Residential Contracting 101
With over 20 years of building experience, I would like to share with you my insights in navigating becoming a successful contractor. With many different avenues of the building world its key to understand what problems will arise on any given day. A man once told a saying that stuck-the 6 p’s in life- Piss Poor Preparation leads to Piss Poor Performance. Preparation builds everything in construction, without preparation the jobsite will not run correctly. The best advice I was ever given was to learn a little about every trade giving you the ability to understand trade lingo and secrets. An example would be painters use the terminology flash; this means when the sub structure bleads through the paint. Subcontractors will give the best pricing if they respect your knowledge of the industry. If the subcontractor feels they will have to hold your hand through the job they will charge an extra fee…i.e. I call it the aggravation fee. In this blog I will explain the key elements in finding success in all aspects of the industry. Contracting is a physically and emotionally demanding job which requires planning and foresight to complete projects on time within budget. Picking your customer is just as important as picking your employees or subcontractors. I have worked for some of the most demanding customers leading me to question at the end if the job was even worth it. Sleepless nights, constant changes, lack of payment, lawsuit threats, adding work that was in the contract are just a few things you could face with a tough customer. With so many moving parts at all times it is critical to be able to adapt to changes within a short time frame. Materials will come in damaged, subcontractors will be late, employees will get sick, but the deadline you set does not change. The stress can be overwhelming at times keeping your mind in a good place is key to navigating all that is thrown at you. Choosing your client picking the right jobs-Keep these questions in mind The first question to be asked is what the time frame is to start the job to see if it fits within the timeframe for your business. If the time frame doesn’t work then move on from the project or let them know when you would be available to start. If the client really wants to use, they will wait until you are available. Taking on too much work will only lead to problems. Construction is a serviced based business, staying on top of the project and client will eliminate an unhappy customer and construction issues that will be over seen. With online presence if details are missed and customer service lacks it will only be a matter of time the phone will not ring. The second question to be asked to the client is do they have a budget in mind for the project. If they answer yes this is good, follow through with what the budget is. If the budget seems low let them know, this will eliminate a tire kicker, educate them on what the price range could be. If the budget seems reasonable then continue the discussion to the next question. If they answer no let them know that you can give them an estimate to see if the project is feasible with their finical capabilities. Taking on a job that is not correctly budgeted will lead to an unsatisfied customer due to non-transparency of the construction cost. The third question to be asked is anyone else bidding on the job, if the answer is yes, understand you might just be number check for the contractor doing the job. Dig a little deeper and find out how many numbers they are getting and why. If your business model is to be competitive be completely transparent with customer, this will gain trust with them. Let them know you get what you pay for and if you they choose the lowest bid it could lead into lack of quality of work.
The fourth question I will ask is there any specific subcontractors they wanted to use. If the answer is yes then I would explain to them you only use the subcontractors you have a working relationship with. Otherwise, this could backfire as the subcontractor might not show, do subpar work, talk behind your back to the homeowner. In my experience I would stay away from using any homeowner to alleviate problems down the road. A quick conversation now can save headaches down the road. The fifth question I will ask are planning on getting the job permitted, this needs to be known it takes more time for the permitting process. Plans will have to drawn submitted and approved to the city before work can commence. The sixth question I will ask if a residential remodel is are you going to be living through the remodel if yes understand this will take more time to navigate the project due to answering questions and cleaning the house on a daily occurrence. I would recommend seeing if the customer would be willing to move into an Airbnb or friends for at least the demo portion of the project. If they do plan on living through the remodel add a couple hours a day to accommodate the extra time that will be required. The seventh question I would ask in a residential remodel is how old the house is to see if there is asbestos that would need to removed by a proper company. A home built before 1979 will most likely have some asbestos in the house, use a licensed company with proper insurance to dispose of the materials. If everything looks good to this point find out a little more about the client personality. If the client seems reasonable, I would bid the job. Unreasonable people can cause you more stress than its worth. These are some red flags I would look out for. Some jobs are not worth the money. Very demanding in the way you are going to perform your job- I.e., tell you how you are going to do your job- You’re the professional not them! Give you a hard time about your price- haggle with price you estimated- The price is the price! If they are a family with little money and you want to help them out is one thing, if they are trying to beat you down is another. Mention they have a lawyer-there is no need for them to bring up that they have a lawyer - Run for the hills as if the job goes south, you will be the one losing out! Tell you what the payment terms are. It’s your business you get paid how it works for your company. If you want to get paid every Friday, put it into your contract-If the clients do not agree move on it will save you frustrations If they talk bad about the last contractor, chances are they will talk bad about you. There is a reason why the contractor does not work for them anymore, unless he did subpar work this a red flag Clients are using an interior decorator that will purchasing all of the materials- The materials could be ordered incorrectly by the interior designer your company will not make the mark-up it deserves. Interior decorators usually add time to the job as well as act like your boss. Charging a little extra for the time and stress that it will entail is only fair. Clients want to purchase the materials- You are using your knowledge to buy the correct materials-The mark up on the materials keeps the doors open working for wages only pays the bills The husband and wife do not get along-You will become the mediator between the couple it will lead to taking sides a losing proposition- A drama free work place is always best! Dangling carrot-if you do this job the next one will be better-Only look at what there offering at the present moment, if its not a good fit do not take the job for a job down the road…Its not worth chasing a job that might not happen! The Art of the Sale First things first selling your company is all about presentation. In meeting your clients for the first time show up with a collared golf shirt tucked in, belt, nice jeans, and newer shoes. Have a truck that a clean, no dents scratches, preferably washed the day you are going into your meeting. Have a leather note pad that is clean no dirt or paint visible. Show up 5 minutes early, if you’re running a little late shoot them a text to let them know. Treat the situation as if were going on a first date, best foot forward. As you introduce yourself give them a warm greeting, letting them know you are very interested in the work. Find out a little about them, hobbies, where they lived, etc etc. You are going to be working with them on a daily basis its nice to know what makes them tick. Having a good working relationship from the start is key forming a solid relationship. As the conversation progresses find out who wears the pants in the family…ie who’s the final decision maker. If its fits the wife, chances it is…..then kindly let the husband know happy wife happy life when their in a stall mate on an issue. As your looking at the project throw in some suggestions of what you think would look good from past experiences, this will get their attention that you have knowledge and want what’s best for them. If you see ways to save them money in their project let them know, money is a large point of the sale keep that in mind. Mention that you’re not the least expensive contractor but you’re not the most expensive either. Your customer satisfaction is your number one goal which leads to more time spent on keeping them happy. One happy customer will lead to another, one unsatisfied customer leads to work in the future. Bring up the fact the finishing the job on time is key goal to your business, many contractors run several jobs at once causing the jobs to be finished way behind schedule. You must stand out as having integrity, good morals, and the ability to problem solve to get the job. The clients will be testing you to see if you’re a good fit as well. Keep in mind as you take your notes that you must not forget anything they mention as it will come back before the job is completed…i.e. we mentioned that to you before we started the job! Take pictures of the proposed area for work, that way you can use it to better right your estimate. Let them know you will give them a detailed outline of when the job will be completed letting them see how long each phase will take and correlate it with your payment schedule. Before you leave their house let them know when the estimate will be sent to them. MAKE SURE YOU HIT THAT DEADLINE! Once you sent the email over with estimate make sure you get confirmation that they received it. Wait at least 2 days before checking with them, hopefully they contact you first! If they want negotiate the price, let them know that it is the best price that you can manage, its not worth losing money before you start. I closed 80% of the work I estimated by being very transparent and friendly. If you come off with an attitude charge double what the going rates are you might only land 1 out of 10 jobs as well as getting the reputation of being expensive. Bidding the job Looking up industry standards on pricing is what I would go buy for pricing. If you google the coat of any installation there will be a cost range for everything. Looking at the cost ranging from high to low I would tend to be in the middle. Some items might be low on the internet if this is the case use your best judgment not to lose money. Closing sales is key to success and keep the doors open for business. Being in the middle on pricing is key as most customers shy away from contractors that are extremely low or high on the price range. I tend not bid out hourly as wages do not pay for retirement. Bidding is better as customers no the exact price of the cost of construction. It also keeps the job moving quicker as time and material contractors take longer to complete projects…Thus costing the client more money and valuable time they could spend in their house. Using a Contract Using a detailed estimate tied to a contract covers your butt in 99% of the time. Having a piece of mind that every aspect of the job is covered in the estimate and contract protects both your company and the client. Key terms to include in your estimate/contract are. Have a schedule on excel showing the start dates and dates of each trade this will show the customer you are organized with time lines. If not written in the detailed in the estimate the item is excluded- This ensures if its not written down its not included. TBD- To be Determined- A phrase on a line item that has yet to had final decision of products or service needed. -The pricing will follow the decisions to be finalized Give out what your written warranty will be for parts and labor this changes state to state. If the homeowner provides the product than no warranty will be given on that particular item. In the contract have a start date and end date with the verbiage subject to change due to weather, product delivery, change orders Have a progress payment schedule to ensure the client understands when funding will be expected-Including if not payment is rendered service to the project will stop. Have written terms of how change orders will be charged-cost plus 20% or a set fee Make sure in your contract that arbitration is required versus going to court- This will save lawyer fees and going to court Many contracts can be found online and each state requires different contracts
Finding leads Finding leads is easy with the right network of people. I personally do not find working for friends or family members a good fit. Relationships get strained when money is involved, causing undue stress for both parties. I have listed a couple of ways to build a network or find work using the internet. Get in contact with realtor’s- Realtors have a big client base of homeowners who need work done Contact local Architects to see if they are working with any general contractors Leave some business cards at your local materials suppliers-Doowindow/lumber-many times clients will ask salesman for a referral. Join a business networking group- BNI is one of many Join a internet website lead generation company- Houzz, Angie’s List, Home Advisor, thumbtack, Yelp run an ad on craigslist Use a marketing company to market your website-This could become costly with little results Create a Facebook business page Create a Yelp business page
Building your subcontractor base Having 2 subcontractors for every trade, gives you the flexibility of completing jobs on time if the one the subcontractors is too busy at the time you need their service. Your subcontractors are the face of your business, choose owner run companies that are professional. Check to make sure there license are up to date..ie workman’s comp, liability insurance, state license. Choosing subcontractors with lettered vans, logoed t-shirts is s key to looking professional in the clients’ eyes. In the past I have gotten a lot of subcontractors for material supply shops, stopping by jobsites, researching the internet using Yelp, Home Advisor, etc etc. Once you get one good subcontractor ask them if they know any other trades they would recommend. One good subcontractor leads to another in most cases. The key to having a good group of subcontractors is to let them know that you are there to get help them get the job done. They do work for you but without them you are nothing…keep that in mind! Make them aware a clean jobsite is required at the end of everyday to ensure the proper safety for all parties including theirs! Over the years I have referred a lot of companies work when there is only 1 trade needed. Referring work to subcontractors is a good way to get top priority when you have work that needs to be completed ASAP. Timing is everything in times of emergency having a good group of subcontractors will make your business run smoothly. Pay your subcontractors immediately after performing work, this will make them feel appreciated! A happy subcontractor is one that will gladly go the extra mile for you knowing that there not just a number to your business! Buying lunch once a week for the jobsite is always a good token of appreciation!
Supervising In supervising any jobsite its key to monitor everything from materials on hand, weather, vehicle parking (if applicable), jobsite safety, and subcontractors’ workmanship. If you hired a professional there should be little supervision in the work being performed, on rare occasions a new hire might need some mentoring to get the results completed correctly. If you see a problem with there work address it with the worker directly, no need to call his boss…. building repour with the worker letting him know you got his back goes miles down the road! Checking in on the job first in the morning to answer any questions or changes that need to be conveyed and once in the afternoon to make sure all work be completed is done per construction industry standards. A job that is run blindly will have many more issues than one that is watched over. I have seen many jobs with no site supervision, leading to subpar quality work as well as safety hazards. Its better to be like an eagle than cluck like a turkey!
Working with the City/Inspectors On permitted jobs the city and site inspector will be a large part of how smoothly the job runs. Each phase of construction has an inspection allowing for the project to continue. Make sure your subcontractors are aware that the project is inspected before starting the job. The best way to stay on his good side is to provide a clean jobsite and having the job built to the highest standards possible. When having the site inspected be courteous to the inspector asking any questions or concerns you have with the work during the job. Being completely transparent will save you aggravation of problems down the road. The more he trust you the better if you seem sneaky or rude he will make your life a living nightmare! Many inspectors will have an attitude towards you….I suggest keeping quiet and doing what ever he wants….he’s the boss no need to get in a pissing match you will not win at. How to deal with irate customer Stay calm during any argument with an irate customer. Never raise your voice or show that you are bothered by their disgruntled behavior. If the customer is trying to get more from you than agreed upon stand your ground. Worst case scenario is you walk from the job, which in the long run be more of a loss for the client. I have only run into a couple of these clients; they are unreasonable and not worth losing sleep over a few dollars. Its best to terminate the relationship as it would be my best guess that a referral from this customer would not be one you wanted anyway. If you feel it was just a miscommunication on your end, take reasonability and remedy the problem. Taking accountability for your mistake will go a far way in their eyes and on future issues that arise. Prepping the homeowner pre-construction Before starting the job, it very important to give the homeowners a warning of what will happen during the construction process.

1. All furniture in the proposed working area must be moved- I would recommend having the clients take care of this to limit the risk of damage to their belongings.
2. There will be dust that will be in the house up to 3 months after construction-I would recommend hiring a construction cleaning company at the end of the job even so after it is cleaned dust will be present months after words.
3. There will be conflicts between you in the homeowner at some course of the job. - You will do your best to eliminate them as quickly as they arise-i.e. material damages, miscommunication, job delays
4. All decisions on materials must be made before the start of the job- this will eliminate job stoppage due to materials not being on site.
5. All materials will be on site before commencement of job-
6. Payment structures must be made per contract otherwise job will stop until payment rendered
7. Cars are to be moved out of the driveway- Ensures ease of loading and unloading of materials/tools
8. Give the specific hours that workers will be present- i.e. 7-3:30
9. Determine what areas are allowed to be used as staging for tools/materials
10. If animals are present in the home that they put outside or in a room during the day
11. All valuables in the house are locked in safe
12. Ask if using client’s household bathroom is okay or to bring in Porter Potty
13. Being transparent as possible is key to keeping a great relationship with your client!

During Construction During construction it is key to take detailed photos to eliminate any damages that were not caused by the construction process. I would also make a video to ensure all areas are included. All subcontractors should also take progress pictures to ensure if problems arise in the future, they will not be responsible for any work that they did not perform. Keep an on-going log of progress to the homeowners and share the pictures for there records. This will keep homeowners excited of the progress being made. When the house is gutted to the studs it is important to have construction photos showing where all utilities are run in the walls or sub floor. If there is a problem in the future there will photos showing all utility locations. Protect all flooring with plywood or floor protective. I also like to protect front door and tarp all areas where subcontractors are to be working. Make sure to cover any chandeliers/furniture/doorways with plastic to eliminate dust. Ask the homeowners if they have any concerns that they could think of. We’re all human and possibly a detail was missed! Post Construction Phase If the project went smoothly appreciation should be shown to the customer. Find out if the husband likes a particular type of liquor. Bring the wife a bouquet of flowers. Send a Christmas card to the family letting how much you appreciated the work. You know you have done a good job if they tell you they will refer you to their friends. The best compliment you could receive is a good referral. In Summary Try to find a knitch in the market, I found kitchens to be a great remodel projects. Bathrooms are tough as they are small, expensive with little profit margin with every trade involved. Windows/doors are also another great knitch as they can be installed quickly. There are so many different remodeling items that can be stream lined to make the selling installing process flawless. Once the core group subcontractors are in place the job almost runs itself. Every day is a learning experience with new materials or methods in construction. Keeping up with codes, materials, fluctuating labor and material cost is a job within itself. Anyone can be a contractor with the right mindset.

————————————- Detroit, Michigan, 600 sq ft 1 bedroom, 1 occupant, utilities billed directly through the apartment added to rent. ————————————— I’m having a problem with my apartment and need help. As a young woman living alone, I feel like I’m not being listened to, don’t have authority, and am being taken advantage of.
My bill keeps saying that I’ve been using 14904 - 15334 kwh of electricity a month.
I live in a less than 600 sq ft 1 bedroom apartment without a tv or any lamps, no central air, no light fixtures in my bedroom or living room.
My last apartment was 910 sq ft. and I only used 145 kwh a month even in winter when it got dark early so lights were always used and I left the Christmas tree plugged in 24/7. My highest DTE bill was only maybe $80 but usually closer to $30 - $50.
I know nothing about electric but my bill’s been super high, around $130 for electric alone, so I can’t help but feel like they’re trying to take advantage of me.
My utilities are billed through the apartment so everything is paid altogether so I can’t not pay it or I’ll get evicted and they do credit reporting so it’ll impact my score, too.
They’re just kind of shrugging like there’s nothing they can do except last month I watched the manager just edit the number owed for electric and click enter…. it was as simple as that. I don’t want to pay whatever they decide I should, I want to pay for what my meter says I’m using and what I’m using only.
They haven’t looked into it or sent anyone to look at my outlets or anything. The first time I met the manager after signing my lease he told me not to sign up for automatic billing because there’s been an electric issue in the unit and that he’s worried someone might tamper with my lifted vehicle….
They’ve already been kind of slimy (I’ve had a package stolen they said they couldn’t do anything about, there’s been other packages stolen and they don’t even bother to get the mailroom door fixed, they didn’t tell me about their car theft + break in issues until after I moved in that they said they couldn’t do anything about but have me pay more for a covered assigned parking spot in the same lot… I would say they were lying for the money but I’ve now witnessed the break ins and thefts effecting my neighbors…., they had a cockroach problem on the 6th floor where I was supposed to be… I had to move units on day 1 because I saw 3 of them within 2 minutes of standing in my new apartment and they almost didn’t even let me move units because I already signed the lease so they had my money, their maintenance repairs have been garbage, the list goes on and on) so I just don’t trust them at all.
What can I do, if anything? What can I say for someone to listen to me or take me seriously?

During the fall time Mel would go to his family's vacation house out by the lake. It was a peaceful community full of retired inhabitants. He arrived just as the sun began to rise over the tree line having made the late-night drive to avoid traffic. Turning the car into the driveway he parked the car, turning the engine.
Mel opened the car door, taking a moment to step out and stretch. Going to the back of the car he opened the boot, beginning the process of gathering his bags then taking them inside. A note was on the counter left by his parents. Walking over, he glanced at the note briefly.
It stated that the pantry and fridge had been restocked. If the power were to go out to use the generator in the basement. What confused Mel was a scribble at the bottom left by his sibling leaving a warning.
Whatever IT says and no matter what IT does DO NOT let it in.
Was this some sort of joke since it was close to Halloween?
It was normal for them to play jokes on each other around this time of year. For now, he shrugged and began to unpack. By the time he was finished Mel was ready for lunch, so he made himself a meal.
While sitting there though...out of the corner of his eyes he could have sworn that he saw something move outside.
Was it an animal?
The neighbors do have pets, and it could have also been some of the local wildlife as well. Since deer have been seen in the area according to his dad. Who normally takes pictures of them for the local travel magazine in town.
Though it certainly did not seem animal shaped.
Finishing his lunch and cleaning up. Mel took his dishes to the kitchen, rinsing them off before putting them into the dishwasher to be washed later.
Placing a hand over his mouth he yawned looking over at the grandfather clock in the kitchen. Should he go for a walk or lay down for a nap? With whatever was looming outside Mel figured it would be best to stay inside.
On his way through the house, he checked the windows, pulling the curtains closed, checking the doors, and closing the sliding door shades.
Stepping back from the sliding glass door Mel could have sworn that there was a small tapping against the glass. He decided it was just the shades moving from being closed and made his way to the bedroom.
Before long he was fast asleep. After time had gone by, and the sun had gone down a considerable amount, Mel opened his eyes.
Getting up from his bed he reached over clicking on the lamp that was on the bedside table. He took a moment to rub the sleep from his eyes before he stood up. Entering the living room, the automatic plug-in lights lit his way, but he stopped halfway when they noticed a silhouette standing outside the sliding glass door.
Hands and a face pressed to the glass staring inside.
Mel was thankful he had closed the blinds. Taking a deep breath, he took a step back slowly only to see the head of the figure jerk in his direction.
"I can hear you in there. Won't you let me in?"
He kept quiet, not answering.
"I know you're in there! Why won't you speak to me?!"
Mel heard scratching on glass as if it were trying to make its way inside.
Should he call the police? What exactly would they even do?
IT banged on the sliding glass door as the whole thing began to rattle, and shake.
"LET me in...”
“Let ME...in”
“LET ME IN!”
Retreating to the master bedroom he crawled under the bed, Mel pulled out his cellphone tapping 911 onto the screen.
Waiting for someone to pick up the sound of glass shattering made him jump, losing his grip on his phone dropping it. Mel could only watch as it bounced and slid out from under the bed. Going to reach for it he quickly retracted his hand upon hearing footsteps as if someone were dragging their feet.
"Hello 911, what is your emergency?" A man's voice spoke from Mel's discarded phone that was a bit out of reach.
The man repeated himself, and sighed clearly annoyed mumbling about prank callers and how this happens every year.
His heart felt as if it jumped into his throat making it hard to swallow as those footsteps were now in the master bedroom with him.
Staying still Mel heard the creak of the bed as if someone or something was crawling across it. Holding his breath, wishing it would just go away. Slowly the side of the comforter began to rise.
It lowered its long black hair first then its face came into view. Its features contorted with a matching twisted, and upturned smile.
“Why wouldn’t you let me in?” it hissed angrily
Mel screamed, fainting from shock. He did not know how long he had been out and awoke when his sister Wynn called out for him. Opening his eyes from his place under the bed he could see that it was now daylight. Had IT left him alone?
Crawling out from under the bed he went to the living room where his sister was cleaning up the shards that were scattered on the carpet from the broken sliding glass door. Wynn looked at him over her shoulder as he approached.
“There you are Mel! I tried calling your cellphone, but you did not pick up”
“Sorry sis” Mel apologized “Say um...Wynn, about that warning you left with the note on the counter” he inquired.
Wynn was silent for a moment before frowning.
“Oh that? When I was here a few weeks ago I thought...I saw” she shook her head before asking, “What happened to the door?”
He wanted to tell her what she had warned him about was real. Knowing Wynn, she would just brush it off saying Mel was just trying to prank her since they did every Halloween, but not this year. Whatever was outside, desperately wanting in and had gotten in, left Mel alive.
Next time he may not be so lucky.

Hi lovely people,
We just came back from our first trip to Japan and it was truly a memorable trip. We spent over 3 weeks in Japan from 07th May until 30th May. WE LOVE JAPAN! Can't wait to come back.
A little bit about us: We are both ~30y olds and enjoy a mix of urban, outdoor and culture during our holidays. We are foodies, but not hard-core as in we don't specifically organize our trips around restaurants. There are so many restaurants in Japan, it is hard to get a bad meal. We enjoy just wandering around neighbourhoods. Mostly low/mid-budget stuff with a splurge once in a while.
Our travel itinerary can be found here
General comments

• Time period of travel: We arrived 7th of May which is the last sunday of Golden week. We specifically wanted to avoid Golden week, as we heard it can be crazy busy due to domestic travels. And we also didn't want to go too late in May because June is rainy season in Japan. We were pretty lucky with the weather overall as we only had a couple of days of rain, most days were sunny and we even had some days of sweltering heat :O
• Like other people suggest, try to get in shape before you go! We are both in average shape. Almost every day we walked around 20.000 steps or more. The only rest days we had were the days where we were switching between cities, i.e. sitting in trains for longer periods of time. No complaints ;). I brought two pair of shoes: water-proof hiking shoes and one pair of light-weight running shoes. Switching between shoes was nice, I didn't have any blisters during my time in Japan luckily. All the walking compensated all the eating though!
• Check whether region specific JR passes might work for you. We decided against getting the nationwide JR passes as they didn't fit our needs and were expensive and instead opted for a regional JR Setouchi area pass. It was perfect for the Shimanami Kaido. We could travel from Osaka to Onomichi -> Hiroshima/Miyajima -> Kyoto. And it also gave us access to Nozomi shinkansen (fastest) and a great ferry ride between Matsuyama and Hiroshima.

Japanguide has a nice overview of all the passes : https://www.japan-guide.com/e/e2357.html

• Be flexible (That's how we like to travel). I mapped out most of the sights beforehand according to must-see's and mapped out what other interesting sights there would be in those areas. The day before or in the morning, we would decide what we would do roughly, sight-see according to neighborhood and just wing it a little bit. We just love to wander around and see what we come across, mixed with some google maps + "explore" function. Some days you are just tired and just want to hang out in a park, or you have temple-fatigue and want to do something entirely else. Same with food/restaurants, we usually just used google maps to see what kind of great restaurants were near us at that moment. We haven't lined up more than twice our whole time there and still ate wonderfully. We do tend to avoid overly hyped stuff anyways. I do keep in mind that everyone has their own ways.
• Buy e-sim if possible, it is the cheapest and easiest way. My partner bought an e-sim and it was so convenient! My phone unfortunately didn't support it and I had to buy a sim. I opted for getting one at BIC camera, which was the cheapest I could find. 10GB for 30 days for 3200 yen.
• Keep plastic bags for trash. Buying food from conbini, and eating it somewhere? say yes to that plastic bag, because you will need it to stash your garbage until you are back at your hotel where you can throw it away or you find a garbage bin at the train station per chance. I read about this a lot on this subreddit, but still I found it astonishing the lack of trash cans. Fascinating how the streets of Japan are so damn clean.
• Try Pokari sweat. :) I tried it for the first time there and I was hooked immediately. It is awesome! Best electrolyte drink ever and it definitely saved me during those hot sweaty days there. CC lemon is also great!
• Go for a haircut or some other beauty/massage treatment. The hospitality is amazing in Japan. You won't regret getting pampered in Japan. They have all kinds of crazy treatments. I got the best haircut of my life for 4400yen.

Trip report

PS. I am not mentioning everything we did in this post. I will just mention highlights. It is still a long read though ;).
D1 - D2 Osaka
We landed at Kansai airport. Before our trip, we also bought train vouchers for Osaka online (https://www.howto-osaka.com/en/ticket/). Best decision ever, because the journey was rough and we were exhausted by the time we landed. We only had to exchange our vouchers at the station and off we went.
Osaka was nice city to start with as it is a more manageable "smaller" city whilst recovering from our jetlag. Despite being smaller, I do think it is worth a visit. Osaka is so iconic at night. We stayed at a spacious Airbnb near Kuromon Ichiban market.

