The radar sensor market has been expanding quickly in recent years, driven by the expanding use of radar technology across a variety of applications, including automotive, aerospace and defence, industrial, and healthcare. Radar sensors are electronic devices that employ radio waves to detect the presence and location of objects and translate this data into a readable form for further processing. As radar technology has several benefits over other sensing technologies, including increased precision, range, and dependability, the market for radar sensors is predicted to continue expanding.
Get A free Sample PDF: https://www.fortunebusinessinsights.com/enquiry/request-sample-pdf/radar-sensor-market-102605
Key Players:
· Robert Bosch GmbH (Germany)
· Continental AG (Germany)
· Infineon Technologies AG (Germany)
· DENSO CORPORATION (Japan)
· ZF Friedrichshafen AG (Germany)
· HELLA GmbH & Co. KGaA (Germany)
· Lockheed Martin Corporation (US)
· s. m. s. smart microwave sensors GmbH (Germany)
· Oculi Corp (US)
· SICK AG (Germany)
· Socionext America Inc. (US)
Radar sensors are being used more frequently in a variety of applications, including automotive, aerospace and defence, industrial, and healthcare, which is what is driving the market's expansion.
The rising use of radar sensors in advanced driver assistance systems (ADAS) and autonomous driving technologies in the automobile sector is one of the key drivers fueling the market's expansion. The need for radar sensors in the automotive sector is anticipated to increase dramatically as electric vehicles become more prevalent and enhanced safety features become more important. The aerospace and defence industries' expanding need for radar sensors for air traffic control, surveillance, and missile guidance systems has further fueled the market's expansion.
About Us:
Fortune Business Insights™ offers expert corporate analysis and accurate data, helping organizations of all sizes make timely decisions. We tailor innovative solutions for our clients, assisting them to address challenges distinct to their businesses. Our goal is to empower our clients with holistic market intelligence, giving a granular overview of the market they are operating in.
Contact Us:
Fortune Business Insights™ Pvt. Ltd.
US: +1 424 253 0390
UK: +44 2071 939123
APAC: +91 744 740 1245
Email: [[email protected]](mailto:[email protected])

Long read. Sorry, I don't know the reddicutte (hehe)
Ok quick backstory. Two days after I turned 18 I was sexually assaulted. (This happened 9 months ago.) He basically did anything he wanted to my body while I was half asleep and drunk. (He was 100% sober and I'm certain about that.) I was in university residence at the time and moved to a new building across campus. Then, I was raped while unconscious by a guy on my floor that basically claimed me as his girlfriend the day I moved in. This was more intense. He constantly sexually assaulted me before that point but I didn't realize until much later. After my floor found out, I was slut shamed and shunned because I 'broke his heart' after I realized he raped me and 'dumped' him. He lived in the room next to me for three months after that and he purposely used intimidation tactics on me during that time. This was 5 months ago.
Yesterday, I showed up for my job as a summer student at a museum. Part of my job is running school tours and day camps for kids in elementary school. Before my manager could introduce me to the kids, one of the students got up to quickly hug me. Which would have been okay if he would have asked. But he didn't and he shoved his face into my boobs and wrapped his arms around my lower body and it was pretty obvious that he knew it was wrong. It happened very quickly and it honestly shocked me. I'm a very understanding person but I kinda flipped out inside. I reacted appropriately and I kinda nervously laughed and put my arms in the air until his teacher said "remember personal space." Of course I didn't treat him any differently and I pretended like nothing happened. (I'm not trying to accuse a 6yo boy of anything but it's important to note that he made several other of my female coworkers uncomfortable with his touching. His teacher also brushed it off which I'm not happy about because it was very apparent that this wasn't a new thing. Maybe he could have been undiagnosed neurodivergent but I have a LOT of experience working with ND kids and he clearly had the ability to understand it was wrong. I'm neurodivergent and I knew not to do that at that age) I don't know why it triggered such a flashback but I just finished bawling my eyes out and digging my fingers into my body. I'm very good at keeping things cool but when my mom drove me home after work I mentally flipped out. I wanted to scream. It felt like it all came back at once. I'm very self conscious about my boobs because of what my rapist did to me. Most of my phantom touch occurs in my boobs so when the boy hugged me, I internally freaked out. I'm diagnosed with a general anxiety disorder and I have had many panic attacks. But this didn't feel anything like it. It felt like a life or death situation even though I was right beside my mom in the car. It felt like the world got brighter but in a distorted way, more like a picture but it was overexposed to the max. When I have a panic attack, I look around frantically and try to run or shake my hands or do literally anything to regulate the feeling. But this time it felt like I was melting into my seat, I was glued down. I couldn't feel any part of my body except where it met with the seat and I felt like I was falling. My eyes went wide like a deer in headlights and I stayed like that until I could calm down. My mom is half deaf on her right side so she couldn't hear my shaky breath and she didn't know I was upset. My mind was absolutely racing but I can't even remember what I was thinking about. I wasn't thinking like normal, I thought in emotions. A wave of anxiety, anger, frustration, and disgust conjured in me. It felt like I would pass out from overwhelm. This hasn't been the only time. I had them more in my dorm but not as severe. The last time it happened was in res after he cornered me in a dimly lit, unsurveillenced, low traffic stairwell. But it's getting unbearable. It feels like I will never go a day without thinking about my rapist. Every little thing reminds me of him. If I hear Spanish, I think of him and I want to rip my hair out. Try going one day without hearing/seeing something related to Spain or the Spanish language. I live on a farm in the middle of nowhere and it happens everyday. Like I said, I'm a pretty understanding person so I get it if I can't get trigger warnings, sincerely. I've had an intentional overdose and I've been self harming (self harm free since February 17th whooooo) since I was 13. In res I normally heard suicide/depression jokes daily. I honestly don't expect everyone around me to be aware of my trauma all of the time so unless someone makes a rape joke, I won't say anything. Again, personal opinion. I will gladly accommodate to other peoples triggers and I encourage them to advocate for themselves. (Also I just don't wanna tell them all that stuff.) But what can I do? How do I make it stop? I'm in a rural area so I can't get in with a doctor or therapist for at least a month+ for treatment/medication. It's not a location issue, health services is just crazy backlogged. (I'm Canadian, wait times are INSANE in rural communities.) Last time I went to a doctor at my university clinic she doubled my Abilify 10mgs and I think that's pretty much only used for people with schizophrenia. I've seen a psychiatrist since then, she said I for sure have general anxiety, depression, and ADHD (diagnosed at 17), and possibly Borderline Personality Disorder but I'm definitely not schizophrenic. Last time I went to the doctor in my town to ask about my self harm scars, he saw me for less than five minutes and prescribed me seroquel, another antipsychotic. I also went off of my antidepressant, mood stabilizer, and adhd medication in October and my psychiatrist thought it would be ok. So I'm a little leary of general practioners and I can't get in to see a psychiatrist until I'm back at university in September. I can't sleep and I smoke weed every night to fall asleep. I'm constantly snapping at my parents and it feels like I'm going crazy. I was such a happy girl. I was calm, collected, and successful. I went to university with glowing recommendations and scholarships to pay for almost my entire degree. My senior superlative was 'Most outgoing.' Now I despise anyone my age. I don't trust them. I'm an anxious mess who has nothing under control and I absolutely ruined my reputation. If it weren't for a good memory and expert cramming skills I would have flunked out. Everyday I wish that I could erase those nights from my memory. I relive them each and every night. Sooo any suggestions or (polite) thoughts/opinions?

Today was my first time going to my home park with a friend since August of last year. I went with a high school friend who I hadn't seen since Memorial Day Weekend last year (also a trip to SFOT), and I let him use the first of my Platinum Pass discounted tickets (and of course now passholders get a $20 bring-a-friend ticket for the month of June). Our plan was to start with Titan and New Texas Giant and do a circle around the park, eventually winding up back where we started and marathoning our number ones (mine is NTG and his is Titan). Things started off incredibly smooth as we hit five rides in the first hour, but things would slow down after lunch as not everything would go according to plan afterward.
Titan - Even though my friend is not an enthusiast, he still ranks some of the coasters at the park, and Titan is his number one. We got the back row on the first train of the day and this thing was already hauling. I have fallen in love with the floater bliss that is the speed hill which will immediately be ruined next year by my first B&M hyper, and I grayed out in the second helix for the first time. This somehow keeps climbing my rankings, and is now competing with Mr. Freeze for my #2.
New Texas Giant - My number one until my upcoming reunion with Iron Rattler and my friend's number two prior to riding Mr. Freeze. We took the ninth row in order to get a walk-on, intent on getting a back row ride later in the day. The first half is great regardless of what row you're in, but riding in the middle versus the back can make the difference between floater and ejector airtime.
Chaparral Antique Cars - We did this as a meme but it turned out to be a nice, relaxing and surprisingly fun early day change of pace, but the best part was seeing some rare angles of Shockwave and New Texas Giant.
Shockwave - I was surprised to see this running single train ops as maintenance was working on the second train. Even so, it was still a walk-on, but we had to take the second-to-last row, again intent on returning for that back row ride.
Superman: Tower of Power - Amazingly, we only had to wait two cycles, and it turns out we timed our ride perfectly, as it started to get a line after we got off.
Newman's Cafe - I first tried these a week and a half ago on a solo trip because of Airtime Thrills, and knew right away I had to get my friend to try them. They're decent for theme park food, but the nuggets and fries could be crispier. Even so, my friend absolutely loved them.
Texas SkyScreamer - Is it just me, or did this get new seats since I last rode it last summer? Regardless, this was still a lot of fun to get back on again. Not very forceful, but the views are absolutely breathtaking, even if I couldn't clearly see the Dallas and Fort Worth skylines today.
Judge Roy Scream - This might actually be worse than some SLCs, though I wouldn't know since it's been 10+ years since I last rode one. We got a back row ride on this classic woodie, and this was the first time a coaster made me question my life choices. My friend and I both agreed that this thing was unbearably rough, and I audibly said that Six Flags should call up GCI.
Mr. Freeze - This was my friend's first time ever riding Mr. Freeze. Lesson learned: Ride this first on less crowded days. We waited anywhere from 45 minutes to an hour, and after waiting that long, we decided we were going to get the front row no matter what. Of course, the only people in front of us when they let us into the station also wanted the front row, and struggled with the restraints after returning to the station. The ride ops ended up reopening the air gates so my friend could get on the same train as me (in hindsight, we should've just gone through the air gates while the people in front of us were struggling and helped them out). So if you saw the ride ops reopen the air gates for one train today at around 2 PM after locking the restraints, now you know why (I'm actually surprised they did). I got stapled, which killed the airtime coming in and out of the inverted top hat, but it was kind of my fault, plus those lap bars are heavy as a brick. After getting off, my friend said that the wait was well worth it and that it very nearly overtook Titan as his number one.
Batman: The Ride - A single train wait for the back row when we got on. I don't know if we got the other train or what it was today since this thing was glass smooth when I rode it a week and a half ago, but Batman was ROUGH today. The B&M rattle was very noticeable and was accompanied with some occasional headbanging.
Catwoman Whip - I used to adore this thing as late as last summer (GP moment), but now that I'm a full-fledged enthusiast, I have come to realize how mediocre this ride truly is. You can definitely feel when you're upside down, but I wouldn't call it hangtime, and the positives when you're upright aren't that strong.
Pandemonium - Another I rode for the first time since last summer, and I was very disappointed by how little we spun. Operations were also iffy, as after we hit the final brake run, the ride ops took forever to start dispatching trains again and there was nothing wrong with the ride.
Runaway Mountain - This definitely deserves more attention. We were assigned to the front car and ended up taking the second row, but even so, it was still a great ride with decent airtime and swooping drops and helices that feel much faster than they actually are. This might actually be better than Batman.
New Texas Giant - Back for our back row ride, only for the ride to break down while we were in the station. We decided to wait it out, as I had seen the ride go down enough times to know that it's usually back up within ten to fifteen minutes. The people in front of us waiting for the back row decided to take another row for a shorter wait, so we got on one train sooner when it started running again.
Shockwave - After our back row ride on NTG, my friend was getting tired as his caffeine had worn off, so we decided to end the day early with a back row ride on Shockwave. As we approached the ride, we noticed that they were now running two train ops, and we walked on to the back row. I was left with plenty of leg room, but the lap bar came down one click on its own during the vertical loops, so I didn't get as much airtime in the second half as I would have liked.
JB's Smokehouse Barbeque - My friend wasn't yet hungry for dinner, but since I have an all season dining plan, I decided to grab a BBQ Brisket Sandwich on the way out. It was smaller than I remember, but was still good (I mean, come on. You can't go wrong with Texas barbeque). And the fries were actually crispy (looking at you, Newman's Cafe).
Overall, today was rather successful despite some setbacks and not getting to do our marathons. We rode everything we wanted to except El Diablo (I probably would have bashed it afterward), and I managed to get my friend on Mr. Freeze for the first time and it very nearly became his new number one.

