year both games released and the year Tim wrote the list.
An odd move to dig up the bones of the past, both the article and Tim’s involvement with RPS, for a single cheap parlour trick. Needless to say, if you search for Tim Stone contributions on RPS now, his “shrine” – a pretty typical A2Z Flare Path – is not his most recent contribution to the site. Instead, it’s “The 25 best simulation games on PC” from 8 years ago.
Fittingly, in the comment section below, the most recent post is by someone seemingly oblivious to the drama surrounding Tim Stone, RPS and trans rights. They’re instead complaining that two other motor racing games were left off the list. And really, there’s probably no better tribute to the community.

Their family just seemed so beyond loaded. They literally had a meditation center, a live-in servant ("grandma" I'm pretty sure wasn't biological), a stupid number of sports cars, etc.
They said they were a "Hollywood" family, not sure if that means they were related to somebody big in Hollywood.
For what its worth, the mom is one of the very few moms who talked about how "apperance is everything" who I actually thought was pretty. Usually they were plastic surgery messes on the show. Even when working at the farm in the other wife's house, she still managed to somehow look amazing.
​
The mom also definately struck me as old money. Nice enough person but just no sense of reality, as we saw by her never having seen a school bus before.

Alright so i have a 2 yr old aussie dachshund mix and he has only ever really lived on a farm with maybe seeing 2 ppl and a whole load of cows in a given week. I’m moving back to nyc for the first time since having him and I am really stressing bc he is really under socialized for a city dog, he knows the basic commands but when he’s out in city settings he is so zoned in that the only way I get his attention is by plopping down next to him and waiting it out. He tries his best when he’s on leash to not bark a tonne and just whines but I hate the stress it all causes him and then I feel like a tool for not having done enough when honestly we didnt go to town much bc the nearst non dollar store sorta town was 1 hr 1/2 away. He does fine at home but im pretty sure in new environments he is really unsteady bc he can have ppl come to the house and babysit while im gone but I tried dropping him off at the groomers and after they left him in a kennel for 30 ish mins waiting for his turn they couldnt get him out bc he was curled up in the corner growling. I cant give him away and in all honesty I need this little dude so is there anything I can do? For info he is not really food motivated and normally even his favorite squeaky toys cant shake his focus but the rest of the time hes just a normal high energy eager to please aussie. Plz help TLDR: aussie mix is meant to move to big city after being farm dog and is super under socialized and anxious in public bc of the sensory, tips and critiques are appreciated!

I (20f) used to live on a farm in the literal middle of fucking nowhere with my mom and her new husband A. she married A when i was 9, and we didn’t move out of his house until i was 14. i saw my bio dad every-other weekend through this time (bio dads not the best either but not nearly as bad as A. A is an extreme “functioning” alcoholic with some sort of undiagnosed mood disorder. he never hit us but he threatened to all the time, he would scream all night long, call us lazy, call my mom a whore, my sister fat, my brother a bastard. i would clean the whole house ALL DAY and he would come home and purposely leave his muddy shoes on and drop dishes to break them)
Ive been diagnosed Bipolar II with PTSD from living at his house along with events that happened when i was 14, 15 & 17.(i’ve been diagnosed since i was 16). Three months ago i started getting all these flashbacks in both dreams and waking life of my step dad (A) SA me when i was around 9-11.
I’m in trade school for massage therapy right now. I told my mom what i’m remembering happened with A, she SAYS SHE BELIEVES ME, SAYS SHES “SORRY THAT HAPPENED”, but will not divorce him. she’s saying she doesn’t have the money to divorce him, she has too many expenses, he helps her pay for them. i don’t think that’s true, i think she could get some of his stuff out of the marriage, maybe sell his stupid mid life crisis car, get some land, i don’t know. she also makes decent money doing her own job.
she says her main reason for not divorcing him is money, and she said he is “like an old pair of shoes i can’t get rid of”. WHAT??? WHAT?? she came to my house, sat on the couch with me and i told her what happened and we cried and i told her about all the times i can remember asking her why she didn’t do anything more. she says she didn’t know it was happening. i brought up how he SAID very creepy things to me throughout my life, i won’t go into detail but honestly it’s just shit that nobody should ever say to a 9-14yr old girl. she says she’s sorry it happened, and respects that i wont go to her house anymore unless he’s guaranteed not going to be there. i don’t want to see him ever again.
