Hi there! I've got the itch to roleplay after taking a break for a few years. With some new free time on my hands, I figured why not give it a go!
I do have my heart set on romance being integrated in some capacity. If that isn't your cup of tea, I totally understand, but I'm probably not the partner for you then :)
I am 26 and prefer my partner to be at least 21+, otherwise it just feels a little odd.
In the past I've done mostly fantasy roleplays. Usually to the tune of being in a guild or adventurers exploring a fantasy landscape with quests and character development along the way. I've also done a sprinkle of more modern day roleplays. I'm sort of wanting to try something different and have two ideas listed below, but I'm open to ideas!
I use Discord for communication and roleplay. I'm generally pretty responsive. The exception being during the weekdays from 8AM-4PM CT when I'm working. My responses range depending on the scene and my partner, but I can post a response that is a couple paragraphs to a couple of pages. Again, all depends on the situation and matching my partner's energy!
Here are some rough ideas that I'm throwing out there, but again, open to more ideas!
​
#1: Small Town Love Story
A quaint small town, nestled in the countryside, with charming local businesses, friendly locals, and a cozy atmosphere.
Character A: A newcomer to the town, who has recently moved to start a new life.
Character B: A long-time resident of the town, who knows everyone and everything there is to know about the community.
Character A has just moved to this small town, hoping to start fresh after a difficult breakup. They're a little apprehensive about settling in a new place but excited about the possibility of new beginnings.
Character B is a friendly and outgoing resident of the town, who has always been a staple in the community. They bump into Character A at the local grocery store and strike up a conversation, eager to welcome the newcomer to the town.
As the weeks pass by, Character A and Character B continue to bump into each other around town, striking up conversations and building a friendship. They explore the local businesses together, attend community events, and get to know each other better.
As their friendship deepens, Character A and Character B both start to feel something more. They begin to realize that they have developed feelings for each other and are drawn to one another's company.
The rest of the story follows Character A and Character B as they navigate their feelings for each other, the ups and downs of small-town life, and the challenges of starting a new relationship. Will their love blossom into something more? Or will the pressures of small-town life and past relationships get in the way?
Possible conflicts and twists:
-Character A's ex-partner shows up in town, throwing a wrench in their new relationship.
-Character B's family disapproves of their relationship with Character A, causing tension and conflict.
-Character B has a secret past that they've been keeping hidden from the town and from Character A. When the truth comes out, it threatens to derail their relationship.
​
#2: Dystopian Romance
In New Eden where love is outlawed, two people from different walks of life meet and are inexplicably drawn to each other. One is a member of the ruling elite, tasked with maintaining the strict laws that prohibit any kind of emotional connection between individuals. The other is a member of the underground resistance movement, fighting against the oppressive regime and hoping to one day overthrow it.
The government is totalitarian, and emotions are considered a weakness that must be suppressed at all costs. People live in a state of constant fear and surveillance, and any kind of personal connection is strictly prohibited.
The ruling elite live in luxurious high-rise buildings, with advanced technology and all the resources they need to maintain their power. They are guarded by heavily armed soldiers who are trained to detect any signs of emotional attachment and report it to the authorities.
The underground resistance movement is scattered across the city, hidden in abandoned buildings and secret hideouts. They operate in secrecy, constantly evading the watchful eyes of the government. They believe that love and human connection are essential for a free and just society, and they are willing to risk everything to fight against the oppressive regime.
The city itself is dark and cold, with towering buildings blocking out the sun. The streets are lined with surveillance cameras and armed guards, and people move quickly and quietly to avoid attracting attention. There are no public spaces or places for people to gather, and communication is strictly monitored and controlled.
Despite the harsh conditions, the two protagonists meet by chance and are inexplicably drawn to each other. They struggle to keep their relationship hidden from both the ruling elite and the resistance movement, facing constant danger and uncertainty.
As their love grows, they must confront difficult decisions and weigh the risks of their actions. They must navigate the treacherous landscape of their society and decide where their loyalties lie, knowing that any mistake could have fatal consequences.

After reading Charlotte's story in the SSC1 and sympathizing with her frustration over Wilfried's path to becoming aub ("It feels like a road to the archducal seat has been paved just for him... He must have the love of the gods.”), it brought up something I've always wondered about Veronica's plan to make Wilfried a puppet aub. Maybe it was a sign of Veronica's arrogance and stupidity, but how did she expect her plan to work if Wilfried was so uneducated that he couldn't even read pre-debut? [Ninefl4mes] mentioned in one of the SSC1 threads that:

Pretty sure it was stated in one of the fanbooks that Veronica's "plan" was to blame Wilfried's failure on Florencia and force Sylvester to marry a new wife from Ahrensbach. Yes, really. She seriously thought it would have been a great idea to make a mortal enemy of the archduke in the most self incriminating way imaginable for the sole reason of spiting the love of his life.

Not sure how she expected this plan to work though, since it seemed like a fair amount of nobles knew that Veronica was raising Wilfried? Even Hirschur knew, and we know how much she stays updated on Ehrenfest.
Assuming Veronica and Wil's attendants somehow got him to pass his debut and kept his lack of progress under wraps from the rest of the archducal family, how was she planning on getting him educated enough to actually pass classes at the Royal Academy? Granted, they'd have 3 years from his debut and he'd still go to the winter playroom, but she had this plan well before Roz entered the picture with her educational reforms. This is also assuming Wil's retinue could get him under control, and he wouldn't keep running away and skipping out on tutoring.
Has it ever been stated that you can flunk out of the Royal Academy, which would have led to Wil being disinherited? In an AU where Roz wasn't involved with the archducal family, I could see Wil never getting educated enough to make it through the RA, leading to Charlotte or Melchior being named future aub, and negating Veronica's flawed puppet aub plan.

Do not repost anywhere.
I don’t know how to get over my anxiety when it comes to my MIL. We have had a very shaky past and she has done countless things that I do not approve of and I had to correct her on the spot. I don’t give a shit when it comes to my son, I will protect him at all costs because I AM HIS MOM. I call the shots, not grandma. To provide a little context my son is 9 months old. There is a language barrier, I speak English as my first language and I speak a little Spanish and Spanish is her first language. I have no problem busting out google translate to speak my peace. She caused a lot of damage in our relationship by saying some disgusting unnecessary things to me about my marriage, my son and my parenting that were all lies. I went NC with her for about 4 months and would have remained NC if it wasn’t for my husband. Ever since this big ass explosion she had on me because I didn’t want her basically living at my house while I was PP and told her that I am going to parent my child how me and my husband feel is right has led to all of this anxiety that consumes me when she is around. Constantly feeling like even though she’s tried to make her peace with me she secretly resents me and does things I don’t like behind my back. When I was one month PP she tells me I should have breastfeed my son longer than one month because we’re not going to bond properly and that formula has chemicals that are not good for him. She told me I should sleep on the couch with my baby in the bassinet next to me so my HUSBAND can get uninterrupted rest. Girl, be fucking for real right now. I work from home, my husband is currently at work too and she is visiting us. side eye I go downstairs and she has my son in his bouncy chair, eating a whole banana, while he’s bouncing. He has only ate purées and rice cereal up until now and we are currently transitioning to table food. Why would anyone with ANY common sense feed a baby solids in a bouncy chair or feed him solids without asking me first? I immediately took him out of the bouncy chair and told her he does not eat in his bouncy chair to prevent choking, he needs to be in his high chair and moved him. Then she says “I’m gonna take him to the park” the park is like easily a mile from my house and the stroller is in my husbands car, at his job. My son can’t even do anything at the park unless they had a baby swing, which they don’t and you can ASK me not tell me. I told her no, if you want to take him right in front of our house in his walker, you can. She walks him out of my sight around the corner from my house and I immediately starting sweating, getting nervous and having intrusive thoughts of something happening to him. Yesterday, I see that my son has her phone, and is putting it in his mouth while she’s right next to him. I walked up right away and took it from him and said no, right in front of her. Today, my son is playing in his crib and I’m working and I have the baby monitor right next to me and I see him with her phone again, I walked in his room and took the phone and moved it to the dresser and said no phone and no phone in la boca (no phone in the mouth) she was standing right there. 5 minutes later I look on the monitor again, and he HAS IT AGAIN. I walked in there and said to her dije sin telefono in la boca, entonces que? (I said no phone in the mouth so why?) She said oh I’m sorry I don’t know how he got it, um you fuckin gave it to him that’s how. I don’t even think she knows I watch the cameras in our house constantly when she is over because I don’t trust her. This whole situation with his mother has caused many problems in my marriage we literally went to marriage counseling and yet I still feel like he does not prioritize my feelings above her. It’s heart breaking. I just have so many emotions when it comes to her, and honestly I don’t want to let her out of my sight when she’s with my son. I called my husband and told him what was going on because he asked and said I sounded annoyed. He is like oh my god I’m so sorry what the fuck, UM DONT BE SORRY CORRECT HER SHES YOUR MOM NOT MINE. My husband doesn’t get it and has a hard time standing up to her because she’s been emotionally manipulative his whole life. Honey, you’re grown now with a family of your own, a wife, a son, and a home. Boundaries and consequences are a MUST and I CANNOT be the only one doing it. I’m just so frustrated.