A Necessary Preface

To start things off, some baselines need to be set for the sake of sidestepping a lot of talking points. This post will come entirely from the perspective that fighting games are a multiplayer genre first. There's a lot of very valid criticisms of the genre's single player aspect. I am actively choosing to ignore them for this post. When these discussions occur, it's meant from the perspective of the fighting game community trying to convince people to play and stick with the genre. For hundreds or even thousands of hours. In the same way that people would League of Legends, Apex, Rocket League, etc. The single-player aspect ultimately have very little bearing on the multiplayer aspect since it only increases impressions and not retention.
I'll also make a deeply arbitrary distinction between accessibility and accommodations for the disabled. They're two very different issues where the latter needs to be tackled in ways that I, or most people, am completely uninformed in. I am going to be addressing the layman's accessibility concerns.
FGC-heads, I know many of you have also thrown in the towel and now sing the virtues of gatekeeping due to not wanting "intolerants". But don't be an ass about it and remember there's a lot more wiggle room than you think. This post already comes across as condescending despite my best efforts, so cool it.
Finally, you don't have to read all of this. Just keep an eye out for the bolds that catch your eye. I'll try to keep things as simple as much as I reasonably can, but things will ultimately be technical. You will likely need a passing familiarity of the terms I'll be using, and I'll try to assist you in that by linking to a definition when appropriate. I will avoid requiring rigorous knowledge of the subject matter though, so don't get too caught up in the details.
This conveniently segways to one common criticism.

There is too much terminology for me to learn

There sure is a lot of them. But they're not used to make things esoteric. They're words meant to concisely convey otherwise intuitive concepts for the purposes of discussion, learning, and troubleshooting.
In other words, you don't really need to explicitly learn them. Eventually, you'll implicitly learn all the terminology. Just not the words to express them. Think of it like how many of us trying out chess will start games by moving a pawn to allow the Queen to move around, completely unaware of the fact that what we're performing is likely a Queen's Pawn or a King's Pawn opening. In the same vein, many are likely already familiar with certain popular concepts in fighting games. You're just unaware of what they're called, or know them by another name.
Take for example, spacing or neutral. You're likely familiar with snipers in a multiplayer shooter. If a sniper is uncontested, they completely own or dominate the "space" they're looking at. Running in full view of a sniper is a terrible idea because of it, and hiding behind cover is a solid idea because they don't "dominate" the space behind cover. To shut down a sniper's control of an area, you need to either physically overpower them (kill them), approach from a space they're not in control of (ambush them), or to force them to move else where (flush them out) via grenades or simply shooting in their general direction. Or in fighting game terms, whiff punish them (kill them), by playing footsies (ambush them), or by zoning (flush them out) them out.
Frame data deserves a special mention. The simplest way to put is that they're measurements of time. If you play any game somewhat seriously, you're already familiar. Reload speeds, fire rates, attack rates, and even movement speeds. Hell, something as simple as not wanting to use Knights of Round on generic encounters due to the long animation is a decision rooted in frame data.

There are too many things I need to learn

That's fair. There's no way around it. Fighting games are so far removed on a physical level that most people will have to learn everything from scratch. But it's not for the sake of it. There's too little overlap for you to rely on to draw experience.
I'll try not to bore you with the details by delving deep into stuff like Razbuten's series about gaming for non-gamers. But there's an inherent language to video game conventions and how things control or happen. It's all very learned behavior and not all of it translates to every game. For fighting games in particular, almost nothing translates unless you play exclusively 2d beat 'em ups, spectacle fighters, Monster Hunter, and Soulslikes. And even then.
And that's all okay. We all have a finite amount of time in our lives, with responsibilities to attend to. We can't invest the time to learn everything we need for everything we have a passing interest in. We all pick our battles.

No, seriously, it's all really overwhelming even when I'm trying

It sure is. And there are lots of ways the on-boarding process could be significantly improved upon. These days, the games with the most renowned tutorials are from French Bread or Arc System Works. And they're very excellent... at being a reference. Primary learning material they are not. I could talk about all about the ways things could be improved, but I'm not part of the industry. Waste of character limits if you ask me.
Until things improve drastically, my only advice is to take things slow. A lot of the things you're tempted to learn are cool combos, special techniques to make people stop blocking, or every single move your character has. Maybe all at once. Don't. Pick one or two things to focus on. Play against people where your only goals in life are the one or two things. Move onto new things when you feel that you're comfortable. Rinse and repeat until you've had enough.

The controls aren't intuitive

There's a funny thing about intuition. Despite it being rooted in instinct, it's entirely learned behavior. If you've used mnemonics before, you probably know that some just aren't very useful no matter how hard you try. It's kinda arbitrary. Things being intuitive or unintuitive also don't matter that much in the grand scheme of things. Like mnemonics, intuition only go so far to help you remember or learn something.
Movement tech in other genres is often brought up as an argument for intuition. They're typically a "logical" sequence of inputs that the player is already familiar with. Smash Melee's Wavedash actually gets brought up as an example time to time. It's jump then air dodge directly back onto the platform. On paper, it's very simple and easy to do.
It's not. The dexterity required to do it is a lot more than you'd expect it to be. Then there's frequency of its use, which causes a very real, physical strain on you. No matter how you look at it, you'll spend several orders of magnitudes more learning the rhythm than you do remembering the sequence of actions. The sequence themselves are a very minor step.
Not to mention, there is a language to how fighting game controls. Most people aren't used to it because most games aren't anything like fighting games. Take for example the quarter circle forward input. It's also known as the fireball input. Why? Because the average QCF input is a fireball. If not, it's probably a move that lunges your character forward. The fact that it ends in forward usually indicates that it's designed to control space in front of you. Hey look, a made up mnemonic. It's also probably useless!

Motion controls are superfluous and should be simplified

A very popular misconception, no doubt due to the widespread popularity of Smash. But the matter of fact is that motion controls are not superfluous and have momentous consequences. But at the same time, the consequences kinda don't matter. It creates a different type of fighting game for people to enjoy, which people do. The problem comes when people assert that it should be mandatory across the entire genre thinking that nothing would change. It's the same as saying that every FPS needs to have parkour mechanics or every action game needs to have animation canceling or every RPG needs to be real time: it's incredibly short-sighted. There's a reason why Smash has poor cross pollination or why not every TF2 player likes Overwatch.
If you're willing to accept the previous paragraph at face value, skip to the next checkpoint. The following will be dense.
The simplest example of the consequences of simplified inputs is the single input invicible DP. Their existence completely redefines how offense is structured and how it is played out. In particular, it heavily emphasizes true gapless blockstrings because the ease of the DP make it so that any unintentional gaps are fundamentally bad pressure. Because of that, pressure becomes more telegraphed and rigid, to the point of turns becoming almost concrete. Or in other words, homogenized and potentially requiring study at all levels.
I also need to stress the word unintentional here. There are entire series and subgenres that thrive on forcing chaotic, ambiguous situations that neither player is fully aware of but have to place their bets anyway. But with a one button DP, intentionally causing mutually ambiguous situations will almost never be in your favor because doing anything will lose out to a DP.
There's some other reasons why the ease factor can cause new problems that need to be addressed, like how most motions don't end in a blocking input which means you must forgo blocking or how some inputs assume that you forgo your ability to move forward. But there are ways around this with surprisingly minimal effects on gameplay or even cause novel situations. But I'm ready to move on.
See, simplified inputs have a very inherent and significant design cost to them. Grapplers in fighting games historically have insanely fast grabs. It's not uncommon for a grappler's command grab to be tied for literally the fastest move in the game, while simultaneously being 2-4x the range of other similarly fast non-grabs, and typically leading to much more advantageous situations post-grab than fast non-grabs. As seen here. Not only are they incredibly strong offensively, but also incredibly strong defensively. Almost as strong as a DP generally, and sometimes stronger than DPs in very specific (but potentially common) scenarios. This is often balanced out by the motions tied to these moves have an associated time cost to perform them in most but not all situations, ontop of the fact that it requires some modicum of effort to perform. Combined, this results in a surprisingly low margin for error to utilize this move effectively, and even players at the highest levels fail it every so often in stress-free, at home in their boxers, scenarios.
Think of it like the choice between slamming on your brakes to minimize collision damage or swerving to avoid it entirely. With enough of a heads up, everyone would choose to swerve. But sometimes you don't realize that you have enough room to swerve and by the time you did, it's too late. You have to pick the next best option. Mental burden is the concept I'm stressing here.
Of course, we can adjust how one button command grabs work to minimize the differences. The most common answer to this is by making the command grab themselves slower. But by doing so, the command grab is now a fundamentally different move. It cannot be used defensively. It is offensively neutered and the scenarios where it is a good idea to use is significantly reduced. The alternative answer is by tying the command grab to a resource. In turn, it's no longer a move that you always have access to. It's something that must be built towards and then managed alongside all the other mechanics that likely share the same resource.
Nothing mentioned so far are inherent downsides and won't make games bad. You can even omit more nuanced moves like command grabs and DPs entirely and people can still like it. The problem is that these would be the only kind of games that could exist if motion controls would be permanently retired. My preferred solution would be not to remove them, but to add more characters who don't have motions.
Anyway if you've read all that, then you might think I'm making up assumptions. That I can't know for sure that this is how one-button specials would affect the game. Except they're not assumptions. They're real world observations of games that already have one-button specials.
Games with one button specials: Fantasy Strike, Smash, DNF Duel
Games with simplified-but-still-motioned specials: Blazblue Cross Tag Battle, Dragonball Fighterz, Skullgirls
Games with both: Granblue Versus, Street Fighter 6, Idol Showdown

Combos are too long

This is a really interesting complaint that comes up a lot. But what it means is one of three very different concerns that all need to be addressed in their own ways.

...because I keep getting stuck in one and dying to them

A very common and popular problem that is unfortunately born out of complete and total ignorance. Allow me to demonstrate with a clip.
Do you believe this was one combo? A really long infinite? A 100% to 0% combo? If your answer to any of these were a yes, then you are wrong. That was about six separate combos. I try to not get caught up on definitions as a rule of thumb and focus on the meaning instead, but this is a pretty big deal for this concern. Because people don't actually know the language, they misuse words all the time. They don't actually know how to express their concerns in an immediately understandable manner. This is... a huge can of worms that I won't get into for this post.
The thing about combos is that combos only work if the recipient of those combos have failed. One failure = one combo. Therefore, six separate combos means that the opponent has failed six times. But if it's the result of failure, then that must mean that success is an option, right?
Yes. It's called blocking, or more accurately, having good defense. Really focus on this bit here:

Players and characters with strong defense tend to be able to survive long offensive sequences from their opponent and take little overall damage

This leads into the next separate concern expressed in the same way.

...and there's nothing I could have done

Here's a clip. The player with the long whip (P1) looks really oppressive, right? The player with the hat (P2) had nothing they could do to stop the onslaught of combos coming their way. It was a miracle that they didn't take more damage from all of that. There's a bit of a hitch to all of this though:
None of those were combos. It wasn't oppressive at all. In the context of that clip, P2 willingly chose to do nothing but exclusively block because they wanted to see if P1 was capable of doing anything else.
What do I mean they weren't combos? They just aren't. For this specific concern, it's a simple misunderstanding of term. A sequence of attacks in quick succession are better known as strings. Not all strings are combos, but all combos are strings. What makes a string a combo is if it makes a character start physically reeling from an attack. This is a very important distinction for reasons that are irrelevant to this concern.
Okay, they're not combos but strings. Why does that matter? It still doesn't seem like P2 could have done anything. The thing with strings is that they must inevitably end. When and where they end is highly game and character dependent, but it's one of the few constants of the genre. From Street Fighter, to Smash, to Fantasy Strike. One of the most significant aspects of the genre is figuring out when someone is actually done so that you can take your turn. How a fighting game handles "the end of offense" is one of the most common ways to distinguish itself from other games. The clip I linked is a game that likes to keep things intentionally vague for the defender. Tekken famously requires you to know frame data to know when it's your time. Some games like to simplify things with rules of thumbs. Some games make it extremely short.
In the clip I shared, there were plentiful of solutions that P2 could have done that didn't require much thinking. Ignoring the DP that character has access to or any of the other moves they had, they could have ran forwards. They even had a second point to run forward.
What's really being complained about in this concern here is actually more along the lines of this:

I don't know what's going on and there's nothing I could do

This has a multitude of solutions. Some of them are tough pills to swallow. Some of them requires an adjustment of how information is conveyed. Some require slowing things way down. They all work, all with their own caveats. But you can't remove the problem entirely. It's not how video games work. It's like how you know it's safer to move while the enemy is reloading or charging or whatever.
Technically, you can make it so that it's theoretically always your time to shine regardless of what the opponent is doing. There are two games I'm aware of where this idea has been played with. A character named Baiken from Guilty Gear XX, and the Touhou games' Typhoon condition.
Nobody likes playing against Baiken. Typhoon is not a good time for anyone involved.