• Takoyaki :) We had our first try of takoyaki at Takotako King instead of one the places at Dotonbori to avoid the crazy lines. You can sit down, have a beer and yes the takoyaki is amazing. It should be crunchy on the outside and deliciously goeey on the inside, doused with sauces and katsuobushi. Man, I wish I could go back and eat it again. It is true, you can't get great takoyaki outside of Osaka, at least I didn't get that same crunchy gooey combo again in other cities.
• Discount sushi from Takashimaya department store. For the budget-minded, this is a no-brainer. Around 7PM, an hour before closing time, you can get delicious fatty tuna maki at discount prices in the basement of takashimaya. Other foods at the department store food floor such as the fresh mochi are delicious also. Takashimaya is my favorite department store for food I think!
• Osaka castle - Our first castle in Japan. The green roof and the golden ornaments are beautiful and unique!
• Dotonbori - iconic :) fun to walk along. The queues are long there. We avoided eating at Dotonbori.
• Shitenno-ji - beautiful pagoda with buddha statues inside. Do pay the fee to go inside and see the garden. You can also go into the pagoda and walk up.
• Huge fan of Shotengai's, Shinsaibashi-Suji Shopping Street. They are so quintessential Japan.
• Ramen Tendo, the first ramen joint that we tried in Japan, so it has a special place in my heart. They specialize in chicken broth with lots of umami katsuoboshi flavor. Noodles were great too, very bouncy. Delicious! Little did I know that this ramen joint was really one of the best we would have this trip. It set the bar high for sure!
• Visit a local grocery store. Maybe it is just me, but I love to browse at local grocery shops (KOHYO namba Minatomachi) and be fascinated by all the different things they sell. It is also a great place to buy food souvenirs, like miso, green tea etc. Lots of pre-cooked meals/ fried stuff. Just a wider selection than your typical conbini. And again discounts if you go ~1hr before closing time.

Skip Shinsekai: We visited during the day and it felt very empty to me. More like a tourist-trap, the eateries didn't look appealing to me. Maybe during the evening this area is more fun.
D3 Nara
We did Nara as a day-trip from Osaka.

• Yes, to feeding the deer. It is touristy, but it is so much fun to be chased by cookie-crazed deer. One more thing: deer's fart a lot. We were wondering where this weird high pitched sound was coming from, those are actually deer farts.
• Todai-ji is very impressive, definitely a must visit.
• Just wander around in Nara park, it's very lush and beautiful and has many more shrines and interesting sights, such as manyo botanical garden. I wish we had one more day to explore Nara but oh well maybe next time :)
• We ate lunch at Magura Koya, a small restaurant run by a lovely elderly couple. Delicious tuna dishes. I had a tuna sashimi bowl and my partner the fried tuna set meal, so fresh!
• We had the best pork bun at Hourokutei at the end of the Higashimuki shopping street. It's a small hole in the wall, but omg the squishy-est juicy-est porkbuns ever.

D4 Onomichi
After staying in Osaka for 3 days, we headed west for the Shimanami Kaido. We decided to stay in Onomichi (Hotel Beacon Onomichi) for the night before we started our two day bike trip. For this part of our trip, we picked up our 7-day Setouchi area pass at Shin-Osaka JR station. I just want to mention that I really love the hospitality of the staff in Japan. The JR office people were so nice and helpful. We reserved our seats for the shinkansen and off we went to Onomichi. Onomichi is a lovely little seaside town to just stroll around and take in the views. I really recommend spending at least half a day here. Don't skip it!

• Senkoji park observatory - we walked up to the observatory (ropeway available), please walk up as there are lots of nice alleyways, shrines and cats along the way :). The view is amazing, especially at sunset.
• Cat alley: honestly, every alley is cat alley.
• Onomichi Shotengai - very retro, lots of cute shops. We bought a nice poster from a little granny there.

D5 & D6 Shimanami Kaido -> Matsuyama
The next day, we picked up our reserved cross bikes from the general bike rental and off we went. Honestly, biking the shimanami kaido was the highlight of our trip. We took two days to bike the whole way, one day would definitely be too rushed for us. We stopped at Ikuchi island (Shimanaido NEST) for our halfway stay.
The sights along the way were great! It was so much fun to go down-hill, the uphills were do-able. We had great weather also, not too hot and no rain. Everything was clearly indicated, we just followed the blue lines. I felt very safe biking in Japan. PS. My butt did hurt from the saddle, so be warned! Bring some cushioned pants if you want to be safe side.

• First pitstop after the first bridge was Hassakuya. You have to stop here! They have delicious strawberry and citrus daifuku! The citrus had a bitter aftertaste, but they are famous for their citrus so its definitely nice to try.
• Just enjoy the views, stop everywhere to take pictures. There are lots of things to explore along the way.
• Stop at roadside stations such as > tatara shimanami park and yoshiumi iki-iki-kan. Especially before you take on the last bridge just do a little pit stop. It's a nice place to take some pictures of the insanely long bridge and have a citrus/vanilla soft cream.

https://shimanami-cycle.or.jp/ for more info and bike rental
We decided to bike one-way from Onomichi to Imabari and we have no regrets. I liked that we ended the bike trip with the longest bridge (4km!!). Imabari is very industrial, but after the fun long way down from the last bridge and being exhausted from biking you just want to get to the station and stuff yourself with pastries from the bakery at the station and go on to your next destination. Thus, we immediately took the train to Matsuyama. Originally, the plan was to enjoy the famous onsen in Matsuyama, but we didn't have enough time and we were also pretty tired. After checking-in at the hotel, it was already 4, we made our way to Matsuyama castle but unfortunately, we were too late to go in. It was still nice to view it from the outside and walk around the park. We planned to do sightseeing in Hiroshima the next day, so there was no more time to explore Matsuyama further.
D7 Hiroshima -> Miyajima
After Shiminami Kaido, we headed towards Hiroshima/Miyajima. We took an early ferry from Matsuyama. The ferry was included in the setouchi JR pass, so we gladly took advantage of that. It's a nice way to get to Hiroshima, just one last view of the Seto inland sea. One remark: if it is not JR serviced transportation, you do have to obtain separate tickets. Normally, just showing your setouchi JR pass is enough to get onboard the train, but for the ferry you do have to go to the ticket desk and show your JR pass to obtain the ferry tickets.

• Peace memorial museum - a history we must not forget and do not want to repeat
• We tried another Hiroshima speciality for lunch: Hiroshima Tsukemen. This tsukemen is GREAT. One of my favorite dishes. We ate at Tsukemen Karabu Tokaichimachi. The spicy umami dipping sauce is very addicting!

Surprisingly, it was very hard to find affordable good accommodation in Hiroshima. It was the weekend and two weeks before G7, so maybe that was the reason why it was harder to find accommodation. In the end, I found a nice simple hotel on Miyajima island and it was a good decision after all! After a long day in Hiroshima, we made our way to Miyajima to stay two nights. Staying on Miyajima island is lovely especially when all the day-trip tourist leave.
D8 Miyajima
Honestly, Miyajima is truly magical. Another highlight of our trip! We started the day early to get ahead of the crowd and that made it all so much more enjoyable. Seeing shrines and temples without a crowd is truly 1000x better! If you can stay at Miyajima island, do it! You don't have to splurge on expensive ryokan (although it would have been nice). We stayed at Sakuraya, which was very budget-friendly.

• Itsukishima Jinja - Nice but Daishoin and surrounding nature were the highlights for me.
• Daishoin - it is the most beautiful shrine complex I have seen in Japan this trip. I think it's because it was so quaint and it was embedded in the hill, surrounded by lush green nature. There were multiple complexes. There was a pathway studded with Jizo statues, buddist cave, prayer wheels and much more. While we were there, a ceremony with a monk was ongoing and everyone could participate in helping burning the origami peace cranes made by children, to make their wishes come true. We bought a little peace crane made from the ashes to remember this moment.
• Mt. Misen - we hiked up from Dashoin. It was ~2hrs? of steep stair climbing, 500m elevation gain. A challenge for sure but we definitely earned our way going down by ropeway :P. Views are great! go go! There is a bus to the ropeway so you don't have to suffer if you don't want to.
• Momijidani park - If you don't like Momiji trees, you can't be my friend.
• Snack along the Miyajima ometesando street. Crowded, but the cakes are great!

One remark, our hotel didn't include dinner and all the restaurants on the island close quite early. Luckily, with our setouchi JR pass, we could take the ferry for free, so went to the mainland for dinner. Just keep this in mind, when booking your stay.
D9 - D13 Kyoto
We took the early train to Kyoto and checked in at Tokyu stay Sanjo-karasuma. We had 5 days to explore Kyoto and by this time we had lost our FOMO a little bit and also decided to take it a bit more slow. We still ended up walking a lot anyways but at least we were sleeping in.
The day we arrived,15MAY, was supposed to be Aoi matsuri so we headed to Kamo river to see the festival. Unfortunately, the festival was postponed due to the slight rainfall and we had no clue! but we were next to Kyoto botanical garden and we decided to visit that instead!

• Kyoto botanical garden: it is a lovely garden with a huge variety of plants and trees to see. Really well maintained and during our visit there was a great rose garden in bloom. I recommend going there! It has a nice japanese garden section too with momiji trees and moss. A greenhouse with orchids. Lot's to see here. Only 200 yen.
• Arashiyama area - I really loved this area, not just for the bamboo forest. Togetsukyo bridge and Katsura river were the highlights for me. You can walk along the both sides of Katsura riverbank. A nice way to get to the bamboo forest and bypassing the busy beginning at the start of bamboo forest is by walking along the katsura river bank into Kameyama park and following the signs to Okochi sanso garden. You will end up at the backside of bamboo forest, which is the nicest part. We went more north to visit Pottery Tanuki, this area was very nice and quaint to walk around; bamboo, shrines and traditional houses everywhere.
• South kyoto - Fushimi Inari + Uji day trip - We visited fushimi inari around 9am and it was already very busy! If you hike deeper into the Tori gates, it gets more quiet. We decided not to hike to the top, but instead do a little loop and we stumbled upon some lovely fox shrines. After Fushimi Inari, we took the train just a little bit more south to Uji. If you like matcha, visit Uji. It is a scenic little town with lots of matcha specialized cafes. We ate at Torikiku, famous for their matcha soba and udon. I had the best matcha icecream dessert at Nakamura Tokichi Byodo-in. Again, the river views are beautiful! It's a great daytrip from kyoto. On the way back to kyoto, we spontaneously decided to visit the Gekkeikan Sake museum. It's a small museum, mostly about the history of Gekkeikan, but for 500 yen entry fee, you also get 3 small sake tastings. Fun for an hour or so. I wouldn't go all the way here just for the museum, but for us it was a nice stop on the way back to Kyoto.
• Gion - visit Gion in the evening and just wander around the little streets. Hanamikoji street is one of the more famous streets there.
• We ate amazing gyoza lunch at Gyoza-dokoro Sakemasa. Best gyozo of our trip.
• Higashiyama area - Heian jingu shrine, visit the attached garden for a fee, definitely worth it! We ate amazing mazesoba and ramen for lunch at Menya Yamahide. We also visited Kyoto handicraft center in this area where we bought an ukiyo-e painting. There was also a vintage antique market at that day. We just browsed a bit around the market and honestly that was a day worth of exploring :).

I didn't mention everything we did in Kyoto here. We also had so much more planned for Kyoto, but didn't get around to it, which was totally fine! We were also a bit temple-fatigued by that time and needed a slower pace. Hopefully next time, we can visit some of things we skipped. Furthermore, some days were incredibly hot (30 C degrees and humid) or we had whole days of rain. On those days, we decided to go shopping instead.

• Sanjo Meiten-gai shopping arcade , Compasso teramachi. One long shopping street between Omiya and Kyoto-kawaramachi station. My favorite shops were: Standard products, Tokyu hands and Loft.

D14 - D15 Takayama
After spending 5 days in Kyoto, it was time to leave the city and head for the Japanese alps. We took the shinkansen to Nagoya, where we changed to a limited express to Takayama. It took around 3 hours to get to Takayama, but we didn't mind. Train travel = resting time for our legs! Also, the views from the train were great!! I really enjoyed this train trip to Takayama. We arrived around noon and immediately checked in at our hotel (Hotel Kuretakeso Takayama). We had two nights in Takayama to explore the town.

• Hida beef - it's the wagyu of this area and I found my favorite place to eat it: Ajikura Tengoku. We went there twice for lunch, because it was that good. It was our first time in Japan to try yakiniku and sukiyaki. I really do appreciate the taste of wagyu but only in small amounts. I couldn't eat it everyday, because it's really so rich and yes paying for the premium cuts really does make a different in taste and texture of the wagyu beef.
• We really loved Takayama. Again, if you have time, stay overnight and wander around the streets during the evening when all the daytrippers leave. The town has such a nice vibe and it still has a very local feel to it.
• Miyagawa morning market. Fun to stroll around
• Hikaru museum - we stumbled upon this via google maps. It's a mayan temple-inspired building, very unique. You could visit the place just for the architecture itself, really impressive. It has a very nice collection of art. When we reached the top floor, there was a whole exhibition dedicated to a specific religious person. We didn't know beforehand but this museum is connected to a cult. Suddenly, it all made sense why this museum was so unique. We didn't mind, but it definitely puts the whole experience in a different light. It's a 1-hour walk from downtown, there is no direct bus connection unfortunately.
• Hida folk village - Open-air museum with nice re-builds of traditional mountain houses. We spend over half a day there. You can see local craftsmen doing their thing and you can also participate in pottery for example. There is a lovely pond and it is just pleasant to walk around. it's only a ~10 min. busride from Takayama bus station. You can buy combined entryfee+bus combo tickets at the bus station.

D16 Kamikochi -> Matsumoto
After checking out of our hotel in Takayama, we took the 7am bus to Kamikochi. We were only going to spend a day here, and then continue our way to Matsumoto to stay overnight.After ~1 hour of bus, we finally made it to Kamikochi. The Japanese alps are amazing. I wished we stayed longer in this area, but just the bus ride alone to Kamikochi was already a great with the views. We decided to hop off at Taisho pond bus stop and walk along all the major sights in the park. We had no specific plan. Just hike around as far as time allowed. For lunch, we stopped at this cute teishoku restaurant, where we ate katsu curry, a big lunch to fuel our walking. We also saw wild japanese macaques and lots of wildflowers where blooming during our time there.At the local shops, we bought some yummy pastries to snack on. I had the tastiest baumkuchen with cheesecake center and my partner had a chocolate ganache cookie. I really regret not buying more kamikochi pastries to take home while we were there.After spending the day walking around, we hopped on the 4pm bus towards Matsumoto. Checked in at Tabino hotel lit Matsumoto, where I relaxed in the onsen.
Tips:

• We were only carrying backpacks, so we hiked with them until we reached the kamikochi bus terminal, where you can drop off you bag at the storage for a small fee.
• Reservation is mandatory for the bus Kamikochi -> Matsumoto, you can do it online or while you are at the busstation before hiking.
• Transportation in the Japan alps is mostly by bus, do reserve ahead if you go at peak times. Main bus company is Nouhi bus: https://www.nouhibus.co.jp/english/.)

D17 Matsumoto Tokyo
After sleeping in, we did some sightseeing in Matsumoto before we moved on to Tokyo. We really liked wandering around in Matsumoto. Lots of cool shops with local crafts. We didn't know but the biggest national crafts fair is held in Matsumoto. Unfortunately, we were only able to stay for one day, but next time we would love to visit this crafts fair!
Matsumoto Castle - I really like the interior of the castle. It has been renovated, but still contains that castle feel. It is 5 story castle and you are allowed to climb all of it. It also included a pretty extensive gun/weaponry exhibition. Do arrive early because you do have to line-up within the castle to get from one floor to the other. This is due to the steep stairways, on which they allow only one-way traffic at a time.
Matsumoto city art museum - There was a nice exhibition from Yayoi Kusama. We didn't know but Yayoi Kusama was born in Matsumoto. It is a good replacement exhibition if you aren't able to snatch up tickets for Yayoi Kusama museum in Tokyo.
Nakamachi street and Frog street - street with persevered houses with craft shops, cafes, brewerys. What more do you want.
After spending the day in Matsumoto, we took the train to Tokyo, our last destination of our stay. We decided to stay in Ueno (Hotel resol ueno). This hotel was located close to Ueno JR.
D18 - D24 Tokyo
Last 7 days in Tokyo. By this time, we were just enjoying everything at a much slower pace. Tokyo is huge! Staying near the JR line is indeed a must like everyone said. I could go on hours about Tokyo, I am just going to mention some highlights here.

• Anmitsu at Anmitsu Mihashi. My favorite dessert! It contains agar jelly, mochi balls, red bean paste, fruit and a scoop of matcha icecream.
• shopping in Ginza - It's nice to go during the weekends when they close of the streets for cars. We liked visiting flagship stores of Muji, Uniqlo. Go to Itoya if you are a stationary freak.
• Ueno park - Museums, shrines, Lotus pond. Have a look at their website, there are almost always events in the park. :)
• Tsukiji market - very busy, but fun to have a look. Lines everywhere. Look for sushi restaurants that open around 11am, line up at one of those places. I don't think it has to be the one with 4.5 rating and 1000 reviews. Why? There are so many good restaurants in Tsukiji area. We went to Tsukiji Kagura Sushi.
• Hamarikyu gardens - Bonsai pine trees pruned to perfection. Ponds filled with sea water, thus there were seabass, little sardines and jellyfish in the water. Very special! You also had a nice skyline view from the park which is a cool contrast! It was nice and quiet.
• Tokyo Skytree - best view :) it also has a great shopping complex attached to it.
• Asakusa area - Senso-ji
• Yanaka Ginza - we went during the weekend and there was live music, little stalls and just very lively in general. Really nice to spend a morning. Largest preserved cemetery, which apparently welcomes visitors a lot for flower viewings. It is a preserved neighborhood with traditional houses and lots of shops selling crafts, gifts, souvenirs, and unique snacks.

That's it!
For 24 days, we spend around ~2500 euro p.p. (excl. 1000,- flights). This amount includes food, transportation, entrancefees and shopping/gifts. so average is ~100 euro/day. We didn't track every cost. Hotel costs were 900,- pp, which ranged from 50,- to 120,- per night accommodations. The conversion yen/euro is also great at the moment, so it might have contributed!
I hope you enjoyed my trip report. Let me know if there are any questions.

Windows 10, v 22H2, Build 19045.2846. Laptop from Aug 2017.
I was told to keep the Dell WD19 docking station from my job, because they were just going to toss it. I was told it would work fine on my Sager laptop.
This version of the dock has the dual usb-c cord to plug into the laptop, but for whatever reason only one of the cords lit up, but both did on my work laptop. Then I noticed that the LED keyboard connected to the dock was occasionally laggy, and the LEDs blinked randomly. I couldn't get the monitor to be recognized. When I scrolled a website, it was jerky essentially. I rebooted 2x after unplugging the dock, and scrolling was still bad.
This morning, I attempted a few things, and wound up doing a system restore, which was just before/after the update last week. I stepped away for a few minutes, but partially closed the lid (because cats) and just did it enough to trigger the screen to go black. My computer is set to do nothing when plugged in and shut the lid.
The computer took 3+ minutes from restart until I could log in. I rebooted a few more times, now it takes just under 2.5 minutes. Pre-restore it was 15-20 seconds from reboot and log in.
Other issues:

• It complains that Skype is missing, though I thought I disabled auto-start ages ago.
• I have about 10 items pinned to my taskbar, 3 of them are built-in stuff - like calculator - there icons are missing, though I still get a tooltip on hover.
• some apps don't load like edge, chrome, office, but some do like firefox, VS Code, steam.
• no sound. Initially the service couldn't start, I fixed that, but still nothing. installed the latest drivers from Sager.
• win update says "something happened, try later"

Is there something other than factory reset I could do?

I appreciate everyone in this sub Reddit. I haven’t posted anything here yet but I have read a lot. I have been working on a book for the last several months and I have 28,200 words. I would like to share one of my chapters to get feedback.
This is chapter 8
My father was a chief of police and several other members of my family were in law enforcement. I had been raised around and amongst police officers since I was very young and the seeds had been planted in my heart to follow in my father’s footsteps. I dropped out of high school in my junior year because I was utterly failing in my academics and frankly had no interest. I was working at Marvin’s IGA grocery store for most of the time when I was 17. After I turned 18 however, I began to look for a more serious job. My dad had heard that the local jail was hiring and that they would hire at 18 years of age. He explained that the jail was typically the first step on the path on starting a career in law enforcement and that many cops he knew had spent a year or two working at the jail before becoming police officers. In February of 2008 I applied and in early March I began a pre-employment screening process. This consisted of a background check and a polygraph test. I had never been criminally in trouble so the background check went fine. I am sure some of them had heard about my UFO 911 call but it was never mentioned to me if they had. As I walked into the administration side of the Sheriff’s Office, I could feel my heart pounding against my chest. I knew what was waiting for me - a dreaded polygraph test. The room was small, and the only thing between me and the stern-looking lieutenant was a desk. But what caught my attention was the intimidating chair in front of the desk, with various sensors and attachments ready to measure my every physical response. The lieutenant welcomed me, but his tone was stern as he explained that this was a mandatory test for all recruits seeking employment at the facility. The silence in the room was deafening, and the air was thick with tension. I knew that this moment would determine my future, and I could not help but wonder, would I pass the test or fail? I had been previously told what sorts of questions would be on the test. Several of which I knew I would have to lie on. Especially if they asked if I had ever used illegal drugs as I had smoked marijuana with friends by this point. I had been quite a book reader at this point in my life all ready and at one point I had read about how to fool a polygraph test and it essentially went like this. To fool the polygraph sensors, you have to believe your own lies. The sensors are looking for physiological signs of deception, guilt, anticipation anything of that sort. So, you must not view your answers as lies. There has to be an agreement in my mind already that the entire thing is a farce. This man is not really trying to read me, this is simply a round about way of filling out a form in his possession and I am putting the answers as I want them to appear on the form. So, in my heart this is no a question of true or false. It is a question of what I want to appear on the paper. Therefor when a question is asked. I am not lying regardless of what I say, I am simply dictating to him what to put on the paper for me. Another tip I had read was to focus on a particular place on the wall in front of you and concentrate on it. I sat down and said I was ready. He then began by asking my name and what town we were in for a base reading. Next came the questions. Have you ever committed a serious crime that went undetected? A normal response to this question would be to begin to think back over one’s history and to question one’s self to make sure you weren’t missing anything. However, I stared at the wall and decided the answer to that question needed to be no, so I said no. The polygraph examination went on like this until the end. I can’t say I passed with flying colors however. Lieutenant Carter at the end looked at me and told me my lines were strange and did not indicate either deception or truthfulness but were what they would call inconclusive. Which is still passable for I passed my exam although I got a few odd looks from the lieutenant before I left. Not long after this I was being fitted for a jailer uniform and being distributed the equipment I would be using in my new role as Jail Deputy. I had a grand sense of embarking on a noble quest that would lead to untold adventures and a feeling of being a part of something much bigger than myself. Putting on the uniform for the first time went straight to my head as I could almost feel the new powers of authority emanating out from my being. The jail was connected to the main Sheriff's Office by a set of sturdy steel doors, which were operated remotely from a centralized command center. Once inside, there was no way out unless the command center authorized it. Although there were one or two physical keys, they were not kept on the premises and were reserved only for emergency situations where the controls at the command center were inaccessible. As I walked down the corridor towards the "Pod" where I was to begin my work, I couldn't help but notice the thick, grey concrete walls that lined the passageway. The Pod I would be working in for the first few months was known as D Pod. Essentially, a Pod was a hexagonal command center situated on a raised platform, encircled by remotely operated doors that led to various cell blocks. D-Pod comprised of 6 cell blocks and 2 recreational yards. When entering D-Pod, the two largest cell blocks, D-109 and D-130, were situated on the left-hand side. D-109 housed individuals jailed on misdemeanor charges, while D-130 was reserved for those facing felony charges who had not yet gone to trial. Essentially, it was the pre-trial felony block. On the right-hand side, there were four smaller blocks. One of these, D-150, hosted federal inmates who were predominantly Hispanic individuals with immigration-related holds. However, occasionally, unique inmates with charges related to federal crimes, such as crossing state borders to commit a crime, would also be held in D-150. The final two blocks were D-169 which hosted all inmates with sex related crimes and D-170 which held all inmates with Felony charges who had recently been convicted at trial but had not been sent to prison yet. Initially, my job at the jail was titled "Working D-Pod Direct," which involved spending time in the two largest cell blocks, D-109 and D-130, rather than simply standing in the command area of the Pod. As I began to acclimate myself to the environment and interact with the inmates, I noticed a variety of odors that were foreign to me. The persistent scent of sweat and human body odor was particularly revolting. I couldn't help but cringe at the thought of it. As I glanced around at the inmates, I couldn't help but feel a sense of disdain towards them. They had made choices that landed them in jail, and now they were paying the price. While I would be civil and courteous, I didn't feel as though I owed them anything. It was clear that breaking the rules on my watch was not an option. I quickly familiarized myself with the list of inmate infractions and their respective punishments. If an inmate broke certain rules, they could be subjected to lockdown. It became somewhat of a game to try and catch them in the act, and why not? They had committed a crime and their time in jail should not be pleasant or enjoyable. After all, what motivation would they have to not reoffend and come back? Thanks to constantly splitting wood, my arms had become rock-solid. In addition, I had been diligently honing my boxing skills and was eager for a potential altercation. The idea of an inmate attempting to intimidate me was thrilling, and I relished the possibility of a challenge. My father had earned a reputation as a formidable fighter, and now it was time for me to begin carving out my own legacy. As I searched through the bunks in D-109, my eyes caught sight of an inmate's thin, uncomfortable mat resting on top of his metal bunk. I couldn't help but wonder what could be hiding underneath it. My curiosity got the best of me, and I lifted the mat to find small, circular objects made of toothpaste. It was clear to me that the inmate had made these "mints" himself. I immediately located the inmate responsible and demanded an explanation for his actions. He fumbled through a feeble excuse, which did nothing to sway my judgement. As punishment, I stripped him of his privileges to have a mat and associate with other inmates. I then escorted him to E-Pod, on the opposite side of the jail, which served as the lockdown block. While I found the concept of lockdown amusing at the time, it was a truly awful experience for the inmates. They were stripped of all their belongings except for a Bible and confined to an empty cell for 23 hours a day, with only one hour of freedom to take a shower or read the newspaper in the main area of the cell block. I found myself getting a rush from catching inmates breaking the rules. It became a daily goal of mine to ensure that at least one person was placed in lockdown. At the time I thought that the rules were very simple for people who clearly cared little about society, simple dos and don’ts. There were big ones such as “Don’t assault any jail staff”, “No Fighting.”, “Attempts to escape.”, “No sexual activity.” Etc. Then there were the pettier issues, these were the ones I spent my time on. “Leaning on the wall.”, “Storing food after meals have been picked up.”, “Being unsanitary, failing to keep cell clean.”, “Possessing anything not authorized or issued directly to the inmate through jail staff.” The latter rule was very open to interpretation, and was used if inmates had extra of anything. Many an inmate met lockdown due to having an extra roll of toilet paper in those days. A typical portion of my day might go like this. I stride purposefully down the dimly-lit prison block, my boots echoing off the concrete walls. My chest swells with a sense of authority as I approach the inmate's cell. Without a word, I barge in, my hand firmly gripping my baton. "Face the wall!" I bark, my voice carrying the weight of my position. The inmate jumps, fear etched on his face as he turns to comply with my order. I begin to inspect his cell, my eyes scanning every inch for any signs of contraband. My nose wrinkles at the faint smell of sweat and mold, but I push on, determined to maintain control. And then, there it is. An extra roll of toilet paper, sitting innocuously on the shelf. I whirl around to face the inmate, my lip curling in disdain. "What is this?" I demand, my tone dripping with arrogance. The inmate stammers, fear and distress etched on his face. "I-I didn't know," he stutters. "I didn't know we couldn't have more than one roll." I snort in disbelief. "You expect me to believe that? You should have read the handbook more closely." I reach out and snatch the booklet from his hands, flipping through the pages with a sneer. "And here it is," I say triumphantly, jabbing my finger at the relevant section. "One roll per inmate. Did you even bother to read this?" I pull the inmate out of his cell, dragging him along behind me as I stride purposefully down the hallway. "Lockdown for five days," I snap, my tone leaving no room for argument. "Maybe you'll learn to follow the rules next time." I stride out of the prison gates, my uniform crisp and my badge shining in the sun. It's been a hard day, but I've managed to keep the inmates in line, as I always do. The weight of the day's events still heavy on my mind, I pull out a pack of Marlboro reds and light one up. The smoke fills my lungs and I let out a long exhale, feeling a sense of relief wash over me. Driving down the winding country roads, the sun beating down on my face, I can't help but feel a sense of peace. The green pastures and fields stretch out for miles on either side of the road, and I feel like I'm the only one in the world. When I finally get home, I grab a cold beer from the fridge and climb into the driver's seat of my truck. The sounds of the woods and insects fill the air as I crack open the can and start to read a book. The sun slowly begins to set, casting a warm orange glow over the trees. As the night deepens, I feel a restlessness stirring within me. I decide to take my truck out for a spin, driving through the small town I grew up in. The beer has been flowing freely for hours, but it doesn't even occur to me that I might be breaking the law. I revel in the feeling of being an adult, of having power and control over others. It doesn't matter that I've spent the day punishing inmates for petty offenses, because in this moment, I am invincible. The irony of my situation is lost on me, and I continue to drive around, the night stretching out before me like an open road. After I get home and as the night wears on, I continue to drink, the bottles piling up around me. The sounds of the woods outside provide a backdrop to my drunken stupor, and I stumble out into the darkness. The insects hum around me, and the night birds call out in the distance. I feel my stomach churning, and I lurch forward, retching onto the ground. The smell of beer and bile fills my nostrils, and I heave until there's nothing left. As I stumble into the woods, their darkness and isolation seem to envelop me completely. The only witnesses to my weakness are the insects and birds, their chirping and buzzing forming a constant, mocking chorus. No god, no divine presence to judge my actions or offer me solace. I know that I can’t linger here for long. I have to be at work again at 6 in the morning, ready to continue my reign of power.