me now not wanting to see him, and my sister also now extra not wanting to see him, means i’m not going to be coming over for christmas or thanksgiving or coming to birthday dinners if he’s there.
she keeps making appointments with me to come into my school and work on her back, and she wants us to get our nails done together every weekend now. i think she feels bad about what happened and she’s getting lonely. i just want her to divorce him. that’s all i want. i don’t need her to try to get closer to me, spend more time with me, i want her to DIVORCE HIM. i can’t respect her when she goes to bed with him every night, cooks him dinner, goes out with friends with him, kisses him, does his fucking laundry like are you KIDDING ME?? FOR FUCKING REAL BRO??
i want to like my mom so fucking bad. i love her, she’s my mother, she taught me how to clean, she’s accepted me in being a lesbian, she helps me with housing, she pays my car insurance. i’m incredibly grateful for her but it’s like there this knife constantly in my stomach. she’s so good in so many ways.
she’s an older woman (upper 50’s) in an abusive relationship. she has a shopping addiction. she’s incredibly insecure. i feel bad for her. i love her and i want to be there for her. it just makes me so sad that she “believes me” and won’t do a single thing about it. i just want to cry. how can she stay married to him?? my brother is 17 and still has to see him all the time. A owns his house on the farm, and my mom owns her house in town. A goes and sleeps at his own house maybe 3-4 times a month. My mom moved away from the farm to attempt to divorce him when i was 14 and she ended up giving him a key and eating dinner in the new house with A like nothing is wrong about a week after we moved back to town. my little brother is STILL living there.
how can she let my brother stay there?? how can SHE stay with him?? i don’t understand

True story.
I used to stay at my grandparents house a lot when i was younger. They wanted to help out and such. They owned a 40-50 acre farm with their house about a quarter mile into the woods. It was summer and we all were going to bed. I always have had trouble falling asleep and was the only one awake and was returning from the bathroom to join my cousin on the top bunk with me in the bottom. The bedroom had one window facing a lightpost my grandparents had installed. I was just covering myself up when i saw something cast a shadow against the window curtain. Once... then twice it was fast but i could tell there was something moving outside. I crawl outta the bed hugging the floor already scared. I was about a foot from the closed curtain with my eye just above the window seal. I stared out and nothing happened for a few seconds. Then I saw a figure cast a shadow onto the curtain it looked like a big dog head. Long snout tail pointed ears. It stopped perfectly center of the window frame the slowly turned it's head to face me. I froze, but it then raised up a few inch to show it's shoulders. I can only describe it as a wolf head on a human body. The it turned away and moved on.
People said i was young it was only a nightmare. It wasn't i remember it to vividly. I forgot to mention that this window was about 5 feet up from the ground. It was my mother's' old room as a child and when i asked her if she ever saw anything. She paused for several seconds began to speak shook her head and stuttered out a no. She knew the folklore and refused to speak and we dropped it, but I knew why she responded that way.
Never mention them aloud.
I can't explain this. I'm still scared to be alone at night there. Even typing this gave me goosebumps.

I'm toying with a couple ideas of businesses to start. I'd love feedback on how to execute them well, what I should be aware of, or any ideas for enhancement. Help me pick which, if any, to do.
1. An Ice Cream Truck Tracker. Ever heard the music from an ice cream truck, only to never catch up with it? Users can see all Ice Cream trucks near them, track common routes, see prices/products in advance, and even ping nearby trucks to request they stop by. Ice cream truck operators can send in their location to the app so users can see them, serve ads/offers to users, and get insights on where/how to improve sales. Revenue would primarily come from truck operators. Focus would be on beach/park/vacation areas where lots of trucks operate. Could be expanded to food trucks in general. Challenges: hard to get a critical mass of users to be able to market to truck operators. Data accuracy would be important, but accurate live map data can be expensive. Limited market size.
2. Pickleball coaching. Pickleball is exploding in popularity and most people who play are affluent. The business would partner with current tennis/fitness coaches, teach them the rules & fundamentals of Pickleball, and pay them an hourly rate to lead group and private lessons. Would advertise at local fitness centers, 55+ active living communities, and parks. Could also arrange matches, tournaments, clinics, etc. Could also set up an online shop to sell gear. Challenges: already exists nearly everywhere and would be competitive. Many fitness centers already offer this in-house and wouldn't welcome outside competition.