...and I can't be bothered

We're finally here. A complaint that actually means what it means. And it's 100%, completely, unarguably, fair. This a common complaint of fans from different series/subgenres too. There are games I love that have really long combos and I still have a limit. It's actually so common that it's been very consistently addressed:
Games with short combos exist. Games with almost no combos exist. We can go a step further: there are specific types of characters common to the genre that don't really do combos. There's usually at least one of them in most games. If you're okay with seeing them but not doing them, that's an option too.
One sidenote. The length of combos make a large difference in how games are played at a very fundamental level, beyond the combos themselves. Like everything else mentioned so far, short combos or long combos aren't better than the other. They simply offer different experiences. The problem is being shoehorned into a specific experience were one implemented genre-wide.

...and do too much damage

A bit distinct from the other concerns. It's suggesting almost a touch of death, but not quite. Fighting games do have an informal equivalent to time-to-kill from FPS that is measured in how many "touches" until you lose a round but that's a little too nuanced and tangential to get into for this.
Combos that do a lot of damage exist. This is true. There are lots of long combos. Also true. Here's one for example. It's a 30 second combo, where 17 seconds of it involves the P1 pushing buttons and then 13 seconds of watching a cinematic. You're probably not having a good time if you're on the receiving side of this.
There are some very, very important caveats. One, this particular game has an above average combo length in the first place. Two, that combo is an especially egregious example even in that game. Three, that combo is a culmination of a multitude of mistakes that required being hit by a very specific attack from P1 while P2 tried to attack, when P1 has at least 80% super meter, while P1 has nigh-max character-specific resources, while P2 is backed into a corner, while P1 has won a minigame. And it barely does enough to do 65% of a life bar. It's pretty rare for a combo this damaging to happen in most games. In some games, the opportunity can only occur once a match.
There's also the cinematic we need to talk about. Personally, I believe that the cinematic could be shorter. Especially in games where cinematic stuff happens all the time such as in Guilty Gear Strive or Tekken 7. One really big problem though:
Cinematics push copies. A very significant portion of a fighting game's marketing strategy is to showcase them because most people see something cool and think it's exciting. Think about how every time a new Mortal Kombat or Injustice comes out, gaming social media is flooded with supers and fatalities for a while. It just works. It also unfortunately has a very real effect on your personal experience when you're playing a game for >10 cumulative hours.
Games that try to make it obvious you didn't get the right answer: Guilty Gear Strive, Street Fighter 5, Skullgirls
Games with short combos: Fantasy Strike, Granblue Versus, Samurai Shodown
Games where combos don't exist: Divekick
Games that try to make it easy to do combos: Every fighting game released after 2014

There are too many buttons and it's too hard to keep track of

A pretty specific complaint that pops up time to time. And again, it's fair. Low button games do exist and actually in fact are more frequent than high button games, but that's besides the point. Let's address the primary purposes of more buttons:

• More actions/options can be mapped
• Pressing multiple buttons can be fun
• Actions are more clearly delineated

I'll focus on the final point since I think the first two are self-evident. There are ways to make low-button games have the same amount of actions as high-button games. The problem is that no matter how you do it, the chances of input errors get increased. A clear delineation of input options makes being in control a lot more accessible. Which is a pretty big thing in this genre.
With a low button game, there are two choices: maintain a comparable amount of actions compared to higher buttons and accept we'll get more input errors, or accept that we'll have fundamentally less actions.
Games with two buttons: Smash, Divekick
Games with three buttons: Fantasy Strike, Granblue Versus, Blazblue Cross Tag Battle, Soul Calibur
Games with four buttons: Touhou IaMP, Touhou Hisoutensoku, Persona 4 Arena, Melty Blood, Under Night, Samurai Shodown, Blazblue, Dragonball Fighterz, Tekken, Mortal Kombat, etc

Combos have no bearing on strategy

Another complaint about combos, but a lot more directed. It's a complicated concern, as misguided as it may be, isn't without reason. Doing combos at some point can feel dialed in, and getting comboed is the equivalent of getting stunned in other video games. Except it can happen multiple times in about 30 seconds, which is frustrating to a lot of people.
A previous section already covered the idea of low-combo or comboless games, so I won't repeat myself on that front. I'll instead try to make a case for combos and why they shouldn't be removed entirely.

...because it is an exercise in rote memorization

This sort of complaint comes up a lot from very specific crowds. Primarily people who have experience in platform fighters like Smash or people who are very interested in the other aspects of fighting games but specifically dismiss combos.
I'll get the elephant in the room out of the way first: what's wrong with rote memorization? There are entire genres of games pretty much dedicated to tickling that part of the brain. If you were there for the 2000's rock band/guitar hero boom, you probably took part of it too. There are competitive rote memorization games. Jeopardy has been a worldwide phenomenon for decades. There's nothing wrong with it, and it's okay to acknowledge they're not your thing. Games that deemphasize combos exist.
Okay, there's still another reason why this complaint exists. People hate losing agency when playing video games and being comboed definitely takes it away. A very common example is brought up as a solution: Smash's Directional Influence. While a player's typical agency is gone, they do gain a new form and a new "game" forms between both players with it.
DI is pretty cool, and can be fun. Not everyone likes it. Some fighting games try to add agency in their own way through a combo breaking mechanic called Burst. Killer Instinct is famous for having a very specific way of handling combos through their combo breaker mechanic. Not everyone likes these either. There are likely other ways that agency can be added that haven't been done yet. And not everyone will like them. And that's okay.
Now, let me try to sell you on the idea that losing agency while being comboed is okay. Fighting games can be a lot. Some of them relish in being a lot. They can be overwhelming to absorb everything that's going on. Not to mention the whole part where you're trying to outwit the opponent.
You need time to breathe and get your bearings back in order. And that's exactly the window that being comboed provides. You can take a mental step back and look at what's going on. How many more times can you get hit and still survive? What is everyone's resources at? Are you winning that weird tug of war minigame? What has the opponent been doing? What's the chances they're going to do the same thing when they're done with the combo? Do you have a response to that thing?
Breathers are really important. People aren't built for full-throttle thinking and action for long stretches. Video games have realized this decades ago. It's why even the most spastic, twitchy of monsters in Monster Hunter will stop in place and roar. Why bullet hell games constantly swap between hyper dense, rapid patterns and patterns where you can kinda veg out for a moment. Why plenty of Zelda/Mario bosses will make you do some slow paced jump roping before they expose their weakpoint again.
This all also applies for the person performing the combo provided that they are at total comfort with the whole sequence. It won't always be the case, but it's worth mening.

...because nobody drops them so why not cut out the middleman?

A very modern take due to the prevalence of accessible high level footage, the massive growth of fighting games overall, and due to evangelical efforts for the genre. Not to mention, the vast majority of games these days have made it very easy to do very simple combos that everyone has access to and is practical at all levels. From more lenient input buffers, to simplified and standardized motion inputs, to autocombos, and an overall philosophical change on how games address damage, it can feel like having to perform combos is unnecessary work.
But people still fail combos. Even players at the highest level when there are zero stakes. The simple increased likelihood that one can fail doing a combo affects their decision-making. If they fail, the opponent can completely turn the tables. It creates tension. It opens up wiggle-room for the defender. It gives people hope. Allow me to paint a picture:
Both players are at low health and will die in about 1.5 "average" combos. P1 gets hit first, and is getting comboed. P2 has two choices: they can do their standard combo that has little chance of failing and place their bets on winning the next interaction after the combo ends. Or they can do their more damaging combo that should kill, but if they drop it (or even if the combo is carried to completion), P2 will be significantly disadvantaged for the next interaction. Or in some cases, even potentially the rest of the round. What do they do? What should they place their chips on?
This is such a popular aspect that certain content creators take this whole concept to its logical extreme and make a game show out of it.

Fighting games need no strategy beyond button mashing and combos

This opinion has largely died out in the past decade among the more dedicated video game communities, but it does still persist. Especially among the mainstream crowd.
Ignoring everything that has already been mentioned in the post so far, let's look at this clip. A very typical and basic interaction in the genre. It may be a little reiterative to what I've already said, but here's a twelve page explanation breaking it all down.

...because everyone picks the most optimal solution

This is a particularly strange complaint. It kind of arbitrarily ignores the fact that fighting games are primarily a real-time genre. Which fundamentally means that fighting games have imperfect information. Ignoring the real time aspect and 4head game theory stuff that most people — including myself — don't actually understand aside, fighting games at their core are sort of like weighted rock paper scissors.
A single dominant strategy doesn't exist, because every strategy loses to something. You know what always picking the most logical strategy in any given situation makes you?
Predictable.

I don't have the reaction time for them

This is a really fun complaint, because addressing it actively involves understanding what reaction times are. Most people will not want to be convinced that their use of it has been wrong their entire lives.
What is commonly understood as reaction time is as follow: how quickly one is able to respond to stimuli. Simple enough. The thing is that this is not actually how most people respond to things except as a very last resort.
There's an excerpt I like to share. It's not at all a formal study and it's pretty anecdotal. You don't have to read through it all, but I do recommend it. This is the relevant part though. The rest of the excerpt then explains how people are hitting something that is physically unreactable with the human body: because they're reacting to something else long, long, looong before the ball goes airborne.
This is what good reaction times really are. People recognizing a situation long before it happens, and reacting accordingly by adjusting their rhythm. Trying to rely on pure stimuli to react is ignoring the entirety of a countdown and only responding to the "Go!" There's a reason why basically every track event starts with a countdown through the words "On your marks".
This is actually such an age old argument that someone made a flash game to make a point back in 2011. You can get it going through an emulator if you'd like, but that's optional. I'll be explaining under the assumption you haven't touched it at all.
The two moves that you are meant to block here is the weird flip kick and the moon. There's something really important to note here: both moves take about 256/288ms (moon/flip) before they can actually hurt you. On a technical level, they land squarely within the average human reaction time.
Millia Blocker is really fucking hard. Most fighting game players can't actually react in time. But in the actual game these moves are from, blocking them isn't that big of a deal in most situations. You only ever really see these two moves in very specific situations that often occur a mile away. It ends up becoming a fairly binary "are they gonna use them or not" sort of situation where you're already blocking with whatever you decided to go with, sort of like pre-firing, or by blocking both. Defending against them is so little of a deal these days that more experienced players tend to opt for more complicated options instead.

...because I'm too old

When I first started playing fighting games ten years ago, the top players were in their mid-thirties. Most of them are still top players in their forties and the young rising stars of the time are now in their thirties and top players as well. Something like 40% of the current top 100 tennis players are over thirty. Baseball and soccer both have very significant 30+ year old representation at the highest levels. 20% of the NBA is comprised of dudes in their thirties.
You can go out to your closest metropolitan community park or gym where random people meet up for a game of ball once a week. You're probably going to find an older person playing and keeping up with the rest of them, if the group isn't primarily older in the first place. And they'll steamroll the average high school senior who only play sports for gym class. They could probably keep up with the average HS sports club too.
Why? It's not that they're physically built different. It's because they decided to continue giving a damn about a game of ball in their older age. It's a conscious decision they've made to balance ball on top of whatever responsibilities they already have. This whole reaction time business ultimately boils down to a lack of experience, not actual reaction times.

...because too much is going on

It gets easier. If you decide to stick with it that is. When you're brand new to something, you're at a total sensory and information overload. It's difficult to parse through all that and you get decision paralysis, but it gets easier. This is known as cleaning up your mental stack. Or more concisely, turning the unfamiliar into familiar, into routine.
If you have a driver's license, remember when you first learned how to drive. There are 2-3 pedals for some reason, you need to keep track of what's behind you and to your sides, what's up ahead, the traffic laws, how the fuck a steering wheel works, etc. Forget trying to have a conversation or turning on the AC, you're way too focused on trying to not to crash the car. But eventually you get used to it all and now you do something very complex almost automatically. Some people are so used to it that they think texting during it all is no big deal. Please don't text and drive.