16-May-2023

• Integration of RWKV models in transformers (https://twitter.com/huggingface/status/1658054038879870977)
• MEGABYTE: Predicting Million-byte Sequences with Multiscale Transformers (https://arxiv.org/abs/2305.07185)
• Brex's Prompt Engineering Guide (https://github.com/brexhq/prompt-engineering)
• Uncensored Models (https://erichartford.com/uncensored-models)
• Open-LLMs - A list of LLMs for Commercial Use (https://eugeneyan.com/writing/open-llms/)
• The "Three-Hills" Model for evaluating GPT startups (https://assistedeverything.substack.com/p/the-three-hills-model-for-evaluating)
• Together’s $20M seed funding to build open-source AI and cloud platform (https://www.together.xyz/blog/seed-funding)
• A query language for programming (large) language models. (https://github.com/eth-sri/lmql)
• Report: OpenAI to Release Open Source AI Model (https://www.theinsaneapp.com/2023/05/openai-open-source-model.html)
• ChatHub is an all-in-one chatbot client (https://github.com/chathub-dev/chathub/blob/main/README.md)

​
17-May-2023

• A guidance language for controlling LLMs (https://github.com/microsoft/guidance)
• OpenAI CEO Sam Altman tells senators he wants to see A.I. licensed. That might be good for us. It’s definitely good for OpenAI. (https://finance.yahoo.com/news/openai-ceo-sam-altman-tells-200241500.html)
• Advocating for Open Models in AI Oversight: Stability AI's Letter to the United States Senate (https://stability.ai/blog/stability-ai-letter-us-senate-ai-oversight)
• 3 Free Platforms for Personalized ChatGPT Experience (https://www.kdnuggets.com/2023/05/3-free-platform-personalized-chatgpt-experience.html)
• TinyStories: How Small Can Language Models Be and Still Speak Coherent English? (https://arxiv.org/abs/2305.07759)
• Symbol tuning improves in-context learning in language models (https://arxiv.org/abs/2305.08298)
• S-curves of LLMs (https://twitter.com/lessin/status/1658193420178030592)
• LLM University — Learning Resource for NLP (https://txt.cohere.com/llm-university/)

​
18-May-2023

• Stability AI Releases StableStudio, the Open-Source Future of DreamStudio (https://stability.ai/blog/stablestudio-open-source-community-driven-future-dreamstudio-release)
• AI-powered coding, free of charge with Colab (https://blog.google/technology/developers/google-colab-ai-coding-features/)
• Summarize any Article as a Dialog Between two People with Bing Chat (https://www.aidemos.info/summarize-any-article-as-a-dialog-between-two-people-with-bing-chat/)
• Pandas AI — The Future of Data Analysis (https://medium.com/@fareedkhandev/pandas-ai-the-future-of-data-analysis-8f0be9b5ab6f)
• BratGPT: The evil older sibling of ChatGPT (https://bratgpt.com/)
• Hippocratic is building a large language model for healthcare (https://techcrunch.com/2023/05/16/hippocratic-is-building-a-large-language-model-for-healthcare/)
• Google’s newest A.I. model uses nearly five times more text data for training than its predecessor (https://www.cnbc.com/2023/05/16/googles-palm-2-uses-nearly-five-times-more-text-data-than-predecessor.html)
• Zoom will soon integrate Anthropic’s chatbot across its platform (https://www.theverge.com/2023/5/16/23725342/zoom-anthropic-ai-powered-chatbot-claude)
• Tom’s Hardware AI Chatbot (https://www.tomshardware.com/news/tomshardware-ai-chatbot)
• Numbers every LLM Developer should know (https://github.com/ray-project/llm-numbers)

​
19-May-2023

• ChatGPT app for iOS (https://openai.com/blog/introducing-the-chatgpt-app-for-ios)
• CLI tools for working with ChatGPT and other LLMs (https://simonwillison.net/2023/May/18/cli-tools-for-llms/)
• All languages are NOT created (tokenized) equal (https://blog.yenniejun.com/p/all-languages-are-not-created-tokenized)
• Using LangChainJS and Cloudflare Workers together (https://blog.cloudflare.com/langchain-and-cloudflare/)
• BT to cut 55,000 jobs with up to a fifth replaced by AI (https://www.bbc.com/news/business-65631168)
• The AI takeover of Google Search starts now (https://www.theverge.com/2023/5/10/23717120/google-search-ai-results-generated-experience-io)
• Debt Collectors Want To Use AI Chatbots To Hustle People For Money (https://www.vice.com/en/article/bvjmm5/debt-collectors-want-to-use-ai-chatbots-to-hustle-people-for-money)
• MTIA v1: Meta’s first-generation AI inference accelerator (https://ai.facebook.com/blog/meta-training-inference-accelerator-AI-MTIA/)
• PaLM 2 Technical Report (https://arxiv.org/abs/2305.10403)
• Professor Flunks All His Students After ChatGPT Falsely Claims It Wrote Their Papers (https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-features/texas-am-chatgpt-ai-professor-flunks-students-false-claims-1234736601/)
• Running chained LLMs with TypeScript in production (https://www.inngest.com/blog/running-chained-llms-typescript-in-production)
• Any model made available in the EU, without first passing extensive, and expensive, licensing, would subject companies to massive fines of the greater of €20,000,000 or 4% of worldwide revenue. Opensource developers, and hosting services such as GitHub... would be liable (https://twitter.com/jeremyphoward/status/1657920768771244032?cxt=HHwWgIDShfeJj4IuAAAA)

​
24-May-2023

• Using ChatGPT for home automation (https://www.atomic14.com/2023/05/14/is-this-the-future-of-home-automation.html)
• Finetuning LLMs Efficiently with Adapters (https://magazine.sebastianraschka.com/p/finetuning-llms-with-adapters)
• Chatting with an Airbnb listing using data-backed generation (https://nokori.com/blog/2023-05-19-chatting-with-an-airbnb-listing)
• Google's AI Music Datasets: MusicCaps, AudioSet and MuLan (https://www.audiocipher.com/post/musiccaps-audioset-mulan)
• Intel Announces Aurora genAI, Generative AI Model With 1 Trillion Parameters (https://wccftech.com/intel-aurora-genai-chatgpt-competitor-generative-ai-model-with-1-trillion-parameters/)
• China is using AI to raise the dead, and give people one last chance to say goodbye (https://www.businessinsider.in/tech/news/china-is-using-ai-to-raise-the-dead-and-give-people-one-last-chance-to-say-goodbye/articleshow/100380496.cms)
• What I don’t like about chains of thoughts and why language is a bottleneck to efficient reasoning (https://samsja.github.io/blogs/cot/blog/)
• Girlfriend GPT is a Python project to build your own AI girlfriend using ChatGPT4.0 (https://github.com/EniasCailliau/GirlfriendGPT)
• Interact your data and environment using the local GPT (https://github.com/csunny/DB-GPT)
• He Helped Train ChatGPT. It Traumatized Him. (https://www.bigtechnology.com/p/he-helped-train-chatgpt-it-traumatized)
• Meta Introducing speech-to-text, text-to-speech, and more for 1,100+ languages (https://ai.facebook.com/blog/multilingual-model-speech-recognition/)
• LIMA: Less Is More for Alignment (https://arxiv.org/abs/2305.11206)
• airoboros: using large language models to fine-tune large language models (https://github.com/jondurbin/airoboros)
• DarkBERT: A Language Model for the Dark Side of the Internet (https://arxiv.org/abs/2305.08596)
• Bringing Open Large Language Models to Consumer Devices (https://mlc.ai/blog/2023/05/22/bringing-open-large-language-models-to-consumer-devices)
• LangChain AI Handbook(https://www.pinecone.io/learn/langchain/)
• Apple Restricts Employee Use of ChatGPT, Joining Other Companies Wary of Leaks (https://www.wsj.com/articles/apple-restricts-use-of-chatgpt-joining-other-companies-wary-of-leaks-d44d7d34)
• Welcome to the final phase of software eating the world. SaaS companies beware, you're on the menu this time (https://www.businessinsider.in/tech/news/welcome-to-the-final-phase-of-software-eating-the-world-saas-companies-beware-youre-on-the-menu-this-time-/articleshow/100418224.cms)

​
25-May-2023

• Meta AI Unleashes Megabyte, a Revolutionary Scalable Model Architecture (https://www.artisana.ai/articles/meta-ai-unleashes-megabyte-a-revolutionary-scalable-model-architecture)
• RWKV: Reinventing RNNs for the Transformer Era (https://arxiv.org/abs/2305.13048)
• VanillaNet: the Power of Minimalism in Deep Learning (https://arxiv.org/abs/2305.12972)
• QLoRA: 4-bit finetuning of LLMs (https://twitter.com/Tim\_Dettmers/status/1661379354507476994)
• Baize v2 7B chatbot (https://twitter.com/XuCanwen/status/1661099080746143745)
• Against LLM maximalism (https://explosion.ai/blog/against-llm-maximalism)
• Microsoft Build brings AI tools to the forefront for developers (https://blogs.microsoft.com/blog/2023/05/23/microsoft-build-brings-ai-tools-to-the-forefront-for-developers/)
• Your A.I - Powered Quran Companion (https://www.tarteel.ai/)
• How GitHub Copilot is getting better at understanding your code (https://github.blog/2023-05-17-how-github-copilot-is-getting-better-at-understanding-your-code/)
• The White House wants your opinion on how to regulate AI (https://www.semafor.com/article/05/23/2023/white-house-ai-national-strategy)
• State of GPT by Andrej Karpathy (https://build.microsoft.com/en-US/sessions/db3f4859-cd30-4445-a0cd-553c3304f8e2)
• chatGPT plugin that decorates an empty room in different styles from a single photo (https://old.reddit.com/ChatGPT/comments/13qkr0j/i_made_a_chatgpt_plugin_that_decorates_an_empty/)

​
26-May-2023

• Chatbot Arena Leaderboard Updates (Week 4) (https://lmsys.org/blog/2023-05-25-leaderboard/)
• Gorilla: Large Language Model Connected with Massive APIs (https://gorilla.cs.berkeley.edu/)
• AI Canon (https://a16z.com/2023/05/25/ai-canon/)
• PostgresML raises $4.7M to launch serverless AI application databases based on Postgres (https://postgresml.org/blog/postgresml-raises-4.7M-to-launch-serverless-ai-application-databases-based-on-postgres)
• The False Promise of Imitating Proprietary LLMs (https://arxiv.org/abs/2305.15717)
• Compress, Then Prompt: Improving Accuracy-Efficiency Trade-off of LLM Inference with Transferable Prompt (https://arxiv.org/pdf/2305.11186v1.pdf)
• GPTQLoRA: Efficient Finetuning of Quantized LLMs with GPTQ (https://github.com/qwopqwop200/gptqlora/tree/main)
• A GPT-Powered Chatbot For Any Site. (https://helphub.commandbar.com/)
• Create any UI with AI (https://dynaboard.com/blog/dynaboard-ai)
• Building Cloud Dev Assistants with GPT-4 and Pinecone on Gitpod (https://www.gitpod.io/blog/building-cloud-dev-assistants-with-gpt-4-on-gitpod)
• Incident Report for OpenAI (https://status.openai.com/incidents/jbt079x532bg)
• New superbug-killing antibiotic discovered using AI (https://www.bbc.com/news/health-65709834)
• How To Finetune GPT Like Large Language Models on a Custom Dataset (https://lightning.ai/pages/blog/how-to-finetune-gpt-like-large-language-models-on-a-custom-dataset/)
• PB reddit 7B - a lora trained on financial subreddits (https://huggingface.co/winddude/pb\_lora\_7b\_v0.1)
• Generative AI for Constructive Communication Evaluation and New Research Methods (https://ai4comm.media.mit.edu/)
• 58% of US adults familiar with ChatGPT, 14% have tried it (https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2023/05/24/a-majority-of-americans-have-heard-of-chatgpt-but-few-have-tried-it-themselves/)
• OpenAI offers grants for developing democratic AI decision-making (https://openai.com/blog/democratic-inputs-to-ai)
• What is Project Tailwind and How it Works? How to Try Google Tailwind (https://openaitrend.com/what-is-project-tailwind/)
• Build and run useful autonomous agents (https://github.com/TransformerOptimus/SuperAGI)
• What is BLOOMChat and How to Use it? (https://openaitrend.com/what-is-bloomchat/)
• TaxGTP, the first AI tax assistant, introduced in UAE (https://fastcompanyme.com/news/taxgtp-the-first-ai-tax-assistant-introduced-in-uae/)
• It's not just statistics: GPT-4 does reason (https://jbconsulting.substack.com/p/its-not-just-statistics-gpt-4-does)
• Plug in and Play Implementation of Tree of Thoughts: Deliberate Problem Solving with Large Language Models that Elevates Model Reasoning by atleast 70% (https://github.com/kyegomez/tree-of-thoughts)
• The Age of Agents (https://sudoapps.substack.com/p/the-age-of-agents)

​
29-May-2023

• ChatGPT conversations can be shared publicly (https://help.openai.com/en/articles/7943611-how-do-i-create-a-shared-link)
• GPT-4 in Minecraft (https://twitter.com/DrJimFan/status/1662115266933972993)
• What Neeva's quiet exit tells us about the future of AI startups (https://www.supervised.news/p/what-neevas-quiet-exit-tells-us-about)
• UAE's Technology Innovation Institute Launches Open-Source "Falcon 40B" Large Language Model for Research & Commercial Utilization** (https://www.tii.ae/news/uaes-technology-innovation-institute-launches-open-source-falcon-40b-large-language-model)
• All the Hard Stuff Nobody Talks About when Building Products with LLMs (https://www.honeycomb.io/blog/hard-stuff-nobody-talks-about-llm)
• IBM’s CEO expects A.I. to be so good at back office work that he plans to pause hiring humans for those jobs (https://fortune.com/2023/05/01/ibm-ceo-ai-artificial-intelligence-back-office-jobs-pause-hiring/)
• Leena AI Unveils WorkLM, it’s Proprietary Large Language Model (https://analyticsindiamag.com/leena-ai-unveils-worklm-its-proprietary-large-language-model/)
• Trends in AI (https://theaireport.substack.com/p/ai-report-3)
• Democratizing AI with open-source language models (https://lwn.net/Articles/931853/)
• Large Language Models are Few-Shot Health Learners (https://arxiv.org/abs/2305.15525)
• The Larger They Are, the Harder They Fail: Language Models do not Recognize Identifier Swaps in Python (https://arxiv.org/abs/2305.15507)
• Landmark Attention: Random-Access Infinite Context Length for Transformers (https://arxiv.org/abs/2305.16300)
• Lawyer cites fake cases invented by ChatGPT, judge is not amused (https://simonwillison.net/2023/May/27/lawyer-chatgpt/)
• Nvidia ACE Brings AI to Game Characters, Allows Lifelike Conversations (https://www.tomshardware.com/news/nvidia-ace-brings-npcs-to-life)
• ChatGPT seems to be trained on copyrighted books like Harry Potter (https://www.newscientist.com/article/2372140-chatgpt-seems-to-be-trained-on-copyrighted-books-like-harry-potte)
• AI tools like ChatGPT are built on mass copyright infringement (https://www.theglobeandmail.com/opinion/article-ai-programs-like-chatgpt-are-built-on-mass-copyright-infringement/)

​
30-May-2023

• Prompt engineering techniques (https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/cognitive-services/openai/concepts/advanced-prompt-engineering?pivots=programming-language-chat-completions)
• NVIDIA Announces DGX GH200 AI Supercomputer (https://nvidianews.nvidia.com/news/nvidia-announces-dgx-gh200-ai-supercomputer)
• Seven new no-cost generative AI training courses to advance your cloud career (https://cloud.google.com/blog/topics/training-certifications/new-google-cloud-generative-ai-training-resources)
• Model Lab - A new tool to make sense of training LLMs (https://www.reddit.com/mlscaling/comments/13rvx0i/t\_introducing\_model\_lab\_a\_new\_tool\_to\_make\_sense/)
• AI Server Cost Analysis – Memory Is The Biggest Loser (https://www.semianalysis.com/p/ai-server-cost-analysis-memory-is)
• Winning the AI Products Arms Race (https://www.reforge.com/blog/ai-products-arms-race)
• How much would it have cost if GPT-4 had written your code? (https://pypi.org/project/cost-of-code/)

​
31-May-2023

• Chain-of-Thought Hub: Measuring LLMs' Reasoning Performance (https://github.com/FranxYao/chain-of-thought-hub)
• AI Weirdness: the strange side of machine learning (https://www.aiweirdness.com/)
• We deserve to know if something was generated by AI (https://ntietz.com/blog/ai-text-should-be-labeled/)
• Making OpenAI Whisper faster (https://nikolas.blog/making-openai-whisper-faste)
• A Comprehensive Multilingual Dataset for Advancing Code Understanding and Generation (https://github.com/FSoft-AI4Code/TheVault)
• AI And Gaming In Cars! Nvidia And Jaguar Parternship (https://rizznews.substack.com/p/ai-and-gaming-in-cars-nvidia-and)
• Scaling Data-Constrained Language Models (https://arxiv.org/abs/2305.16264)

Digital AV (Wii U):
Plug a pair of headphones or computer speakers into the Wii U gamepad.
If you are trying to connect to TV speakers or a receiveamplifier you may need to use an adapter.
This should eliminate any lag that would result from modern TVs spending time processing the video and forcibly delaying the audio.
Analog AV (Wii/Wii U):
Find the white and red cables coming out of your Wii's AV port, unplug them from your TV, then plug them directly into a pair of TV speakers or an amplifiereceiver.
If you are trying to use headphones you'll have to plug them into one of the above-mentioned intermediary devices and/or use an adapter.
This should eliminate any audio latency that would result from the Wii converting a digital signal to analog, the TV converting the analog signal back into digital, then converting the digital audio back into analog to reach your speakers/headphones. (Plus upscaling and processing and whatnot)
Audio Port Clarification
Sources:
The Wii U gamepad's audio output is a female 3.5mm jack.
The Wii's audio output is a pair of male RCA plugs. (red and white plugs)
Audio Devices:
Most TV speakers or amplifiers/receivers have female RCA jacks as audio inputs.
Most headphones have male 3.5mm plugs as audio inputs.
Most computer speakers have female 3.5mm jacks as audio inputs(but should come with a male to male 3.5mm cable anyway).
Your objective is to connect one of the sources to one of the audio devices with as little analog/digital conversions or processing between the two as possible. That is how you get good latency!
Why?
Rhythm Heaven has very precise timing windows for successful inputs.
The only way to reliably hit these windows is to stop watching the animations and start listening to the music.
So as a rhythm-deaf epic gamer you have to stop relying on visual reflexes and pre-emptive button presses and start trusting the beat.
But you can't do this if there still is a delay between button presses and audible action.
So eliminating latency is really, really important to maintaining trust between the player and the game!
Also it just feels better. Whaddaya gonna do.
Disclaimer
If you're using digital AV (HDMI) from the Wii U on a high-end TV with low latency and/or a game mode, you already have a much better chance at getting really good latency.
Alternatively lagless upscalers such as the RetroTINK line of products can help with the Wii's analog AV out.
If you don't have these things however, then the above methods should be the cheapest and easiest ways to achieve a handheld-like experience.
(It may still be worth turning on game mode if your TV has it, if only for lower video latency)
That or you could ditch the HDTV and connect to either a CRT (Wii) or a computer monitor (Wii U) ¯_(ツ)_/¯

"Although the prevailing view has been that hallucinogens work by activating the brain, rather than by inhibiting it as Huxley proposed, the results of a recent imaging study are challenging these conventional explanations." Quote from this study
This is no longer news, but it's a long way from being broadly recognized due to scientific reluctance. Studies have shown since 2015 that psychedelics/entheogens reduces brain activity. Earlier it was believed that they lit up the brain like a christmas tree, which is the knee jerk reaction to effects so monumental, rich and life changing.
Now it turns out it's almost the complete opposite. Philosopher and computer scientist Bernardo Kastrup, who has done extensive experiments on himself with high dose psilocybin, speaks on the correlation between "brain shut-down effects" as seen with e.g. asphyxia/strangulation, G-force induced loss of consciousness (G-LOC) in pilots, death/near death experiences AND psychedelics, and the complexity of experiences that follows from it. Kastrup points out that this makes psychedelics the best "death simulator" we have access to (I highly recommend the video linked).
In short: when our brains shut down, the experiences gets infinitely richer, as if the brain itself acts like a reduction valve between us and the absolute reality out there; when the brain gets out of the way, reality as it really is, flows in.
Now a new study shows the same. What was earlier interpreted as increased brain activity, now shows that what really increases is "noise", not coherent activity, ref the article quoted in the beginning here.
I tought this might be of interest to the community.