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I went to an AE store yesterday for the first time in about a year, and there's two dresses I really fell in love with: the Smocked Tiered Mini Dress and the Hey Baby Tee Mini Dress. The only problem is I needed an XS in the Smocked Mini, and the Baby Tee Mini needed about another inch or two of length to be wearable, so I was going to order it in a Tall size. But both of these are out of stock online, and the Tall sizes are online only. I read that AE restocks their items online every few weeks, but I also read that they don't restock that often and that it depends on the popularity of the item.
How likely is it that there will be a restock of these pieces in the next month? I'm trying to decide if I should just settle for a slightly bigger size or a color I don't like as much.

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Good afternoon UNC Charlotte students. This summer i will be interning in charlotte and am looking for housing from June 5th to August 13th. if any of you have a extra room at your apartment/house please feel free to send me a message to see if we can arrange something. Also if you have any recommendations please LMK. Thank you>

https://www.nytimes.com/2013/01/27/magazine/how-much-can-restitution-help-victims-of-child-pornography.html
When Nicole was a child, her father took pornographic pictures of her that still circulate on the internet.
Victims of child pornography can now collect damages directly from those convicted of possessing their images. But how much can restitution help them repair their lives?
By Emily Bazelon Jan. 24, 2013
The detective spread out the photographs on the kitchen table, in front of Nicole, on a December morning in 2006. She was 17, but in the pictures, she saw the face of her 10-year-old self, a half-grown girl wearing make-up. The bodies in the images were broken up by pixelation, but Nicole could see the outline of her father, forcing himself on her. Her mother, sitting next to her, burst into sobs.
The detective spoke gently, but he had brutal news: the pictures had been downloaded onto thousands of computers via file-sharing services around the world. They were among the most widely circulated child pornography on the Internet. Also online were video clips, similarly notorious, in which Nicole spoke words her father had scripted for her, sometimes at the behest of other men. For years, investigators in the United States, Canada and Europe had been trying to identify the girl in the images.
Nicole's parents split up when she was a toddler, and she grew up living with her mother and stepfather and visiting her father, a former policeman, every other weekend at his apartment in a suburban town in the Pacific Northwest. He started showing her child pornography when she was about 9, telling her that it was normal for fathers and daughters to "play games" like in the pictures. Soon after, he started forcing her to perform oral sex and raping her, dressing her in tight clothes and sometimes binding her with ropes. When she turned 12, she told him to stop, but he used threats and intimidation to continue the abuse for about a year. He said that if she told anyone what he'd done, everyone would hate her for letting him. He said that her mother would no longer love her.
Nicole (who asked me to use her middle name to protect her privacy) knew her father had a tripod set up in his bedroom. She asked if he'd ever shown the pictures to anyone. He said no, and she believed him. "It was all so hidden," she told me. "And he knew how to lie. He taught me to do it. He said: 'You look them straight in the eye. You make your shoulders square. You breathe normally.'"
When she was 16, Nicole told her mother, in a burst of tears, what had been going on at her father's house. Her father was arrested for child rape. The police asked Nicole whether he took pictures. She said yes, but that she didn't think he showed them to anyone. A few months later, while her father was out on bail, Nicole was using a computer he gave her to work on a presentation for Spanish class when she came across a file with a vulgar name that she couldn't open. She showed it to her mother and stepfather, and they brought the computer to the police.
A search detected five deleted video files of child pornography, two of them showing Nicole and her father. In the spring of 2006, he was charged with a new crime—producing the videos—and he fled the country. At this point, the police didn't realize that Nicole's father had also distributed the images.
Months later, the police said they had no leads on her father, so Nicole went on television to ask the public for any tips that might help them find him. A police officer in Toronto involved in tracking child pornography around the world saw the broadcast and recognized Nicole as an older version of the girl in the notorious videos. The Toronto officer set off an alert that reached the police in Nicole's hometown, informing them that she was the victim in a major pornography-distribution case.
The alert brought the local detective to Nicole's house on that December day, to confirm that she was in fact the girl in the pictures that circulated around the globe. "It was the worst moment of my life," Nicole said of seeing the pictures of herself. "In a way, I didn't remember it being that bad with my father—and then I saw that it was. Knowing that other people, all over, had seen me like that, I just froze. I could hear my mother crying, but I couldn't cry."
Nicole's appearance on TV produced a tip that eventually led the police to arrest her father in Hong Kong. But by going public, she had inadvertently exposed her identity to thousands of men who for years had collected her images. On one Web site with an American flag design, on a thread that continued for four years, commenters described in detail the acts of rape and bondage Nicole had experienced. One called the videos "legendary." Another called her "an eager participant" because her father instructed her to smile and talk in the videos. "The fact remains that she is the most searched for, sought after and downloaded ever," a third commenter wrote. "There are hours of video out there. It's just too bad there are not more willing like her."
For Nicole, knowing that so many men have witnessed and taken pleasure from her abuse has been excruciating. "You have an image of yourself as a person, but here is this other image," she told me. "You know it's not true, but all those other people will believe that it's you—that this is who you really are."
Until the 1970s, magazines with titles like Lolita were rife with sexual images of minors and routinely sold alongside adult pornography at red-light bookstores. In 1978, Congress made child pornography illegal, and four years later, the Supreme Court upheld a state law banning its sale. The court's decision changed the market along with the law. "The commercial distributors started to go out of business," said Kenneth Lanning, a retired F.B.I. agent who consulted on child pornography cases for decades. For a time, distribution and production plummeted. But then came the Internet. By the mid- to late 1990s, Lanning said, "there was a way for people seeking it to find each other and send images."
A decade later, the Justice Department interviewed veteran experts like Lanning for a 2010 report, and concluded that "the market—in terms of numbers of offenders, images and victims"—was growing to a degree described as "overwhelming" and "exponential." In the early-Web year of 1994, only 61 defendants were sentenced in federal court for child-pornography offenses; in 2011, 1,880 were, a 30-fold increase. The federal definition of child pornography extends to young people up to age 18, but the 2010 report noted that it had become more common for images to involve young children, as well as violence and sadism.
Precise numbers of child-pornography viewers are hard to come by. Unicef estimates that there are at least hundreds of thousands of Web sites with child pornography worldwide. Child-pornography consumers are even more likely to swap with one another via hidden networks. Using a tool developed at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, in 2009, police have logged close to 22 million public I.P. addresses offering child-pornography pictures or videos via peer-to-peer file sharing, which allows users to download content from one computer to another; almost 10 million of the I.P. addresses were located in the United States. Many of the users shared only a single illegal image, perhaps downloaded inadvertently, but others offered collections of hundreds or thousands of pictures.
To gain access to a group of downloaders, a recent arrival may have to prove himself by delivering new material. Often this involves digitally altering an existing image, but in some cases, it can also mean seducing children to create new pictures to trade. The most desired series zoom around the Internet. "A lot of these guys have a collector's mentality," Lanning said. The pictures Nicole's father took became must-haves and went viral.
For Nicole, knowing that her photos were circulating was an unrelenting burden. It was hard to concentrate at school and hard to forge new friendships. She stayed close to just a few friends from her church. Her family is deeply Christian—"I've found comfort in my faith," she says—and she was home-schooled for a few years as a younger child. Her friends from church were the only ones she told about her father. "Everyone else I held at arm's length," she told me when we met this summer at her lawyer's office. Nicole speaks deliberately and carefully, and on that day she was wearing an outfit that matched her coral nail polish and perfectly applied makeup. "But other kids found out after my father was charged. I remember walking down the hallways and thinking I could hear people saying, 'There's the girl who was raped by her dad.'"
In her junior year, Nicole transferred to a community college with a program for students who wanted to earn an associate's degree while finishing high school. "At the time I'd have said I went for academic reasons, but looking back, it was also to isolate myself," she said.
Late that spring, Nicole got a series of messages on Myspace from a man who said he had been looking for her for five years. He asked, "Want me to come visit u?" When Nicole blocked him, he wrote to one of her friends on Myspace, telling her that Nicole was a "porn star"—and sending two images. "That's when I fully realized what it meant for these pictures to be out there," Nicole said. "I couldn't get away from it, not really. I started getting paranoid and having nightmares."
The man was arrested and went to prison, but Nicole couldn't avoid the knowledge that other men were still looking at the sexual photos of her young self. Later that year, she got a letter from the Victim Notification System at the Justice Department. Congress had passed a law in 2004 mandating that crime victims receive notice every time a suspect is arrested or has a court appearance. The letter was addressed to Nicole's mother and stepfather because she hadn't yet turned 18; it informed them that a man in California had been arrested for possessing a pornographic photo of her. "It just sat there on the counter for days," Nicole remembered. "We didn't really know where to put it." More arrests followed and more letters—piles of them. "We stacked them in a laundry basket in a walk-in closet so I wouldn't have to see them," Nicole said. "Then there were more baskets, and we had to move them to the garage. It was really hard for me. I was still scared of my father, but I knew him. These other people, they were strangers, and there were so many of them."
The piles of letters would eventually connect Nicole with another young woman who had also been abused and then lead them both to court. Back in April 1998, in one of the first investigations into Internet trafficking of child pornography, the F.B.I. started tracking an AOL user, with the handle HAZMAT029, who was posting on an AOL bulletin board service. HAZMAT029 sent 80 illegal pictures to another user, BMR169, along with e-mails that included the message: "do me a favor. get a peice [sic] of paper and wright HI HAZ on it and take a pic of her in nothing but stockings pulled down below her [genitals]." BMR169 e-mailed back pictures of a young girl, her shorts and underwear pulled to the side, sitting on a gray carpet in front of a wooden dresser. Next to her, a note read, "HI HAZ."
The F.B.I. traced BMR's AOL account to a suburban house in a small town, and in October of that year, a team of agents arrived with a search warrant. In a basement bedroom, they found the gray carpet and the dresser. They also seized a computer full of illegal images, including pictures that showed the same girl being forced to give oral sex and being raped. The man the F.B.I. suspected was BMR wasn't home, so the agents showed the face of the child in the photos to his wife and his adult son. Did they recognize the girl?
They did. As they spoke, one of the agents looked out the window of the house and saw the girl playing in the yard across the street. "It's something I'll never forget," he told me.
Amy, as she's called in the court documents, was BMR's 9-year-old niece. Shown sanitized versions of the pictures, Amy denied that her uncle had abused her. She said he told her she was special and took her to buy treats like beef jerky, and she didn't want anything bad to happen to him. "How is he?" she asked her parents in the weeks after his arrest. "Is he going to be mad at me?"