3. Live Christmas Tree Additive. Live Christmas Trees are growing in popularity and are also generally purchased at tree farms. The tree farms typically have limited revenue each year based on the number of trees they have. They'd all love to add a few extra dollars to every ticket because that's the only way to grow revenue. I'd contract a botanist or something to help me make a proprietary powder to be added to live tree water. It would extend the life of trees, keep them greener for longer, and enhance moisture retention in the tree, reducing fire hazard. I'd put the powder in bags, and sell it for $5 at the point of sale at Christmas Tree Farms, giving the farm operator a chance at an extra $1-2 per customer. Challenges: Extremely seasonal, extremely limited market, thin profit margins. This probably gets started as a side-gig and maybe never grows beyond that.
4. Online Mini Golf Supply Shop. I'd be drop shipping mini golf clubs, balls, scorecards, etc. The value add is that I would set up web domains related to parks that have free mini golf with bring-your-own equipment. There are several of these in my town, and probably tons across the country. So, if there's one at 55th Street Park, I would set up 55thstreetminigolf (dot) com with my online shop. I would make a very official looking sign that simply says "Equipment available at 55thstreetminigolf (dot) com". I'd hang it right beneath the actual official sign that the parks have explaining that they are free and BYO equipment. This would not be sanctioned by the city/municipality, but odds are good no one would notice or care. I could do some additional long-tail search advertising too. Challenges: Would have to set up independently for each park/location. Could get in trouble for posting unofficial signage. Relatively low volume and low margins, so not a big opportunity. But once it's set up, it would run itself.
5. Indoor Golf-in-the-dark. Buy old warehouses/barns near vacation destinations. Clear them out, pave the inside, set up black lights, music, neon decor, and mini golf holes. Can sell snacks at the front counter. Can do birthday parties, company events, etc. A perfect bad weather activity at vacation places. Could also set up as a turnkey franchise. Challenges: hard to find good locations that aren't too capital intensive. Requires design/creativity skills to set up well. Overall a lot of upfront capital and work.

He was the sixth of seven sons. An unfortunate position, all the more for their good health. His father’s herd was not a trifle, but it could only give two sons respectable dowries. So one of his siblings took two feathers and became a wife, another married beneath the family and took up residence in the fields. Small homes and small futures, but a secured path. A fifth married a spirit.
Porubōsu had no interest in such small horizons, however, and taking a second feather never felt right to him. Camaraderie is one thing, marriage is quite another. Nor did losing his and the possibilities of a family of his own.
So Porubōsu set off in a canoe with shovel and seed.
They are a strange, featherless people—those to the north of the well cultivated fields and verdant shores of the Kemithātsan. Their tongue mostly proper, if strange at times, but they farm rotu and make wine like civilized people. In truth, the better maple wines come from these folk. None are suitable for marriage yet, though.
Porubōsu found a lovely strand of cattail and rotu, growing in the outwash of a gentle stream. A slight point protrudes into the lake, offering some drier ground, surrounded by wetlands. Here he set to work.
With axe and mallet, he cut small trees into posts. With willow fronds, he wove a wattle and daubed it with clay from the lake-shore. Soon enough the beginnings of a house. Small, yes, but a house of sorts.
He began to dig out a paddy on the lake shore. A small one, simply made from the earth he dug, but well suited for planting next year.
A featherless village was nearby, and there he’d go on moons to be with people. To chat and dance and get to know them.
Before the harvest, he returned briefly to his parent’s hall to get new pots for the rotu he’ll reap. Puffing tobacco around the low fire, he remarked the difficulties of one-man harvesting. And so his younger brother, Neritsāna, offered to return with him, to aid in the harvest.
The first year’s harvest was respectable, for such a little amount of work, and with such unproven seeds.
But they fermented and roasted the rotu all the same, preparing some for rotusāmä, and others for grain. They pickled fruit and duck and eel, and began the work of planting.
By the fifth solstice, paddies surrounded the point’s shallows, with fields of free-growing rotu and cattail beyond. In their third year, the free-standing harvest failed, but their paddy stock remained strong. It was a hard winter, but the generosity of the featherless got them through it.
Now some young featherless sons had joined them here. They built homes and paddies of their own, and a kiln was built for common use. A common granary and home for pickles too.