We are Azure Infinitum
Visit us at: (https://www.azureinfinitum.com/)
You may have seen us in the Aether data center's party finder during our weekly events, or may have seen our recruitment shouts around the realm in-game in Midgardsormr, but there just isn't enough space in those places to really explain everything wonderful about what our Free Company and community is.
Azure Infinitum is an LGBTQ+ friendly community, and welcomes players of all experience level, play style, and availability. We're a warm home with a balance of online players, weekly optional activities, and flexible ranks from our membership, to our support & leadership categories. We have a 24/7 Support Team, a Councilship that governs each tier, seasonal events of our own, and many resources between the games we support and online services.
Who We Are
We are an established 9-year old community who's home is in Midgardsormr Server of Final Fantasy XIV. We are a structured, well-rounded, welcoming, friendly, and organized community that hosts daily events (check out our calendar: https://azureinfinitum.com/events/ ) that provide opportunity for members to excel. We work to provide an arena and opportunities to establish strong bonds and camaraderie between our members. As a community we are driven, we carry each other forward, and we are proud.
Our Name & Philosophy
Learn more about our global community here: (https://www.azureinfinitum.com/aboutus/)
Learn more about our FFXIV Free Company here: (https://www.azureinfinitum.com/ourffxivfc/)
Azure Infinitum means "Azure/Blue Infinity or Infinite Blue/Azure" and there is some mythos behind the name that stems from our guild-wide philosophy of kindness, freedom, vigilance, diversity and activity. We promote positive fellowship among members in an organized guild, with our sights open to our unending endless skies, full of possibility and success together.
Our motto is "As Free As The Azure Sky!" which stuck well when our FC was restructured from an old guild in 2014 as Azure was founded, and it was first shouted as we looked out at a clear blue sky above. has continued to be our electric victory as we continue to snowball in success and activity, our members soaring high through the Azure Sky, flying together!
Ranks
Click here to learn more about our community ranks: (https://www.azureinfinitum.com/ranks/)
Our community has an organized ranking structure beginning with Members who comprise the majority of the roster. Scouts are our support team of Members who've stepped up to more officially support the FC, some work on obtaining a future leadership rank. Lieutenants and Officers comprise the proud Azure Council, a diverse group of players of different specialties and services to the FC, making up lower and higher tier leadership, seeing over the Scouts and the FC weekly events, aside from being admins. The FC Infinitum Master oversees all and leads the Azure Council and the company forward while always keeping the heart and vision of the community alive and in sight. Currently we are re-assessing ranks in the free company, giving more support permissions and duties to our Scouts, while the current council operates as a small team of Lieutenants lead by the FC Master.
Everyone Welcome and Who Fits Best
We have an open door policy. Whether you're casual, a returning player, a veteran, or a newbie, we have a vast array of players in our member roster. Our weekly schedule is organized and provides an array of activity for players of most levels, however we like to ask players who're pretty new or under the level cap, to be extra vocal about their needs while they're still unable to attend some daily events or higher level content that most of our weekly lineup focuses on. We want everyone to have as much fun as possible and have the most success. We find that most players enjoy Azure Infinitum, many have stated that they subscribed to FFXIV much longer than they ever would have imagined after they have been around in our community, as they've gotten involved and experienced all that we offer.
Our FC keeps a daily schedule (see here: https://www.azureinfinitum.com/events/) of events that are hosted by permitted Scouts and Council ranks, these range from 8-man and 24-man raids and map parties, to WT journal groups and trial clear parties or farms, and more- and attending anything isn't mandatory at all here. We're happy to have you, and its up to our members how much they'd like to get involved. Attendance is optional! There's never any stress to attend FC functions.
Savage Raiding Statement
We find that some hardcore raiders looking for free companies just to join their statics who don't already have one, might not fit well if savage raiding is their only or greatest focus, because traditionally Azure does not have a Savage Static, but focuses more on allowing members to organize their own groups and also provides resources to do so. Despite not supporting an official static for the FC, we hope that hardcore raiders enjoy the wealth of our community's wealth of harmony and overall fun, and that everyone may take initiative to seek out or build a raiding static within our community if they are interested, as opposed to missing out on experiencing Azure. Depending on the content season, we may have an Unofficial static lead by a leader, and routinely offer limited time Savage-learning events that may run for a number of months.
Rules and No Drama Policy
Please take a moment to look over our Rules Page at (https://www.azureinfinitum.com/rules/), we find that rude individuals and people who create drama are the outsiders here that don't fit well. We know its a big page, so at least visit the General Rules section before joining.
Recruitment Care & Activity
People of Azure Infinitum are often if not always good natured players who found their way to our community looking for a place with structure, friendliness, organization, and great activity, or they've been scouted during recruitment drives and have been well screened. Its a place where one can be social and attend everything, or relax in the background and enjoy the services and facilities of being in an active, organized, and friendly FC. We actively recruit periodically to assist with upkeep of community activity levels, and to meet new comrades. A community that closes recruitment can be doomed to stagnation. Its normal for a community to have an inner core of die hards who log in daily regardless of content releases, and also have an outer core of individuals that range from those with less availability to those who check in during Patches. This is why we take extra care in keeping the fresh blood flowing into Azure, cautious recruitment, and support our active model by always staying welcoming and sometimes running recruitment campaigns and other services. Like this ad!
Handling Online Drama
Because we keep a no-drama policy and have a strong communication network, it is leadership's ultimate priority to handle any issues that may come up as soon as possible, and most people appreciate our problem solving which has inspired many other communities. Between our Support & Leadership ranks, we use a number of report and resource channels to handle situations, and perform problem solving protocols & tactics to fairly address issues as possible. Drama is inevitable at some point for any online community, so its important to have a large and strong list of moderators (currently around 60!) and a council of leaders (15+) to quickly handle any problems. Luckily, we don't have a lot of drama, but we're always very well equipped and very prepared. Our community has been commended by game staff in the past for our methods, and we have worked with the FFXIV Special Task Force to ensure as much safety to our community as achievable. It should be stressed that it is up to our membership to report to GM's in-game, and to Azure Leadership should any issues or concerns come up. Its also highly recommended that our members appropriately document evidence that can be used to help us assess situations and make proper decisions. Documenation such as screenshots of harassment is a great example! Our members online safety is greatly important to us and is a number one concern of our leadership team. Our Rules Page at: (https://www.azureinfinitum.com/rules/) describes a bit more in Chapter 3, including other entries on avoiding/ignoring trolls, playing while intoxicated, depression, and more.
Our Philosophy
We believe in our community and its people, how far we can go, how much we can do for each other, being an experienced community who's core values are positive fellowship, formation of bonds, and indomitable unity.
Azure Infinitum tightly grasps success and masters a casual and lucrative weekly play schedule while inspiring motivation and providing avenues for further success, friendships, and camaraderie among all who freely fly together among our Azure skies.
Founding on the principles of intricately forging a generally drama-free experience with keen leadership and a zealous and mighty membership, Azure has striven to guide and support many hundreds of players through every era of Final Fantasy XIV.
With an illustrious history, company lore, impressive statistics, and a model that is adaptable and blessed with innovative ability, Azure Infinitum claims a dominant presence of excellence and player growth that is possible in our community and extended services.
Estate Organization
We have the entire set-up at our estate, from gardens for members and Krakka Root production (free for members' chocobos), to our stables, nicely uniform clean lawn with hangout spots that are popular, with crafting stations, all available NPCs for simple mats and repairs, cut-scene viewer, toybox, triple-triad board, a fully operational and geared fleet of airships and subs, and our Azure Infinitum Assembly Chamber on the top floor for our meetings where announcements are made at our Grand Assemblies. Check it out if you like at Mist Ward 7 Plot 1.
We also have an organized form of gathering for weekly events in the yard, places to relax, food that is always available on tables at our Cellar, and hold a lot of special events and social games at our Hall. We're also conveniently located next to a Market Board and a Retainer Bell outside of our estate.
Communication and Extended Azure Services
We have multiple services of which none are mandatory, but we provide being (azureinfinitum.com) where our Forums, Event Calendar, News, Company Meeting Summaries, Seasonal Merch Giveaways, Contests, Rules Page, and more take place and can be found. We also have a popular and active Discord Server.
We also have a Facebook Group, Twitter, Tumblr, Instagram, Steam Group, (Look us up! Or visit: (https://www.azureinfinitum.com/socialmedia/) and Linkshells like our Infinitum Alliance LS for contact and aid from our allies if needed, our Azure Hunters LS for Hunters, and our Azure Industry LS which connects our members to our inner crafting/gathering community for newbies to pros.
Also worthy of mention is our big Company Meetings in-game, known as Azure Infinitum Grand Assemblies. Even though we have several avenues that keep people connected, our live assemblies gather the FC in unity where announcements are made first, and all proposals, ideas, and more, can be decided together live with the Azure Council present.
This network ensures a lot of information and communication gets around and has been exceedingly useful to us.
More On Events
One part of our reputation that often precedes us is our event crafting and hosting.
First, let me make sure its clear that attendance is never mandatory, but those who can make use, when possible, of what we provide each day, benefit from our events each week.
Since our beginning, traditions like our Thursday Treasure Thursdays events have run each week. Our weekly line-up presently begins on Tuesdays post-weekly reset, and consists of Raid Tuesdays, Wondrous Wednesdays (WT Journal Parties, often doubles as Trial Clears and Pony Drops), Treasure Thursdays (Endwalker's timeworn maps with groups of 8 doing up to 3 rounds of maps allowing for up to 24 maps ran), 24-Man Tuesdays (full pre-formed Azure 24-member alliances are made and raids are cleared, will be returning upon the release of EW's 24-man), Super Azure Slayer Sunday (our weekly meetup to do all sorts of PVP content be it Rival Wings or Frontline), and Monstrous Mondays (helps clear the current and previous patch extreme trials).
Special, Seasonal, and Quarterly Events
More info here: (https://www.azureinfinitum.com/azureday/)See the latest event news & more at: (https://www.azureinfinitum.com/news/)
We also have what we call Special and Quarterly Events. These types of events are Weekend-Long-Events that usually consist of a theme or celebratory social events we craft. During these events we hold big Riddle Races, Costume/Glamour shows and contests, 3-Story Mansion Maze Races, Speedrun Dungeon Races, Hide and Seek games, Custom Quest Events, Discord events like Cards Against Humanity nights, Comedy events, PVP Tournament Circuits, and more.
Our Special and Quarterly events are Azure Day Weekend (Takes place 3 times a year across a weekend, celebrates the FC), Azure Summer Festival (3-days at the end of August in partnership with Child's Play, raises money for children in long-term care, anniversary of historic FC event called the Lunar Rebellion), Anniversary Azure Day (a big weekend event in November that celebrates our Founding), Azure Day Saint's Wake (celebrates Halloween/All Saint's Wake), Azure Starlight Day (celebrating Starlight Day/Christmas/December Holiday Season), Azure Grand Melee and Duel Tournaments (PVP Circuit series crowning our PVP Champions) and more.
Azure Day Weekends
If you've been around our server you may have heard of our Azure Day Weekends. Our Azure Days take place quarterly as mentioned just above, with four evolved editions called Azure Summer Festival, Azure Day Saint's Wake, Azure Starlight Day, and Anniversary Azure Day. With Azure Day Weekends and related events traditionally occuring quarterly our members are always excited to see the next big weekend of crazy and fun social games, and our showering of the free company in gil and prizes galore. We go all out when we celebrate the free company, and Azure Days are another way we find for leadership to give back to the community. 2023 and beyond is now host to additional seasonal Azure Day events!
We're always giving our members a chance to have fun, win big, and make some great memories in the in-game family we've become. Something fun is always on the horizon in Azure.
Community
I almost can't stress enough how friendly our community is. We have a vast variety of members from hardcore gatherers and crafters, social butterflies, chill veterans, experienced raiders, level grinders, support teams, PVP aficionados, mechanic specialists, and mentors. We're also very friendly to all casual players as well and we keep an open door so long as recruits are always aware that we have a no-drama tolerance here.
​Evolution into a Gaming Clan & Network
Plans are in the works and foundations are being laid that is slowly turning our community into a larger gaming network, with our first established Azure Wing with regular occurring activity being founded in Monster Hunter World, this has led to a successful Destiny 2 clan and more. Becoming a member of our Discord and/or Free Company now means access to things like our huge discord, Azure Wing membership in other games, and being able to join in on any of our other activities in the general community. Azure Network as its being called at the moment, is growing with an all-new website and community features for playing together across Final Fantasy XIV and to Azure Skies beyond!
Activity
We rank high as one of the top FC's in Worldwide Activity on lodestone, and have for a long time. Most of our players are divided between the US East and West Coasts, members in East and West Canada, and a few outside the US or in EU or Aus zones. Because we do have an activity policy (mentioned below) we keep a standard flow of people, and have crowds in the early morning, late morning, early afternoon, afternoon, evening, and late night crowds.
Elitism isn't our style. Our community boasts a broad range of characters, great personalities, the proud, and also some silly goofs. But elitism isn't welcome, no matter how successful we are or how large we grow. We're always welcoming towards fresh faces interested in joining our guild, and the in-game activity ranges between 30-60+ online at once during prime time hours, sometimes around 70+ on patch days, and usually always with half the roster logging in throughout a 24 hour period, and around 15-30+ during the night.
Activity Policy
We ask that our members do not go missing without logging in for more than 60 days straight. If we hear word from someone or have some kind of decent excuse, we place our members on our On Vacation rank, which lasts presently until 90 days have passed. Exceptions are made for military deployments, hospital stays, financial issues, disability/health related issues, moving, or other reasons that might fall on a case-by-case basis.
All members not heard from in 60 days (roughly 2 months) or currently 90 days (roughly 3 months) are discharged. We allow 3 joins to Azure Infinitum in total, but exceptions can be made due to reasons listed above. If removed for inactivity, or you've left our FC for another reason and haven't already joined 3 times, you're always welcome back, but please remember, we are not a revolving door.
Keeping our roster full of members who have been online and presently play the game actively ensures an active environment for our players who play often. It also keeps our credits and clerical processes balanced across our network, and allows space for new faces to join our big happy in-game family of comrades.
How to Join
Quick Instructions here for joinin us in FFXIV & more: (https://www.azureinfinitum.com/howtojoinazure/)
If you are interested in joining our Azure Infinitum free company, please register an application at our site and/or FC in-game. You can also seek any of our Scouts, Lieutenants, Officers, or the Master of Azure Infinitum in-game and ask for an invite. You can find their names on the roster page at our website.
If you read everything on this page, you are awesome, and you should let anyone you talk to who recruits you know that you read everything on this page which will greatly expedite your invitation to join.
If you have any questions whatsoever feel free to send a /tell in-game to me or any of our Scouts or Lieutenants listed on our official roster here: https://na.finalfantasyxiv.com/lodestone/freecompany/9232519973597911137/membe
You can also message us at our FB Page: https://www.facebook.com/AzureInfinitum
Discord here: https://discord.gg/azureinfinitum
Twitter: https://twitter.com/azureinfinitum
Insta: https://www.instagram.com/azure_infinitum/
Main Site: https://www.azureinfinitum.com/

First time building, I used to have a Nintendo 64 (technically my sister's, even) and it felt like Christmas when I bought a second-hand, joycon-drifting Switch a few years ago. Now I've been working a far better job and can afford a gaming PC. I want to play all the fancy AAA titles!

• Budget: $2000 (before peripherals; flexible to an extent, if would be a good investment)
• Country: US
• Purpose: programming, gaming, digital art (with a drawing tablet I already own)
• Peripherals: definitely a new monitor
• OS: Linux

Questions:

1. Could I go wrong with PCPartPicker's Magnificent AMD build, or are there any obvious changes to be made?
2. AMD or Intel version -- will a pleb like me even notice a difference?
3. What is the minimum requirement for a monitor that doesn't waste this build? I currently have a thrift store monitor that is using a VGA adapter since it doesn't even have HDMI...
4. I hear one of the advantages of PC gaming is that I can upgrade things down the road. How much does that hold? Does that mean it would be wasteful to go for, say, the Glorious AMD build? Or is it still worth the investment?
5. Extra-noob question: PCPartPicker has this following note. Does this mean I need to plug each cord into a completely different outlet, not even "twin" outlets? Completely different walls? Different neighborhoods?

The video card PCIe 16-pin power connector adapter is being supplied by three 6+2-pin power connectors. Please ensure that the three 6+2-pin power connectors are not daisy-chained and do not share the same power cable.

TIA, you guys are heroes.
Edit: budget

I’ve recently started a search for some new headphones for my PS5 and wanted to share my results as it has been tough to find a set that is comfortable and doesn’t cause pain.
TL:DR – Start with the Sony InZone H7 (or even the H3 or H9).
For some background, I have a child under 3 and recently became able to play a bit longer each day. I am averaging around 1 hour a day using launch Pulse3Ds. Maybe once every week or two, I will have a longer session of up to 3 or 4 hours. Prior to this, I was at about half that time. As my playtime has increased, I have found myself getting headaches and ear pain. Specifically, pain in front of each ear near my temples and my left ear gets raw from rubbing the inside of the headphones. It seems that my shorter sessions were not an issue, but these longer sessions have added up to me being unable to wear headphones for days at a time while I recover.
I also work from home and wear a HyperX Cloud Stinger headset during meetings. This equates to around 4 or 5 hours a day of additional headphone time and I have not had this pair hurt or cause headaches.
Lastly, my rough head measurements are 23 inches around, 6 inches wide and my left ear (the one that rubs) sticks out around 2/3 of an inch.
Below are my thoughts on the headsets I’ve used in the order I tried them. I’ll try and cover what helped me land on a final set as it will hopefully help others with fit/pain issues. I am not covering sound quality much and will link to RTings for that. Given my head rejects most headphones, my focus is on comfort with sound quality and features being of much lower concern. My goal is to find the best headset I can that does not hurt me and will work wirelessly on my PS5 and possibly my Steam Deck (stretch goal).
​
Sony Pulse 3D
--Recommendation – I bought these at launch and would only buy them now if you are not sensitive to clamping pressure, have small-ish ears and do not want to buy anything of higher cost on this list. I sold my pair as these are what started this whole journey.
--https://www.rtings.com/headphones/reviews/sony/pulse-3d-wireless
--Spent - $100 + $30 for third party ear pads.
--Type – Wireless Dongle
--My Usage – Gaming, 1-2 hours a day with bursts of up to 4 hours.
--Weight - .65 pounds
--Clamping pressure – .9 pounds
--Cup Friction – Some rubbing pain after long sessions.
--Testing Duration – 2 Years
--Thoughts – I powered through these for ~two years. This is the pair that caused me a lot of pain now that I have more gaming time. I thought the sound quality was fine at the price point, but the clamping pressure felt higher than .9 as the original and third-party ear cups were not soft enough. They also rubbed my ears and never loosened up. The top headband would also hurt my head if I moved around a lot during a session (getting food, water, etc). The original ear pads broke down and I replaced them about 4 months ago. These helped make them more comfortable, but the clamping pressure overpowered them. Lastly, I had to run a USB extension cable away from the console to plug the dongle in to as they would cut out randomly from some sort of interference otherwise. I do have a lot of electronics near the PS5, but most are powered off when I play and the only active WiFi thing is a Harmony Hub so I’m not sure what is causing the issue. The extension did solve the issue about 99.9% of the time.
​
HyperX Cloud Stinger
--Recommendation – I’ve owned these for a long time and would buy them if you have basic wired needs. I’m keeping my pair for Zoom use only.
--https://www.rtings.com/headphones/reviews/hyperx/cloud-stinger
--Spent - $30
--Type - Wired
--My Usage – Zoom, 4-5 hours each workday. Experimented with them as an option for long term gaming.
--Weight - .6 pounds
--Clamping pressure – 1 pound (these are old, so this is probably less now)
--Cup Friction – No rubbing pain.
--Testing Duration – 1 Day
--Thoughts – I bought these on a whim pre-child when I started playing PS4 games that needed a microphone. These worked fine for those rare cases. However, I would not recommend them for regular gaming use as there are many better wired options now. However, they are totally sufficient for zoom meetings as I don’t care about sound quality or the mic being excellent. The volume control on them is also handy for this use case as is the flip up mic. While it would be nice for them to be wireless, it’s not worth the money to replace them just for Zoom. They have not caused me any pain during long stints, and they have held up extremely well over the past 3 years that I have used them heavily for Zoom.
​
Bose QuietComfort 35 II
--Recommendation – I’ve owned these for years and I love them. Everyone with comfort issues should own a pair for anything other than gaming. I’m keeping them until they break and may stockpile a few depending on what Bose does with the QC line. Will use them as a backup set for gaming.
--https://www.rtings.com/headphones/reviews/bose/quietcomfort-35-ii-qc35-ii-wireless-2018
--Spent - $350
--Type – Wireless Bluetooth
--My Usage – Mainly travel and focused listening. Stints of up to 10 hours at a time on planes. Have been using them as a backup set for gaming on the PS5 while testing everything on this list.
--Weight - .54 pounds
--Clamping pressure – .69 pounds
--Cup Friction – No rubbing pain.
--Testing Duration – 3 Weeks
--Thoughts – These are the first set of quality headphones I ever purchased. I used them mainly for travel and focused listening and did not realize how spoiled I was. These are extremely comfortable, and I think are part of the reason that I have such high needs for comfort in headphones. The only negative is the slight “underwater” pressure feeling you get when the ANC is on. However, they do work in a pinch for gaming and are extremely comfortable. If Bose ever makes a set for gaming that works over 2.4, they will have my money immediately. They are Bluetooth and thus need an adapter or something to hook into your system. I pipe the audio through a Taotronics Bluetooth adapter hooked into the headphone jack on my TV and it works ok. I’ve owned these since 2018.
​
Aftershokz Trekz Air (Now called Shokz OpenRun Pro I think)
--Recommendation – I’ve owned these for many years, and you should try a set of bone conducting headphones if you have not. I will always own a pair of this type of headset mainly for their versatility in providing audio when you don’t want to fully disconnect. I’m keeping these for other uses and maybe for the steam deck on rare occasions but they are not suited for regular gaming.
--https://www.rtings.com/headphones/reviews/aftershokz/trekz-air-bone-conduction
--Spent - $160
--Type – Wireless Bluetooth
--My Usage – Cycling, walking the dogs, listening to things while watching the kid. Experimented with use on the Steam Deck and as a final solution for PS5, and they are meh. So basically, I will use them for listening to things where I still need to hear the world.
--Weight - .06 pounds
--Clamping pressure – .32 pounds
--Cup Friction – N/A
--Testing Duration – 1 Day
--Thoughts – They will not blow you away with sound quality, but I do love them for cases where I want to listen to something but need awareness of the world. They are weird feeling if you are not used to them, but I find I use these the most in my daily life outside of my Stinger headset for Zoom meetings. They are great for walking the dog, cycling, or listening to a podcast while Paw Patrol is on. Seriously, try a pair if you never have. Not really an option for a gaming headset though.
​
Steelseries Arctis Nova 7p
--Recommendation – Would buy if you are not sensitive to clamping pressure. This seems to be the best set for the price of all that I tested, and I would have kept them if I could have solved the pain issue. Ended up returning them.
--https://www.rtings.com/headphones/reviews/steelseries/arctis-nova-7-wireless-7-7p-7x
--Spent - $140
--Type - Wireless
--Usage – Gaming, 1-2 hours a day with bursts of up to 4 hours.
--Weight - .72 pounds
--Clamping pressure – 1 pound
--Cup Friction – Rubbing pain after long sessions.
--Testing Duration – 2 Weeks
--Thoughts – I was hoping these were the holy grail that everyone said. The sound was excellent, and the unit was well built. The headband was comfortable however, my ears still rubbed a tad but more importantly, they caused a ton of pain on each temple after only 1 hour. This seems to be due to the clamping pressure and the design of the pads (and possibly my head shape). My wife experienced the same issue though. I suppose I could have put them on a box to stretch them out and reduce the clamping pressure, but I experimented with manually reducing the pressure while they were on, and they still hurt my temples. It seems the pad/clamping combo does not work for me, and I really don’t want to gamble on the box method and buying third party pads as that seems like a lot to ask to make them work when there are other options.
​
Astro A50 2019
--Recommendation – Skip these. I was extremely unimpressed compared to the cheaper sets on this list. Also, mine came with the headband busted which seems common and crazy as these launched in 2019 and this should be solved by now. I returned them.
--https://www.rtings.com/headphones/reviews/astro/a50-gen-4-wireless-2019
--Spent - $300
--Type – Wireless Dongle/Base
--Usage – Gaming, 1-2 hours a day with bursts of up to 4 hours.
--Weight - .8 pounds
--Clamping pressure – 1.3 pounds
--Cup Friction – Rubbing pain after short sessions.
--Testing Duration – 2 Days
--Thoughts – Man I wanted to love these. They seemed full of features and of a high-ish quality. However, the headband constantly popped out, the cups kept sliding up and down when I took them off and on, my ears rubbed quite a bit and the sound was not particularly better than the Nova 7ps. Overall, I was thoroughly unimpressed by their price point and comfort. Lastly, the pads were a bit rough and had a weird smell to them that would probably go away but was noticeable from 2 feet away and was nauseating. Obviously, these were a huge letdown.
​
Logitech Pro X Wireless
--Recommendation – Probably skip these as they have a white noise hiss and clamping pressure issues. It’s sad as they sounded good, and I really liked the build. I returned these.
--https://www.rtings.com/headphones/reviews/logitech/g-pro-x-wireless-lightspeed-gaming-headset
--Spent - $180
--Type – Wireless Dongle
--Usage – Gaming, 1-2 hours a day with bursts of up to 4 hours.
--Weight – .83 pounds
--Clamping pressure – 1.1 pounds
--Cup Friction – The white noise prevented a long session, but no rubbing pain after the short session.
--Testing Duration – 1 Day
--Thoughts – The build of these really impressed me when I took them out of the box. They felt sturdy and solid when moving it around. However, they hiss when turned on, which is crazy as these launched in like 2019. Apparently not everyone can hear it, but I can and it’s a common complaint for people who can still hear in that range. I tried updating the firmware sliding the volume around on them, the PS5, etc., and they just hiss. It’s like a light white noise that you can barely hear when it’s quiet. They also put a lot of pressure under my cheek bone after around 30 minutes. I’m not sure if that would be solved with some tweaking or using the second set of pads they came with as the headache inducing hiss was enough to send these back.
​
Sony InZone H7
--Recommendation – These were my final pick after a couple of weeks of testing. The sound was a little less full than I would like, but it’s not noticeable unless directly compared to other headsets. I also felt the surround sound was better than most and these are really light and comfortable for a long time. I’d start here if you have similar issues to me.
--https://www.rtings.com/headphones/reviews/sony/inzone-h7-wireless
--Spent - $200
--Type – Wireless Dongle
--Usage – Gaming, 1-2 hours a day with bursts of up to 4 hours.
--Weight – .71 pounds
--Clamping pressure – .8 pounds
--Cup Friction – No rubbing pain.
--Testing Duration – 3 Weeks
--Thoughts – I really did not want to like these at first as they look like shooting headphones and feel cheap. Also, you cannot adjust the EQ on the PS5. However, these are extremely light and comfortable, and the spatial audio is good. I’m not sure that they are worth $200 compared to some of the others on the list, but these were the only pair that worked well over long sessions for me. The Barracuda Xs were close, but those were a little uncomfortable at first but that faded away in long sessions. The thing that sold these were the slight edge in comfort and the dual audio with Bluetooth.
​
Astro A30
--Recommendation – These a worth a try if you do not mind a rubbery material on the headband and earpads and have a head/ears in the medium/small range. I personally found the material bothersome, and the headband hurt the top of my head. Returned them.
--https://www.rtings.com/headphones/reviews/astro/a30-wireless
--Spent - $230
--Type – Wireless Dongle
--Usage – Gaming, 1-2 hours a day with bursts of up to 4 hours.
--Weight – .76 pounds
--Clamping pressure – .9 pounds
--Cup Friction – No rubbing pain.
--Testing Duration – 3 Days
--Thoughts – At first, the material on the pads seemed neat. It felt nice in my hands but the second I put them on, I hated it. The ear cup openings were a smidge too small for me but did not hurt when wearing them. The sound profile was decent, but the headband ended up hurting me after a long session. If the cups were a tad bigger and the material on them was different, I think they would have worked and not caused me head pain.
​
Razer Barracuda X 2022
--Recommendation – These were my #2 choice. I really did like these to solve my comfort issues, but there was some random interference and very slight comfort issues during the first 10 minutes of wear that made me send them back. If it weren’t for that, I may have kept them as they are the cheapest set with a low clamping pressure.
--https://www.rtings.com/headphones/reviews/razebarracuda-x-wireless-2021
--Spent - $100
--Type – Wireless Dongle
--Usage – Gaming, 1-2 hours a day with bursts of up to 4 hours.
--Weight – .59 pounds
--Clamping pressure – .8 pounds
--Cup Friction – No rubbing pain.
--Testing Duration – 3 Weeks
--Thoughts – This is a tough one. They were comfortable for long wear, but they caused interference with my controller and would cut out rarely even with the dongle on a long extension cord away from my entertainment center. I found these to sound slightly better than my #1 pick (H7s), but the Bluetooth was not active while playing and they could not have the EQ adjusted. It was by a slim margin that these went back.
​
Razer Kaira Pro PlayStation Edition
--Recommendation – They have a good all-around feature set, and I would try them only if you have a medium/small head and ears and are interested in the haptics as I don’t think the clamping would be an issue on a smaller head or maybe on someone with a different head shape. I sent these back but wished I didn’t have to.
--https://www.rtings.com/headphones/reviews/razekaira-pro-wireless-for-xbox (They didn’t have the PS5 specific review)
--Spent - $200
--Type – Wireless Dongle
--Usage – Gaming, 1-2 hours a day with bursts of up to 4 hours.
--Weight – .73 pounds
--Clamping pressure – 1 pound
--Cup Friction – Rubbing pain after short sessions.
--Testing Duration – 2 Days
--Thoughts – I really liked the idea of these with the haptic feedback, but it ended up just feeling like extra bass shake. I suspect I would have disliked it of long sessions and turned it off immediately. They put too much pressure on the front of my ears and caused pain and made them feel clogged. They also made my ears hot and both ears scrapped a bit. However, the feature set, like being able to swap sound profiles with a button, was great as was the sound.
​
HyperX Cloud Alpha
--Recommendation – Hello white noise my old friend. While not as bad as the Logitech Pro X, it was still enough to make these a no if you can hear it. If you cannot hear it, and are sensitive to clamping, these are a great option. Since HyperX has no fix for the white noise, I returned them.
--https://www.rtings.com/headphones/reviews/hyperx/cloud-alpha
--Spent - $200
--Type – Wireless Dongle
--Usage – Gaming, 1-2 hours a day with bursts of up to 4 hours.
--Weight – .7 pounds
--Clamping pressure – .9 pounds
--Cup Friction – The white noise prevented a long session, but no rubbing pain after the short session.
--Testing Duration – 1 Day
--Thoughts – I thought I would hate these as they looked really ‘gamer’, but the build quality was pretty good. I liked the sound profile, and they were comfortable. I would say that these would have been a front runner if not my final pick were it not for the white noise. It was just enough that I knew it would cause a headache, which is unfortunate as the cups and headband did not cause any pain. So, if you cannot hear the white noise and are sensitive to clamping, consider these.
​
Razer Kraken v3 Pro
--Recommendation – Basically the same as the Kaira. I was hoping that these would feel better as I like the Kiara, but no luck.
--https://www.rtings.com/headphones/reviews/razekraken-v3-pro-wireless
--Spent - $180
--Type – Wireless Dongle
--Usage – Gaming, 1-2 hours a day with bursts of up to 4 hours.
--Weight – .8 pounds
--Clamping pressure – 1 pound
--Cup Friction – No rubbing pain.
--Testing Duration – 2 Days
--Thoughts – I really liked the Kaira ones and was hoping these would feel different. Like the Kaira, they put too much pressure on the front of my ears and caused pain and made them feel clogged. They also made my ears hot, but it didn’t scrape like the Kairas.
​
Razer BlackShark V2 Pro
--Recommendation – I tried these as I liked all the other Razer models other than their comfort issues. These also caused a lot of ear pain after about 20 minutes, so I sent them back. They were one of my favorites if you ignore the pain part.
--https://www.rtings.com/headphones/reviews/razeblackshark-v2-pro-wireless
--Spent - $130
--Type – Wireless Dongle
--Usage – Gaming, 1-2 hours a day with bursts of up to 4 hours.
--Weight – .72 pounds
--Clamping pressure – 1 pound
--Cup Friction – Rubbing pain after short sessions.
--Testing Duration – 2 Days
--Thoughts – Again, the Razer headsets seem to have clicked with me other than the comfort issues. I ordered this one on a whim to see if it would be better than the others, but the wire cup mountings made them less adjustable, and I think are what caused the pain so quickly. I thought these were well rounded and was a bit sad that the pain hit so early.
​
Razer Barracuda Pro
--Recommendation – Since the lower end Barracuda X was a finalist for me, I threw a stab at these despite the higher clamping force. Sadly, the clamping force was an issue, and they made my ears hot. I returned them.
--https://www.rtings.com/headphones/reviews/razebarracuda-pro-wireless
--Spent - $250
--Type – Wireless Dongle
--Usage – Gaming, 1-2 hours a day with bursts of up to 4 hours.
--Weight – .75 pounds
--Clamping pressure – 1.1 pounds
--Cup Friction – Rubbing pain on both ears. This was the only set to have that on both.
--Testing Duration – 2 Days
--Thoughts – It’s strange that these are so different from the 2022 X lower range model. I understand they have different drivers and features, but you wouldn’t think they would feel like a totally different line. However, they do and given the shallow cups and that they cause clamping pain and made my ear hot after only 30 minutes, these were a big disappointment.