Over months of therapy, Amy began to talk about the abuse. "My mind has everything in it," she told her therapist, according to court records I read with her permission. She remembered her uncle trying to have sex with her—it hurt, and she pulled away. And she remembered, at his direction, chatting with men over the Internet about the photos he sent them.
Amy's uncle pleaded guilty to one count of rape and two counts of child sexual abuse in state court and was sentenced to the minimum for each one, adding up to 12½ years in prison. In federal court, he pleaded guilty to one count of production of child pornography and received a 12-year sentence. Amy's current lawyer, James Marsh, says her parents were told the state and federal penalties would run consecutively, but instead, her uncle was allowed to serve the two at the same time.
Amy was given a diagnosis of depression and post-traumatic stress disorder the year her uncle was sentenced, but she also asked to stop going to therapy—she told her parents that she didn't want to talk about the abuse anymore. Her mother, who worked in health care, and her father, a tradesman, blamed themselves for trusting Amy's uncle with her. For years Amy's mother barely spoke to Amy's aunt, who remained married to her husband, even though the sisters continued to live across the street from each other.
As Amy grew up, she tried to push aside what had happened to her. Every few months, in middle school and high school, her parents would ask if she wanted to talk about it, and each time she would say no. "I was always thinking about it, but I wasn't ready to deal with how I felt," she says now. Amy threw herself into her social life, going out and drinking in the hills behind her house. Even to the friends who knew, it almost seemed as if the abuse hadn't happened.
When she was 17, Amy received her first crime-victim notice from the Justice Department. "My mom said it was a mistake, because I was still a minor—the letter should have been addressed to her and my dad," she said. "But it had my name on it, and I never got mail, so I wanted to open it. My parents took me into their room and said we needed to have a talk." Amy's parents had never told her that her uncle had distributed images of her to other men. "It had been so long by then, eight years," she said. "They didn't know how to tell me."
Amy's parents took her to see Marsh, who had started the public-interest Children's Law Center in Washington. At their first meeting, he explained to Amy that the letters meant her pictures had been traded countless times online. "I just felt so full of shame," Amy said. "I started wondering, Has he looked at them? He said he hadn't, and that made me feel better. But then I thought, Who has?"
Marsh researched legal remedies for Amy. Combing through his casebooks, he found a provision in the Violence Against Women Act that he had never heard of before: it gave the victims of sex crimes, including child pornography, the right to restitution or compensation for the "full amount" of their losses. Enumerating what those losses could be, Congress listed psychiatric care, lost income and legal costs and concluded, "The issuance of a restitution order under this section is mandatory."
The provision for restitution, enacted in 1994, had yet to be invoked in a case of child-pornography possession. The basis for such a claim wasn't necessarily self-evident: how could Amy prove that her ongoing trauma was the fault of any one man who looked at her pictures, instead of her uncle, who abused her and made the pornography?
Marsh suggested that Amy see a forensic psychologist, Joyanna Silberg, who evaluated Amy and said she would need therapy throughout her life and could expect to work sporadically because of the likelihood of periodic setbacks. Silberg attributed these costs—Amy's damages—to her awareness of the ongoing downloading and viewing. "Usually, we try to help survivors of child sexual abuse make a very strong distinction between the past and the present," Silberg, who has given testimony on Amy's behalf for restitution hearings, told me. "The idea is to contain the harm: it happened then, and it's not happening anymore. But how do you do that when these images are still out there? The past is still the present, which turns the hallmarks of treatment on their head."
Marsh put together a lifetime claim for Amy totaling almost $3.4 million. With the crime notices arriving in the mail, Marsh started tracking men charged with possession of her pictures. He looked, in particular, for wealthy defendants. He planned to use the concept of joint and several liability to argue that each defendant should be on the hook for the full amount of his client's damages—that is, for millions of dollars. Joint and several liability is often used in pollution cases: when several companies dump toxic waste in a lake over time, a plaintiff can go after the company with the deepest pockets, and a judge can hold that single company responsible for the entire cost of the cleanup—with the understanding that it's up to that polluter to sue the others to pay their share.
In July 2008, Marsh learned about the arrest of Alan Hesketh, a former vice-president of Pfizer, who was charged with trading nearly 2,000 child-pornography photos online—among them four pictures of Amy. Marsh filed one of his first requests for restitution with the prosecution. Hesketh pleaded guilty, and his sentencing was scheduled for later that year.
At the time of the Hesketh case, Amy was struggling. She was 19 and living with her boyfriend. She had enrolled at a local community college, but she drank too much to concentrate on studying. The crime-victim notices had stirred up the past for her, and she wasn't in regular therapy. "The last class I went to, there was this PowerPoint slide, something about child sexual abuse, and I thought, I can't do this," she told me as she sat in her kitchen smoking a cigarette. "It just brought everything back." Amy dropped out after that, without telling her parents. "I told myself I would just take a year off," she continued. "But you know, statisticwise, once you leave school, the chances you'll finish go down about 80 percent."
Amy has a quick intelligence—she's a college dropout who can rattle off her own odds of going back—and asks lots of questions. She has focused her curiosity on the legal strategy that Marsh has pursued for her. When Hesketh was sentenced, Amy decided she would be there. "I kind of wanted to face my fear," she told me. She also wanted to prove a point: Hesketh was arguing, through his lawyer, that he had committed a victimless crime—a common defense in cases of child-pornography possession. "I thought, I want him to look at me and know that I'm not a picture; I'm a person," she said.
In a federal courthouse in Bridgeport, Conn., in October 2008, Amy sat on the opposite side of the courtroom from Hesketh's family. The judge opened the proceedings by acknowledging that there was a victim in the courtroom. Amy listened as Hesketh's grown children asked the judge for mercy for their father. "His kids kept saying he was the best grandfather ever," she said. "And I was like: 'But you know. You know what he did.'"
Then Hesketh took the stand. As Amy remembers it, he said, "I'm so sorry." Earlier, he said that "he hadn't hurt anyone," Amy told me. "Now he totally flipped around. I felt like I'd made an impact. It was like, 'He knows now.'"
Hesketh was sentenced to 6½ years. Four months later, in an unprecedented move, the judge advised Hesketh to settle the restitution claim and he agreed to pay $130,000.
Not long after, Amy found out she was pregnant. She wasn't sorry—at the time she had faith in her boyfriend, whom she had told about the abuse and the photos. But he was a heroin user and dealer, and he went to jail two months after their son was born. Amy started seeing another man who she says had a jealous streak and broke her nose, twice. He also broke her infant son's leg, she told me. She took the blame when he threatened her, and she had to give up custody to her mother for six months.
As she recalled this time in her life, she took out her phone and scrolled through her photos until she found a close-up of her beaten face: lip split, one eye half-closed, nose swollen and cheek yellow with bruises. The young woman next to me had clear skin and bright eyes, and I had just watched her charm a police officer into calling us a cab. The girl in the photo was expressionless.
Amy stared at the picture on her phone. "That was my normal," she said.
Six months after Hesketh's sentencing, Marsh went after another child-pornography defendant, Arthur Staples, a 65-year-old sheriff's deputy in Virginia, who had chatted online with an undercover detective and expressed an interest in young children. Staples sent one image of a young girl (not Amy), and he was caught with more than 600 pictures on his computer, including hers. Staples agreed not to appeal any sentence or restitution judgment. The judge sentenced him to 17½ years, and made the unusual move of ordering him to pay all of Amy's claim. To Marsh's surprise, Staples turned out to have $2 million in assets. He has since paid $1.2 million to Amy. (Marsh says the government let Staples's wife keep part of the estate.) While Amy has been turned down for restitution by some courts, which have stated that there was not enough proof that any one man who viewed her pictures was responsible for the harm she has suffered, she has won more than 150 cases, totaling $1.6 million. Most of the amounts aren't large: $1,000 or even $100, paid out in checks as small as $7.33.
Nicole has also been pursuing restitution. Her lawyer, Carol Hepburn, did her own research and got in touch with Marsh when she learned about the claims he was bringing for Amy. The two lawyers now collaborate on ideas and strategy, though they represent their clients separately. Since receiving her first check for $10,000, Nicole has collected more than $550,000, mostly in small amounts from 204 different men. So far only a few other child-pornography victims have gone to court for restitution. Many may not know there is a legal remedy; others don't know their images have circulated.
The restitution checks gave Nicole a lift when they started to trickle in, but, like Amy, she had trouble with the transition into adulthood. In the fall of 2008, Nicole was attending a one-year bible college and working at an ice-cream shop. At work she felt increasingly self-conscious around male customers. Had they seen her pictures? Were they like the man who stalked her on Myspace—were any of them coming to the store because they knew? That spring, Nicole testified at her father's sentencing. She asked the judge to give him a long punishment, and her father was sent to prison for 50 years. Her roommates, one of whom was a friend from her childhood church, supported her. "But I didn't have a counselor there, and that was tough," she said. "I called my parents and said: 'I have to quit my job, and I need to come home. I feel like I'm going crazy.'"
During her first few weeks at home, Nicole slept all day in her childhood bedroom and stayed up late watching sitcoms like Sabrina and The Nanny. Finally, she started counseling and was able to get a job doing administrative work at a nuclear-waste site. That June, she testified at the sentencing hearing of four child-pornography defendants caught with her images, hoping to gather strength from speaking out. Instead, the experience made her feel exposed.
More than a year later, in the fall of 2010, she left for a four-year college away from home. She was worried about being on her own, but she wanted to try. "I push myself," she told me. "I don't like to say something is too much for me." Like Amy, however, she took a psychology course, about child development, that brought up unbearable memories. During lectures, she began going blank. "All of a sudden class would be over, and I would be like, 'What happened?'" she said. She started skipping class for fear of continuing to disassociate.
Nicole, who wasn't in counseling at the time, failed all but two of her courses that spring. "I just totally broke down," she said. "I'd come home and sit in the same position and stare into space, and then I'd look at the clock, and it was six hours later." Nicole talked about this period of her life with Hepburn and me over dinner one night last summer. She showed us a tattoo on her right wrist: a heart sheltered by wings that she got after her father's sentencing. She also learned to make tattoos, and she took out her phone to show us a picture of the first one she created, an anchor with a rope curled around it. "My cousin is a tattoo artist, and he taught me," she said. "We grew up together, and he was a very easy person to hang out with during that bad time. I'd go over to his place, and he'd be drawing, and he said, 'You're into design, you could do this.' When I tried I felt this release of emotions. We started drawing for hours to music—Tom Petty, Cake, everything. You have to learn how to go smoothly and keep the same pressure on the line the whole time. I drew anchors over and over again on grapefruit. I'd been numb for months, and now I could feel again. I actually felt joy."