Porubōsu grew restless though. He’d made a name for himself, a life. It’s hard-work, but the rewards are clear. But as his works come into view before him, he reminisces about the girls he knew back home. About having a wife make an honest, two-feathered man of him.
So the brothers returned home for the winter solstice. Laden heavy with gifts, they secured marriages. Clans of Bald Eagle and Woodpecker expanded north, to a new village. Later, two cousins of Porubōsu’s, women unsure off the paddies available to them, came to join the brothers, marrying the featherless and bringing the clan of Sparrow with them.
By the time Porubōsu was an old man, he could soundly say he’d seen a great many changes in his life. What once was a featherless frontier, now boasts four clans in a prosperous village. The paddies stretch out beyond the point and up the stream. Many kilometres of cultivated land replaced what once was just a marsh.
At times, Porubōsu mishes that marsh. It had sustained him, that first hard winter here. But the wine and tobacco and busy-tasks of village life leave little time for yearning. The featherless swiftly adopted feathers, even as their speech inflected Menidān. Some sons would marry featherless wives, bringing them to their birth clan.
His grandmother would have screeched at such hermaphroditic practices, but Porubōsu can’t help but be impressed by the ingenuity. And his wife said it was fine, so who is he to disagree with ancestral wisdom?
Ancestral wisdom had helped him once: The path is always there, even if it’s covered. He’d followed that path north, he’d tamed the unknown, and now civilization stretches many days of travelling north still. Ancestral wisdom helps again.
That, and the maple harvest. The syrup tapped is richer here, a fair trade for the colder winters and longer frosts, and makes lovely wines. The great cities of the heartland demanded good maple wine, and the small village he made provided.
That also certainly got the featherless interested. Good trade and food for the maple they tapped, and the possibility of marriage and a proper hall. Of course they’d adopt a feather.
At Porubōsu’s death, his pyre was piled high. Five bison were sacrificed in his name, and his cloak was full. Wine and rice filled the cold-air on that midwinter day, as the town he founded prospered in its 40th year.
MAP

I don't know where else to write this except here on this subreddit so here goes.
I have so many mixed feelings about Diablo 4. This is going to be long so if you can get through it kudos to you.
A quick history:
I played Diablo upon release and loved it. I still remember sitting in the car with my mother driving home from gamestop as I pondered what I'd name my character.
When Diablo 2 came out I was in college and played it exclusively for what felt like a year. When the expansion came out I once again dove in and the world faded away as I slayed demons endlessly and crafted runewords with excitement.
When Diablo 3 released I was so pumped. I watched videos on youtube for hours and excitedly played the beta. My first few weeks with the game were incredible. I was frustrated with the game though as I quickly realized in order to get a good item for my build to make any meaningful progression in torment difficulty I would have to shell out $100+ in the real money cash store. The market prices on stuff being so high really pissed me off. Furthermore the itemization was pitifully bad. A sharp contrast from Diablo and D2. I'd pick up a unique item and jump out of my chair only to be frustrated it rolled mods for the wrong class. Really? A unique ability tailored for a witchdoctor but rolled Dexterity? Are you kidding me? Wtf was blizzard thinking.
My excitement waned after a few months and I shelved the game. Fast forward a few years and Blizzard reworked Diablo 3 with rifts for end game and fixed the itemization to at least be functional and I got addicted to it. All said and done I've probably played 1000+ hours of D3.
D3 as it stood in its final form was all about sets. You'd reach max level at the start of a season and get going on assembling the set for the build you wanted to play. The set made up about 75% of your gear slots and the modifiers were insane. +10,000% damage wasn't an uncommon bonus for a completed set. The moment you completed it you could jump to the highest difficulty tier and start farming paragons and loot for the other slots or minor upgrades to the set pieces. The gameplay loop was fun however and I enjoyed it for many many seasons. Usually I'd quit around paragon 800-1000, maybe 3-4 weeks after the start of a season. I was never the type to push leaderboards or grind hours for a 1% improved piece of gear I already had.
Project Diablo 2:
When they announced D2R was coming I was like, woah, I haven't played that game in over a decade. How cool! I decided in preparation and after watching all the hype videos I wanted the play the original. So I started looking up how to play it. Turns out you couldn't just load the game up in battle.net like all of blizzard's modern titles. So I read a post online about how to get Diablo 2 working and the same post recommended I use Project Diablo since it had some neat improvements over the original. I was like, what the hell, why not? I think this was season 3 at the time.