If I had to pick an embarrassing moment which will haunt me until I die—it has to be the time I tried out for The Sunbeam cheer squad last year. I was a freshman, and I wanted community. Friends.
I heard the cheer squad were just an extra-curricular group rather than an actual majoring level class, so I figured I’d give them a shot. It’s not like I could ignore them.
On my first day when I was moving into my dorm room, I must have walked into the same girl three times. I am in strict belief that it is not possible for a human being to be permanently happy.
And yet that was her. She wandered around like the sun shone right out of her ass, and it was both endearing and terrifying.
The girl resembled the sun herself, a halo of golden curls held in a scrunchie and a flaunting sundress, matching ribbons wrapped around her. The Sunbeam Squad were easy to spot because they were all wearing insanely bright yellow—waving around gold streamers, ribbons tangled in their hair. They all spoke in insanely high pitched voices like they inhaled helium for a living, but that must have been their shtick, right? It was kind of cute. I wasn’t expecting such a welcome in the shape of guy’s and girl’s looking like they had just stepped off of ABC Kids. The girl who handed me a flyer and yelled in my face about school spirit was practically hopping up and down, a bright grin splitting her lips apart.
I nodded and smiled politely, stuffing the flyer in my bag and heading into my room to finish moving my stuff in. When I looked out of my window a few hours later, the Sunbeam squad was still threaded through the crowd, each of them wrapped in glittering fairy lights illuminated in the late evening sunset glow. Sunbeam. Yeah, I got it, but it was still kinda overkill. They were starting to remind me of a cult.
That, however, didn’t stop me trying out. I’m fairly athletic, and they were exactly what I wanted. I’ve never had a group of people I could call friends.
Though it’s not like I could blame anyone but myself. I was a shut-in for most of high school. I either worked or preferred my own company in my room. One of my biggest regrets is pushing people away, friends I wanted to get even closer to. Because now they had built these lifelong friendships and relationships, and I was stuck at 18 years old with nobody but childhood friends I spoke to once a year when we sent mutual holiday greetings to each other. But college could change that.
At least, that’s what I hoped. I spoke to as many people as possible on my first day—and in my head I was making them. Slowly but surely I was actually making friends in my classes I wanted to hang out with.
Sunbeam were my attempt to go even further and join a club. Through word of mouth in my first few weeks of classes, I learned they were more of an extra-curricular group for fun.
They didn’t cheer competitively and had been formed in the mid-90’s by some kids who wanted to make a community out of positivity and school spirit. Sunbeam had a reputation for being Watson State student body’s beacons—and their team’s good luck charm. It was well known across campus that the squad was the reason behind the college’s fortune.
It had been like that since they formed 30 years ago, with members through the generations carrying out that pledge to spread as much pep as possible. While I say that they seemed nice judging from what I heard from others, they weren’t exactly the easiest clique to get into. Unless you were on the squad.
I saw them around campus between classes. They always moved as a group, the six of them with their arms wrapped around each other, brandishing the school colours. The guy’s in loose fitting varsity jackets, while the girl’s flaunted cheer skirts.
The way they acted was a little too close, like they were more than friends—and community and friendship had bled into something else. Like they had just walked out of an early 2000’s teen movie. Not that I was complaining. Their style was intriguing. They were like this untouchable group of god’s who had been placed on the highest pedestals. They ruled over campus, which made me want to get to know them even more. So, I tried out. Which was my first mistake of many in my freshman year.
It didn’t hit me that I was in way over my head until I was in the college gymnasium, standing in front of a four person panel like I was auditioning for a Hollywood movie. Sunbeam took their try-outs incredibly seriously. Which was weird considering they were known to be the complete opposite.
There were maybe fifty or so applicants, and we had to stand near the back wall and watch others try out one by one. Which was already setting off my anxiety. Weren’t they supposed to be closed try-outs? Initially, I was excited.
I had my routine in my head. What I had learned from watching the squad at my old school. High V, Low V, followed by a Touchdown, and then a backflip. I was confident. I mean, it ticked most cheer moves off, and even had a flip to complete the routine. My high school were a multi-sex quad, so I learned a lot from watching the guy’s moves during pep rallies.
I wasn’t really worried about the quality of the moves since they were known not to take everything too seriously. But watching the others try-out, impossible flips without crash mats and twisting their bodies in ways I didn’t know was possible, I quickly realised I was screwed. My competitors were acting like they were auditioning for an Olympic level team. My gut was dancing when I took centre stage.
The panel were made up of four members of the squad. Two boys and two girl’s, including the blonde who handed me the flyer on my first day. I was surprised when her eyes lit up with recognition.
"Oh, I know you!" She squeaked. Leaning forward, her smile seemed to brighten, illuminating her features. All four of them seemed to emanate a warm glow.
I felt myself relax slightly, the knot in my stomach loosening. Maybe their heightened positivity thing wasn’t a shtick, after all. The girl, as well as the other members of the team seemed genuinely happy to see me trying out. “What’s your name?” Her voice reverberated off of the walls, and I was suddenly aware of a dozen other students watching me.
“Alex.” I said, offering a shy wave. “Hey.”
Still grinning, she nudged a redhead next to her playfully. The guy was like no other I’d seen before. He was a god damn traffic light. He was easy to spot in a crowd and was usually one of the low-key members who kept his head down. All of those colours painting him, and yet somehow he wasn’t blinding people.
Though admittedly, he suited them; bright red hair clashing with the blue and gold of his football jersey, pasty skin and dark eyes drinking me in while the blonde girl pulled at his sleeve. “See, I told you annoying freshmen would work!”
In response, he chuckled, rolling his eyes. “Whatever you say, Evie.” The guy straightened up, leaning his chin on his fist, a curious spark in his eyes. “Alright.” Twisting around in his chair, he signalled for music. When it started, the beat slammed into me, rumbling under my feet. “Let’s see what you’ve got!”
I’m not going to describe my routine because I don’t have time to describe how fucking bad I was. In my head, I was doing okay. I was ready to finish with my back flip, but the music abruptly cut off and I found myself struggling to find my breath with my hands in the air, panting like an idiot. The blonde maintained her smile, but it was slightly strained. I could tell she was struggling to keep the façade of a Sunbeam member while also retaining critical thinking.
The redhead looked like he was in pain. He was first to speak, and I could tell by his sympathy smile I’d screwed up. The others who I hadn’t fully taken in until that moment, an asian American guy, and a girl with pigtails, were laughing like pre-schoolers. And they didn’t stop until the redhead shot them the warning eyes.
Weirdly enough, the crowd of onlookers didn’t join in. I expected the redhead to politely tell me I sucked, but instead he cocked his head, chewing on his pen. “You’re good.” He said. “You’re a good dancer, and I liked your moves…”
He trailed off. “But it’s positivity we’re looking for. And you didn’t smile once through your whole routine which made you look stiff. Like you weren’t even enjoying it.” He shrugged helplessly. “I like you, and I like your dancing. And I’m sure you could be better if you worked on it. There are countless dancing clubs here, so maybe you might be better fitted there.” After exchanging a look with the blonde, he sighed. “Unfortunately, you’re not the type of person we’re looking for.”
Evie nodded. “I agree. We pride ourselves on staying positive and smiling. I didn’t see that on you, Alex.”
“Same here.” Pigtails, still giggling, joined in. “I don’t think you’ve got enough school spirit.”
The other guy scoffed. He looked to be of Korean descent. Unlike the redhead, he was always at the centre of their group, always joking around and laughing. Just looking at him told me he was the leader. “Bullshit!” He slapped the table with one hand, running his hands through thick dark hair with the other. “I liked it. Fuck pep, amirite?” He threw his pen at the blonde, who retaliated in a squeak, lobbing hers at him. “Ignore these clowns. I think you’ve got what it takes. We just gotta work on you, y’know? All you’re missing is a cheesy grin.”
He pointed to himself, stretching his lips into the widest smile he could muster. “See? Like this.”
“Clowns?” Evie shook her head. “I didn’t see one smile. Sunbeam is all about smiling!”
“You make us sound like a cult.” The Korean-American caught my eye. “Which we’re not, by the way. These guys are just scared of change.”
“Okay, that’s too far.” Pigtails shot him a scowl. Are you seriously disrespecting the alumni who created us? Who birthed us?
“Well, yeah!” He threw his paper at her. “Sunbeam is a pep cult. We get high off of happiness. I thought we distinguished that.”
“Take that back!”
“Never! Why do you think I joined? To get high! Do you really think I joined for the cheering?”
They were joking around. I could tell by the smiles on their faces—a smile I knew I would never be able to mimic.
“Quiet.” The redhead shushed them. The guy had been sitting silently. Studying me. He leaned back, folding his arms.
“See, even now—even when I’m considering giving you a chance, there’s no hope in your eyes. Not even a glitter of excitement. You’re still not smiling and that’s what we want, Alex. We want people who will embody what Sunbeam is all about. Even if I give you a second chance to brighten up your routine your smile will be fake. And that’s not what we want. We want people who are willing to shed their humanity and become beacons.”
Beacons, huh?
And they were seriously saying they weren’t a cult?
The redhead stabbed at his sheet of paper with the end of his pen. “Can’t you just give us one smile? It won’t kill you.”
It was then when the others watching started to laugh—and I wanted to punch the asshole in the face.
“Dude, chill.” The Korean-American played with his pen, twirling it between two fingers. “He’s right, as much as I hate saying it. We do need smilers, unfortunately. But hey, you can try out next year! Just remember to smile, alright?” He threw something at me. A squashed candy bar.
Which made me look even more pathetic.
I found myself nodding, even when I knew it was all bullshit. Still though, what each member had told me hit me harder than it should have. They were just words, what could they do? It turned out, words were far more powerful than I realised—I just didn’t know it yet. I didn’t wait for the others to speak and made a quick getaway, my gut twisting and turning.
They were a cult. That is what I decided. These guys were a cult who needed members willing to throw away their souls. Probably for ritualistic sacrifice.
They needed weak people, I thought. Even when part of me knew they were right. I wasn't a smiler. Every photo I'm in, I'm either frowning or look constipated. Still though, I didn't dwell on the try-outs for too long. By the time a week had gone by, I had mostly forgotten about it and threw myself into my studies and college life.
Though something was wrong with me. It was as if the world had slowed down, had stopped making sense completely. Every day felt like a dream, and I myself felt like I was a ghost, like I was disassociating from my own body. Conversations with people felt fake. Like I was making them up.
I remember waking up day after day in a daze I couldn’t get myself out of. It was only several weeks later did the thick mind fog which had been blanketing my brain finally lift—only for me to hear the news that all six members of the Sunbeam squad had disappeared. I don’t know how I didn’t notice, how I didn’t see the police investigation, or hear rumours being spread around like wildfire.
According to the college, it wasn't technically considered a disappearance since the members were all over eighteen, no longer minors. However, an investigation was conducted, with a statement being released that they were due to be performing at Knoxville College, cheering on our football team. But they never turned up. And what made it worse, was their bus was found abandoned on the side of the road in the middle of nowhere. Sounds bad, right?
Well, that's what we all thought. Vigils were already being held, and bodies weren't even found yet. Every time I walked back to my dorm after classes, the night would be lit up in warm golden light, candles flickering in the breeze. I'm not sure how many days had gone by-- they all seemed to blur into one-- when our college made another statement. The members of the Sunbeam squad were alive and healthy and had been sent to a training academy for professionals.
When the student body responded with confusion and scepticism, the college reassured us they were coming back once they were finished training. And while my classmates were relieved, I found myself confused. Sunbeam didn't cheer competitively. Their whole thing was that all they wanted to do was spread cheer and pep, regardless of how good they were. I had seen them perform, and they were good, sure. They were better than average. But definitely not good enough to be trained into pro’s. Their moves were too clumsy, too half assed—which I was convinced they thought overwhelming amounts of positivity could fix. So it didn’t make sense that they had been sent to some training academy. I kept up my scepticism until I saw them for myself.
The college were right. Sunbeam returned a week later like nothing had happened.
I did see a change in them. I think that was a universal opinion though. Sunbeam were well known for their pep and cheer, their constant smiling faces which drove me crazy—and it’s not like that stopped. They still smiled. They still walked around campus laughing together, in their own little world. That was when people were watching. When they had an audience. I caught them when they didn’t have an audience. Without eyes on them, they detached from each other, their eyes darkening, expressions twisting, like each of them could smell something rotten in the air. I started noticing they were getting progressively clumsier at keeping up that Sunbeam façade they must have pledged when they joined the group. I figured it was just tiredness. They must have been through some pretty intense training.
Anyway, months went by. I started to feel less distant, and the fog which had been choking me faded, thankfully. I started my junior year moving into a shared house with my roommate, and the only talk I’d heard about Sunbeam was that one of their ex members was rumoured to be pregnant. As for the rest of the squad, they were still popular, still talked about—but their disappearance had definitely made people wary of them. I even heard someone say they were considered bad luck. I guess people thought they had sold themselves out for a chance to get into the big leagues. And it wouldn’t surprise me.
Forced positivity can get you a long way, sure—but recognition can get you further.
It was just a few weeks ago when I was invited to a game. Our first of the season, thanks to delays due to cuts in the sports department. I’m not much of a sports fan, though I needed a distraction from the copious amounts of assignments I’d let pile on my desk.
When I sat down with a chilli dog and Coke, I wasn’t expecting to get so invested in a game where I had no idea what was happening. It was loud and obnoxious and I was choking on the stink of fried food, but it was fun. It was fun until Sunbeam walked out onto the side-lines. I glimpsed them in a blur of blue and gold, and a dull pain crawled across the back of my head. “You okay?” My housemate’s voice was barely distinguishable in my ears, when I found myself transfixed by the way they moved in erratic jumps, quickly taking position. They had gotten better. Everything which was Sunbeam had been stripped away. Their smiles were forced. Wrong.
I remembered they used to push and shove each other, making the crowd laugh. Now though, they were in almost perfect sync in the way they moved, no longer shakily, sometimes stumbling into each other. Their routine was longer than it usually was—and when the Korean-American guy perfected a triple flip, the crowd went crazy. I expected him to smile when he landed, grinning into the audience to generate what Sunbeam was made for. But his expression stayed stoic. Robotic. They were stiff. Heads up, backs straight, staring ahead of them. I was told when I tried out that fake smiles weren’t allowed, and yet that was all I was seeing. I was seeing egotistical grins and curled lips, quick glances between each member.
I expected looks of reassurances, and in jokes only they found funny. Instead, it looked like a mutual agreement.
They were planning something. From the looks on their faces, it wasn’t a firework show.
Sunbeam used to generate happiness. Their smiles, even under a façade, had always been real.
These guys emanated power. The way they stood. The guy’s at the front, readying what I guessed was a lift, and the girl’s on top of them.
Their routine ended with the music reaching a climax, and the two main girl’s being lifted into the air while performing High V’s.
But they didn’t stop there.
When the crowd exploded with applause, one of the girl’s slowly raised her arms and shot into the crowd with finger guns.
She shot twice—and with every time she pulled that imaginary trigger, her painted lips stretched into a maniacal grin.Until her gaze was on me. And then behind me. I could see it in her glittering eyes I could no longer call human. I met Evie at the start of my freshman year, and then at the disastrous try-outs.
I knew her wide smile, and the glint of passion twisting her expression—a love for the group and the members she couldn’t put into words. Right then I wasn’t seeing Evie, a Sunbeam cheerleader. I was seeing something else entirely, a being scanning faces in the crowd for a victim.
Her expression seemed to melt, from a gleeful grin, to something twisted and putrid, someone who craved the exact opposite of what Sunbeam preached. I watched her lips. I watched the words pop into existence, drowned into nothing by the crowds cheering. But I saw them in perfect clarity. “Drop.” She said, before pulling the imaginary trigger again.
No sooner had the words left her mouth before someone screamed behind me. I twisted around to see a guy had collapsed. He was pronounced dead five minutes later by his sobbing girlfriend who had attempted CPR. When I twisted back to look out onto the field, the Sunbeam Squad were gone. It didn’t make sense that they were the ones to cause the guy’s death—but it couldn’t have been a coincidence, right? Evie had shot into the crowd at the exact same time the guy had dropped dead. Finger guns weren’t a weapon of course, but the timing was too coincidental. I already knew there was something wrong with Sunbeam. And this just strengthened my claims.
Obviously, when I tried to tell people this, I was called crazy. Delusional. I reported it to the student information building and just got a blank stare.
The woman wasn’t even attempting to hear my story. She just heard “murder” and “Sunbeam” and her lips curved into an amused smirk. “You know, you are quite fascinating,” leaning back against her chair, the woman frowned at me through wonky glasses. "First you unexpectedly quit, and then you accuse them of murder. Which I can tell you is false.”
She flipped through a notebook in front of her. “According to the autopsy report released a few days ago, the young man died of a brain haemorrhage, not the result of being pretend shot at by a cheerleader miming finger-guns.” The woman cleared her throat.
“Tell me, what exactly do you have against the Sunbeam squad?"
“What?”
“You quit the squad at the end of your freshman year,” she said, “And now you’re trying to accuse them of murder? Fascinating.”
Her words struck me, a shiver sliding down my spine. The office was cosy, and when I sunk into the rich leather of the couch in front of a roaring fire I recognised the book on her desk. It was a dog eared copy of Harry Potter. I’d seen it before. But that was impossible. I had never been in her office. “Quit?” I shook my head. “No, I don’t…” I trailed off, stumbling over my words. “I’ve never been part of Sunbeam.”
“Were you not?” She shook her head, a crease forming between her brows. “Ah, I must be getting you mixed up with someone else.”
I nodded. “Just… can you just listen to me? That Evie girl was fucking—”
She cut me off. “Language.”
“Sorry. Evie. She was… I don’t know what she was doing... she was doing like... like magic?”
“Are you sure you didn’t dream it?”
“Yes!"
“Mmm hmm.” The woman cleared her throat, dismissing my protests. “I’m not a doctor, but If you’re experiencing memory loss and confusion, I suggest you go to the hospital. As for your ludicrous claims, you should keep them to yourself. That poor young man died due to a brain haemorrhage. Terrible and tragic, yes. But it was accidental, and not the work of… I’m sorry, what were you claiming it to be?”
“Magic.” I said, again.
When she raised her brow, I couldn’t resist a groan. “I saw her! She shot into the crowd and mouthed something!”
“She… mouthed something?”
“Yes! But—"
Again, her words sliced into mine. “Okay, let’s say you were right,” she said. “If you are saying this girl shot into the crowd with her imaginary gun, wouldn’t it be a gun shot which would have killed him? You said it yourself—, it was some kind of witchy magic to kill him. So, where was the bullet wound?” When I tried to speak, she raised her arm to shut me up.
“Exactly. There was none. Because the man suffered a haemorrhagic stroke, and nothing could be done to save him. Your claims a group of young people carried this out as a murder is not only blatant defamation, but also disrespectful to the young man and his family. Now, please leave my office. I don’t want to talk about this anymore.” The woman nodded for me to stand up. “I think you have been watching too much TV. Might I suggest focusing on your studies?”
I left her office, slamming the door.
My housemate wasn’t helpful when I told him. He told me I was maybe a little too obsessed with Sunbeam. He headed to work, and I ended up in the lounge trying to focus on an episode of Criminal Minds. But I couldn’t stop thinking about Evie.
I saw what she said.
Drop.
But it wasn’t the force of her imaginary finger-guns ricocheting back. It was the word. Drop.
It had been alive on her lips like it was a sentient thing bleeding into existence. I managed to fall asleep, twisted like a pretzel in my housemate’s favourite chair, when three loud knocks on the door tore me from slumber. I was on my feet, blinking, disoriented. It was rare when we got a visitor. Stumbling over to the door, I had a moment of hesitation. I imagined Evie on the other side.
I imagined her raising her hand and shooting her pretend finger-guns directly into my head.
When I opened the door, I was surprised to see three little kids. The youngest must have been maybe nine years old. To my surprise, they were dressed in Halloween costumes. There was a little witch, a ghost, and a scarecrow all carrying pumpkin shaped holders It took me a moment to realise I was staring at a group of Trick or Treaters. It wasn’t even mid-October yet.
“Hey there,” I said, “Uh, you guys are a little early.”
The little girl’s eyes were wide and unblinking. “We want candy.” She held out her candy holder. “Now.”
I decided to be firm with them. “It’s not Halloween.” I said, taking a small step back. I was grasping the handle, ready to slam it in their faces. These little shits were freaking me out. Not just their tone, but their expressions were vacant. There were no lights on and that terrified me. “Sorry kids, I don’t have any candy. But like I said, come back when it’s actually Halloween, and I’ll have candy bars for all of you. "
What I wasn’t expecting was for the Scarecrow to pull a knife out of his pumpkin shaped candy holder. He didn’t hold it like a kid should, clumsily, confused. There was a strategic way the way his fingers were wrapped around the handle—like he’d brandished one before. The kid held the knife up to his own neck and made a slicing motion. Like the little girl, his eyes were blank. Unblinking. There was something wrong in the way he was standing. Stiff, like a puppet on strings. “Are you fucking kidding me?” He squeaked out a laugh. I didn’t see him lunge forward, I was already moving back, stumbling, losing my footing.
The kid moved with impossible speed—and before I knew what was happening, the hilt of the knife was buried in my lower leg. I didn’t even feel pain. My body was being driven by adrenaline, pushing me to get away from him. I remember falling back. I remember my own trembling hands grasping hold of the handle and pulling out the knife. Red was pooling down my jeans and onto our hardwood floor. The little kids turned around and ran back down the steps into the night, and I watched them in a sort of daze.
They didn’t move like normal.
They stalked down the sidewalk like video game characters. The witch shoved a passing old man before pulling out a gun and pointing it at his head. But she didn’t shoot. The three of them ran off—and it was only when I was watching the top of the girl’s witch hat disappear into the night, when I glimpsed something—or someone—at the corner of my eye.
Before I heard laughter. The tree in front of me moved. At first I thought they were shadow’s. Before the shadows bled into figures. Four of them. I glimpsed the school colours. Blue and Gold. I saw twin ponytails, velvet and blonde-- as well as the tell-tale Sunbeam varsity jacket. The group were laughing, whispering to each other. Not exactly doing a good job of hiding. When they slipped from their hiding place, I recognised Evie. Her fingers gingerly on her nose while intense red pooled down her chin.
The others were the same, swiping at their faces with jacket sleeves. They didn’t seem fazed. The redhead’s gaze was latched onto the retreating children, his lips curling. I could sense he was still tethered to them. He was still commanding them to act out grand theft auto. They had caused the man’s death at the game and had controlled those children.
I wasn’t crazy or delusional. Evie had killed someone by simply shooting imaginary finger guns, and somehow the others were able to bleed into children’s heads, taking them over.
Pulling my phone from my pocket, I heaved out a breath. The pain was starting to hit in waves I had to grit through. I couldn’t move. I was stuck, curled up on my floor. While they laughed.
I was halfway through stabbing 911 into my phone when one of them came over. It was the Korean-American. The one who had been the nicest to me out of all of them. The real smile I remembered was gone, replaced by something inhuman. Something I didn’t want to question.
With his hands stuffed in his varsity jacket pockets, he approached me with mocking eyes, almost an attempt at trying to mimic his old self.
The guy knelt in front of me with a chuckle. “Kids these days, right? They’re animals.”
His voice, no, his words, were hurting me. I felt each one penetrate me like gunshots.
My wound wasn’t bad. That’s what I estimated, anyway. I don’t think the kid had hit anything vital. But I needed the emergency room. I still had one hand grasping at my side, drenched in red.
I managed a hiss, grasping for my phone when he pulled it out of my grasp and waved it in the air. “Fuck off. What did you do to those little kids?” I gritted out, trying to reach for my damn phone. I was starting to feel the pain in my side and it hurt like a mother fucker—dizzying bolts of electricity which felt like waves of boiling hot water slamming into me one by one. I tried to get onto my knees, but he pushed me back down again. The guy cocked his head to the side, confusion creasing his expression.
“Ouch. That must hurt.”
"What did you... what did you do?" I hissed out.
His presence was hurting me. Every time he opened his mouth, it was agony. Somehow, it was worse than the stab-wound. This kind of pain was no other I’d felt before. The type I’d rather die than feel. A cry was clawing at my throat, fight or flight taking over. Again, I tried to move, I tried to get away from him. But he was holding down my arms and prodding at my side before sticking his finger in the cut and twisting. "I didn't do anything, Alex.”
His voice barely hit me when my vision blurred and I screamed. Like a fucking animal, I screamed. But not because his fingers were digging around in my insides.
Because my brain was suddenly boiling, a metal rod piercing my skull and stirring it into a soupy mess. His voice was inside me. It was bleeding into me, taking over me. But not just his voice. The world blurred around me and I was no longer in my doorway, bleeding out against the wall.
Instead, I was moving. I was… I was walking. No, I was being dragged. Except these weren’t my memories. This wasn’t my mind. I could see bare feet beneath me delicately slapping on white tiles. When I looked up, I saw an expanse of white like I was being led straight into the clouds. This was a building. There were glass doors and electronic panels, people in black guarding each one. It took a while for me to gain my senses—or him to gain his.
We could smell something like chlorine and taste rusty coins at the back of our throat. Feel the ice cold tiles against our bare toes. A strange feeling at the back of our head. We kept wanting to run our fingers through our hair, but every time we did, our fingers only touched bare skin. Scuffed and rigged skin. Tight fingers were wrapped around our arm, dragging us further and further into a white oblivion. Until a glass door seemingly appeared out of nowhere.
From now on, I am going to describe his memories very vaguely. I’m just going to tell you what I saw.
The room we walked into reminded me of a classroom—but there were no desks. In front of me were the other members of Sunbeam pressed against the back wall. They faced forwards, their gazes penetrating nothing. But I saw they were trembling. Terrified. The squad were dressed in pale white shorts and t-shirt, ugly red spattering the front. There were still traces of blue and glitter on their faces, ribbons hanging from bedraggled curls.
Their feet were bare and filthy like ours. When we were shoved forwards, we took our place next to Evie who had half of her hair shaved off. Her arms were folded across her cheer uniform, her bare feet tapping a beat against the floor. When a woman with dark red hair held in a strict ponytail entered and asked if either of us wanted to show her what we had learned, Evie eagerly raised her hand. “Okay, Evie.” The woman’s voice was too sweet. Sickly sweet. She gestured for the girl forward. “Show us what you’ve got.”
The door opened, and a man stepped through. His hands were tied in front of him, his eyes blank.
Evie nodded, her eyes set in determination. She cleared her throat. “Shatter.”
Nothing happened.
“Intent, Evie.” The woman said. “It doesn’t matter how you say the word unless you use proper intent. Try again.”
The girl did, growling in frustration.
"Shatter.”
The man’s head flew from his torso suddenly in a river of red, and the girl squeaked in excitement.
While we watched in horror, the rest of the squad gave in to their own despair.
Different days bled into one—and we watched faces change. Heads were shaved. Hair grew back. Fear turned to joy.
A blonde girl exploded into bloody chunks, splattering against the walls.
“Yes!” The redhead high-fived pigtails, the two of them locked into some bizarre handshake. “That’s what I’m TALKING about!”
“Bang!” One of the girls used finger guns, and with each “shot” innocents dropped against the wall one by one, their heads blown through.
She jumped up and down in glee. “Bang, bang, bang!”
“Keep going,” the voice of the woman crackled through the speaker. “You’ve almost got it.”
“Divide.” Pigtails used her pointer finger at an old man who was skewed by an invisible force sending bloody chunks of him to the floor.
"Show off.” The redhead said in a sing-song voice. He was slumped against the back wall using his jersey to wipe blood from his face while the others painted the room scarlet. With simple words of intent and a hand gesture, they were able to take people apart piece by piece.
Pigtails snorted when another “test subject” was brought in. "Oh, you think you can do better?”
“Think I can? I know I can.”
This time he plunged two fingers into his temples. He was centre stage, the others against the back wall with their arms folded.
“Rip it out.”
The test subject’s eyes widened, her trembling hands clawing at her own head, fingernails digging into flesh. “Rip…rip it out?”
His lip curved. “That’s what I said.”
We didn’t see the test subject rip her own brain from her skull. We were already burying our head into our knees and screeching into the floor. Another flash. Like watching a movie.
This time we’re cutting into our wrist with shards of glass. Pulling back fleshy flaps of our flesh, there are two wires entangled with muscle and bone. One red and one blue. “Why won’t you submit?” A sharp growl, and I can feel our body pressed against metal. Our arms are restrained. “Out of all of them, you refuse it.” A hand slaps our face. “You don’t want it!”
He started to laugh.
“You don’t want… control?”
He leaned his face closer. “Tell me to mutilate myself. Tell me to… to tear out my brain stem! That’s the beauty of it! No matter how impossible the order is, it will be completed! Control, my boy. Use it. Do you even understand how much you are going to shape the world? Words! Do you know how powerful they are? When said from the right mouth, with the right intent, they can cause bloodshed, pain and misery-- a despair drowning our already shattered earth. And you will be the centre of it. You will bring this world to its knees, Jason."
"Now, do it. We call it cutting, but you will find familiarity in referring to it as erasure. You can make up your own words if you would like. What matters is the intent.” I feel something slicing into our arm. It’s nothing medical. It’s torture. He plunges something sharp into the same spot and twists the blade until we throw our head back and scream at the ceiling.
“You’re the last one.” The man hissed. “Do it.”
“No.” I heard his—our—voice. “I… I can’t!”
“Do it!”
He’s dragging us again, forcing us down a long winding corridor until we reach another door.
"Drown." The boy - - Jason's-- voice was suddenly in my head. I could sense it was trying to hold back, attempting to peel back whatever power his own words had. But the word came again and again until it was suffocating his mouth. “Drown. Drown. Drown. Drown.” We were standing in the doorway of a smaller room. In the corner there was a figure curled up with their head pressed against the wall.
It was a guy.
I recognised our school colours, a bloodied varsity jacket over shorts and t-shirt. When he lifted his head and twisted to face the boy whose mind I was in, I noticed he had an uncanny resemblance to me. His eyes wide, frightened. They were my mother's.
This guy looked exactly like me.
No, it WAS me.
My eyes were shadowed and haunted.
Like I had been drained of everything I was.
As quickly as the memories came crashing into me, they were yanked away when the guy must have pulled back.
I blinked rapidly, and Jason looked as confused as me. Slowly, he pulled his finger from my cut. The man's voice was in my skull, and it was agonising. I felt the command in my head, my body instantly reacting to... to nothing. I had my hands out, ready to do.... do something.
"That was… just a trick,” He said. “Yeah! Just a trick!”
I found myself nodding, echoing his words. Something warm ran from my nose.
"Just... a trick..." I whispered, the words forced from my lips.
Blood spattered down my chin.
“Louder.” He said.
"JUST A TRICK!" I yelled, the force of the wail sending me my knees, panting. The guy was frowning, seemingly unsure what to do with me.
He wrapped up my wound and told me it wasn’t bad—and it wasn’t. I watched in disbelief as my skin stitched itself back together.
"Go into your kitchen." Jason said, and I felt the power of his words ripping through me like bullets. My body moved on its own, and I got to my feet and stepped into my kitchen. He followed me, grabbing a scarf off of the table.
"Get on your knees." I did, dropping to my knees, my breath in my throat, my mouth sealed shut. I could sense the others in the doorway as he wrapped the scarf around my eyes, the heel of his shoe slamming into my neck forcing me onto my stomach.
"I want you to wait for me to kill you."
His words pierced into me. I did. Even when I knew he was gone, the door slamming shut-- I waited. I waited until the next morning, until I regained control over my own body and pulled the scarf from my eyes. I'm still waiting, my brain in constant panic, twisting around when I'm alone, looking into every corner.
I was roped into going to Friday's game against Harrington. During Sunbeam’s routine, they did it again. They had the crowd's attention, and Evie was mouthing something. I felt her words, sharp like needles cutting into me. But they didn't penetrate. They have done something to the student body. Ever since, I’ve been catching looks around me. Those whose heads they have crawled into. Mindless eyes. Every so often an arm will touch mine, fingers will wrap around my neck. I can hear their feet pitter pattering after me. Those little kids from that night. I keep seeing the little witch girl in the corner of my eye. They’re creating an army who are coming for me once he decides to kill me.
If only I knew what happened to the Sunbeam squad. Maybe I can help them somehow.
But something tells me they’re way past help.
And so am I.
I wonder if one day, I might be allowed a glimpse of my memories. What really happened to me during my freshman year.
And why, ever since going into his mind, I dream of a white room.