In the fall of 2011, Nicole transferred to a campus closer to her family. She made her way through her course work by avoiding subject matter that upset her and by allowing for her own limitations. "I had to accept that, because I have this extra stressor, I get overwhelmed by things that other people can do," she said.
Nicole decided to spare herself going to court, so she wasn't in El Paso, in September 2011, for the sentencing of Luis Enriquez-Alonso, a student at the University of Texas. He agreed to plead guilty after being caught with thousands of illegal videos and images, including Nicole's, on his computer. At the hearing, Enriquez-Alonso and his parents listened while the prosecutor read into the record a statement Nicole wrote about what it is like to know men are looking at her pictures: "After all these years and going to different counselors, I still haven't learned the trick to let my mind rest," Nicole wrote. "When I do sleep, my dreams are vivid and I remember them for weeks. A common theme is finding myself naked in front of a crowd of people or in an enclosed space and I can't escape or run away fast enough."
That day, without a court order, Enriquez-Alonso's family handed over a check for $150,000, along with an expression of remorse. "That really touched me," Nicole said, "that his family wanted to make sure that I was taken care of, that I could get all the counseling I need. Most of the time when I get restitution, there's no story behind it. I feel like they're forced to give the money. In this case, they wanted to do it, and there were words behind it, kind words." Enriquez-Alonso, who faced a maximum of 10 years in prison, is serving 5.
Study after study links child sexual abuse to psychological trauma, addiction and violent relationships in adulthood. There is almost no research, however, that deals with the specifics of Amy and Nicole's experiences: What additional harm comes from knowing that pictures of your childhood exploitation are circulating widely?
The Supreme Court actually addressed this question in its 1982 decision upholding child-pornography bans. "Pornography poses an even greater threat to the child victim than does sexual abuse or prostitution," Justice Byron White wrote, quoting from a book about abused children. "Because the child's actions are reduced to a recording, the pornography may haunt him in future years, long after the original misdeed took place."
David Finkelhor, a sociologist who directs the Crimes Against Children Research Center at the University of New Hampshire, sees the moral weight of the Supreme Court's proclamation, but not the empirical proof. "The evidence doesn't yet tell us to what extent the experience of being a pornography victim aggravates the experience of the sexual abuse itself," he told me. "How do you separate it out?"
Courts have disagreed on this question. In at least a dozen cases, defendants have appealed restitution decisions and mostly won. In five of those cases, federal appeals courts have expressed skepticism that Amy and Nicole should receive more than nominal restitution. Two other appeals courts have allowed the young women to recover from individual defendants as members of the group of viewers but, so far, only for amounts of $10,000 or less. (Amy collected a far greater sum from Arthur Staples because he waived his right to appeal.)
Last spring, the legal battle was focused on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit, which covers Texas, Louisiana and Mississippi. One panel of three judges upheld full restitution to Amy of millions of dollars from a Texas man. Based on that decision, a second three-judge panel affirmed a separate $529,000 restitution order for Amy against a New Orleans defendant, but voiced its fundamental disagreement with the original ruling. To address the dispute, 15 Fifth Circuit judges gathered last May for a hearing in New Orleans. James Marsh and Carol Hepburn were there along with Amy; Nicole chose not to go. Amy knew this was the most significant hearing to date, and she wanted to show the judges that she was real, just as she had shown Alan Hesketh.
At the lectern to argue her side was Paul G. Cassell, a former federal judge who teaches law at the University of Utah. Cassell is a staunch conservative (he challenged the right to a Miranda warning before the Supreme Court), and Marsh and Hepburn, both Democrats, were surprised at first to be allied with him. But as a leading advocate for victims' rights, Cassell sees in Amy's claims a chance to lay the groundwork for broader change.
For 30 years, the victims'-rights movement has fought for a larger role for victims in criminal prosecutions. Victims have gained the right to make statements in court about the impact a crime has had on them, which judges can take into account in determining punishment. Restitution remains an ambitious next step. The standard context is crime involving financial loss—a bank robber ordered to return stolen money to the bank or an embezzler who must repay the employer he defrauded. Cassell sees Amy and Nicole's cases as a route to expand the idea. "I'd like to pursue the concept of total restitution for all victims, for whatever crimes and losses a defendant has caused," Cassell told me. "This is a good opportunity to show how it can work."
In the courtroom, Cassell linked the defendants to the network for child-pornography distribution. "What the defendants have done is collect images of an 8-year-old girl being bound, raped and sodomized," he said. "If you participate in a market, you become responsible for that market." The lawyer for the New Orleans defendant disagreed. She argued that there was no proof that her client, in particular, had harmed Amy—no way to show that his viewing of her images caused damage. She also called the restitution order for $529,000 "grossly disproportionate to his culpability relative to other people who have abused Amy."
Michael Rotker, the lawyer for the department, told the court that the problem with the restitution awards was that there was no statutory authority for joint and several liability—nothing in the law, as Congress wrote it, which allowed a victim to recover a large award from one defendant who could then seek to recoup those losses by suing other defendants. Instead, Rotker argued, each defendant could be held responsible only for a small and roughly equal fraction of the whole. He offered this hypothetical example: if 200 men were convicted of possessing Amy's images, and her claim for damages totaled $3 million, then a judge would have discretion to order a defendant to pay restitution of $15,000 to $30,000.
As the lawyers spoke, Amy's eyes filled with tears. "Some of it was hard to listen to," she told me later. "But my therapist said to think of it as a store, with different compartments you can take out and put back. She said, 'When you were a little girl, you had to compartmentalize to deal with everything you went through.' So I can still do that now, and sometimes it's good, I guess."
At one point in the proceedings, Judge Emilio Garza stopped Cassell, not to challenge him, but to pick up on his theme. "It seems to me that we're in this brave new world, where not only was there an actual rape, but I'm going to suggest to you there is a continuing digitized rape," the judge said. "Possession of the digitized recording of the rape contributes to the system, contributes to the economic benefit of those who produced this thing."
The judges would not announce their decision for several months, but at the end of the hearing, Amy focused on what Garza said that day. "To hear that from a judge—I couldn't believe it," she told me. "It was so relieving. It was like he really got it. He understood."
Just six weeks after Amy got home from New Orleans, her uncle was released from prison after completing his concurrent 12-year sentences. Amy says she was greatly relieved when her aunt told her that she wouldn't allow him in the house. Instead, he was paroled nearby. When Marsh texted to give her the address, Amy happened to be only a few blocks from it. "I almost dropped the phone," she said. "Oh, my God, it was just so weird. I thought, He's got binoculars, he's looking for me. I thought the worst." Marsh reminded her that if her uncle contacted her, he would go back to prison. And also that she was an adult now and safe from her uncle's [abusiveness toward children].
Last month, while standing in line at Wal-Mart with her brother and a friend, Amy saw a man who she thought was her uncle looking at her. "I wasn't positive because I haven't seen him for so long," she said. "But as soon as I made eye contact, I didn't breathe." Was she being paranoid? She couldn't tell. The man seemed to follow them out of the store. As they got into her car, the man stopped to light a cigarette, and she thought he was staring at them. "It was very, very scary," she said.
Today, a sentence like the one Amy's uncle received—with no additional prison time for a federal conviction for pornography production and distribution—is extremely rare. The penalties for distributing or receiving pornography have become harsher. Receiving one illegal photo carries a mandatory minimum penalty of five years. The number of images a defendant downloads increases the punishment, as does his use of a computer. Now that large volumes of data stream with a click, the average recommended prison term for possession has jumped to 10 years, even if a defendant has no criminal record and there is no evidence that he produced or distributed porn. Because some child sexual abuse cases still end in relatively low penalties in state court, there's a paradox: defendants who look at sexual pictures of children can spend more years in prison than people who abuse children but don't have pornography of them.
The United States Sentencing Commission held hearings last February to discuss whether the punishment for child-pornography offenders has become both disproportionate and unfair—with people who committed similar crimes receiving vastly different penalties, based on the subjective decisions of judges. Restitution was discussed even though the prevailing view is that technically it isn't considered part of punishment. Its purpose is to "make the victim whole," as the legal phrase goes. "Simply put, an innocent victim should not suffer financial losses from a crime—the defendant should make good on those losses," Cassell said.
But Douglas Berman, an Ohio State University law professor who writes a frequently cited blog about sentencing, argues that the commission could rethink the role of restitution. In some cases, restitution could be considered commensurate to prison time—and courts could recommend shorter sentences for child-pornography collectors who agree to compensate victims based on their ability to pay. Berman thinks the key to making this leap is adopting the point of view of the victim. "Victims are shrewder than most prosecutors about the diminishing returns of long incarceration," he said. "They want perpetrators to serve some time. They want these men's lives disrupted, and they want the deterrence that helps protect other people. But they're often wise enough to realize that there's not much gain in deterrence from a 5 or 10 year sentence to 15 years. If victims are saying that restitution is as, or more, important to them than five extra years, I very much think the sentencing commission and Congress should listen."
When I asked Amy about such a trade-off, she supported it. Nicole had mixed feelings: she liked the idea of greater incentives for restitution, but she wasn't sure about giving up longer punishments, given how easy it would be for someone to leave prison and go back to downloading child pornography. Cassell says that using restitution in this way could have value. "If it makes the perpetrators internalize how they've hurt the victims—if it makes them see there are real victims—then you deter them from doing this again when they get out," he said.
Berman also favors a proposal that has been discussed at the Justice Department: a general compensation fund that would systematically collect restitution from child-pornography offenders and pay it out to victims like Amy and Nicole based on the harm they suffered and the costs they've incurred because of it. A compensation fund could give more victims the financial means to put their lives back together. And it could force more defendants to reckon with the children in the pictures and with their own role in supporting a market that depends on abuse.
Restitution has allowed Amy and Nicole to get the counseling they need, but receiving large sums can be complicated. When Amy received her $130,000 check from Alan Hesketh, she went on shopping sprees at the mall, splurging at stores like Abercrombie & Fitch. She had never been able to earn a steady paycheck, and the money was a sudden windfall. By the time the $1.2 million check came last spring, she was more considered. She didn't want to stand out in her small town. Last summer, she bought a modest three-bedroom house a few miles from her childhood home, where her mother and brothers still live.
Amy has also discovered that she likes giving money away—to her mother for a new deck, to a close friend who wanted kitchen cabinets she couldn't otherwise afford. It's her way of dealing with the discomfort of having resources that people around her don't and repaying those who helped her along the way.
1/