After spending a few weeks in Project Diablo 2 I fell in love with it. Holy hell this mod was designed so well and the maps and end game content really set it apart from the original version. The trading was much better and I never felt like I had to dump real money into it to compete. I was just killing stuff, listing it on the site or discord, getting runes, and buying upgrades for my gear with the runes. Phenomenal system. Trading in PD2 felt so good compared to D2 or D3. I've played about 3-4 seasons of PD2 now and absolutely love it. Season 7 feels kind of bad because I know I and just about everyone else is going to be leaving tomorrow for D4 though so it's kind of been whatever. I'm sure we'll all be back for season 8 though and I can't wait for that.
D2R:
When D2R came out I jumped in feet first. Felt like I was light years ahead of everyone else because I just played PD2 for a few months and my knowledge of the game was fresh compared to everyone else who hadn't played it since the early 2000s. But, as I'm sure you can guess, after reaching end game and crafting an enigma and infinity there's not much else to do. Who wants to do Baal runs or Chaos over and over once your character is so strong you can sleep walk through it? Boring. I quit. I did play season 1 and 2 briefly.
I was excited for the "terror zones" but once I realized they were the exact same thing but with higher level mobs so you can get more exp I quit again. That wasn't a real end game addition in my eyes, it was just a way to get level 99 faster. Which, I'll be honest, I've never gave two shits about. You're strong enough at level 90 to trivialize the content so who cares about 99. Seemed completely pointless. Maybe if I was still in college I could see myself going for it but I've got kids and a job. That shit ain't possible or desirable with the limited time I have these days.
I went back to PD2 and never looked at D2R again. PD2 is such an incredible game by comparison and now that we have 60 FPS and HD Text the graphics are fantastic. Sure they're not D2R graphics but they're close enough and the gameplay is so much better it's not really an issue.
Diablo 4:
When they announced Diablo 4 they said they were returning to their roots. I assumed, and I'm sure a lot of others assumed, this meant Diablo 2. The real standout hero of the series. Awesome. Runes were back, hell yes! The gritty feel and look was back, awesome! The numbers wouldn't be in the trillions like Diablo 3, great. You were free to use any items in the end game you wanted and not forced to use a set in most of your slots. In fact they said you could juxtapose the legendary power from one item to another. Sounds interesting.
Now that I've played the beta, twice, and seen the reviews I'm extremely concerned this game is going to be a huge disappointment to me.
First the good stuff:
The graphics are nice. The skills and abilities felt good. The itemization at the low levels felt good. The combat felt great. All good stuff.
Now the concerns:
After watching some reviews and seeing the end game it looks just like Diablo 3 with some WoW mixed in. I'm not seeing anything Diablo 2 oriented here other than the darker graphics in "some" areas. The spell effects at low level looked great in the beta. But having watched some of the end game videos I've seen I swear to god I was looking at Diablo 3. I literally paused a few videos because I could not discern Diablo 4 from Diablo 3 at all. Once all those over the top spell effects from high level combat are on the screen it's just a mess of cartoonish garbage. The way the characters and monsters move and look all felt like Diablo 3 all over again.
The skill tree and paragon system is bloated with filler. Who thought this was a good skill tree?
According to reviewers the overworld is a joke once you're a little ways past level 60. You can sleep walk through it. What is the point of open world if none of it is a challenge after you're level 70? A full 30 levels below max!? Are you kidding me? Why is there even an overworld at that point?
What is with all the walking around and talking to characters during quests? Just give me the quest and let me get back to combat. I don't need to follow some character for 3 minutes to a cellar to kill the purple baddie that pops out of the ground in the middle in 5 seconds. This was a terrible design in D3 and they should have noticed once they released adventure mode NO ONE EVER DID THE CAMPAIGN AGAIN for a reason.
The gear drops all being tailored for your class removes one of the most interesting parts of D2, finding stuff for other characters that make you want to try that class or build. Or better yet, trading it for something you actually do want.