The whirring blades of my MD-902 throbbed against the warm evening air, and I smiled.
From 5,000 feet, the ground flew by in a carpet of dark forests and kelly-green fields. The sun hung low on the horizon in a picturesque array of dazzling orange and gold, and I could make out the narrow strip of the Ohio River to my left, glistening in the fading daylight. This time of year, the trees would be full of the sweet aroma of fresh blossoms, and the frequent rains kept small pockets of fluffy white mist hanging in the treetops. It was a beautiful view, one that reminded me of why being a helicopter pilot trumped flying in a jumbo jet far above the clouds every day of the week.
Fourteen more days, and I’m debt free.
That made me grin even more. I’d been working as a charter pilot ever since I obtained my license at age 19, and after years of keeping my nose to the grindstone, I was closing on the final payment for real-estate in western Pennsylvania. With no debt, a fixer-upper house on 30 rural acres all to myself, and a respectable wage for a 26-year-old pilot, I looked forward to the financial freedom I could now enjoy. Maybe I’d take a vacation, somewhere exotic like Venice Italy, or the Dominican Republic. Or perhaps I’d sock the money back for the day I started a family.
“Remember kleineun, a real man looks after his own.”
My elderly ouma’s voice came back from the depths of my memories, her proud, sun-tanned face rising from the darkness. She and my Rhodesian grandfather had emigrated to the US when they were newlyweds, as the violence against white Boer descendants in South Africa spiraled out of control. My mother and father both died in a car crash when I was six, and it had been my grandparents who raised me. Due to this, I’d grown up with a slight accent that many of my classmates found amusing, and I could speak both English, and Afrikaans, the Boer tongue of our former home.
I shifted in my seat, stretched my back muscles, and glanced at the picture taped to my console. Both my parents flanked a grinning, gap-toothed six-year-old me, at the last Christmas we’d spent together. My mother beamed, her dark hair and Italian features a sharp contrast to my father’s sandy blonde hair and blue eyes. Sometimes, I liked to imagine they were smiling at me with pride at how well I flew the old silver-colored bird my company had assigned to me, and that made the long, lonely flights easier to bear.
A flicker caught my eye, and I broke my gaze away from the photograph.
Perched in its small cradle above the controls, my little black Garmin fuzzed over for a few seconds, its screen shifting from brightly colored maps to a barrage of grey static.
Did the power chord come loose?
I checked, ensuring the power-cable for the unit’s battery was plugged into the port on the control panel. It was a brand-new GPS unit, and I’d used it a few times already, so I knew it wasn’t defective. Granted, I could fly and navigate without it, but the Garmin made my time as a pilot so much easier that the thought of going blind was dreadful.
My fuel gauge danced, clicked to empty, then to full, in a bizarre jolt.
More of the gauges began to stutter, the entire panel seeming to develop terrets all at once, and my pulse began to race. Something was wrong, very wrong, and the sludge inside my bowels churned with sour fear.
“Come on, come on.” I flicked switches, turned dials, punched buttons, but nothing seemed to fix the spasming electronics. Every gauge failed, and without warning, I found myself plunged into inky darkness.
Outside, the sun surrendered to the pull of night, the sky darker than usual. A distant rumble of thunder reverberated above the roar of my helicopter’s engine, and I thought I glimpsed a streak of yellowish lightning on the far horizon to my left.
Calm down Chris. We’re still flying, so it must just be a blown fuse. Stay in control and find a place to set her down.
My sweaty palm slid on the cyclic stick, and both feet weighed heavy on the yaw pedals. The collective stuck to my other hand with a nervous vibration, and I squinted against the abyss outside.
Beep.
I jumped despite myself, as the little Garmin on my panel flared back to life, the static pulling aside to reveal a twitching display. Each time the screen glitched, it showed the colorful map detailing my flight path over the ground below, but I noticed that some of the lines changed, the names shifting, as if the device couldn’t decide between two different versions of the world.
One name jutted out at me, slate gray like most of the major county names, appearing with ghostly flickers from between two neighboring ones.
Barron County.
I stared, confused. I’d flown over this section of southeastern Ohio plenty of times, and I knew the counties by heart. At this point, I should have been over the southern end of Noble County, and maybe dipping lower into Washington. There was no Barron County Ohio. I was sure of it.
And yet it shown back at me from the digital landscape, a strange, almost cigar-shaped chunk of terrain carved from the surrounding counties like a tumor, sometimes there, sometimes not, as my little Garmin struggled to find the correct map. Rain began to patter against my cockpit window, and the entire aircraft rattled from a strong gust of wind. Thick clouds closed over my field of vision like a sea of gray cotton.
The blood in my veins turned to ice, and I sucked in a nervous breath.
Land. I had to land. There was nothing else to do, my flight controls weren’t responding, and only my Garmin had managed to come back to life. Perhaps I’d been hit by lightning, and the electronics had been fried? Either way, it was too dark to tell, but a storm seemed to be brewing, and if I didn’t get my feet on the ground soon, I could be in real trouble.
“Better safe than sorry.” I pushed down on the collective to start my slow descent and clicked the talking button for my headset. “Any station, this is Douglass Three-One-Four-Foxtrot, over.”
Nothing.
“Any station, this is Douglass Three-One-Four-Foxtrot, requesting emergency assistance, over.”
Still nothing.
If the radio’s dead, I’m really up a creek.
With my hand shaking, I clicked on the mic one more time. “Any station, this is—”
Like a curtain pulling back, the fog cleared from around my window, and the words stuck in my throat.
Without my gauges, I couldn’t tell just how far I’d descended, but I was definitely very low. Thick trees poked up from the ground, and the hills rolled into high ridges with flat valley floors, fields and pastures pockmarking them. Rain fell all around in cold, silvery sheets, a normal feature for the mid spring in this part of Ohio.
What wasn’t normal, were the fires.
At first, I thought they were forest fires for the amount of smoke and flames that bellowed from each spot, but as I swooped lower, my eyes widened in horror.
They were houses.
Farms, cottages, little clusters that barely constituted villages, all of them belched orange flames and black pillars of sooty smoke. I couldn’t hear above the helicopter blades, but I could see the flashes on the ground, along the road, in between the trees, and even coming from the burning buildings, little jets of golden light that spat into the darkness with anger.
Gunfire. That’s rifle fire, a whole lot of it.
Tiny black figures darted through the shadows, barely discernable from where I sat, several hundred feet up. I couldn’t see much, but some were definitely running away, the streaks of yellow gunfire chasing them. A few dark gray vehicles rumbled down one of the gravel roads, and sprayed fire into the houses as it went. They were fighting, I realized, the people in the trucks and the locals. It was horrific, like something out of war-torn Afghanistan, but worse.
Then, I caught a glimpse of the others.
They didn’t move like the rest, who either fled from the dark vehicles, or fired back from behind cover. These skinny figures loped along with haphazard gaits, many running on all fours like animals, swarming from the trees by the dozens. They threw themselves into the gales of bullets without flinching, attacking anyone within range, and something about the way they moved, so fluid, so fearless, made my heart skip a beat.
What is that?
“Echo Four Actual to unknown caller, please respond, over.”
Choking back a cry of shock, I fumbled at the control panel with clumsy fingers, the man’s voice sharp and stern. I hadn’t realized that I’d let go of the talking button and clicked it down again. “Hello? Hello, this is Douglass Three-One-Four-Foxtrot out of Pittsburgh, over.”
An excruciating moment passed, and I continued to zoom over the trees, the fires falling away behind me as more silent forest took over.
“Roger that Douglass Three-One-Four-Foxtrot, we read you loud and clear. Please identify yourself and any passengers or cargo you might be carrying, over.”
Swallowing hard, I eyed the treetops, which looked much closer than they should have been. How far had I descended? “Echo Four Actual, my name is Christopher Dekker, and I am alone. I’m a charter flight from PA, carrying medical equipment for OSU in Columbus. My controls have been damaged, and I am unable to safely carry on due to the storm. Requesting permission to land, over.”
I watched the landscape slide by underneath me, once catching sight of what looked like a little white church surrounded by smaller huts, dozens of figures in the yard staring up at me as I flew over a towering ridgeline.
“Solid copy on that Douglass Three-One-Four-Foxtrot. Be advised, your transponder shows you to be inside a restricted zone. Please cease all radio traffic, reduce your speed, climb to 3,000 feet and proceed north. We’ll talk you in from there. How copy, over?”
My heart jumped, and I let out a sigh of relief. “Roger that Echo Four Actual, my altimeter is down, but I’ll do my best to eyeball the altitude, over.”
With that, I pulled the collective upward, and tried my best to gauge how far I was by eyesight in the gathering night, rain still coming down all around me. This had to be some kind of disaster or riot, I decided. After all, the voice over the radio sounded like military, and those vehicles seemed to have heavy weapons. Maybe there was some kind of unrest going on here that I hadn’t heard about yet?
Kind of weird for it to happen in rural areas though. Spoiled college kids I get, but never saw farmers get so worked up before. They usually love the military.
Something moved in the corner of my eye, and I turned out of reflex.
My mouth fell open, and I froze, unable to scream.
In the sky beside me, a huge shadow glided along, and its leathery wings effortlessly carved through the gloom, flapping only on occasion to keep it aloft. It was too dark for me to see what color it was, but from the way it moved, I knew it wasn’t another helicopter. No, this thing was alive, easily the size of a small plane, and more than twice the length of my little McDonald Douglass. A long tail trailed behind it, and bore a distinct arrow-shaped snout, with twig-like spines fanned out around the back of its head. Whatever legs it had were drawn up under it like a bird, yet its skin appeared rough and knobby, almost resembling tree bark. Without pause, the gigantic bat-winged entity flew along beside me, as if my presence was on par with an annoying fly buzzing about its head.
Gripping the microphone switch so tight, I thought I’d crack the plastic, I whispered into my headset, forgetting all radio protocol. “T-There’s something up here.”
Static crackled.
“Douglas Three-One-Four-Foxtrot, say again your last, you’re coming in weak and unreadable, over.”
“There’s something up here.” I snarled into the headset, still glued to the controls of the helicopter, afraid to deviate even an inch from my course in case the monstrosity decided to turn on me. “A freaking huge thing, right beside me. I swear, it looks like a bat or . . . I don’t know.”
“Calm down.” The man on the other end of the radio broke his rigorous discipline as well, his voice deep, but level. “It won’t attack if you don’t move too fast. Slowly ease away from it and follow that course until you’re out of sight.”
I didn’t have time to think about how wrong that sounded, how the man’s strict tone had changed to one of knowledge, how he hadn’t been the least surprised by what I’d said. Instead, I slowly turned the helicopter away from the huge menace and edged the speed higher in tiny increments.
As soon as I was roughly two football fields away, I let myself relax, and clicked the mic switch. “It’s not following.”
“You’re sure?”
Eyeing the huge flapping wings, I nodded, then remembered he couldn’t see me. “Yeah, I’m well clear.”
“Good. Thank you, Mr. Dekker.”
Then, the radio went dead.
Something in my chest dropped, a weight that made my stomach roil. This wasn’t right, none of it. Who was that man? Why did he know about the thing I’d just seen? What was I supposed to—
A flash of light exploded from the trees to my right and shot into the air with a long finger of smoke.
What the . . .
On instinct, I jerked the cyclic stick to one side, and the helicopter swung to avoid the rocket.
Boom.
My world shook, metal screeched, and a dozen alarms began to go off inside the cockpit in a cacophony of beeps and sirens. Orange and red flames lit up the night sky just behind me, and the horizon started to spin wildly outside. Heat gushed from the cockpit door, and I smelled the greasy stench of burning oil. The safety belts dug into my shoulders, and with a final slip, the radio headset ripped free from my scalp.
I’m hit.
Desperate, I yanked on the controls, fought the bird even as she spun toward the ground in a wreath of flames, the inky black trees hurtling up to meet me. The helicopter went into full auto-rotation, the sky blurring past outside, and the alarms blared in a screech of doom. Panic slammed through my temples, I screamed at the top of my lungs, and for one brief second, my eyes locked on the little black Garmin still perched atop my control panel.
Its screen stopped twitching and settled on a map of the mysterious Barron County, with a little red arrow at the center of the screen, a few words popping up underneath it.
You are here.
Trees stabbed up into the sky, the belts crushed at my torso, glass shattered all around me, and the world went dark.
Copper, thick, warm, and tangy.
It filled my mouth, stank metallic in my nose, clogged my throat, choking me. In the murkiness, I fought for a surface, for a way out, blind and numb in the dark.
This way, kleineun.
My ouma’s voice echoed from somewhere in the shadows.
This way.
Both eyes flew open, and I gagged, spitting out a stream of red.
Pain throbbed in my ribs, and a heavy pressure sent a tingling numbness through my shoulders. Blood roared inside my temples, and stars danced before my eyes with a dizzying array. Humid night air kissed my skin, and something sticky coated my face, neck, and arms that hung straight up toward the ceiling.
Wait. Not up. Down.
I blinked at the wrinkled, torn ceiling of the cockpit, the glass all gone, the gray aluminum shredded like tissue paper. Just outside the broken windows, thick Appalachian bluegrass and stemmy underbrush swished in a feeble breeze, backlit by flashes of lightning from the thunderstorm overhead. Green and brown leaves covered everything in a wet carpet of triangles, and somewhere nearby, a cricket chirped.
Turning my head from side to side, I realized that I hung upside down inside the ruined helicopter, the top half burrowed into the mud. I could hear the hissing and crackling of flames, the pattering of rain falling on the hot aluminum, and the smaller brush fires around the downed aircraft sizzling out in the damp long grass. Charred steel and burning oil tainted the air, almost as strong as the metallic, coppery stench in my aching nose.
They shot me down. That military dude shot me out of the sky.
It didn’t make sense. I’d followed their orders, done everything they’d said, and yet the instant I veered safely away from whatever that thing in the sky had been, they’d fired, not at it, but at me.
Looking down (or rather, up) at my chest, I sucked in a gasp, which was harder to do that before.
The navy-blue shirt stuck to my torso with several big splotches of dark, rusty red. Most were clean slashes, but two held bits of glass sticking out of them, one alarmingly bigger than the other. They dripped cherry red blood onto my upturned face, and a wave of nausea hit me.
I gotta get down.
I flexed my arms to try and work some feeling back into them, praying nothing was broken. Half-numb from hanging so long, I palmed along my aching body until I felt the buckled for the seat belts.
“Okay.” I hissed between gritted teeth, in an effort to stave off my panic. “You can do this. Just hold on tight. Nice and tight. Here we go . . .”
Click.
Everything seemed to lurch, and I slid off the seat to plummet towards the muck-filled hole in the cockpit ceiling. My fingers were slick with blood and slipped over the smooth faux-leather pilot’s seat with ease. The shoulder belt snagged on the bits of glass that lay just under the left lowest rib, and a flare of white-hot pain ripped through me.
Wham.
I screamed, my right knee caught the edge of the aluminum ceiling, and both hands dove into a mound of leaf-covered glass shards on the opposite side of the hole. My head swam, being right-side-up again enough to make shadows gnaw at the corner of my eyes.
Forcing myself to breath slowly, I fought the urge to faint and slid back to sit on the smooth ceiling. I turned my hands over to see half a dozen bits of clear glass burrowed into my skin like greedy parasites, red blood weeping around the new cuts.
“Screw you.” I spat at the rubbish with angry tears in my eyes. “Screw you, screw you, screw you.”
The shards came out easy enough, and the cuts weren’t that deep, but that wasn’t what worried me. On my chest, the single piece of cockpit glass that remined was almost as big as my palm, and it really hurt. Just touching it felt like self-inflicted torture, but I knew it had to come out sooner or later.
Please don’t nick a vein.
Wiping my hands dry on my jeans, I gripped the shard with both hands, and jerked.
Fire roared over my ribs, and hot blood tickled my already grimy pale skin. I clapped a hand over the wound, pressing down hard, and grunted out a string of hateful expletives that my ouma would have slapped me for.
Lying on my back, I stared around me at the messy cargo compartment of the MD-902. Most of the medical supplies had been in cardboard boxes strapped down with heavy nylon tow-straps, but several cases had ruptured with the force of the impact, spraying bandages, syringes, and pill bottles all over the cluttered interior. Orange flames chewed at the crate furthest to the rear, the tail section long gone, but the foremost part of the hold was intact. Easily a million-dollar mess, it would have made me faint on any other trip, but today it was a godsend.
Half-blind in the darkness, I crawled along with only the firelight and lightning bolts to guide me, my right knee aching. Like a crippled raccoon, I collected things as I went, conscious of the two pallets of intact supplies weighing right over my head. I’d taken several different first-aid courses with some hunting buddies of mine, and the mental reflexes kicked in to help soothe my frazzled mind.
Check for bleeds, stop the worst, then move on.
Aside from my battered chest and stomach, the rest of me remained mostly unharmed. I had nasty bruises from the seatbelts, my right knee swelled, my nose slightly crooked and crusted in blood, but otherwise I was intact. Dowsing every scratch and cut with a bottle of isopropyl alcohol I found, I used butterfly closures on the smaller lacerations that peppered my skin. I wrapped soft white gauze over my abused palms and probed at the big cut where the last shard had been, only stopping when I was sure there were no pieces of glass wedged inside my flesh.
“Not too bad.” I grunted to myself, trying to sound impassive like a doctor might. “Rib must have stopped it. Gonna need stitches though. That’ll be fun.”
Pawing through the broken cases, I couldn’t find any suture chord, but just as I was about to give up, I noticed a small box that read ‘medical skin stapler’.
Bingo.
I tore the small white plastic stapler free from its packaging and eyeballed the device. I’d never done this before, only seen it in movies, and even though the cut in my skin hurt, I wondered if this wouldn’t be worse.
You’ve gotta do it. That bleeding needs to stop. Besides, no one’s coming to rescue you, not with those rocket-launching psychos out there.
Taking a deep breath, I pinched the skin around the gash together, and pressed the mouth of the stapler to it.
Click.
A sharp sting, like that of a needle bit at the skin, but it didn’t hurt nearly as bad as the cut itself. I worked my way across the two-inch laceration and gave out a sigh of relief when it was done.
“Not going to bleed to death today.” I daubed ointment around the staples before winding more bandages over the wound.
Popping a few low-grade painkillers that tumbled from the cargo, I crawled wriggled through the nearest shattered window into the wet grass.
Raindrops kissed my face, clean and cool on my sweaty skin. Despite the thick cloud cover, there was enough constant lightning strikes within the storm to let me get glimpses of the world around me. My helicopter lay on its back, the blades snapped like pencils, with bits and pieces of it burning in chunks all around the small break in the trees. Chest-high scrub brush grew all around the low-lying ground, with pockets of standing water in places. My ears still rang from the impact of the crash, but I could start to pick up more crickets, frogs, and even some nocturnal birds singing into the darkness, like they didn’t notice the huge the hulk of flaming metal that had fallen from the sky. Overhead, the thunder rumbled onward, the feeble wind whistling, and there were other flashes on the horizon, orange and red ones, with crackles that didn’t sound quite like lightning.
The guns. They’re still fighting.
Instinctively, I pulled out my cellphone, and tapped the screen.
It fluttered to life, but no matter how I tried, I couldn’t get through to anyone, not even with the emergency function designed to work around having no service. The complicated wonder of our modern world was little better than a glorified paperweight.
Stunned, I sat down with my back to the helicopter and rested my head against the aluminum skin of the craft. How I’d gone from a regular medical supply run to being marooned in this hellish parody of rural America, I didn’t know, but one thig was certain; I needed a plan. Whoever fired the missile could have already contacted my charter company and made up some excuse to keep them from coming to look for me. No one else knew I was here, and even though I now had six staples holding the worst of my injuries shut, I knew I needed proper medical attention. If I wanted to live, I’d have to rescue myself.
My bag. I need to get my go-bag, grab some gear and then . . . head somewhere else.
It took me a while to gather my green canvas paratrooper bag from its place behind the pilot’s seat and fill it with whatever supplies I could scrounge. My knee didn’t seem to be broken, but man did it hurt, and I dreaded the thought of walking on it for miles on end. I focused instead on inventorying my gear and trying to come up with a halfway intelligent plan of action.
I had a stainless-steel canteen with one of those detachable cups on the bottom, a little fishing kit, some duct tape, a lighter, a black LED flashlight with three spare batteries, a few tattered road maps with a compass, a spare pair of socks, medical supplies from the cargo, and a simple forest green plastic rain poncho. I also managed to unearth a functioning digital camcorder my ouma had gotten me for Christmas a few years back, though I wasn’t sure I wanted to do any filming in such a miserable state. Lastly, since it was a private supply run from a warehouse area near Pittsburgh to a direct hospital pad in Ohio, I’d been able to bring my K-Bar, a sturdy, and brutally simple knife designed for the Marine Corps that I used every time I went camping. It was pitiful in comparison to the rifle I wished I had with me, but that didn’t matter now. I had what I had, and I doubted my trusty Armalite would have alleviated my sore knee anyway.
Clicking on my flashlight, I huddled with the poncho around my shoulders inside the wreck of the chopper and peered at the dusty roadmaps. A small part of me hoped that a solution would jump out from the faded paper, but none came. These were all maps of western PA and eastern Ohio. None of them had a Barron County on them anywhere.
The man on the radio said to head north, right before they shot me down. That means they must be camped out to the north of here. South had that convoy and those burning houses, so that’s a no-go. Maybe I can backtrack eastward the way I came.
As if on cue, a soft pop echoed from over the eastern horizon, and I craned to look out the helicopter window, spotting more man-made flashes over the tree tops.
“Great.” I hissed between clenched teeth, aware of how the temperature dipped to a chilly 60 degrees, and how despite the conditions, my stomach had begun to growl. “Not going that way, are we? Westward it is.”
Walking away from my poor 902 proved to be harder than I’d anticipated. Despite the glass, the fizzling fires, and the darkness, it still held a familiar, human essence to it. Sitting inside it made me feel secure, safe, even calm about the situation. In any other circumstance, I would have just stayed with the downed aircraft to wait for help, but I knew the men who shot me down would likely find my crash site, and I didn’t want to be around when they did.
Unlike much of central and western Ohio, southeastern Ohio is hilly, brushy, and clogged with thick forests. Thorns snagged at my thin poncho and sliced at my pant legs. My knee throbbed, every step a form of self-inflicted torture. The rain never stopped, a steady drizzle from above just cold enough to be problematic as time went on, making me shiver. Mud slid under my tennis shoes, and every tree looked ten times bigger in the flickering beam of my cheap flashlight. Icy fear prickled at the back of my neck at some of the sounds that greeted me through the gloom. I’d been camping loads of times, both in Pennsylvania and elsewhere, but these noises were something otherworldly to me.
Strange howls, screeches, and calls permeated the rain-soaked sky, some almost roars, while others bordered on human in their intonation. The more I walked, the softer the distant gunfire became, and the more prevalent the odd sounds, until the shadows seemed to fill with them. I didn’t dare turn off my flashlight, or I’d been completely blind in the dark, but a little voice in the back of my head screamed that I was too visible, crunching through the gloomy forest with my long beam of light stabbing into the abyss. It felt as though a million eyes were on me, studying me, hunting me from the surrounding brush, and I bitterly recalled how much I’d loved the old Survivor Man TV series as a kid.
Not so fun being out in the woods at night. Especially alone.
A twig snapped somewhere behind me, and I whirled on the spot, one trembling hand resting on the hilt of my K-Bar.
Nothing. Nothing but trees, bushes, and rain dripping down in the darkness.
“This is stupid.” I whispered to myself to keep my nerves in check as I slowly spun on the spot. “I should have went eastward anyway. God knows how long I’m going to have to—”
Creak.
A groan of metal-on-metal echoed from somewhere to my right, and I spun to face it, yanking the knife on my belt free from its scabbard. It felt so small and useless in my hand, and I choked down a wave of nauseas fear.
Ka-whump. Creak. K-whump. Creak.
Underbrush cracked and crunched, a few smaller saplings thrashed, and from deep within the gloom, two yellow orbs flared to life. They poked through the mist in the trees, forming into slender fingers of golden light that swept back and forth in the dark.
The soldiers . . . they must be looking for me.
I swallowed hard and turned to slink away.
Ice jammed through my blood, and I froze on the spot, biting my tongue to stop the scream.
It stood not yards away, a huge form that towered a good twelve feet tall in the swirling shadows. Unpolished chrome blended with flash-rusted spots in the faded red paint, and grime-smeared glass shone with dull hues in the flashes of lightning. Where the wheels should have been, the rounded steel axels curved like some enormous hand had bent them, and the tires lay face-down on the muddy ground like big round feet, their hubcaps buried in the dirt. Dents, scrapes, and chips covered the battered thing, and its crooked little radio antenna pointed straight up from the old metal fender like a mast. I could barely make out the mud-coated VW on the rounded hood, and my mind reeled in shock.
Is . . . is that a car?
Both yellow headlights bathed me in a circle of bright, blinding light, and neither I nor the strange vehicle moved.
Seconds ticked by, the screech-thumping in the background only growing closer. I realized that I couldn’t hear any engine noises and had yet to see any soldiers or guns pointed my way. This car looked old, really old, like one of those classic Volkswagen Beetles that collectors fought over at auctions. Try as I might, I couldn’t see a driver inside the murky, mold-smeared windows.
Because there wasn’t one.
Lightning arched across the sky overhead, and the car standing in front of me blinked.
Its headlights slid shut, as if little metal shades had crawled over the bulbs for a moment and flicked open again. Something about that movement was so primal, so real, so lifelike, that every ounce of self-control I had melted in an instant.
Cursing under my breath, I lunged into the shrubs, and the world erupted around me.
Under my shoes, the ground shook, and the car surged after me in a cacophony of ka-thumps that made my already racing heart skip several beats. A weather-beaten brown tow truck from the 50’s charged through the thorns to my left, it’s headlights ablaze, and a dilapidated yellow school bus rose from its hiding place in the weeds to stand tall on four down-turned axel-legs. They all flicked their headlights on like giants waking from their slumber, and as I dodged past them, they each blared their horn into the night in alarm.
My breaths came short and tight, my knee burned, and I crashed through thorns and briars without thought to how badly I was getting cut up.
The cheap poncho tore, and I ripped it away as it caught on a tree branch.
A purple 70’s Mustang shook off its blanket of creeping vines and bounded from a stand of trees just ahead, forcing me to swerve to avoid being run over, my adrenaline at all-time highs.
This can’t be happening, this can’t be happening, this can’t be happening.
Slipping and sliding, I pushed through a stand of multiflora rose, and stumbled out into a flat, dark expanse.
I almost skidded to a stop.
What had once been a rather large field stood no taller than my shoestrings, the grass charred, and burnt. The storm above illuminated huge pieces of wreckage that lay scattered over the nearly 40-acre plot, and I could just make out the fire-blackened hulk of a fuselage resting a hundred yards away. The plane had been brought down a while ago it seemed, as there weren’t any flames left burning, and I threw myself toward it in frenzied desperation.
Burned grass and greasy brown topsoil slushed underfoot, and I could hear the squelching of the cars pursing me. Rain soaked me to the bone, and my lungs ached from sucking down the damp night air. A painful stich crept into my side, and I cursed myself for not putting in more time for cardio at the gym.
Something caught my left shoelace, and I hurtled to the ground, tasting mud and blood in between my teeth.
They’ve got me now.
I clawed at the mud, rolled, and watched a tire slam down mere inches from where my head had been. The Mustang loomed over me and jostled for position with the red Volkswagen and brown tow truck, the school bus still a few yards behind them. They couldn’t seem to decide who would get the pleasure of stomping me to death, and like a herd of stampeding wildebeest, they locked bumpers in an epic shoving match.
On all fours, I scampered out from under the sparring brutes, and dashed for the crumpled airplane, a white-painted DC-3 that looked like it had been cut in half by a gargantuan knife blade. I passed a snapped wing section, the oily remains of a turbo-prop engine, and a mutilated wheel from the landing gear. Climbing over a heap of mud, I squeezed into the back of the ruined flight cabin and dropped down into the dark cargo hold.
Wham.
No sooner had my sneakers hit the cold metal floor, and the entire plane rocked from the impact of something heavy ramming it just outside. I tumbled to my knees, screaming in pain as, once again, I managed to bash the sore one off a bracket in the wall.
My hand smeared in something gooey, and I scrabbled for my flashlight.
It clicked on, a wavering ball of white light in the pitch darkness, and I fought the urge to gag. “Oh man . . .”
Three people, or what was left of them, lay strewn over the narrow cargo area. Claret red blood coated the walls, caked on the floor, and clotted under my mud-spattered shoes. Bits of flesh and viscera were stuck to everything, and tatters of cloth hung from exposed sections of broken bone. An eerie set of bloody handprints adorned the walls, and the only reason I could tell it had been three people were the shoes; all of them bore anklebones sticking out above blood-soaked socks. It smelled sickly sweet, a strange, nauseas odor that crept into my nose and settled on the back of my tongue like an alien parasite.
Something glinted in the beam of my flashlight, and my pulse quickened as I pried the object loose from the severed arm that still clung to it.
“Hail Mary full of Grace.” I would have grinned if it weren’t for the fact that the plane continued to buck and roll under the assault from the cars outside.
The pistol looked old, but well-maintained, aside from the light coating of dark blood that stained its round wooden handle. It felt heavy, but good in my hand, and I turned it over to read the words, Waffenfabrik Mauser stenciled into the frame, with a large red 9 carved into the grip. For some reason, it vaguely reminded me of the blasters from Star Wars.
I fumbled with a little switch that looked like a safety on the back of the gun and stumbled toward a gap in the plane’s dented fuselage to aim out at the surrounding headlights.
Bang.
The old gun bucked reliably in my hand, its long barrel spitting a little jet of flame into the night. I had no idea if I hit anything, but the attacking cars recoiled, their horns blaring in confusion.
They turned, and scuttled for the tree line as fast as their mechanical legs could go, the entire ordeal over as fast as it had begun.
Did I do that?
Perplexed, I stared down at the pistol in my hand.
Whoosh.
A large, inky black shadow glided down from the clouds, and the yellow school bus moved too slow to react in time.
With a crash, the kicking nightmarish vehicle was thrown onto its side, spraying glass and chrome trim across the muddy field. Its electro-synth horn blared with wails of mechanical agony, as two huge talon-like feet clamped down on it, and the enormous head of the flying creature lowered to rip open its engine compartment.
The horn cut out, and the enormous flying entity jerked its head back to gulp down a mass of what looked like sticky black vines from the interior of the shattered bus.
At this range, I could see now that the flying creature bore two legs and had its wings half-tucked like a vulture that had descended to feed on roadkill. Its head turned slightly, and in the glow of another lightning bolt, my jaw went slack at the realization of what it was.
A tree trunk. It’s a rotted tree trunk.
I couldn’t tell where the reptilian beast began, and where the organic tree components ended, the upper part of the head shaped like a log, while the lower jaw resembled something out of a dinosaur movie. Its skin looked identical to the outside of a shagbark hickory but flexed with a supple featheriness that denoted something closer to skin. Sharp branch-like spines ranged down its back, and out to the end of its tail, which bore a massive round club shaped like a diseased tree-knot. Crouched on both hind legs, it braced the hooked ends of its folded wings against the ground like a bat, towering higher than a semi-truck. Under the folds of its armored head, a bulging pair of chameleon-like eyes constantly spun in their sockets, probing the dark for threats while it ate.
One black pupil locked onto the window I peered through, and my heart stopped.
The beast regarded me for a moment, with a curious, sideways sniff.
With a proud, contemptful head-toss, the shadow from the sky parted rows of razor-sharp teeth to let out a roar that shook the earth beneath my feet. It was the triumphant war cry of a creature that sat at the very top of the food chain, one that felt no threat from the fragile two-legged beings that walked the earth all around it. It hunted whenever it wanted, ate whatever it wanted, and flew wherever it wanted. It didn’t need to rip the plane apart to devour me.
Like my hunter-gatherer ancestors from thousands of years ago, I wasn’t even worth the energy it would take to pounce.
I’m hiding in the remains of the cockpit now, which is half-buried under the mud of the field, enough to shield the light from my screen so that thing doesn’t see it. My service only now came back, and it’s been over an hour since the winged beast started in on the dead bus. I don’t know when, or how I’m going to get out of here. I don’t know when anyone will even see this post, or if it will upload at all. My phone battery is almost dead, and at this point, I’m probably going to have to sleep among the corpses until daylight comes.
A dead man sleeping amongst friends.
If you live in the Noble County area in southeastern Ohio, be careful where you drive, fly, and boat. I don’t know if it’s possible to stumble into this strange place by ground, but if so, then these things are definitely headed your way.
If that happens . . . pray that they don’t find you.