For context, I currently still have here 2 x cv1 headsets, an oculus go, quest 2 with both the 'praised' bobo M2 plus headstrap and the kiwi headstrap non battery, VR cover faceplate.
I never did and still don't use my quest 2 on PC, I just can't deal with compression and disjointed feeling being in the game worlds compared to cv1.
Honestly, the only reason I have my quest 2 is because I also didn't use my quest 1 as much as I wanted to because of its weight and 72hz, but I of course loved the sideloading and oled and bought a load of quest games. so the apparently lighter quest 2 and 90hz was a 'see ya later' to quest 1 and crossing my fingers 90hz link would improve things for my pc use to replace cv1.
Sadly it didn't, and as such, was stung with the 'lol no go library for you' aswell and the sideloading being the same ball ache procedure with half the stuff not passing through external inputs and no dedicated environment like oculus TV for viewing with (until years later) unable to change the screen size correctly. basically worse than the oculus go for sideloading, which is why it was kept.
the weight also let me down, going down the rabbit hole of many headstraps yet again and still not finding something I want to wear for hours- again it's slightly unfair as it's up against a cv1 which just fits me like a glove.
So, apart from the occasional exclusive quest game, quest 2 really doesn't get used and every time I turn it on I now actually sigh, it's just a bloated mess.
We all know what online games are like with this headset, I had a squeaker say the other night ''why do you sound like a man bRO'' and that was that, stopped playing as it's weird and it's awful.
Enter the Pico headsets, first with the neo 3 link which is essentially a much lighter quest 2 with better Fresnel lenses and a display port for pcvr, that despite its messy start and still underlying problems needing to be fixed, has become an actual 2 in one headset for me and I use it more standalone than I ever did on quest 2 in the years I've owned it, I also have the Pico 4, but with the software being pretty much the same, it's basically identical with slightly less user functionality (no aux, no DP, glare on lenses, no buttons on headset for use with just Xbox controller)
So my recent push to turn my quest 2 back on after spending the last few months using my picos, I am still absolutely baffled how meta are so anti-user focused and was surprised to see janky avatar arms that would stretch when controllers were placed on my desk and decide to disappear and reappear depending on how long I kept my hands still for, what a mess.
My take aways from the return:
Quest 2 lenses are just bad by comparison to both the picos and in edge to edge clarity, worse than even cv1 so it feels incredibly restricted, its hard to go back. made worse when you don't have the things up against your eyeballs when using the bobo strap, which of course being halo just wobbles around in movement and causes you to go outside those tiny sweetspots.
Going back to kiwi strap, after an hour I'm tired, it's just too much weight up front and I just find I don't want to use the quest 2, I still haven't completed re4vr despite buying it on release because of this.
'Advanced' user stuff. 1. Sideloading is just a joke compared to drag and drop on picos, infact I don't need a pc at all.