I don't like how you have to take out your credit card to unlock characters instead of unlocking them like you used to

This is a really interesting complaint born from yet another misunderstanding. In the overall microtransaction discourse, this can be valid regarding things like cosmetics. The good ol' SFxT DLC fiasco during the early days of DLC really does not help things either. But I'm going to spell it out in absolutely no uncertain terms:
You always had to pay money to get new characters in fighting games. The "unlockable" characters were not new characters, they were always part of the base roster.
When most people look back on history, they look at the character roster a game ends with and compare it to a post-DLC era roster and note the differences. But it's missing such a fundamental detail that is always conveniently forgotten in these complaints: fighting games used to have an insane amount of rereleases. Consider the age ol' meme of Super Street Fighter 2 Super Championship Turbo Edition.
Ever considered why that was? It's because fighting games were console ports of arcade games, where changing updating the game was relatively "trivial" on the arcade's end. Consoles? Consoles couldn't patch games until the 360/PS3 era. Which is around the time DLC started being a thing outside of PC games. And do you know what one of the main selling points of new patches/editions were? New characters. Compare Street Fighter 2's original roster of eight eventually growing up to a total of 16 in its final version. And you had to fork over money to buy the same game again to get those new characters.
To obfuscate things even further, each franchise had their own nomenclature to refer to patch versions. Street Fighter did "editions", reserving new numbers for actually brand new games (ala Alpha/Zero and 3). Tekken just increased the number. King of Fighters used the year they came out. Both franchises didn't properly distinguish whether it was a brand new game or a new patch either.
Anyway, it's 2023 now. Companies usually don't sell patches for $60-70 a pop anymore. Balance updates are entirely free these days with characters being the only things you have to purchase.

Fighting games are too expensive to get all the characters

Yup. Fighting games don't exactly have a better monetization method yet either, so we're kinda stuck with it.
In practice, it surprisingly doesn't matter that much. Even with the entire roster available, the vast majority of players don't actually play more than 2-3 characters. For most games, learning new characters can be really difficult for people. A new character can feel like playing a different version of the game in of itself. Combined with the fact that most people have struggle readjusting muscle memory, a lot of people put very little effort in actually playing new characters.
Alright so learning them is hard, but surely people need to study new characters because matchups are important, right? They totally are. But most people don't actually bother since the community is far more casual than people outside realize. That said, most people do agree that we should be able to try out characters for free. And hopefully that becomes standard in the genre. In any case, it sucks. But for most people, it's an inconvenience and not a money sink.

Fighting games lack progression

My personal disdain towards progression systems and love for abstract improvement aside, it's true. Fighting games lack engaging progression systems that are popular amongst multiplayer games. And I do believe that a well-made progression system would actually do wonders to resolve a lot of the misunderstandings found in this post. But forget well-made, most fighting games don't have any progression.
Until then, if your desire to play multiplayer games rely on concrete and highly measurable goals, fighting games are going to be a hard pass for a long while.

My extended family owns a big property down South. It sits in the flattest, dryest plains you could imagine, with the dullest house I've seen at the end of a drive that takes you through what looks to be untouched post-apocalypse. It's a two-story antebellum affair, built of planks that were probably painted a hundred years ago, but are now dried and grayed by the sun. Its windows are cloudy and floors creaky, but its interior has some charm, and we've refused to sell it, mostly since nobody wants to figure out who exactly it belongs to.
School will be starting up soon, so to put an end to the drowsy mid-August slump, I decided we'd go down and give the place a visit. I'm forty or so, work in an office job, with a wife and two kids. I gave my aunt a call, and made sure nobody was at the old place, then broke the news to my kids when they got home. One's seven and one's nine, both boys, and they were surprisingly excited. The last time we'd went had been boring beyond belief, thanks to the nearest town cancelling the annual fair, but they must have been too young to remember.
It wasn't an unpleasant drive. We stayed the night in a pleasant little inn in Kansas, and arrived around noon at the property. I unlocked the front door with a charmingly outdated brass key, and walked back a century in time. A thin layer of dust covered most of the living room. A fireplace sat on the left wall, and on the right a doorway led into a small kitchen. Against the back wall of the living room was a less-than-sturdy staircase, and two bedrooms sat at the rear of the first floor. I rolled my suitcase up against the wall to the kitchen, moving an intricately carved hat stand to the other side of the doorway. "Welcome in!" I announced, as the other three filtered in.
The room was dimly lit even with light streaming through the windows. Luckily the house had been "modernized", with electricity in some of the rooms. I flicked a switch, inviting the pleasant glow of an incandesent floor lamp on the other side of the room. My older son flopped down into a red velvet armchair, with gilded armrests, as if he'd been standing for hours. "You just spent three hours sitting in the car, Mikey," I reminded him, smiling.
"Gotta say, this isn't my kinda place. If I gotta share a room with Todd, I'm at least taking the nice chair."
He was right about it being the nice chair. A wooden chair sat opposite the fireplace, with a rough construction that seemed oblivious to the possibility of splinters. An equally robust bench sat between them, facing the fireplace, made of the same gray, splintered wood. My wife Liz sat down, stretching, while my youngest started exploring the house. I walked to the foot of the stairs, looking up at the second floor. I could see an attic door in the ceiling to my right, and at the top of the stairs against the wall sat a table, with a vase of cotton plants, which had dried out long ago. I walked up tentatively, checking each step to ensure it wouldn't buckle under my weight.
On my left was a short hallway, with a room on each side. On my right, an open space stood empty, with windows overlooking the dirt driveway. I tried to open up the door to one of the rooms, which I seemed to remember held cardboard boxes of old documents and trinkets, but it wouldn't budge. The other room seemed to have been a bedroom. Its only window was boarded up, and the only furniture, a bed, made of the same rough wood, sat against the far wall. There was a closet door opposite the foot of the bed, but it too was stuck. The house had surely shifted, especially given the unstable soil it rested upon.
The rest of the evening passed uneventfully. I cooked some delightfully rustic (my wife used less forgiving terms) food on the 1970s-vintage electric stove, and opened the windows to let a breeze in to combat the stifling warmth of the un-air-conditioned house. Not long after sunset, which we watched from the porch, I put my sons to bed, both in the bedroom downstairs, across from ours.
At some point in the dead of the night (I'd foregone my digital alarm clock, trusting the sun would wake us up), I felt something over my shoulder, standing beside the bed. The room, which had no windows, was pitch-black. I felt it drift away, and fell back asleep.
I awoke again, this time with light faintly streaming through the now open door. "Dad," a voice said. I could make out Todd, my younger son, standing shortly inside the doorway. "I keep waking up. I think someone is coming in our room."
I quietly crawled out of bed, trying not to wake Liz. "It's probably just the house settling and making creaking noises," I whispered. "Or maybe Mikey couldn't sleep."
Todd and Mikey's room, which had two windows, was slightly lighter, and I could see the beds. I helped Todd back into his, assuring him that everything was alright. I turned to Mikey's on the other side of the room, and found it empty. "Todd," I said, in an urgent voice. I heard him quickly sit up. "Do you know where Mikey went?"
"He left."
"D...do you know where?"
Todd pointed up, in the general direction of the stairs. I walked out of the room and up the stairs, worried, trying to walk slowly on the weak planks, but rushing to find my son. I looked around, not seeing him in the open area overlooking the driveway. I opened the door to the upstairs bedroom, and saw him, sitting against the wall below the window. I rushed over to him. "Mikey, what are you doing up here?"
"I heard you tell me to go upstairs," he said, looking into my eyes with worry.
I looked around, confused and concerned. "Okay. What happened when you went up here?"
"I got in bed. I couldn't sleep. I kept seeing the closet and it was so dark and-"
Mikey trailed off. I looked at the closet door, which was again shut. I walked over and shook the handle, but the door didn't budge.
"It was open, and inside was pitch black. I was scared. I'm not lying Dad. Why did you tell me to come up here?"
I was deeply unsettled by this point. I didn't want to scare Mikey, so I lied. "I told you to come up here so you'd have your own room. I'm sorry, I didn't realize it was so scary up here." That part wasn't a lie. I led him downstairs, and put him back to bed.
The next morning, I awoke to the sun streaming in through my bedroom door. I'd left it open in case something else happened, but the events of the night before were starting to feel like a bad dream. As we all awoke and gathered in the living room, I recollected the things that had happened, considering all the ways they could have happened. I get night terrors from time to time, I talk in my sleep, and the house's foundation wasn't particularly stable. It made perfect sense that I just sleep-told Mikey to go upstairs, and the house settled just enough to let the closet door swing open for a little while.
We had a breakfast of bacon and eggs, cooked in a thick iron skillet I found in a cabinet. "I hear there's a waterpark in town," Liz mentioned. That got the boys' attention. We pulled our swimsuits out of our suitcases, and drove twenty minutes down to the town for the day. It wasn't exactly bustling with people, but there was a small waterpark with a couple of slides, and a nice sandwich place for lunch. We drove back to the house and played some card games.
Although I'd done my best to put on a good face and see the house as charming and welcoming, as the shadows grew longer that afternoon, I couldn't help but feel something gnawing in the pit of my stomach. It got dark outside by the time we'd finished playing games, and Liz and I said goodnight to our boys. As I sat on the edge of our bed to pull off my shoes, I glanced over at her. "Does something feel...off? About this place?"
She looked over at me. "Last night, did you hear something?"
"Hear something?" I asked, probing, hoping it was something innocuous.
"Never mind," she replied, shaking her head.
I chose not to tell her about Mikey. Although I was pretty sure I'd just sleeptalked, I didn't want to worry her.
I walked out to the living room and flicked the light switch, plunging myself into darkness. The starlight was just enough for me to see my way back to our room, and shut the door. " 'night," I uttered, crawling under the covers, and nudging up against her reassuring warmth.
I woke to a startling crash. I bolted awake. I opened the bedroom door, as quickly as I could without flinging it into the wall, and ran around the corner. In the near pitch black room, I made out the figure of a young boy. It was Todd, on the ground under the stairs. Right at head height was a broken board, half of it hanging at an unnatural angle. "Todd!"
He sniffled. I bent down and put my hand on his shoulder as he sat up. "Why did you try to go upstairs?" I asked, with quiet restraint, holding back panic.
"It told me to," he replied, barely whispering.
Wordlessly I picked him up, and rushed to his and Mikey's room. Mikey was still asleep. I sat Todd back in his bed, and pulled his covers over him. I fumbled through the darkness to the fireplace, and grasped the fire poker. I stepped over and took hold of the stair railing, and carefully ascended, minding the broken step. When I reached the top, upon seeing the open door to the upstairs bedroom, I felt a chill. I stepped inside. The closet door was wide open.
The hair stood up on the back of my neck. Something felt deeply wrong. I turned, and ran down the stairs, feeling every board bend under my weight. I rounded the corner and catapulted into bed. All I felt was cold. I took heavy breaths, slowly feeling the warmth return, and soon drifted back to a worried, interrupted sleep.
In the morning, I wasn't as quick to shake off the feeling from the night before. I gathered everyone in the boys' bedroom, where we sat on the beds. I explained what had happened with Todd, who had some bruises, but nothing serious. There was an unspoken unease, that made us all eager to get out of the house for a while. Liz decided to take Todd to a petting zoo half an hour down the road. Mikey, who was too old for the petting zoo (since when?), wanted to go walk the property with me.
Liz and Todd took the car out to the petting zoo, leaving us waving in the driveway. We turned to our right, and headed out to the barn, a half-collapsed wooden structure that held some old tools and not much else. I grabbed an axe and Mikey took some hedge clippers, and we strolled the boundary of the plot, hacking through some brush that had popped up along the barbed wire fence. The sky, which had been cloudy for the first time that morning, started to darken, eventually promising rain as we made it half a turn from the driveway again.
As rain started to fall and thunder echoed from across the plains, we crossed the front path back to the barn. As I walked under the windows of the house, I couldn't help but feel it was watching us...or maybe that something was watching us from it. I brushed past my worries. I was toting an axe, after all. As we leaned our tools back against the rotting barn wall, heavier drops started falling, and the thunder grew louder. Not wanting to be the only other tall things on the prarie, we made our way back from the barn to the house. Lightning stuck just a few hundred feet away, with a blinding flash, burning a line into my retinas...straight down to the power line along the road.
When we got inside, as I'd expected, the light switch didn't work. The storm clouds had blocked out the sun, leaving the house almost as dark as the night before. A gust of wind slammed the front door shut. Mikey was silent. He slowly walked forward, straight toward the back wall of the living room. I followed him, at his same slow pace. As he reached the foot of the stairs, I turned. I cannot describe the shock of seeing the attic door standing open, the ladder folded down, making contact with the second story floor. Mikey gasped. I silently covered his mouth with one hand, and wrapped around him with the other. I tried to walk backward, pulling him away with me, but he was frozen, fixed on the gaping black entrance. As something moved in the corner of my eye upstairs, with sudden strength, I pulled Mikey to the side. This must have shaken him, and his feet moved. I released him and he ran, ran to the door. I followed in his path, looking back, seeing a glimpse of a shadow against the top of the back wall. I didn't want to look back to shut the door.
Mikey faltered, running out of breath, as he ran down the porch stairs and across the front path. I picked him up, holding him tightly, my arms burning, as I ran. He let out a wail, finally, and tears streamed down our faces. With some distance between ourselves and the house, I let go of Mikey and turned, and saw a shadowy figure in the upper window. Its eyes were dark, hollow. Until Mikey grabbed my arm and pulled me away, I stared, unable to move away from the figure. "What are you staring at?" he whispered, wrapping me in a hug which seemed more like a straightjacket.
Silently I reciprocated, holding him tightly, as rain battered us and thunder rolled through the barren landscape around us. With immense relief I saw headlights in the distance, and a blue SUV purred into the driveway. we threw ourselves into the car, and with a silent understanding, Liz immediately reversed out and flew toward the nearest town.
---
I'm not sure what we encountered in that house. I think it must have been a ghost, or some sort of reaper. I know I shouldn't have lived, that without Mikey, I would've walked back into that house. That without me, one of the boys might have had too close of an encounter with that thing. I don't know what Mikey saw in that closet, and I haven't asked him since. I don't know what Liz heard, but I think if we hadn't been sleeping in the same room, she would have gone up those stairs too. I haven't told them what I saw, and I don't know if they saw it too. All I know is, if you're invited to stay in a house that old, and you start feeling drawn to something, you get. out.