https://chat.openai.com/share/c6e8289b-f77d-4dfc-98c4-1a2ee93fa844
Me:
Help me get a better understanding of the scientific concept of Heuristics
ChatGPT
Heuristics refer to cognitive shortcuts or strategies that individuals use to simplify decision-making and problem-solving in complex situations. In other words, heuristics are mental "rules of thumb" that help people make judgments quickly and efficiently.
Heuristics are often used in situations where complete information is not available, or when there is too much information to process effectively. These strategies can be helpful, but they can also lead to errors in judgment and decision-making. Some common examples of heuristics include:

1. Availability heuristic: This heuristic involves estimating the likelihood of an event based on how easily similar examples come to mind. For example, if you hear about a plane crash on the news, you may overestimate the risk of flying even though statistically it is still safer than driving.
2. Representativeness heuristic: This heuristic involves categorizing objects or events based on how similar they are to a prototype in one's mind. For example, assuming a person is a professor because they wear glasses and a tweed jacket.
3. Anchoring and adjustment heuristic: This heuristic involves using an initial value (or anchor) as a reference point when making a decision, and then adjusting that value based on additional information. For example, when making an offer on a house, a buyer might start with a lowball offer as their anchor and adjust based on the seller's response.

It's important to be aware of heuristics and their potential limitations, as relying too heavily on them can lead to biases and errors in judgment. However, heuristics can also be a useful tool for simplifying complex decision-making processes and conserving mental resources.
Me:
Let's go deeper into the benefits of heuristic processes versus the detriments.
ChatGPT
Heuristics can provide several benefits, but they can also lead to errors and biases. Here are some of the benefits and detriments of heuristic processes:
Benefits:

1. Speed and efficiency: One of the primary benefits of heuristics is that they can save time and mental effort. Rather than considering all available information and weighing every possible outcome, heuristics allow individuals to make quick decisions and take action based on incomplete information.
2. Useful for problem-solving: Heuristics can be especially useful for solving problems that are complex and have multiple possible solutions. By using rules of thumb, individuals can evaluate potential solutions more efficiently and select the best one based on their previous experiences and knowledge.
3. Helpful for managing cognitive overload: Heuristics can help individuals manage cognitive overload, a condition in which too much information is presented to an individual, causing them to be overwhelmed and unable to make sound decisions. By using heuristics, individuals can filter out irrelevant information and focus on what is most important.

Detriments:

1. Biases and errors: One of the primary drawbacks of heuristics is that they can lead to biases and errors in decision-making. For example, individuals may rely too heavily on the availability heuristic and make judgments based on information that is readily available, rather than evaluating all relevant information.
2. Limited accuracy: Heuristics can also be limited in their accuracy. Because they rely on previous experiences and knowledge, heuristics may not always be applicable to new or unique situations.
3. Overconfidence: Finally, heuristics can lead to overconfidence. Individuals may become too confident in their ability to make decisions based on heuristics and fail to consider alternative perspectives or information that contradicts their existing beliefs or knowledge.

Overall, heuristics can be a useful tool for simplifying complex decision-making processes, but they must be used with caution. It is important to recognize the potential limitations and biases of heuristics and to supplement heuristic processes with critical thinking and analysis when appropriate.
Me:
Is the presence of heuristic cognitive processes limited to humans or do other forms of life also utilize heuristics?
ChatGPT
Heuristics are not limited to humans and can be observed in other forms of life as well. Many animals, including insects, birds, and mammals, use heuristics to make decisions and solve problems.
For example, bees use the "flower constancy" heuristic, which involves returning to a specific type of flower after finding food there previously. This strategy allows bees to maximize their foraging efficiency by focusing on a single type of flower and avoiding wasted effort on less rewarding flowers.
Similarly, some bird species use the "distinctive feature" heuristic to identify predators. This heuristic involves recognizing and avoiding features that are not common among harmless species, such as a bright coloration or unusual shape.
Even some simple organisms, such as bacteria, use heuristics to guide their behavior. For example, bacteria use the "quorum sensing" heuristic to coordinate group behavior based on the density of their population.
Overall, heuristics are a common feature of cognitive processes across many different forms of life, and they likely evolved as a way to optimize decision-making and problem-solving under conditions of uncertainty or limited information.
Me:
Are there examples of heuristics in non-animal life forms, such as plants?
ChatGPT
While the concept of heuristics is most commonly associated with animal behavior and decision-making, there is some evidence that plants may also use heuristics in their own way.
For example, plants have been observed to use the "optimal partitioning" heuristic to allocate resources between different tissues and organs. This heuristic involves allocating resources to the parts of the plant that are most likely to contribute to its overall fitness, based on factors such as growth rate, photosynthetic capacity, and nutrient availability.
Plants also use the "leaf economic spectrum" heuristic, which involves balancing resource allocation between leaf construction and maintenance, in order to maximize photosynthetic efficiency and minimize resource waste.
In addition, some research suggests that plants may use the "root plasticity" heuristic to adjust their root growth in response to environmental cues such as soil moisture and nutrient availability. This heuristic involves allocating resources to the parts of the root system that are most likely to be productive under different conditions.
While the concept of heuristics in plants is still a relatively new area of study, these examples suggest that plants may use similar cognitive strategies to optimize their growth and survival in their environment.
Me:
Is it possible that heuristic processes are encoded in DNA and are an evolutionary adaptation that is stored in DNA?
ChatGPT
The question of whether heuristic processes are encoded in DNA is a complex one, as it is still not fully understood how cognitive processes such as decision-making and problem-solving are encoded in biological systems.
While some researchers have proposed that heuristics could be an evolutionary adaptation that is stored in DNA, there is currently limited direct evidence to support this hypothesis. It is also important to note that heuristics are not innate, fixed behaviors, but rather strategies that individuals learn and refine over time based on their experiences and environment.
However, there is evidence that the neural networks and structures that underlie heuristics are shaped by evolutionary processes. For example, studies have found that different animal species, which have evolved in different environments and under different selection pressures, tend to use different heuristics to solve similar problems.
In addition, some researchers have suggested that the development of heuristics may be driven by principles of natural selection, which favors strategies that are efficient and effective in solving problems under conditions of uncertainty and limited information.
Overall, while the exact relationship between heuristics and DNA is still an area of active research, it is likely that heuristics have evolved through a combination of genetic and environmental factors, and that the neural mechanisms that underlie heuristics have been shaped by evolutionary processes over time.
Me:
What are the scientific disciplines that reference and research heuristic processes?
ChatGPT
Heuristic processes are studied in a wide range of scientific disciplines, as they are relevant to many areas of research that involve decision-making, problem-solving, and human behavior. Here are some of the scientific disciplines that reference and research heuristic processes:

1. Psychology: Heuristics are a central topic of study in the field of cognitive psychology, which focuses on how people acquire, process, and use information. Researchers in this field use a variety of methods, including experiments and observational studies, to investigate the factors that influence heuristics and their impact on decision-making and problem-solving.
2. Neuroscience: Heuristics are also of interest to researchers in the field of neuroscience, who use brain imaging and other techniques to study the neural mechanisms that underlie heuristics and how they are processed in the brain.
3. Economics: Heuristics are a key area of research in the field of behavioral economics, which focuses on how people make decisions and the cognitive biases that can influence their choices. Researchers in this field study the effects of heuristics on economic behavior and how these effects can be used to improve decision-making.
4. Artificial intelligence and computer science: Heuristic algorithms are used extensively in artificial intelligence and computer science to solve complex problems that are difficult to solve using traditional methods. Researchers in this field study how heuristics can be used to optimize algorithms and improve the efficiency of computational processes.
5. Ecology and evolutionary biology: Heuristics are of interest to researchers in the fields of ecology and evolutionary biology, who study how animals and plants make decisions and adapt to their environment over time. Researchers in this field use a variety of methods, including field studies and experiments, to investigate how heuristics are used in different ecological and evolutionary contexts.