1. Sideloaded windows while cool you can have multiple, I can't distance them away from me, making it horrible with the outer edge blur of the lenses.
   
2. If I want to watch a movie, I still can't distance the screen from me and to play half my files and not be deafened by audio corruption, I have to play it in skybox which is a paid app just to do basic media functionality and it's still awful with those lenses as you have blur in the corners of your screen.
   
3. Just getting screenshots and videos off the headset- what the actual hell, completely useless companion app that even requests Bluetooth for some pointless reason, even more useless sharing feature on headset, seriously meta, I need to email or upload to sites to get my media off headset??? With Pico its 2 clicks in the companion app, no Bluetooth, no stress.
   

5: when configured to long pressing the oculus button (to stop it opening up overlay accidentally in BS) it's ridiculous the recenter button isn't on the first group of things you see.
6: starting and stopping video recordings is a joke, it's 2023, take a page out of picos book and add a button shortcut to start and stop recordings or screenshots, not deal with the overlay and later having to edit to cut that out.
7: bloat, absolute bloat everywhere, I'm tech savvy but it's so unnecessary getting to things you need either in menus or while gaming.
8: oculus avatars actually causing a problem for cross play games, I was on wander in Pico last night and joined a group who were all oculus, they could see my avatar from my pico but I could not see any of theirs, wander uses ready player me avatars but I guess that's not allowed with meta and have to stick to their own.
9: store is still the locked down crap it was when I left it several months ago and talk going forward isn't about pushing the chips harder (red matter 2 on both picos looks and plays way better than oculus) but meta says the way forward is app render space warp, absolute nope from me, that's sacrificing the end experience if it's still subject to motion artifacting and especially if they do that at 72hz.
10: casting is just awful latency compared to picos and once again, unnecessarily complicated, mixed reality just doesn't exist without complicated setup where it does on picos using just my phone even with a hotspot direct from phone to headset (an old pixel 3a phone, nothing special)
11: apps populating the standard gallery with their thumbnails causing it to basically never load, I just want to view my own 360 photos, not have to scroll through every single thumbnail of a beat saber song, there's no proper directory or filtering I could see basically forcing me back to a pc to add a .nomedia file to the folders to fix it
Quest 3 is likely carrying on this tradition of adding even more crap and not sorting the user experience.
The grass isn't exactly always greener with picos, but dear god just having a common sense approach to things has been so honestly refreshing.
If I want to play a Drbeef game he just shared apk for, I copy link on my phone, click companion app, send link direct to Pico headset, put headset on and click download and install, job done
Getting same apk on quest is just a nightmare and yea the sidequest app can be put on (through a pc) but that's obviously out of date and doesn't launch on my quest 2, requiring me to go through the steps of just getting sidequest running again before I even start.
Just so unnecessary, it's android, these basic things have not been improved years after release and infact it's been made even worse, so quest 3, unless it has a damn display port which I highly doubt, would be the second oculus/meta headset I won't be buying, the quest pro is basically a fancy pair of lenses on a quest 2 and doesn't interest me in the slightest, nothing else is changed for bettering my personal use cases with that either as none of the above has changed.
I know I'll get shit and downvoted but to me it's ''oh how the mighty have fallen''
The cv1 will always remain in my collection, quest 2 is just here, go I no longer need because the picos cover it's use case, just seems it's become so stagnated and uninteresting, laughably depressing seeing ''best update ever'' videos on YouTube about some basic feature that should have been present 3 years ago, Xbox cloud gaming? That's cute.
I don't know where meta go from here, sideloading alone shouldn't be a taboo and would likely retain the users, no good trying to aim for some next level all in one computing device if every single app made for android needs a 15 step process on a pc to even unlock the ability to load that app to even begin working.
Specs of the headsets are going to waste not offering the DP connection.
Just seems like meta has had its day, HTC and Pico now in the game and despite what people will argue meta do better, there is alot of things both are doing better than meta in the immediate time after release, let alone several years in.