Get out while you can. I’ve never been on a subreddit like this, the ends to which people complain about this job…. You’d think this was air traffic control.
Acceptance rate? Yours to choose. Some people in some areas keep it low as they get fewer high tip orders, some people actually benefit from being top dasher. There is no magic number to look for, take the order if you want. Stop doing calculations. Stop trying so hard to make the most optimal system and just fuckjng DASH.
$1 a mile works for some people, but what about YOU? Set your own goals! Does everyone MAGICALLY end up in the same exact city when they start dashing? I didn’t think so. Every city and area is different. The ONLY advice that is actually useful for dashing is just to know your location. That’s it.
Waaah wah people don’t tip!! News flash, this has been happening for a long time, before doordash was even a thing. There will always be people who don’t tip. Always. There is no time of the year, no specific restaurant, there is no trickity trick to avoid non tippers. If you don’t want the order, don’t take it.
So yeah, LEAVE. People keep trying to make this perfect blueprint for this job and you CANT. Much like almost everything else in life, there is no formula and you can’t just go off of someone else’s experience. There is no correct way to dash. Stop. Just do it your way.
The weight off my shoulders is already lifting. Join me. The people here put too many things in our heads and so much misinformation. Just leave like me.
Obviously we don’t all live in the same carbon copy town. Every single piece of “advice” you see on here doesnt apply unless you both dash in the exact same area, it just doesnt. It’s like people will complain about the most obvious things: oh it’s so DEADDD right now oh geee I wonder why? Maybe it’s because I live in a college town? GEE WOW I didn’t expect dashing would be slow when HALF THE TOWNS POPULATION IS GONE. Get a grip!!!

Kubernetes
I have a really simple flask application running on kubernetes (GKE). The pods get a fair amount of traffic (60req/s +-) and they run under an autoscaling group with a minimum of 4 active and 10 max.
At every 4-5 hours the liveness probe starts failing and all pods get restarted. I sometimes find that my pods got restarted 11-12 times during a single night. When I describe the pods I get the same error:
Liveness probe failed: Get http://10.12.5.23:5000/_status/healthz/: net/http: request canceled while waiting for connection (Client.Timeout exceeded while awaiting headers)
All pods have the same number of restarts so it's not a load issue (and I also have autoscaling).
The _status/healthz/ endpoint is as simple as it gets:
@app.route('/')@app.route('/\_status/healthz/')def healthz(): return jsonify({ "success": True }) I have one other route on this application which connects to mysql and verifies some data. I had the same applications distributed on digitalocean droplets running under much higher load for months without issues.
I can't seem to find out why the liveness checks start failing al lat once and my pods get restarted.
The allocated resources are also decent and really close with what I had on digitalocean droplets:
"resources": { "requests": { "cpu": "500m", "memory": "1024Mi" }, "limits": { "cpu": "800m", "memory": "1024Mi" }} I had the same pods running with 100m for cpu limits and with 900m. Same result, every few hours all pods are restarting.
Liveness settings:
"livenessProbe": { "initialDelaySeconds": 30, "httpGet": { "path": "/\_status/healthz/", "port": 5000 }, "timeoutSeconds": 5}, UPDATE: added Readiness probe, increased CPU = same results, 7 restarts on each of the 4 pods.
Answer link : https://codehunter.cc/a/kubernetes/kubernetes-pods-failing-all-at-once

We're now in that sweet spot after A-Day and before Summer OVs/Camp Season where it makes sense to take note and reflect. Remember that camp season likely changes this board dramatically and we'll see a good # of decision (both to Alabama and elsewhere) throughout June and early July.
Rankings Note: Every comic is someone's first so here's how to read/interpret/understand the rankings listed below: Commits and Top Targets will show their 247 Composite Rank, their On3 Composite, and their Comp² Ranking, which is just the raw average of the 2 composite ranks, rounded down. This overview will just reflect the pre-summer top targets/names to know and not the full list. Summer camp season will drastically change this list (new big board in July/August)
# of 4/5* change each year but I like a little consistency so here's generally how I arbitrarily split it, based on the average year-over-year data:
5*: #1-#32
4*: #33-#350
3*: #351-#2000
​
QB (1 Needed/1 Commited)
Overview: Barring something crazy, a team's QB will be the most important player on the field 9 times out of 10. Bama's looked around for a potential 2nd option but is pretty content with their 5* QB of the Future already commited

Name	H.S.	Rank	Notes
Commits
1. 5* Julian Sayin	Carlsbad in Carlsbad, CA (SoCal)	247: #11 , On3: #14, Comp2: #12	One of the most "ready" prospects in the 2024 class, Julian is very skilled at every facet of QB play - might not be the highest ceiling from an NFL perspective but very likely the highest floor. Julian commited to Alabama somewhat out of the blue but has been locked in since and the Tide's primary leader on offense in this class. This is your QB of the Future.

RB (1-2 Needed/0 Commited)
Overview: Alabama has good RB depth heading into 2023 but could very likely lose both Jase and Roydell at the end of the year so 2 RBs again this cycle feels right. It's doubtful it'll have the star power of the Haynes/Young duo from '23 but I would not sleep on the 2024 targets.

Name	H.S.	Rank	Notes
Top Targets
1. 4* Kevin Riley	Tuscaloosa County in Northport, AL (Tuscaloosa area)	247: #97, On3: #102, Comp2: #99	A homegrown talent, Riley does it all, running with great balance, breaks contact and gets going in a hurry. Top 3 of Bama, Auburn, UGA - this should end up being an Iron Bowl battle that Alabama wins, though it does appear Riley might take his time. If Alabama pushes hard, he could be a summer commit.
2. 4* Daniel Hill	Meridian in Meridian, MS (E MS)	247: #196, On3: #194, Comp2: #195	One of the more unique RB prospects, Daniel Hill is a big bodied guy but plays a ton of receiver as well - not a comparison but could have a Najee Harris-esque roll. Alabama is battling South Carolina here, with the Cocks having some buzz after an early Bama lean. Bama is not done here but might need to press harder.
3. 4* Nate Frazier	Mater Dei in Santa Ana, CA (SoCal)	247: #76, On3: #74, Comp2: #75	One of the nation's top RB prospects with some of the best long speed, Nate Frazier will push for #1 back status in 2024. Frazier is pretty wide open currently, being highly desired by both the local west coast school and the SEC powerhouses. I'd have trouble projecting him anywhere yet but it would be really cool if it was Alabama.

WR (2-4 Needed/2 Commited)
Overview: Alabama has taken 10 non-transfer WRs over the past 2 cycles so while I think they'll take a normal # in 2024, I'd lean more towards 3 than 4 total, unless a 'best available' type wants in

Name	H.S.	Rank	Notes
Commits
1. 5* Perry Thompson	Foley in Foley, AL (Mobile area)	247: #27, On3: #29, Comp2: #28	A taller receiver, Perry thrives with straight-line speed and a suprising ability to weave through space - Thompson earned his offer last season in camp routing up 2023 5* DBs. As a high-ranking prospect, Perry is somewhat keeping his options open and will likely take visits but has repeatedly reaffirmed his commit - Alabama's steady pursuit should allow them to hold on.
2. 4* Rico Scott	Bishop McDevitt in Harrisburg, PA (Cent PA)	247: #372, On3: #289, Comp2: #330	A real smooth operator - plays RB and WR and is at his best going up the field. A bit of a suprise to some, Bama had seen him previously in camp and then watched his fall progress and saw what they needed to pull the trigger. I think we'll finish in the top 150-170
Top Targets
1. 4* Amari Jefferson	Baylor School in Chattanooga, TN	247: #270, On3: #288, Comp2: #279	My favorite realistic WR addition - his vertical and lateral speed POP off the screen, looks like a top 75 guy. Currently a Tennessee baseball commit, football is his likely future, as Alabama and Georgia battle it out. This will be a tough battle but one I very much hope the Tide wins.
2. 4* Aeryn Hampton	Carthage in Carthage, TX (E TX)	247: #116, On3: #126, Comp2: #121	More fast than quick, Aeryn runs like a RB, weaving through traffic and hitting the jets. Aeryn has been up-front about his love for Alabama and has narrowed his list to Bama and Texas, his former commitment. Aeryn has the green light to commit but seems like a guy who could go back and forth so unclear where this ends up.
3. 4* Cam Coleman	Central in Phenix City, AL (E AL)	247: #54, On3: #25, Comp2: #38	This guy's the real deal - big bodied but with slot speed and one of the best high-pointers in the class. Alabama's been trying to get him on campus and he's been uninterested, so the communication has been laid back. Cam and Perry Thompson kinda fill the same role so it's not a huge concern but Auburn is leading here and would give Hugh Freeze a real weapon.

TE (1-2 Needed/0 Commited)
Overview: I think *how* Tommy Rees constructed/called his ND offenses is a bit overblown in how his Bama offenses will look (you play with the talent you have) but Bama has been trying to find their Kyle Pitts/Brock Bowers/Michael Mayer for years now - really since OJ Howard/Irv Smith with a brief detour into Jahleel Billingsley. Alabama would like multiple bodies here if available but would really like a least one really good on in 2024

Name	H.S.	Rank	Notes
Top Targets
1. 4* Caleb Odom	Carrollton in Carrollton, GA (W GA)	247: #85, On3: #69, Comp2: #77	A true mismatch nightmare, Odom is a true receiving threat TE, big bodied with room to grow but a little slender currently. Caleb is kinda wide open at the moment but this feels like one where Bama should start to push, with UGA snagging two of their targets in Jaden Reddell and Colton Heinrich

OL (4-5 Needed/0 Commited)
Overview: Alabama brought in a big OL class in 2023, which is already living up to expectations behind the scenes. They'll try to repeat the process in 2024, as they continue to re-tool their OL room

Name	H.S.	Rank	Notes
Top Targets
1. 4* OT Daniel Calhoun	Walton in Marietta, GA (Atlanta Metro)	247: #86, On3: #106, Comp2: #96	A mammoth of a prospect, Calhoun has the look of a SEC lineman, able to play on the left or right side of the offensive line. Top 3 of Bama, UGA, and Texas but suprise suprise, this looks like another Bama/UGA battle. Feel better about Bama in this one but it's close and OVs will be big.
2. 4* IOL Casey Poe	Lindale in Lindale, TX (E TX)	247: #142, On3: #134, Comp2: #138	One of the most coveted interior prospects, Poe boasts both a mean streak as well as the ability to move the center, making him about as A1 as you can get for an interior OL prospect. Top 3 currently would be Alabama, Oklahoma, and UGA. Will be a tough battle but Alabama is the perceived leader heading into visits. Bama REALLY wants him.
3. 4* OL Jordan Seaton	IMG Academy in Bradenton, FL (Originally from Washington DC)	247: #41, On3: #42, Comp2: #41	Big, athletic frame who could end up playing inside or out - Seaton prefers OT but somecurrently leaning towards IOL. Ohio State was and is very involved but Bama/UGA feel like the primary players since making the move to IMG. I believe he visited for the A-Day game and it certainly seems like Bama will be an option until the end here.
4. 4* OT Marques Easley	Kankakee in Kankakee, IL (NE IL)	247: #263, On3: #240, Comp2: #251	A longer and leaner tackle prospect, Bama and UGA are again involved with Tennessee being the 3rd team in the mix, as well as the possible leader. Despite the Vols' early lead, this one can really go any direction after visits.
5. 4* OT Weston Davis	Beaumont United in Beaumont, TX (SE TX)	247: #180, On3: #124, Comp2: #152	A basketball-first prospect with high-upside as an OT, Davis has some interest in Bama but local programs like Texas A&M are getting some good recent buzz. Think it'll be paramount for Weston to camp.