How about the corruption system like PD2 has? I get that they didn't want to directly steal that great idea from PD2 when they did D2R but come on, recognize when someone innovates in the genre and use it when you make a new game. Corrupting gear is some of the most insanely rewarding and heartbreaking stuff I've ever seen in a game. I literally close my eyes when I slam a great item. The high we get from hitting 3 sockets on a badass helmet is something unmatched in diablo 3. Oh boy, I found a new dagger I was already using but this one has 5 more DPS! Nah. Fuck that. I found a Stone of Jordan and had the balls to slam it and nailed faster cast rate and now I'm literally rich and can fund an entire character. Now that is a rush.
This is what we waited all this time for? An updated version of Diablo 3? Did we learn nothing from the D2R launch? Players are yearning for that old school style of Diablo 2. They want to find high runes that have such a low drop rate you literally get chills when you find one. They want powerful runewords that you can craft that change your entire play style once you get. They want to corrupt gear letting you customize your build in unique ways. They want a fleshed out trading system so you can offload the loot you don't need and exchange it for gear you do want. They want to save up currency for those big GG items that you can flex in front of your friends.
I'm not naïve. I realize what D2 offers doesn't necessarily appeal to "modern gamers" at large and currently Blizzard is all about producing a product designed to sell cosmetics to as many people as possible. I just thought maybe they had learned from their mistakes with Diablo 3 and were actually going back to Diablo 2 with a fresh game, like they originally said. We were lied to. This game is going to be Diablo 3 with a damn horse and I'm frustrated.
I wish I had never played PD2. It seriously has ruined Diablo in all it's "blizzard forms" for me at this point. It's like eating at all the finest Steak Houses in Chicago for a few years and then moving to Nebraska and realizing you'll never enjoy a steak in that state ever, because they have no idea how to cook them and expect you to put A1 on it to cover up the fact that they fucked it up.
With that out of the way. I'm still excited to try Diablo 4. Maybe I'll be pleasantly surprised with the end game. Maybe the cartoonish graphics won't bother me. Maybe the itemization towards the end will be better than I expect. Maybe the gameplay loop will hook me. Maybe they'll add runes with season 1 and powerful runewords. Maybe maybe maybe. But, I'll be totally honest, I'm not expecting to love this game the way I thought I would when they first announced it. I could be wrong, I hope I am.

I'm hurting.
I am not sleeping well.
I'm spending days running over all these wounds that were opened back up and realizing they are not healed after I read my mother's tell-all (how she felt it) book.
I have been trying to talk to my mom, often, since my daughter was born. I've recently decided to go VLC. I wanted her support. I wanted her to be the mom I saw in others who would ease the transition into my own motherhood. Instead it's been a tension filled dance to try and hold boundaries. For a while she seemed to listen. Now I'm scared it's just points of ammunition she'll spit back at me. Everything from the gifts (ugh, the loaded weapon that is gifts), to visits, to how we spend our time off has been subject to her emotional volatility and I'm just feeling burnt out.
I know it's no good for my daughter to be exposed to her mood swings. I know my son's don't need to hear anything about their step grandpa and grandma's 30 year old beef. I'm starting to see them turning into men and I worry she will see them as "the enemy" soon.
(Edits: I dropped my phone and hit post before I was done)
I'm stuck in the place of knowing full well stepping back is the right thing to do, but really wanting to have that "normal" relationship. But I'm literally sick with stress and the thought of being back under her heavy wet blanket, trying not to crush eggshells. I'm constantly nauseous and trying not to eat for comfort. I'm getting migraines and insomnia and my body is an inflamed mess.
I know it will pass. I will finally process that my mother will never be the kind of mother I can cozy up on the couch with, snuggled up with my own daughter, watching the know on Christmas drinking hot chocolate. She will never be the grandma we can call to watch them for a while if we want a weekend out as a couple. I know she will hate that I feel closer to my step mom for being kinder and more supportive.
I will feel better not being so stressed I start behaving poorly in front of my children from my own emotions influenced by the FOG. I will feel better not having to dance around mentioning every visit with my father or his side of the family. I will feel better not having to navigate telling her no to "vacations" we don't want to take, to places we don't want to go, with money we could spend elsewhere having a better time or fixing our house. I will feel better without stifling back tears and telling my mother she needs to leave when she starts talking about any of our no-go topics (negative self-image/body talk, my fathefamily, etc.). I will feel better the less I have to wave away the FOG.
AND today just feels hard.