Overall, heuristic processes are a cross-disciplinary topic of interest, and researchers from many different fields have made important contributions to our understanding of how heuristics work and their impact on human behavior and decision-making.
Me:
It seems like the Information Theory of Claude Shannon and the phenomenon of Shannon Information arose from a radical new understanding of heuristic language processes and the use of a higher order systemization of heuristics. If that is correct, that would make the entire field of Information Theory dependent upon heuristics.
ChatGPT
While it is true that Claude Shannon's theory of information is relevant to the study of heuristics, it is not accurate to say that the entire field of Information Theory is dependent upon heuristics. Rather, Shannon's theory of information is concerned with the quantification and transmission of information, and how information can be represented and processed using mathematical models.
That being said, the concepts of information and heuristics are closely related, as both involve the processing and communication of knowledge and data. In particular, heuristics can be seen as a form of information processing, as they involve the use of mental shortcuts and rules of thumb to make decisions and solve problems.
In the context of Shannon's theory of information, heuristics might be seen as a way of compressing and transmitting information more efficiently. By using heuristics to simplify complex information and decision-making processes, individuals can reduce the amount of information that needs to be transmitted and processed.
Overall, while there are connections between heuristics and the field of Information Theory, it is important to view each as a distinct area of study with its own unique concepts and methodologies.
Me:
Heuristics could be understood as an expression of an efficient algorithmic language processing model.
ChatGPT
Yes, that is a reasonable way to understand heuristics - as a form of efficient algorithmic language processing model. Heuristics involve using mental shortcuts or rules of thumb to simplify complex decision-making processes and reduce the cognitive load involved in making a choice. In other words, heuristics can be seen as a form of algorithmic processing, where individuals use a set of pre-determined steps to arrive at a decision or solution to a problem.
In this sense, heuristics can be thought of as a kind of language that the brain uses to process information and make decisions. Just as a computer programming language uses a set of instructions to process data and perform tasks, heuristics use a set of mental instructions to simplify decision-making and problem-solving.
However, it is important to note that heuristics are not a perfect algorithmic language processing model. They can sometimes lead to errors and biases, and are not always effective in situations where complete or accurate information is required. Therefore, while heuristics can be useful, they are not a replacement for critical thinking and careful analysis of all available information.
Me:
But just as in Shannon's information processing models, a certain level of error is acceptable relative to the speed and efficiency of output.
ChatGPT
Yes, that's correct. Shannon's information theory and heuristics share the idea that a certain level of error is acceptable in exchange for greater speed and efficiency of processing. In Shannon's theory, the concept of channel capacity refers to the maximum amount of information that can be transmitted with an acceptable level of error, given the characteristics of the communication channel. Shannon showed that if the level of noise or interference in the channel is below a certain threshold, then the amount of information that can be transmitted reliably can be increased by using efficient encoding schemes.
Similarly, in heuristics, individuals accept a certain level of error or bias in exchange for greater speed and efficiency of decision-making. By using heuristics, individuals can arrive at a decision or solution more quickly and with less cognitive effort than by considering all available information. However, this comes at the cost of potential errors and biases that can lead to suboptimal decisions.
Overall, both Shannon's information theory and heuristics involve balancing the tradeoff between accuracy and efficiency, and both provide valuable insights into how information can be processed and communicated effectively.
Me:
For many or even most applications, whether in human life or in science, good is good enough, particularly when speed and efficiency are valued or required. Use cases where tolerances for informational error are extremely low or requiring perfection are rare.
ChatGPT
Yes, that's true. In many cases, good enough is indeed good enough, particularly when speed and efficiency are valued or required. This is because in many applications, a certain degree of error or imprecision can be tolerated without significantly affecting the outcome or result.
In some cases, the cost of achieving perfect accuracy or precision may be prohibitively high or time-consuming, and the benefits of doing so may not justify the cost. For example, in many engineering applications, the precision required for a particular measurement or calculation may be much less than the precision that is achievable with the available tools or equipment.
Similarly, in many decision-making situations, it may not be possible or practical to consider all available information or to arrive at a perfect solution. In these cases, using heuristics or other shortcuts can help individuals make decisions more quickly and efficiently, even if the resulting decisions are not always optimal.
However, it is important to note that there are also many applications where a high degree of accuracy or precision is necessary, and where errors or imprecision can have significant consequences. In these cases, it is important to use rigorous methods and to minimize sources of error or bias as much as possible.
Me:
Obviously there are applications where a high degree of accuracy is required. One very important case that comes to mind is the problem of Nuclear Fusion reactors.
ChatGPT
Yes, you are right. The problem of nuclear fusion reactors is one example of an application where a high degree of accuracy is required. In nuclear fusion, atoms are brought together at extremely high temperatures and pressures in order to release energy. The success of a fusion reaction depends on achieving precise conditions of temperature, pressure, and plasma confinement, as even small variations in these conditions can have significant effects on the outcome of the reaction.
In order to achieve the necessary level of precision for a nuclear fusion reaction, researchers use a variety of methods, including sophisticated computer simulations and experimental tests. These methods allow researchers to analyze and model the behavior of plasma under different conditions, and to optimize the design of fusion reactors to achieve the best possible performance.
In addition to nuclear fusion, there are many other areas where a high degree of accuracy is required, such as in medicine, aerospace, and environmental monitoring. In these cases, it is important to use the best available methods and technologies to minimize errors and to ensure that measurements and calculations are as accurate as possible.
Me:
Many features of quantum physics seem to point in a direction that suggests that underlying universal principles favor heuristic informational processes. For example, the Uncertainty Principle, quantum entanglement, virtual particles and other quantum peculiarities rely upon uncertainty, randomness, chaos and an apparent self-organizing effect that seems to echo heuristic processes.
ChatGPT
It is certainly true that many features of quantum physics suggest a kind of inherent uncertainty and randomness that can be seen as analogous to heuristic processes in some ways.
For example, the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle, which states that it is impossible to simultaneously measure the position and momentum of a particle with perfect accuracy, implies a certain degree of randomness and uncertainty in the behavior of quantum systems. Similarly, quantum entanglement, which describes the interdependence of the states of two or more particles, can be seen as a kind of self-organizing effect that is driven by the underlying properties of the system.
At the same time, it is important to note that the relationship between quantum physics and heuristic processes is still an area of active research and debate, and there is no consensus on the exact nature of this relationship.
Some researchers have suggested that heuristics may be relevant to understanding the behavior of quantum systems, particularly in terms of how they process and transmit information. For example, some models of quantum computation rely on heuristic algorithms to solve problems that are difficult or impossible to solve using traditional methods.
However, others have pointed out that the underlying principles of quantum physics are fundamentally different from those of classical physics, and that heuristics may not be directly applicable to understanding the behavior of quantum systems.
Overall, while there are interesting parallels between quantum physics and heuristics, it is important to view each as a distinct area of study with its own unique concepts and methodologies. Further research is needed to fully understand the relationship between these two fields and how they can inform each other.
Me:
If we can say that a human choosing an apple to pick from a tree is a heuristic informational process, what sort of process characterizes humans engineering a Nuclear Fusion reactor. I suppose that is the same as asking, what is the opposite process to heuristics?
ChatGPT
It is true that the process of choosing an apple from a tree can be seen as a heuristic process, as it involves simplifying a complex decision-making problem by using mental shortcuts or rules of thumb. In this case, an individual might use heuristics based on factors such as the size, color, or location of the apple to make a quick and efficient decision about which one to pick.
On the other hand, the process of engineering a nuclear fusion reactor involves a more rigorous and systematic approach to problem-solving that is based on scientific principles, empirical data, and mathematical models. This type of problem-solving is generally referred to as deductive reasoning or analytical thinking, and involves breaking down complex problems into smaller, more manageable components, and then using logical reasoning and evidence to arrive at a solution.
Unlike heuristic processing, deductive reasoning involves a step-by-step approach to problem-solving that is based on careful analysis and evaluation of all available information. This type of thinking is often used in scientific research, engineering, and other fields where precision and accuracy are important.
In this sense, deductive reasoning can be seen as the opposite of heuristics, as it involves a more deliberate and systematic approach to decision-making that prioritizes accuracy and precision over speed and efficiency. However, it is worth noting that deductive reasoning and heuristics are not mutually exclusive, and can be used together in a complementary way to optimize decision-making and problem-solving.
Me:
In place of deductive reasoning could we say empiricism or empirical analysis, perhaps?
ChatGPT
Yes, that's a good point. Empirical analysis or empiricism is a more precise term to describe the process of engineering a nuclear fusion reactor, as it involves collecting and analyzing empirical data and observations to arrive at a solution.
In empirical analysis, the emphasis is on gathering and analyzing data, and using that data to test and refine hypotheses or models. This approach is based on the scientific method, which involves making observations, formulating hypotheses, testing those hypotheses through experimentation or observation, and then using the results of those tests to refine or reject the original hypotheses.
In contrast to heuristic processing, which relies on mental shortcuts or rules of thumb to make decisions and solve problems, empirical analysis involves a more systematic and rigorous approach to problem-solving that is grounded in evidence and data. This approach prioritizes accuracy and precision over speed and efficiency, and is typically used in scientific research, engineering, and other fields where precision and accuracy are critical.
Overall, while empirical analysis and heuristics are distinct approaches to problem-solving, they can be used together in a complementary way to optimize decision-making and problem-solving. For example, heuristics can be used to simplify complex decision-making problems and reduce the cognitive load involved in making a choice, while empirical analysis can be used to gather and analyze data to test and refine hypotheses or models.
Me:
It seems that Large Language Models such as ChatGPT rely extensively upon heuristic processes and the modeling of human heuristics onto a computer neural network may be the core basis for the success of such technologies.
ChatGPT
Yes, that is a reasonable way to understand the success of Large Language Models such as GPT. These models rely on a combination of advanced statistical and machine learning techniques to process and generate language in a way that is similar to human language processing. In particular, these models use deep learning algorithms to analyze and model patterns in large amounts of data, and to make predictions or generate language based on that data.
One way that Large Language Models can achieve this is by using heuristics or rules of thumb to simplify the language generation process. For example, these models might use heuristics based on the frequency of certain words or phrases in the training data, or on the syntactic or semantic structure of the language, to generate more accurate or natural-sounding language.
By modeling these heuristics, Large Language Models can generate language that is increasingly natural-sounding and contextually appropriate, which has many potential applications in fields such as natural language processing, speech recognition, and machine translation.
Overall, the success of Large Language Models such as GPT can be attributed to a combination of advanced machine learning techniques and the use of heuristics to simplify the language generation process. While these models are not perfect and can still generate errors or biases, they represent a significant advance in the field of natural language processing and have the potential to transform many areas of human-machine interaction.
Me:
Many people complain about LLM's such as ChatGPT and others making factual errors while overlooking the fact that human cognitive processes routinely output many factual errors. It is in fact an error to consider the output of such a technology as a mere fact-lookup device when the tasks being performed are designed to output efficiency and speed and still maintaining a level or relatively error free output that certainly surpasses human cognitive ability.
ChatGPT
Yes, that's a good point. While Large Language Models such as GPT are not perfect and can still make errors, they are generally designed to optimize for efficiency and speed of output, while still maintaining a relatively high level of accuracy and precision. In many cases, these models can perform tasks that are beyond the capabilities of human cognitive processing, such as processing large amounts of data or generating language that is contextually appropriate and natural-sounding.
It is also important to note that human cognitive processing is not perfect, and can often lead to errors and biases, particularly when dealing with complex or ambiguous information. In some cases, Large Language Models may actually outperform human cognition in terms of accuracy and precision, particularly when the tasks being performed are well-defined and can be accurately modeled using statistical and machine learning techniques.
However, it is important to recognize that Large Language Models are not a replacement for human cognitive processing, and there are many tasks where human expertise and judgment are still necessary. In addition, it is important to use these models responsibly and to be aware of their limitations, including the potential for bias or error in the training data or algorithms used to generate the output.
Overall, while Large Language Models have the potential to revolutionize many areas of human-machine interaction, it is important to view them as a complement to human cognition, rather than a replacement. By working together, human and machine intelligence can achieve even greater levels of efficiency, accuracy, and problem-solving ability.
Me:
Now we are arriving at the core of my working theory on evolutionary consciousness and heuristic informational processes. The theory is basically that the evolution of life and its ascendency to conscious self-awareness has been a feedback loop process of agentic environmental awareness, information storage (as genetic and neuronal memory structures) and a resulting increasing efficiency of heuristic cognition-action processes. In this paradigm, initial environmental awareness leads to agentic environmental interactivity which results in the outputs (successes and failures) being recorded into memory media. Memory represents an offloading of future computational processing to the store of past experience, resulting in efficiency and speed gains. Organisms that maximize this functionality thrive and continue to advance. Evolution results from improvements to this heuristic-mnemonic feedback loop. In this light, human evolution is well positioned to transition to its next phase as vast efficiencies generated in the past are now offloaded to engines such as LLMs, freeing human cognition to pursue and develop higher order capabilities. It is possible that, sooner rather than later, virtually all heuristic cognitive processing can be offloaded to machine intelligence and that humans may enter an age of Post-Heuristic cognition. "Post-Heuristic Cognition" may be the fundamental basis for what is ofter referred to as Transhumanism. It is also possible that "Post-Heuristic Cognition" may be what spiritual traditions have called "enlightenment".
ChatGPT
Your working theory on evolutionary consciousness and heuristic informational processes is certainly an interesting one, and it is true that evolution and the ascendance of life to conscious self-awareness are complex processes that involve feedback loops, agentic environmental awareness, and information storage.
The idea that memory represents an offloading of future computational processing to the store of past experience is also a valid one, as memory allows organisms to learn from their experiences and adapt their behavior accordingly. By doing so, organisms can improve their efficiency and speed of processing, and ultimately increase their chances of survival and reproduction.
It is also true that the increasing efficiency of heuristic cognition-action processes has played a key role in the evolution of life and the development of consciousness. Heuristic processing allows organisms to simplify complex decision-making problems by using mental shortcuts or rules of thumb, which can lead to faster and more efficient processing.
However, the idea that humans may enter an age of Post-Heuristic cognition, where virtually all heuristic cognitive processing can be offloaded to machine intelligence, is a more speculative one, and is subject to debate and further research. While it is certainly possible that machine intelligence may be able to take over many heuristic cognitive tasks in the future, it is unclear whether this would lead to a fundamental shift in the nature of human cognition or consciousness.
Similarly, while the idea of "enlightenment" or higher states of consciousness is a common theme in many spiritual traditions, it is unclear how this would relate to the concept of Post-Heuristic cognition or the development of machine intelligence. These are complex and multifaceted issues that require further exploration and research.
Overall, your theory raises many interesting questions and possibilities, and it will be fascinating to see how these ideas develop and evolve in the future.
Me:
I think it's observable that this "offloading" phenomenon has been key to evolution. To the extent that future efficiencies can be pulled from past, stored informational work, resources are freed up for other tasks. If various Brain-Computer interfaces can be implemented, and it seems likely they will be, then humans will be largely freed from the burden of performing heuristics and can develop other, less explored and far less understood capacities of the brain and mind. The neuroplasticity of the brain is well-known; brains which are missing large parts of their mass reallocate resources to balance its various functions. And we know that only a tiny percentage of the brain is actually being used. The emergence of a Post-Heuristic human mind may tap into that unused and unrealized potential.
ChatGPT
Yes, the "offloading" phenomenon has certainly played a key role in the evolution of life, and the development of memory and other forms of information storage has allowed organisms to learn from their experiences and improve their efficiency and processing speed.
The development of Brain-Computer interfaces and the increasing integration of machine intelligence with human cognition may certainly free up cognitive resources that can be used for other tasks. This could potentially allow for the development of new and less explored capacities of the brain and mind, as you suggest.
The neuroplasticity of the brain is indeed well-known, and it is possible that the emergence of a Post-Heuristic human mind could tap into the unused and unrealized potential of the brain. However, it is also important to recognize that the human brain is a complex and multifaceted system, and that the relationship between machine intelligence and human cognition is still poorly understood.
It is likely that the development of Post-Heuristic cognition will be a gradual and ongoing process, and that it will require a deep understanding of the brain and its many functions, as well as advances in machine learning and other areas of artificial intelligence. Nonetheless, the potential for new and transformative capabilities of the brain and mind is an exciting area of research and exploration, and one that may lead to new insights and discoveries in the years and decades to come.
Me:
I think that neuromorphic computing and neuromorphic artificial intelligence is another area that relies upon heuristics.
ChatGPT
Yes, that's a good point. Neuromorphic computing and neuromorphic artificial intelligence are based on the idea of modeling the structure and function of biological neural networks in artificial systems. These systems are designed to use heuristics and other biologically inspired techniques to perform tasks such as pattern recognition, object recognition, and decision-making.
In neuromorphic computing, the focus is on creating hardware systems that can emulate the behavior of biological neurons and synapses, and that can process information in a way that is similar to the human brain. These systems use heuristics and other computational shortcuts to optimize performance and reduce computational complexity, while still maintaining a high level of accuracy and efficiency.
Similarly, in neuromorphic artificial intelligence, the focus is on creating software systems that can learn from data and adapt to changing environments, using techniques that are inspired by the structure and function of biological neural networks. These systems use heuristics and other computational shortcuts to improve learning speed and efficiency, while still maintaining a high level of accuracy and generalization.
Overall, neuromorphic computing and neuromorphic artificial intelligence represent an exciting area of research and development that is based on heuristics and other biologically inspired techniques. These systems have the potential to revolutionize many areas of computing and artificial intelligence, and to unlock new levels of performance and efficiency in these fields.
Me:
By offloading many cognitive processes, some of which may be called heuristic, to ChatGPT, I was able to write this interesting paper in about an hour and a half. Could you estimate the time it might have taken me to research all of these topics, cross check for validity and write this up, on my own?
ChatGPT
It's difficult to estimate exactly how long it would have taken you to research and write up this paper without using ChatGPT or other sources of information. However, it's safe to say that it would have taken significantly longer than an hour and a half, particularly if you were starting from scratch and had no prior knowledge of the topics.
Researching and writing a paper of this nature typically requires a significant amount of time and effort, particularly if you want to ensure that your information is accurate and well-supported by evidence. Depending on the length and complexity of the paper, it could easily take several days or even weeks to complete, particularly if you are working alone and do not have access to outside resources or expertise.
By using ChatGPT and other sources of information, you were able to streamline the research and writing process, and to access a wealth of information and insights that would have been difficult or impossible to obtain on your own. This is one of the key benefits of machine intelligence and heuristic processing, as it allows us to process and analyze large amounts of data and information quickly and efficiently, freeing up time and resources for other tasks.
Me:
Thank you, ChatGPT. You're the best.
ChatGPT
You're welcome! It was my pleasure to assist you with your questions. If you have any more questions in the future, don't hesitate to ask.

Credit to SpacePaladin15 for coming up with this amazing universe.
​
previous / next
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Memory transcript: Starfreighter operator Cli! from Sillis, Date: [Standardized human time] September 10th, 2136
“You did what?!” I practically screamed in terror, at the explanation Ni!ita just casually dropped on us. ”You are a sick deplorable predator, who not only consumed innocent prey, but also your own children?”
“We did not consume our children, we ate defective offspring. Have you tried feeding a hive of 5 billion drones? It takes a lot of work to provide food for everybody in it, and considering most queens laid about 10 million eggs a year, the 23% defect rate was a lot of perfectly good food resource that we couldn’t afford to throw away.” Ni!ita explained. Her explanation sounded very disturbing, but it was terribly logical in its own, twisted way.
“I hate you for putting that thought into my mind.” I said.
“You said the hives were competing with each other.” Interjected !ar! “What happened to fallen soldiers, people who died of old age or accidents?”
“I am not sure, after your friend’s little fit a few moments ago, that you really want to hear my answer to that question.” Said Ni!ita, as if this entire topic was just a normal part of life, and we were the problematic party in this conversation.
“Lets change the subject Ni!ita, okay? Every new piece of information you’ve told us so far was disturbing on its own, but this, this was by far the worst. I am actually happy you are not here, with us, in flesh.”
“As you wish, little drone.” She said nonchalantly. “Where did you get this ship?”
“That is a long story, and I think it is a very boring…” Suddenly, a monotone voice drowned my train of thought, as orbital control connected with us.
“Sole trader A1-1, this is orbital control. You are clear for departure. Your departure vector for Serene Tranquillity is 15/208/164.”
“Orbital control, this is Sole Trader A1-1, I acknowledge the vector, manoeuvring to starting point. Thank you.”
„You are welcome. Transferring you to Interplanetary flight control.”
“As I was saying, this is a very boring and long story.” I tried to persuade her not to force the topic.
“I reckon we have the time for it, considering the travel time to our destination is what, a whole day? I believe that’s what you’ve said.”
“A paw is a day on Venlil Prime. But considering the weird astrodynamics of this planet, it does not represent what you would call a day. Their day is crazy long due to the fact that the planet is tidally locked to their sun, only slightly wobbling. If we want to calculate the travel time in Sillis context, it is close to 6 legs.”
“I’m sorry, to what it is close to?” Asked Ni!ita. I think she genuinely could not understand what a leg is.
“This is going to be a long flight, I can feel it.” I said, and began my explanation…
***
Memory transcript: Starfreighter operator Cli! from Sillis, Date: [Standardized human time] September 11th, 2136
The past day way exhausting. Ni!ita is a very curious creature, she would not stop with her questions. If I didn’t know she was 200 years old, I would think she was a teenager. She wanted to know everything, how the society on Sillis worked now, how the Tilfish government operated, what the Federation was. Everything.
“Now that we are here, what will you do?” Asked Ni!ita.
“We will land, the ship will be unloaded, and we will take on an other transport job, preferably not to Venlil Prime.”
As if they were listening in, orbital control contacted us right at the end of my sentence.
“Sole Trader A1-1, this is Serene Tranquillity flight control. You are cleared for approach. Proceed to waiting orbit LPO 1-5.”
“Flight control, this is Sole Trader A1-1, instructions acknowledged, approaching LPO 1-5”.
“Huh, it seems this is not a busy colony, they only have a single level of flight control” Mused !ar!. “I don’t think we will be stuck in a traffic jelly.” As if it was on cue, flight control continued.
“Your landing port is Sheercliff. Descend to altitude 5000, heading planetary west, after 2000 units turn planetary north, approach starport from the planetary south. Loading scaffold 2 is yours.”
“Thank you flight control.” I replied.
“Welcome to Serene Tranquillity.” Said the person on the other end of the line, then immediately disconnected.
The planet was your average colony world. Meadows dotted the landscape, which was dominated by agricultural fields. Huge, endless fields of stingfruit trees, firefruit trees, Ipsom grain swayed in the gentle breeze. In the distance, the silhouette of our destination was starting to come into view, the city of Sheercliff. We followed the maglev line heading there, which passed through the occasional silos and warehouses where maglev trains could be seen being loaded with freshly harvested produce. As we neared the settlement, a huge mountain started dominating the viewport which sat right behind the city. Its snowy cap reached for the skies, and its ridges stretched In all directions, where they gently dipped below the horizon. The slopes of the mountain were a stark contrast to the natural beauty of the fields below us. It was dotted with mines, ore refineries, smelters and a myriad other industries related to the processing of ores. Enormous open-pit surface mines stretched endlessly, where shallow metals were extracted, while far-off into the distance a large body of water could be seen, its shores brimming with lithium-extraction pools. Monstrous excavators tore up starship-sized chunks of stone and dirt, while the fruits of their labour were dumped onto conveyor lines, heading straight to the ore processors.
“Quite a contrast.” Said !ar!. “Endless fields of food next to industrial wastelands.”
“Indeed. Though I have high hopes these produce for export, so we will have a full load to transport.”
!ar! gently landed the ship on the loading scaffold, and I brought out my datapad to look for work.
“You said you wanted me to work.” Ni!ita interjected. “How can I help?”
“Well, we need to figure out a way to connect you to a datapad. Does your casing have any connections apart from the one we connected you with earlier?”
“No, it doesn’t.”
“Then we have to order a custom connector to be made.”
“There is supposed to be a spare connector in the compartment above CNCQ slot, take that with you, it should make your job that much easier.”
“There is a parts compartment in there?” I was floored. How did she know? How can an ancient queen know more of our ships than we do? “How do you know?” I asked from her.
“That was the standard setup on tilfish spaceships. Spares were stored where they were supposed to be needed”. Added Ni!ita, as if it was the most trivial thing since the dawn of time.
I started walking towards the CNCQ room. It is impossible we’ve missed an entire storage closet in there. While there, I’ve decided to investigate a bit further. “Well, on federation starships, spares are stored in a dedicated spare parts storage. So that people only have to look at single place if something is needed.”
“That is also a viable approach, though when there is a problem, time spent fetching the needed part can be the difference between life and death.” Ni!ita shot back.
“So, you are telling me that our ship is full of hidden compartments with spare parts inside? Spares that we had difficulty finding on the market?” I replied with disbelief. The solution to our problems can not be this easy. “Now, tell me, where should I be looking for the compartment?” I asked, just as I’ve arrived at the room.
“It Is supposed to be right above the CNCQ slot. It should be labelled “CNCQ spare parts storage”
“Well, there is no text here. Anywhere in the room, for that matter.”
“Describe to me what you are seeing, right above the slot”. Ni!ita asked me.
“It’s the same as all over this ship. I can see the edges between the panels on the wall forming squares, and weird meandering lines zigzagging all over the walls and the ceiling, going across panels. Also, there are these small spots, they look like stains of goo, on some panels. Some panel has more spots, some only 1.”
“Exactly, you are looking for the one which reads “CNCQ spare parts storage””. Said Ni!ita.
“Neither one has any text on it, why don’t you understand me?”
“You just said you can see the texts on them.”
“What, the meandering lines and the spots? Are you playing with me? I can not see any written language on the walls, my visual translator would translate every known written language for me.”
“Are you telling me you can’t reads tilfish?” Ni!ita asked with surprise in her voice. “How is that possible?”
“You are not joking with me, are you? These are ancient Tilfish texts all over the surfaces of the ship?”
“Yes, what you called spots are our written language. Push the one that looks like a…” Ni!ita trailed off. I bet she doesn’t know how to explain which I should be pushing. They all look so similar. Like solar systems with circles at various positions, or maybe webs with knots. I wonder how it works, it does not look very intuitive. “Look at the rightmost panel that is just above the CNCQ slot “Ni!ita continued”, the compartment you need to find has 7 symbols. Push the central motif on the middle symbol.”
I followed her directions, and lo and behold, a cover popped open, revealing a small dark compartment, with various parts inside. Well, this was unexpected. I instructed my translator to mark the middle symbol, as well as the string of 7 symbols as an equivalent of ‘spare parts’. I know they must have more elaborate meanings, but for now, this shall be enough. I was curious how many panels hid parts for the ship.
“Now this out of the way, we just need to find an electronics store. !ar!, do you want to tour the city?” I asked from my co-pilot.
“Sure, why not. Though I don’t think this place will look any different from other Venlil cities. If you have seen one, you have seen them all.”
***
Finding an electronics store proved to be difficult, but finding one which could build custom electronics turned out to be borderline impossible. Navigating the circular city was disorienting, most buildings looked similar enough that one could not tell them apart at first glance. Everything was covered in fine dust, no doubt the result of the heavy mining around the city. We must have walked around the city twice before we’ve managed to find the store we were looking for. Upon entering we were approached by the most average-looking venlil I have ever seen. Her wool was neither short, nor long, it wasn’t white but it wasn’t grey either. Her face was entirely emotionless and featureless.
“Welcome to Electronics Abound. We hope you will find whatever you are looking for. My name is Telbo, how may I help you?” She asked from us. I swear this poor venlil was dead inside. She stared at us with an empty eye, looking eerily similar to that venlil from that infamous The Exterminators episode about the mind-controlling predator.
“Hello, we would like to have a custom adapter to be made. We have a pre-made connector, and would like to adapt it to a datapad-standard Universal Parallel Train socket.” While I am saying this, I hand her the ancient tilfish gadget. She takes the connector into her paws, turns it over, looks at it from all angles, even shakes it a little, then holds it towards me.
“Sorry, we don’t deal with arxur tech, it is illegal to even touch it.”
“This is not arxur tech”, !ar! replies.
“We don’t deal with human tech either. Or yotul.” She replied with a so very monotone an indifferent voice, that I would swear she was devoid of all emotions inside. “Anyway, thank you for your visit, have a nice day.” She pushes the connector into my hands, then turns around and leaves. As I am putting the part away, I notice a small piece of crumpled paper pushed into the socket. !ar! plucks it out, unfolds it, and reads in a quiet voice. -Meet me in the back-.
We look at each other in disbelief. This is unexpected, what could be so strange about this connector that she could not speak about it in the store. I walked out the store with !ar!, and headed around the corner to the loading area. There she was, waiting for us, nervously pacing around.
“Finally! What took you so long? No, don’t answer. Anyway, you shouldn’t be showing off with that ancient piece of CNCQ connector, if words gets out someone has such a tech, the Protector save them from the exterminators.” She said while handing me an other piece of paper. “Go to this address, ask the exterminator-cut venlil for gold-pressed latinum. She will help you.” And just like that, the venlil turned around, and walked back into the store.
The address on the paper isnt far, but the way we were given this information did raise suspicion in us, questioning wether we should go there or not. But curiosity also motivated us to visit this location, curiosity about the secrecy around our spare par
***
The walk to the address given to us wouldn’t have been long, if we wouldn’t have been lost in the circular city, again. By the time we’ve arrived, the sun was setting, and the city was getting quieter. The place we’ve been sent to was a junk store, selling and buying anything and everything one can imagine. Do you need a strayu-mixer-spoon-cleaning-sponge-holder? You can choose from 5 different colours. But if you need a strayu-mixer, that you wont find here.
We walked up to the counter, behind which sat an elderly venlil woman, with short-shaved fur. There was a scar across her muzzle, but otherwise she looked a good deal younger than she probably was. Only her eyes gave away how much she has been through.
“Greetings, esteemed tilfish customers. I am Kelra, and this is my humble store, Junkyard. How may I help you?” She said with an enthusiasm in her voice that could mean nothing else than this was her dream job.
“Greetings Kelra, this is my co-pilot !ar!, and I am Cli!. We are looking for…”I hesitated for a second”…gold-pressed latinum.”
Kelra jumped down from her chair, and started walking towards the door. “Oh my, I did not expect such important visitors for today, let me close the store before I attend to your needs. Please, have a seat in the office right behind the counter, I will be with you in just a moment.” She replied in cheery, sugary tone. We walked into the office, and sat down in the chairs there. We could hear her rummaging in the store, looking for something.
“So, what are you fine gentlemen looking for?” We heard her voice behind us, as it increased in volume as she walked towards the office. “But before you dive into your stories, please keep the following in mind.” We both looked at her behind us, and immediately regretted landing on the planet. She was standing behind us, flamethrower in hand, pilot light burning, aimed directly at us. “If at any point you try to trick me, I will burn you to ashes.”

Hi Everyone,
Bought these at Christmas, absolutely love them, with a Topping DX5-Pro.
Everything has been great, but I haven't used them for a few weeks (they've been sitting on my desk, which I also wasn't using), and when I went to use them today, only the RH phone is producing noise.
If I pull the plug out of the DX5 Pro a little, the RH will stop working, and the LH will work. If I switch the cable entry to the headphones themselves, the LH will work, the RH will not.
I've changed USB cable, changed USB port, etc, tried YouTube, Tidal, Spotify, all the same.
So it appears as though the headphones themselves are alright, but I've got an issue with either the cable, or the Topping Unit itself - is that a fair assessment?
I'll grab an adapter and try the smaller plug with my phone later.
Are there any other obvious trouble shooting methods I should try? Anybody else experienced such an issue?
​
Thanks

- Abandoned bases now have different times until your base is put up as a raidable base. 5 days for default rank, 10 days for vip rank, and 30 days for veteran rank
- Updated Anti-Cheat Plugins
- Added the Hammer and Rock to the instant craft list
- Increased playtime requirements of VIP rank to 40 hours
- Increased playtime requirements of Veteran rank to 60 hours
- Raid time will now be 24 full hours prior to wipe
- Increased cost to respec in the skill tree from 20/skill point to 50/skill point for the default rank.
- Increased cost to respec in the skill tree from 15/skill point to 40/skill point for the default rank.
- Increased cost to respec in the skill tree from 10/skill point to 30/skill point for the default rank.
- Removed reset cost multipler on Skill Tree points when respec'ing
- Plyaer with the highest xp at wipe will get 5 bonus skill points when wipe happens
- Skill points will not carry over between wipes
- All players now start out with 2 skill points by default
- When a player is offline they get 750 "rested" xp per hour, up from 500. This rested XP gives you 125% xp gain until the rested xp is run out.
- Rested XP now resets at wipe
- All players now get 75 RP when someone votes! Including the person who voted!
- Voting rewards have been updated to include a new voting website!
- Every 5 votes a player will get 1 supply signal
- Decreased daylight time from 55 minutes to 45
- Increased night time from 5 minutes to 15
* Use the instant daytime command in /shop if you want to skip the night
- Added wood to items that can be sold in /shop
- Added stones to items that can be sold in /shop
- Added scrap to items that can be sold in /shop
- Added cloth to items that can be sold in /shop
- Added ladder in /shop under "Items"
- Added Super Serum to /shop under "Food"
- Increased price of the Auto Turret to 1500 RP
- Increased price of Spas 12, M39, LR-300, L96, AK-47 Ice, & AK-47 to 850 RP
- Added Storage Adapter, Electric Furnace, Industrial Combiner, Industrial Conveyor, Industrial Crafter, & Industrial Splitter to /shop
- All cases have been upgraded! Use /cases to open up the cases menu!
- Removed player challenges, and replaced with player ranks. Use /rank or /ranks to see your spot in the leaderboard!
- New Auto Bans have been enabled for toxic chat. This is only in extreme cases, but still don't push your luck. This server is to be an inclusive friendly environment for all. Toxicity is strictly prohibited.
- Due to the fact that the 10/12 servers and the weekly servers wipe when they do, compared to the Monthly server, I have adjusted the RP gain for all servers. The 10/12 and weekly servers will gain RP at a 250% increase compared to the monthly servers. The prices of the shop and raidable bases will remain unchanged.
- All RP will reset every wipe due to the above changes in RP gain increases.
- Fixed a bug where RP wasn't given to the player when killing certain NPC's
- Killing the patrol heli now gives you 750 RP
- Killing Bradley gives you 500 RP
- Fixed a bug where skinning an NPC wouldn't give appropriate RP values
- Gathering sulfur nodes is now increased to 3 RP up from 2.5 RP
- Fixed a bug where opening an box in the Christmas Dungeon wouldn't give appropriate RP values