DL (3-4 Needed/1 Commited)
Overview: Another unit Alabama's been trying to step-up, talent is a necessity in 2024

Name	H.S.	Rank	Notes
Commits
1. 4* DE Jeremiah Beamon	Parker in Birmingham, AL	247: #103, On3: #98, Comp2: #100	Alabama's most recent commitment, Jeremiah is a FORCE rushing the passer, a little undersized with plenty of room to grow before a potential reneissance. If that sounds like Quinnen Williams, it's because that's the comp he's been getting. Many thought he'd be a sooner or later kinda commit and he went ahead and stopped messing around.
Top Targets
1. 5* DE Eddrick Houston	Buford in Buford, GA (Atlanta Metro)	247: #15, On3: #15, Comp2: #15	High upside, athleticism, and flexibility - bit of a tweener for the Saban defense who could slim down to an Anfernee Jennings role and add some weight to try and emulate Jonathan Allen. Another prospect that I think comes down to Bama and UGA, I feel better about Bama's chances here than with Eddrick's Buford teammate, KJ Bolden.
2. 4* DT Terrance Hibler	Holmes County Central in Lexington, MS (Cent MS)	247: #281, On3: #368, Comp2: #324	A bit undersized, Terrance makes up for it with violence, punch, and pure 'want-to'. Alabama has made a great early impression, alongside local Miss State, and the Tide are in a great spot if they choose to push here.
3. 3* DE Utah Commit Isaia Faga	Central in Phenix City, AL (E AL)	247: #733, On3: #676, Comp2: #704	Alabama has seen some recent success with Pacific Island players but it's rare to have one so local. Isaia excels at getting through traffic and getting into the backfield. Isaia's uncle is the Utah DL coach, leading to the early commitment, but Alabama is interested in seeing him camp and who knows where it could go from there.

EDGE (1-2 Needed/1 Commited)
Overview: The highest star rating per capita, talent is hardly a problem here but we'd love to have more.

Name	H.S.	Rank	Notes
Commits
1. 4* Cayden Jones	Christ School in Arden, NC (W NC)	247: #147, On3: #171, Comp2: #159	Alabama has been looking more and more at hybrid LB types who could end up on the EDGE or off-ball (Jihaad Campell, Qua Russaw) - Cayden Jones is another, playing a ton off-ball and walking down to the edge and will likely project into a Terrell Lewis/Dallas Turner - type role. Since last year, Cayden had been up-front about wanting the green light to commit and jumped on it when he got the chance.
Top Targets
1. 5* Dylan Stewart	Friendship Collegiate Academy in Washington DC	247: #10, On3: #9, Comp2: #9	Maybe the top pure Edge guy, Dylan reminds me of Keon Keeley from last cycle; similar build, bend and length. Visits to Alabama, Ohio State, Miami, South Carolina and UGA have put all 5 in contention, similar to Keeley. I'd give the Gamecocks and Hurricanes the edge going into the summer but Alabama is RIGHT there and another visit to campus could flip the script.
2. 4* Jordan Ross	Vestavia Hills in Birmingham, AL	247: #38, On3: #33, Comp2: #35	A high-end Edge, Jordan flashes natural talent that can only grow with development. A little undersized, Alabama has told him to gain weight and camp prior to a serious pursuit, giving UGA and Tennessee an early lead. This could change quickly this summer, as Jordan finds his way onto campus.
3. 5* Colin Simmons	Duncanville in Duncanville, TX (DFW Metro)	247: #4, On3: #3, Comp2: #3	One of the Nation's top athletes, Simmons effortlessly flies around off the edge. LSU and Texas are battling it out thus far but Alabama will continue to work here.

LB (2-3 Needed/1 Commited)
Overview: There's somewhat of a logjam of older player at the LB position so I would expect attrition after 2023, which will need to be replaced by incoming players.

Name	H.S.	Rank	Notes
Commits
1. 4* Sterling Dixon	Mobile Christian School in Mobile, AL	247: #188, On3: #164, Comp2: #176	Similar to Cayden Jones, Sterling is another hybrid type - beginning as an edge type with some off-ball experience, Sterling will transition to ILB this offseason for Mobile Christian and then at Alabama. A long-time commit, Sterling will take some visits but there's not a huge concern there.
Top Targets
1. 5* UGA Commit Demarcus Riddick	Chilton County in Clanton, AL (Cent AL)	247: #25, On3: #38, Comp2: #31	Demarcus is an excellent example of a modern LB and exactly what Alabama wants from the position: excellent weaving through traffic, sideline-to-sideline movement and can shade down to rush the passer. An early UGA commit, the strength of that commitment has wavered significantly and while there's still some work to do, the feeling is he could very likely flip to Alabama over the summer.
2. 5* Justin Williams	Oak Ridge in Conroe, TX (Houston area)	247: #13, On3: #12, Comp2: #12	Similarly archetypal LB prospect: a bit slight at the moment, he makes up for it with WR-level speed and burst, making him a real weapon against a high-powered offense. Oregon, Alabama, and UGA are the likely top 3 - Bama made a good impression this spring but needs to get him back on campus ASAP - feels like UGA could swoop in here if Riddick flips.
3. 4* Bradley Shaw	Hoover in Hoover, AL (Birmingham area)	247: #176, On3: #139, Comp2: #157	More of a traditional ILB, football IQ and sure tackling give him a Shaun Dion Hamilton feel. Alabama, Auburn, and UGA are the top 3 schools and this feels like Iron Bowl battle, where Alabama will win or lose based on how they push to reel him in.

DB (4-5 Needed/1 commited)
Overview: You gotta take a solid # of DBs every cycle but CB is one of the most important/most needed positions in 2024 after losses to the transfer portal.

Name	H.S.	Rank	Notes
Commits
1. 5* CB Jaylen Mbakwe	Clay-Chalkville in Pinson, AL (Birmingham area)	247: #19, On3: #17, Comp2: #18	A legitimate two-way player, Mbakwe, like Kool-Aid before him, could have been a 5* WR as well as DB but prefers defense. Jaylen is the defensive leader of the class and will be pretty instrumental in how the defensive class comes together.
Top Targets
1. 5* CB Charles Lester III	Riverview in Sarasota, FL (Cent FL)	247: #16, On3: #19, Comp2: #17	An all-around athlete with the ability to play multiple DB positions, CL3 could be commited or off the board at any moment. There's a clear interest in Alabama on his end but the Tide have yet to really push, leaving the door wide open for FSU. He OVs on June 3rd so it's likely that we'll have a better idea of where Bama goes after that.
2. 4* CB Jameer Grimsley	Tampa Catholic in Tampa, FL	247: #230, On3: #195, Comp2: #212	Somewhat of the prototypical Saban corner, with a long and lean build and a wingspan for days. Jameer has seen his recruitment skyrocket this spring and schools like Bama, FSU, and Penn State are pushing. Bama's got a great shot for this prospect who should continue to rise.
3. 4* S UGA Commit Peyton Woodward	St. John Bosco in Bellflower, CA (SoCal)	247: #69, On3: #70, Comp2: #69	Peyton shows good play speed and flows to the target in run defense; a good balanced safety. Peyton has not been shy about letting other programs try to flip him from the Dawgs and his family is full of Alabama fans, making the Tide a very possible flip option.
4. 4* CB Zabien Brown	Mater Dei in Santa Ana, CA (SoCal)	247: #57, On3: #56 , Comp2: #56	Zabien is a physical pass defender who excels at getting in passing lanes and making plays on the ball - not a specimen but a true competitor. As a Mater Dei kid, the axiom has been USC most often has first right of refusal so we'll see how the summer visits go and if Bama can/will make a push here.
5. 5* S KJ Bolden	Buford in Buford, GA (Atlanta Metro)	247: #8, On3: #5, Comp2: #6	Likely the top DB in the 2024 class, KJ is how they come; a true 5* safety. UGA has a healthy lead thus far but Bama (alongside others) will have a chance to fight back during summer OVs
6. 5* CB UGA Commit Ellis Robinson IV	IMG Academy in Bradenton, FL (Originally from CT)	247: #5, On3: #7, Comp2: #6	One of the stickiest DBs in the class, Ellis was the other 5* CB alongside Alabama freshman Desmond Ricks at IMG in 2023. Alabama led early but UGA got the momentum and the commitment. It's likely Ellis will take visits, including a potential OV to Alabama, but I would not predict a flip to Alabama at this time or in the future.