Hello,
I have a few Polyphemus and Luna moth cocoons that I reared last year and stored for overwintering in a chilled environment (~6 C). Does the moths community have any specific advice for when I should remove them from their compartment and introduce the pupae to ambient temperatures?
I have reared saturniids before in this way, but I want to improve my eclosion times to be as in sync with the wild moths in my area as possible. Any tips would be much appreciated.
Thanks!
​
P.S. When I say 'ambient temperatures', I plan on putting the cocoons in some moth-safe mesh enclosures in my unheated garage, away from rodents and direct sunlight.

Several factors I have noticed during the small run up in price in Bitcoin this early year and of course… bank failures.
FDIC fund only had 128 Billion to help insure any FDIC qualified bank failures. I’m not sure if Silicon Valley Bank and Signature Bank was but FDIC stepped in and will cover all deposits. 143 Billion dollars. Here is what gets interesting. FDIC only supposed to cover only up to $250,000. Only 2.7% of Silicon Valley Bank deposits are less than $250,000. Meaning 97.3% aren’t FDIC insured. When the banks failed, bond holders got wiped out. Bonds suppose to be the safest but boring investments. Nothing is safe.
Treasury Secretary Yellen want to cover wealthy depositors that is greater than $250,000. Some holding 10s of millions in their accounts at the 2 banks that failed. Here is the thing. Median balance that US citizens have in their accounts are $5,300 if lucky. So the Feds do not fear us when it comes to bank runs but from the wealthy. But there is more.
So far… Silicon Valley Bank, Signature Bank, Credit Suisse has been bailed out. Deutsche Bank is rumored to fail next. They say 180+ US banks are in same situation as SVB and others. Who knows on the banks rest of the world.
Small and midsize banks asked FDIC to insure all deposits 2 yrs. Commercial mortgage real estate (CMRE) are next to fall. 20 Trillion dollars of it set to expire end of this year 2023. Lot of small and midsize banks give out those mortgages. Many restaurants and other small businesses never did recover from the severe lockdowns. High inflation such as high cost of labor, food, rent, expenses, electricity…. took a beating on their profits. Rossman in NYC on youtube and jeremiah babe in LA was documenting all the store closures for few yrs now. No way they will return. Empty commercial buildings and towers where used to be full of employees.. gone. Hell even Dollar General and Dollar Tree stores are closing.
Where as an investor park their money if bonds are unsafe? CMRE suppose to be stable but that is about to crap out. Majority of deposits, we have found out are not insured… especially if its greater than $250,000. Feds are afraid of the wealthy creating Bank runs.
That leads to attacks on crypto exchanges and fiat ramps. If enough leave the banking system and jump on stable coins in crypto… Bitcoins go nowhere but up.
Not sure if this should be posted but what the hell. I would watch BRICS. Members are China, India, Russia, Brazil, South Africa and others. A coalition of countries, instead of using the US Dollar as world currency reserve…. Use a basket of currencies and gold. They have 40% of world’s population and 60% of worlds gas reserves. And Mexico recently joined. Less demand for US Dollars, inflation goes bbbrrrrrr.

My Titan is currently a female but I’m not really liking any of the builds I have for her style wise. I keep seeing male titans looking like brick sh*t houses and love how beefy they are.
The problem though is that I know I’ll have to do the last 4 dlc over again. Lightfall might suck cause I have a decent strand build but I’m okay going through it again, but I know for sure Beyond Light is going to be a slog. I don’t really use Stasis Titan that much though.
Other than the DLC will I lose anything else important? I know to store my good armor and weapons in the vault so I don’t lose them (assuming that they’ll change gender models after I switch) but I think that’s it right? All achievements and unlocks should stay?

When Nate Cooper picked up his dorm room key (Clinton Hall, floor six, room five) from the front desk, the RA on duty (a smiling brunette named Alexis) offered some friendly advice: "Keep your door open during move-in week. It's the best way to make friends with your neighbors!" Nate agreed to follow her upperclassman wisdom with a fleeting grin and thumbs-up of his own, but his promise only remained unbroken until he dragged his belongings — about three-and-a-half cardboard boxes, a bulky suitcase, and a backpack full — into his room and discovered just how sweltering a spacious single could be in the dog days of mid-Atlantic summer without central air conditioning.
His first move was to reach across the twin-sized mattress of his bed and slide open the window that faced the quad; the stifled breeze that flitted through wasn't nearly enough to take on the heat. Nate's second move was to mentally note to pick up a fan from the student store once he was suitably unpacked. His third move, and the one he'd most regret in just about fifteen minutes or so, was to keep his dorm room's door shut, ditch his chinos and slate-gray polo, fold the discarded articles neatly on his mattress, and proceed to start the arduous unpacking process in just his underwear and glasses.
With a "Summer Vibes" Apple Music playlist streaming from his propped-up phone, Nate brushed a bead of sweat away from his messy blonde locks and started making Room Five of Floor Six feel a little more like his own, a pair of high school basketball trophies adorning his desk along with a stack of newly-purchased textbooks (Education 101 on top, naturally) and a poster of the periodic table taped neatly over his dresser.
Humming along to a song he was only a little familiar with, Nate glanced down at his door, noticing that someone had attempted to slide a flyer of some sort through the crack. Probably advertising a freshman mixer or some other bonding experience. When he reached down to pluck the folded paper, his clumsy pinch only pushed it further outside, so Nate peeked through the keyhole with a studious hazel gaze. The hallway was vacant, so he took his chance, quickly darting out and snatching the flyer. (It was for a freshman mixer, of course.)
What followed happened too quickly to react to. The door, not propped open properly, slammed shut. Nate pulled at the handle, watching it refuse to turn. He reached for a lanyard that was definitely not around his neck. And, clutching the gaudily-colored flyer in a fist that tightened with deepened mortification, realized that he was locked out of his dorm room wearing a pair of (adorably embarrassing undies of YOUR choice!) that, in hindsight, shouldn't have even been packed for college, let alone his move-in day pair of choice.
**
Hi! I'll keep this part short and sweet after a lengthy prompt. I'm a male writer in my early-mid twenties looking for a similarly aged writing partner looking for a slice-of-life romantic comedy story! Please take this writing sample as a kind of template for the level of detail and literacy I'm looking for, and, if you're interested in pursuing this story, I'd really enjoy if you wrote a response in-character as whoever discovers Nate's predicament! Who your character might be is entirely your call. A rescuer who lives next door? An RA with a latent mischievous streak? A performing arts major down the hall with a flair for the dramatic? Whatever you think would be most fun!