"Everyone's eyes are missing from their faces."
“What do you mean by that?” I asked her calmly, making note of her body language. Each time my patient spoke, she avoided eye contact entirely. She’d dart her eyes around, as if scared to land on one thing for too long. Her hands were folded in her lap, and her left knee bounced rhythmically.
“There’s nothing there,” She murmured, mind in a different place. “Where the eyes should be.”
“Can you describe it more in length?” I asked.
She paused before speaking again. “They still have noses. And mouths. And eyebrows, I guess. But there’s no eyes. It’s just…smooth.”
“I see,” I wrote that down. “How long have you been seeing this?” She shrugged, fidgety as ever.
“Does it frighten you?”
“Sometimes,” She replied, now looking to the floor.
“Is that why you don’t want to look at me?” I began. She tensed her shoulders, so I added, “You don’t have to. I’m just curious.”
“I don’t know,” She spoke quietly.
“It’s alright, I won’t make you do anything you’re not comfortable with.” I tapped the notepad lightly with my pen, coming up with some other questions. I wondered to myself if this was a side-effect of an underlying condition, manifesting into her reality.
“How about pictures? Or mirrors? Do people still look funny there?”
“It’s not funny.” She said bluntly, then immediately shrunk back into herself, as if expecting discipline.
“I’m sorry, Brynn.” I conceded. “I only mean, do they still not have eyes when you’re not looking directly at them?”
“Yes.” She nodded. “But it’s worse.”
“Do you mind telling me how so?” I tried to be as inoffensive as I could with my words and tone.
The more I knew, the better understanding I had of what she was experiencing. But I also knew not to probe too much, or I lose the chance of hearing more. Some patients require lots of patience and security, and I had no problem obliging. So far Brynn had shared with me far more than she has in our previous sessions, and I wanted to see more into her world. Get an idea as to why she had done what she did, leading to her school expulsion.
“Their entire face is…wrong.” Brynn began to explain, struggling with which words to choose. “They’re warped and stretched and confusing to look at. The longer I stare, the more it changes into something worse. Until I can’t look anymore and have to shield my eyes.”
“That sounds quite unpleasant,” I frowned. “You said this is only in pictures and mirrors?”
“Yes. For now.” She breathed with a shudder.
“For now?”
“Sometimes, I see the faces in the real world too. In the sides of my vision. And if I look at it it goes away, but I don’t think that will last for long.”
I sighed. I felt deeply sympathetic for her. She seemed to be battling against demons created by her mind, fueled by anxiety and stress. I tried to piece together what she told me with what I knew, and the main reason the state had hired me to help her in the first place.
Even her own parents cowered before her, relieved as soon as she stepped out of their car in my driveway. It sickened me they’d deny her love and support in these trying times, but I was only seeing one perspective. Brynn has yet to deliberate any issues with her family.
“Were you experiencing this when you attacked that girl in April?” I said slowly, hoping to reintegrate the incident in her mind as unobtrusively as possible. “If you don’t want to talk about it, I underst-“
“That wasn’t a girl!” Brynn pleaded, finally looking towards me. She paused for a fraction of a second before snapping her head away, terrified. “It was one of them disguised as her, I swear! I would never hurt someone like that unless I had to!”
“Ok.” I bit my lip, glancing at my files. “So you believe that you were in danger?”
“She was stronger than the others.” She didn’t answer my question, but I chose to momentarily lean in to that comment.
“The others as in the faces?” I clarified.
“Yes.”
“You perceive them as…other people? Not just strange faces but separate entities?”
I knew I should avoid putting words in her mouth, as it was best to let her come to her own conclusions, but I couldn’t help myself. A part of me was morbidly curious, trying to accept how a child could brutally maim another child with nothing but a rock and her bare hands. The pictures provided from that day were visceral and disturbing. Brynn so far seems troubled, but not to this degree. Not to the degree of severe institutionalization, as the court suggested.
“Yeah!” Her face melted with relief, tears welling on her lower lashes. “They’re not human. Just shadows or glitches. But they follow me everywhere! And that girl, she wanted to hurt me! She told me awful things….”
And then the tears fell as she dissolved into sobs. I reached for my tissue box and handed it to her, allowing her to get it out of her system.
“You are very brave for telling me all this.” I started. She had her face buried in her palms, hiccuping. “We can be done for today if it’s too much.”
“It’s fine.” She choked. “I just need a minute.”
“Take all the time you need.”
I leaned back and glanced around the room, eyes flickering over the mirror hung on the wall behind the sofa. In the reflection was myself, my desk to the right, the window to the left spilling light from the afternoon.
And then I saw it. Like a spec or an illusion, there was a second face over my own. One with a twisted grin, hollow eyes, pupils swelled in the sclera. I shut my eyelids and shook my head. I didn’t even need to convince myself I was seeing things, I already felt so confidently I had. I opened them and saw it again, but much closer, face pressed against the other side of the mirror like it was a window.
I jumped, startled, and Brynn snapped her head up. “Sorry,” I laughed. “Just had a sudden chill.”
I’m not sure she could tell if I was lying, but regardless she didn’t push it. We concluded our session on a high note, talking about how proud I was of her progress. As soon as she left my office, I removed the mirror from the wall and stashed it into a closet.
Then, I made a call.
“Hello?” Brynn’s mother answered, voice etched in trepidation.
“Hi, Mrs. Barker,” I began. “I’m calling about Brynn’s progress so far in my sessions.”
“Oh,” Mrs. Barker was timid and sheepish, speaking at a barely audible murmur. “How is she doing?”
“Really well.” I replied. “But before my next session with her, I wanted to see if I could have you and your husband come in. I want to get your perspective, if that’s alright.”
“Just us?”
“For a session, yes.”
She paused. “That’s fine.” She answered.
We scheduled a time, and I hung up with an exhale.
When Mr. and Mrs. Barker arrived, I showed them to my office and had them choose their own seats. They sat on the sofa, a person’s length between them.
I asked then how they were, offered them some bottled water. They were very uncomfortable in each other’s presence as well as my own, displaying a clear lack of trust. I wondered how long they’d been like this, if it had anything to do with Brynn’s behavior.
“How long have you been together?” I began, wanting to see their reaction. Subtle facial expressions and body language would notify me whether or not the subject of their relationship was one of merriment or tension.
“Ten years,” Mr. Barker replied, seemingly neutral about the topic. “Married two years before Brynn was born.”
“That’s lovely,” I added. “My husband and I are coming up on our sixth year this June.”
“Congratulations.” Mrs. Barker smiled meekly.
“Do you have kids of your own?” The husband asked.
“No, we don’t plan on having children.” I replied. “But we do have plenty of pets.”
“That’s nice.” He nodded.
“Is it just you three at home?” I crossed my legs. “Any pets of your own?”
“We had a cat once.” Mrs. Barker fidgeted with her nails, picking at her cuticles. “That was a while ago.”
I figured this was enough preamble before diving into the meat of the conversation. “Brynn seems quite lonely,” I said. “Maybe another pet could help her, if you’re open to the idea.”
“We can’t trust her with pets anymore.” Mr. Barker stated. That piqued my interest.
“Do you mind telling me why?”
He pondered, then shook his head.
“Well, I won’t force your hand, of course.” I began. “But this is a safe space. The more you share with me, the better I can help Brynn.”
He sighed, then sunk further into the sofa. “Brynn was an infant when we had the cat.” He shared. “He was an older family cat from my late mother. One day, we heard Brynn crying from her crib. Julie went to check on her,” He glanced over to his wife. “And she found him in pieces.”
“Pieces?”
“He was strewn about like he had been mauled.” Julie answered. “It was…horrifying.”
“Do you think it might’ve been an intruder? A stray dog that may have wandered in your home?” I asked.
“No, that’s not possible. At the time we lived in an apartment, fifth story.” The husband said. “It wasn’t a large space. We would have heard someone enter.”
“When you saw the cat in the state he was in,” I thought aloud. “What was going through your mind?”
“I’m sorry, but I want to move on.” Julie looked distressed, so I dropped the subject.
“Anything else peculiar with Brynn? She’s told me some troubling things that she’s seen as of late.”
“The angels?” Julie raised both her brows. She saw my confusion and blushed.
“Sorry.”
“Don’t be,” I studied her. Angels was an interesting choice of words. I would’ve understood entities, ghosts, maybe glitches. But angels was very specific. “Has she called them angels?”
“No,” The husband’s faced morphed into a scowl. “Julie insists on calling them that.”
She shot him an apprehensive glare.
“So, regardless,” I continued. “How long has she been talking about these…angels?”
The husband looked to his wife, expecting her to answer. She did the same to him. Both had some kind of silent communication between the two of them, and Julie sighed. “We really wanted to have a baby.”
“Pardon?”
“Kent and I had gotten married and wanted to have a child.” Julie clarified. “I got pregnant with a girl.”
This wasn’t what I had initially asked, but I sat back and let her continue.
“Five months into pregnancy, I suffered a miscarriage. It was devastating. I didn’t know what to do with myself. I was living a waking nightmare and I wanted to die.
“Then, one day, I was at the store and I ran across an older looking woman. She approached me and said she was sorry for my loss. I don’t know how she knew, and at first I was angry, telling her to screw off and leave me alone. But then she offered to help me. I was about to pass her off as crazy, but she handed me a card and told me to call her when I was ready.
“I wanted to throw that card away so badly. But I couldn’t. I didn’t know who this woman was, but on the card she listed herself as a ‘fertility witch’. Sounded made up but I was beside myself with grief. So I went anyway, and took Kent with me. He tried to talk me out of it but I just needed to see. Get the curiosity out of my system.”
“Her office was the very definition of what you’d expect.” Kent added. “Shrunken heads, animal bones, dried herbs, crystals. The woman beckoned Julie to lay down and offered to perform a ritual for free. We were uncomfortable and declined, but the woman said something that rattled us. She said the name of our baby, and there was no way she would’ve known. We had wanted the name to be a surprise, so only my wife and I knew.
“This should have been what sent us on our way, but Julie and I felt some kind of deeper connection. This woman seemed to be legit, and we allowed her to do the ritual.”
“And then I was pregnant again.” Julie said. “As if we got a second chance, Brynn was back inside me developing as a beautiful healthy baby. We delivered her with ease. We couldn’t have been happier.”
“And then the…’angels’ appeared.” Kent’s brows furrowed, his expression turning grim. “They followed Brynn everywhere, and by proxy began to haunt the people nearest her. We saw them in the dark corners of our house, the alleyways of downtown, in the reflections of the mirrors and car windows and water in the tub. We also tried to ignore them. But each birthday Brynn had, the angels would do something drastic, as if lashing out against us before fading back into distant apparitions.”
“The death of our cat was one such instance.” Julie added. “The others I don’t wish to speak of, but they are similar. She’d turn another year older, the angels would do something bad, and then cease to be an issue until next year. They never worsened in severity, so we falsely assumed we could manage. Prepare for what would happen and deal with it.”
“So,” I finally broke the silence, unsure of how to process this information. “This instance with Brynn attacking her schoolmate…is it birthday related?”
“No,” Julie broke into nervous tears. “That’s why we’re so scared.”
“It’s almost like it’s corrupting her now.” Kent held his wife’s hand and gave it a singular squeeze before letting go. “It’s starting to bleed into everyday life and we’re at our wits end.”
I looked at them for a moment before coming up with a response. “I’m sorry, but I find this incredibly hard to believe.” I began.
“I know, I know.” Kent looked pleading. “I know how crazy it sounds. But that’s why we’re telling you. You’re a professional child psychologist, not a psychic or paranormal nutcase. You aren’t going to take my words to heart because it sounds ridiculous. But Brynn has opened up to you. She trusts you, where as any help we’ve tried to get from the church or elsewhere has just made things worse.”
“Everyday it gets harder and harder not to be afraid.” Julie continued to cry. “It’s ruining our relationship with Brynn and each other. We just want to know how to help her.”
That night I was tossing and turning, unable to get any rest. I was hoping to get some clarity from Brynn’s parents, but what Julie and Kent shared with me only added to the confusion. Did I believe in the supernatural? Not really. But the Barkers were fully convinced that Brynn was being haunted by entities that were slowly beginning to influence her. And yet, I’ve seen movies with similar plots. The brief visage of said entity in my office mirror wasn’t enough proof to validate any of this as true.
So were they making this up? Why? What benefit would the Barkers have in telling me this tale of demons and witches when their child’s very well being was at stake? I was the one who the state hired to see whether or not Brynn needed juvenile psychiatric treatment. She had hurt another student to the point of irreversible damage. The only reason she wasn’t behind bars was because she was eight. So didn’t Kent and Julie see how serious this was?
I dissented these questions to my husband, leaving out names and specific details as per protocol (though if you’re reading this now, that got thrown out the window.) He agreed with what I said, but also suggested I request documentation of Brynn’s birth, if I was able to. Try to see if she really had “been born again.” I wasn’t too keen at first with the idea, but decided it could be beneficial in helping Brynn by rooting out what was and wasn’t the truth.
The documents, to my surprise, were granted. There was her birth certificate, a miscarriage certification from the state months prior, copies of tests from both times Julie was first reported to be pregnant. The timeframe in between the miscarriage certification to the birth of Brynn was…strangely short. Only four months separated the two dates, which perplexed me.
I knew I was beginning to tread upon territory outside my pay grade, but I was too invested. I reached out to the doctor that signed off on both documents, hoping maybe I could get some answers.
“Hello?” The woman on the phone picked up after the third ring. “Yes, hi, my name is Dr. Grey and I’m calling about one of your previous patients, Brynn Barker.” The woman paused. “And you’re supposed to be..?”
“Her psychologist,” I replied, trying to find a way to justify my calling. “I’ve been asked by the state to begin treatment for her but I’ve noticed a discrepancy in her forms of identification.”
“I’m sorry, but I can’t help you. Despite her no longer being my patient, I have a confidentiality agreement.”
My hopes fell. “Ok, I understand. Tha-“
“But I no longer work for that hospital anyways,” She continued. “So said agreement must no longer apply, right? Not sure that’s how it works but we’ll roll with it.”
“Well, I would love it if you could perhaps stop by my offic-“
Again, another interruption. “Let’s meet somewhere else. Keep it on the down low.” “I understand.”
That evening I met up with her at a local sports bar. I found her sitting alone at a booth, drinking a beer and staring intently at her phone. I introduced myself and we shook hands before I sat.
And then, after I explained to her what the Barkers had told me, she shared her side of the story. It’s not unheard of for a woman to be pregnant soon after the gestation period of her previous miscarriage. If she was ovulating, she could be pregnant with another baby within the week. But according to the woman, Julie had shown back in her office a month later, six months pregnant. That was medically impossible. She tried to run more tests, consult other doctors, but the higher up’s ended up saying that she had made a mistake prior. But she hadn’t.
Undoubtedly, the fetus hadn’t survived in Julie’s womb. The woman even had a prognosis for the miscarriage, a cervical insufficiency. Despite this, Brynn was born healthy and it seemed the matter would get swept under the rug.
“Then I was approached by an older lady.” She continued. “This lady wasted no time telling me that she had performed a ritual on Julie in order to allow her to be pregnant, but it appeared to have backfired. Rather than have a new child, Julie’s womb appears to have reanimated her deceased child, which in the lady’s words ‘borders on necromancy.’” The woman shook her head.
“I was taken aback by the absurdity of these claims, but she told me to quit my practice at once. There are these angels that try to settle the score of death. If someone comes back to life, they intervene. I guess they can’t take back the life directly, but they will take the lives of others until the scales are balanced. It’s not as easy as an eye for eye. These angels will wreak all kinds of havoc and curse any who seek to get in their way. Which is why she advised I quit my job, for it would have unattended consequences there on. And so I ignored her outright.”
She looked to her hands, appearing guilty. “It took the stillbirth of my next two patients for me to finally understand. Any woman I saw I’d inevitably doom to suffer the loss of her child. I tried to get in contact with some of the other staff surrounding Brynn’s birth. Some of them killed themselves. Some others went insane. Most vanished without a trace.”
Then she turned to me with a look of urgency on her face. “Dr. Grey, I know it’s your job to help. Believe me. But Brynn cannot be saved, and you’ll damn yourself the more you try to interfere. If I were you, I’d tell the state she needs to be put away for the safety of herself and everyone around her.”
I was disgusted by her reply. So much so I stood without a single word and left the bar in a hurry. I got to my car and sat, gripping the steering wheel. After calming myself down with some deep breaths, I looked up and saw a fucked up version of Brynn behind me, reaching over with speed to grab onto my neck and strangle me. I struggled for breath and I tried to fight her off me, but it was unrelenting. I reached for my keys and stabbed one of them onto its arm, and it recoiled long enough for me to catch some air. I threw myself out of the car and fell onto the pavement, scrambling away. I turned back and saw my car was empty. I had merely stabbed my keys into the foam of my seat.
Now I sit at home, after having worked up the courage to re-enter my car. I have another meeting with Brynn tomorrow. But given all I know, and all I’ve seen, I’m not sure what to do.
I don’t want to abandon a child in need. It goes against everything I stand for as a person. But I’m not sure I have what it takes to give Brynn the help she needs.
Even now, my husband is making dinner in the kitchen behind me. I have to turn my back against him, because every time I see him from the corner of my eye, I notice his eyes are missing from his face