Last second question, The eshop closes at 5pm PT for Na. would this mean that it closes at 5 pm local time? Or do time zones apply? For example, I'm in CET, does this mean my store closes at 5 pm local? Or on March 28 1:00 am (The equivalent of 5 pm PT)

Welcome to Maxgree Community! Factions & PvP (1.8 - 1.19.3)
Description: This server provides an amazing faction experience! intense fights in the pvp zone, perfect tnt mechanics, creating farms with spawners or seeds, fighting against npc boss with your team, collecting envoys and more! The availability for making money is great, with just a few hours of playing you are already good to go!
Supported Features: Saber Factions ShopGUI+ AuctionHouse Random Teleport Custom Features Ranks Give aways Vault 10 Voting Sites McMMO 24/7 online & lag free
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Dallas Mavericks at Charlotte Hornets

Spectrum Center- Charlotte, NC
ESPN
TV/Radio

Time Clock
Final

	Q1	Q2	Q3	Q4	Total
DAL	16	32	24	32	104
CHA	30	25	26	29	110

Player Stats

Dallas Mavericks

Player	MINS	PTS	FGM-A	3PM-A	FTM-A	ORB	DRB	REB	AST	STL	BLK	TO	PF	+/-
J. Green	14:00	2	1-2	0-1	0-0	0	0	0	0	1	0	0	3	-25
R. Bullock	33:47	3	1-5	1-5	0-0	0	6	6	0	0	0	0	3	-8
D. Powell	3:44	0	0-1	0-0	0-0	0	0	0	0	0	0	0	0	-8
K. Irving	35:30	18	5-15	2-6	6-6	0	4	4	3	2	1	2	3	-8
L. Doncic	40:00	40	12-29	7-16	9-10	1	11	12	8	2	2	4	2	-11
M. Kleber	32:05	14	4-9	4-7	2-2	1	3	4	1	1	2	0	5	2
T. Hardaway Jr.	36:27	15	5-14	3-9	2-2	0	5	5	1	1	1	0	3	17
J. Hardy	13:09	3	1-3	1-1	0-0	1	0	1	3	1	0	1	2	5
C. Wood	17:21	9	3-4	1-2	2-2	0	4	4	1	0	1	1	2	-1
J. Holiday	13:56	0	0-2	0-2	0-0	0	1	1	1	0	0	0	1	7

Charlotte Hornets

Player	MINS	PTS	FGM-A	3PM-A	FTM-A	ORB	DRB	REB	AST	STL	BLK	TO	PF	+/-
G. Hayward	32:22	22	8-14	1-1	5-5	1	5	6	4	0	0	3	2	4
P. Washington	31:15	21	9-22	3-8	0-0	2	10	12	4	1	1	1	1	6
M. Williams	32:23	15	5-9	0-0	5-7	6	10	16	1	0	0	2	2	10
S. Mykhailiuk	33:13	7	1-7	1-4	4-4	1	2	3	3	2	0	0	0	16
D. Smith Jr.	28:11	14	5-11	1-4	3-4	1	4	5	6	1	0	3	4	4
B. McGowens	20:22	9	3-8	2-3	1-2	1	3	4	4	0	0	2	1	0
J. Thor	17:01	9	3-4	3-3	0-0	0	3	3	0	0	0	0	2	0
T. Maledon	19:49	6	2-7	0-3	2-2	1	4	5	5	1	0	1	2	2
K. Jones	15:20	2	1-1	0-0	0-0	1	0	1	0	0	0	2	3	-4
J. Bouknight	10:03	5	2-5	1-3	0-0	0	3	3	0	1	1	0	1	-8

Team Stats

Team	FGM-A	3PM-A	FTM-A	AST	PF	STL	TO	BLK	OREB	DREB	REB
DAL	32-84	19-49	21-22	18	24	8	8	7	3	34	43
CHA	39-88	12-29	20-24	27	18	6	14	2	14	44	63

Note: This data is only as accurate as NBA.com
Please message u/nba_gdt_bot if you have any suggestions or notice any bugs with the bot

Welcome to Maxgree Community! Factions & PvP (1.8 - 1.19.3)
Description: This server provides an amazing faction experience! intense fights in the pvp zone, perfect tnt mechanics, creating farms with spawners or seeds, fighting against npc boss with your team, collecting envoys and more! The availability for making money is great, with just a few hours of playing you are already good to go!
Supported Features: Saber Factions ShopGUI+ AuctionHouse Random Teleport Custom Features Ranks Give aways Vault 10 Voting Sites McMMO 24/7 online & lag free
Server IP: mc.maxgree.net Discord: https://discord.gg/cRbNq8Sh3X Store: https://maxgree-store.tebex.io

I have these two shapefiles in R:
​

 > file_1 Simple feature collection with 1507 features and 4 fields Geometry type: MULTIPOLYGON Dimension: XY Bounding box: xmin: -95.15386 ymin: 41.68132 xmax: -74.34347 ymax: 56.05945 CRS: +proj=longlat +datum=WGS84 First 10 features: ADAUID DGUID LANDAREA PRUID geometry 1567 35010001 2021S051635010001 643.4007 35 MULTIPOLYGON (((-74.48809 4... 1568 35010002 2021S051635010002 605.0164 35 MULTIPOLYGON (((-74.55843 4... 1569 35010003 2021S051635010003 515.4641 35 MULTIPOLYGON (((-74.90049 4... >file_2 > pop_mini Simple feature collection with 310 features and 9 fields Geometry type: MULTIPOLYGON Dimension: XY Bounding box: xmin: -116.9893 ymin: 41.98072 xmax: -64.09933 ymax: 53.53916 CRS: +proj=longlat +datum=WGS84 First 10 features: PCUID PCPUID DGUID DGUIDP PCNAME PCTYPE PCCLASS LANDAREA PRUID geometry 1 0001 350001 2021S05100001  Acton 2 2 7.8376 35 MULTIPOLYGON (((-80.00597 4... 5 0006 350006 2021S05100006  Alexandria 4 2 2.0689 35 MULTIPOLYGON (((-74.63831 4... 6 0007 350007 2021S05100007  Alfred 4 2 0.8654 35 MULTIPOLYGON (((-74.87997 4... 

​
My Question: I am trying to construct a matrix which shows what percent of each polygon in file_1 is covered by polygons in file_2 - and what percent of each polygon in file_2 is covered by polygons in file_1.
​
Based on some research I did (e.g. https://stackoverflow.com/questions/75849216/r-checking-matrix-sums , https://github.com/r-lib/isoband/issues/6 ), I first repaired the geometries with both of these files:
​

 library(lwgeom) library(sf) library(dplyr) # Repair invalid geometries in file_1 file_1$geometry <- st_make_valid(file_1$geometry) # Repair invalid geometries in file_2 file_2$geometry <- st_make_valid(file_2$geometry) 

​
Then, I tried to write a matrix-loop procedure to calculate the percent coverage of pairwise polygons in both files:
​
​

 # Calculate the number of polygons in each file n_file_1 <- nrow(file_1) n_file_2 <- nrow(file_2) # Create a matrix to store coverage percentages coverage_matrix <- matrix(0, n_file_1, n_file_2) # Calculate the number of polygons in each file n_ada <- nrow(file_1) n_pop <- nrow(file_2) # Create a matrix to store coverage percentages coverage_matrix <- matrix(0, n_file_1, n_file_2) # Calculate coverage percentages for each pair of polygons for (i in seq_len(n_file_1)) { for (j in seq_len(n_file_2)) { intersection_area <- st_area(st_intersection(file_1[i,], file_2[j,])) if (length(intersection_area) > 0) { file_1_area <- st_area(file_1[i,]) coverage_matrix[i,j] <- 100 * intersection_area / file_1_area } # Print intermediate results cat(paste0("i: ", i, ", j: ", j, ", coverage: ", coverage_matrix[i,j], "\n")) } } # Set row and column names for the coverage matrix rownames(coverage_matrix) <- paste0("file_1 ", seq_len(n_file_1)) colnames(coverage_matrix) <- paste0("file_2 ", seq_len(n_file_2)) # Print the coverage matrix print(coverage_matrix) 

​
The code appears to be running :

 i: 1, j: 1, coverage: 0 i: 1, j: 2, coverage: 0.349480438105992 i: 1, j: 3, coverage: 0 i: 1, j: 4, coverage: 0 

But I am not sure if I am doing this correctly.
​
Can someone please show me how to do this?
​
Thanks!