It's fairly common for air traffic to be over residential areas or say government owned property which is inaccessible. Just curious if anyone gets properly buzzed by loud helicopters on a weekly basis, we have it happen extremely early in the morning before the sun comes up and it wakes up the entire neighborhood and it's quite scary to see them nearly crash into the trees next to the house. They're nearly 300 feet tall and thats the height they fly at so they come zinging in at 40 mph or more and one nearly flipped while I was walking the cat which wasn't pleasurable as the cat climbed me like a tree with his claws . The last one came by at 530 am it was still dark out but I flipped them off anyways for lifting every dish off every surface in the house. I don't care if it's the fucking FBI and it is they just do training in the area . It's literally the fbi flying over our house . Why can't they go somewhere else half our neighborhood are PTSD riddled veterans they don't even celebrate the 4th of July because it would hit a fucking jet or a helicopter flying over.

You have been a good woman your whole life, but you also have carried a secret with you that fills you with silent shame and embarrassment, because your fantasy doesn't match your personality at all. There is something secretly submissive in you that yearns to be satisfied. You long for a dominant, sexy, man to take control of you and discipline you. You want to feel helpless...dominated...NOT in control. You want to have your panties forcibly taken down and be spanked like a naughty school girl. You want to be pushed down over the sofa, feel your skirt lifted, your moistened underwear pulled aside. You want a big, hard cock to invade your slippery wetness, stretching you wider than you thought possible and making you feel oh so delicious!. You are a normal person, constrained by society's conventions and frustrated by your inability to realize your innermost fantasies. You want to be spanked with your panties down and you want to be fucked hard! -- you are already getting wet right now just thinking about it.
I am a well educated, intelligent & professional man who is physically fit and accustomed to dealing with naughty women like you. I will lecture you and instruct you to pull your skirt up around your waist as I kneel before you and pull your panties down to your thighs. The delicious smell of your aroused pussy will rise to meet me. You will feel the cool air on your bush and revel in the delicious anticipation. Then I will instruct you to stand against the wall with your legs spread and your hands above your head while I slowly pace about behind you and your clit tingles with excitement. You will feel my eyes on your pussy and this thought will excite you even more. Then I will call you sternly and bend you over a chair so that your pussy is in full view - wet, exposed, vulnerable. Oh, the shame of it. I will stroke your clit gently and when you try to stop me I will slap your cheeks hard.
Then I will commence the spanking proper. Perhaps I will use my hand. If you resist too much I will use a slipper or my leather belt. It will sting, but not be intolerable, and every now and again you would feel my fingers probe your fragrant slippery slit, making you gasp with pleasure and ache for penetration. Maybe I will tell you to reach between your legs and spread your lips apart with your fingers as I kneel behind you and slide my tongue between your sopping aromatic folds. I will continue spanking your now very red ass and you will be torn between tears and screams of delight. When your punishment is over, I will instruct you to kneel in front of me and take my big cock deep into your mouth, making you almost gag as I hold your hair and fuck your face while you moan approvingly and look up at me, your eyes wild with desire. When I am convinced that you want my cock badly enough I will turn you around on your hands & knees and I will wait as you kneel in that position until you BEG me to fuck you, and then I will grab you firmly by your hips and RAM my hard cock into your wet & swollen pussy hard and fast; banging you the way you were meant to be banged, until we both collapse in a sweaty heap of sexual bliss.
I know you are wet after reading this so lets do something about it..

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.

I just picked up a black 2013 single owner FR-S with 75,000 miles for a reasonable price. I live in Madison, took a bus to Chicago to pick it up after having Lemon Squad check it out(fairly disappointed in them). It had been maintained by the owner, but has some smaller issues that I will be taking care of over the coming weeks. I am starting this post to document the issues I fixed, and get the opinion of the forum on some issues that come up.
First group of "repairs" - driving home I noted a significant, rhythmic vibration that was very notable above 70mph. There is also a burning oil smell that is most notable when going slower, or creeping forward in traffic. On arriving home I found that the front passenger side wheel, and rear drivers side wheel each had only 4 lugnuts on. My fault for not noticing when I picked up the car( I assumed something like this would have been noted on the inspection I paid for), but this gives an idea of the corner cutting the car has been experiencing for the past several years. Breaking free the lugnuts, it was obvious that they were over-torqued, and the studs had never seen anti-seize. I had to repair the threads on one of the studs, but otherwise had no issues switching over to some RPF-1s I had from my WRX, and luckily kept the lugnuts that fit those wheels from before. This got rid of the vibration, but I now notice a creaking/clicking noise from the rear drivers side suspension that I haven't figured out yet. The tires are a few year old hankook V12s, and the car was hilariously tail happy until the glaze wore off.
I also did the H9 conversion for the main beams, and had to replace a turn signal bulb to get rid of the hyper-fast turn signal rate.
the source of the burning oil smell seems to be from a oil leak on the rear of the engine block on the passenger side. a little googling led me to find out this was a cylinder head cover plate that commonly leaks oil. Rather than rely on RTV again, I got an aftermarket billet cover from nameless performance, which I will put on next week. I will also replace the PCV valve and hose, as that has never been replaced, and I suspect that this is part of the issue with the leaking.
​
Issues that I have found but haven't decided what to do yet.

1. loud wind noise from passenger side window, the vertical front window gasket(between the triangle and main window) is very loose and I suspect this is the issue. Im not sure how I plan to fix it, but it will likely involve a heat gun and clamps.
2. the black plastic part of the drivers visor that clicks into the hook on the roof cracked off and it bounces everywhere when Im driving. I might just warp that in electric tape, but It might be worth the 50 dollars to just replace the whole piece.
3. the buttons next to the dash dont work at all(odo, Kph/Mph/Display). I havent found anyone talking about this issue, the part isnt super expensive, but Im not sure it is the buttons, and not sure how to test where the fault is.
4. look into the creaking/clicking sound from the drivers rear suspension
5. need a place to put my cell, where do people mount their phones in these cars?

issues my inability to call good enough alone will drive me to do

1. Im planning on looking at the throttle body to see if it needs to be cleaned
2. I doubt the spark plugs have been replaced, so that will be done this summer as well
3. replace the oil and filter
4. the owner reported changing the rear diff and tranny fluid in the past 20k miles, will likely replace it in the next several months anyway just to be sure
5. brake fluid was done in the last 2 years, and pads look like they are fine. Rotors are surprisingly good(light car I guess). will probably do all of that next year.
6. the air intake box is cracked where the tube from the front enters it. I should replace it, but it really only means a bit more hot air is entering the filter. I read that Cold air kits really dont benefit these cars, and I would rather not drop a few hundred on that right now
7. the car came with K-Sport coilovers, I will likely put them on or have them put on this summer as well. they likely have less than 20k miles on them. the prior owner took them off for being too stiff for chicago roads. the current springs are pretty harsh, so Im a little hesitant to try the coilovers out.
8. the doors do not stay open, I will eventually replace the door stays, but dont want to take the door panels off more than necessary to avoid breaking any tabs. would likely put in some sound deadening material at the same time when I do.

im sure more will come up, and I will document this. Also if anyone is in the madison area and is interested in some 18x7.5 drag wheels with worn out tires on them I would be willing to sell them at a very reasonable price.

First
Capes and Conundrums
Alviara lets out a slight gasp as they reach the apex of the motion and then they begin to fall. They land on a lower tier of a skyscraper and he seems to accelerate in a smooth movement. Then gravity presses down on Alviara as Robin leaps again and they hurl through the air, out of the traffic lanes and startling a few different Sonir as they easily crest in height and land lightly hundreds of feet higher than their last start point.
“I’m never going to get tired of doing that.” Robin notes and Alviara lets out a slight laugh.
“Easily amused?”
“If by easily amused you mean ‘enjoys breaking the laws of physics as previously understood’ then yes, I’m easily amused.” Robin notes with a grin. “I’d ask if you’re comfortable on my back, but you clearly have the cushioning to take it.”
“What was that supposed to be? I’m fairly average as women go, although I understand that puts me on the level of spine cracking for a human woman.” Alviara notes and Robin offers her a smirk over his shoulder. She wraps her arms around his shoulders and simply can’t reach her hands around the other side. Robin may not be as big as some of the other soldiers, but he’s still so much massively trained man that he dwarfs her in almost every respect. “So what was it? An observation? A compliment? An insult?”
“Hmm...” Robin considers out loud and the tensing of his legs is all the warning Alviara gets before they’re suddenly rising upwards fast. The slight arc of the movement has them land on the top of a gargoyle before Robin slides down it’s back with trivial ease and a casual gait. “I’m not sure, it just sort of slipped out. What did it sound like?”
“You’re toying with me.”
“Well yes, aren’t dates supposed to be fun?” Robin asks shortly before a small swarm of Sonir swoops in.
“Since when could Trets fly like that!?” One of them asks.
“I’m not a Tret and I can’t fly.” Robin says quickly. “She’s a Tret and I jump good.”
“... Either you took a shot in the head and lost some verbal skills or you’re quoting something.” Alviara says.
“It’s a quote.” Robin remarks. “Now do you girls want something or...?”
The swarm scatters, but not too far.
“They’re going to be following us for hours.” Alviara notes.
“How about we give them something to chase then?” Robin asks.
“Go.” She tells him and he races along the tier of the skyscraper and launches off. Alviara has to use Axiom to keep her grip as the wind resistance to the sudden movement is like being caught in a storm. There is no arcing in this jump, it’s a straight shot from one skyscraper to another with neither rise nor dip. HE also doesn’t land on the next skyscraper. He kicks off it and suddenly they’re going diagonal and up before kicking off again and going down.
The bit of freerunning turned mad game of human ping pong as he zips through the city before Robin launches himself up and then slowly comes down on the top of a skyscraper. Grabbing onto it’s highest point and hanging on by what seems to be only his fingertips. A slight wirl of ash and smoke wave around them in the higher winds of the city where just a hint of the brimstone from the volcanic trench the city’s cave is carved into.
“Having fun?” He asks her and she gives him an odd look.
“Giving people something to chase generally stays a little further down from the sound barrier.” Alviara chides him despite smiling at the absurdity. He looks over his shoulder with a roguish grin before easily pulling himself up to the next level. The pull is with such force that he easily crests to the top and lands lightly at the very tip of the skyscraper’s spire.
“Really? I never would have guessed.” He says as he holds his arms out, turns and then regards the city below before glancing at the blimps above. “Can you spot them? If they want to play, then they can be fun to play with.”
“What are you planning?”
“Nothing hurtful or harmful. Not even a crass word.” Robin assures Alviara.
“Over there, to your left. Two blocks forward. I recognize the bandana.” Alviara says and he nods.
“And she’s moving at... okay, time to say hello.” Robin says. “Do I need to say hang on?”
“At the end of this you’re going to need a prybar to get me off.”
“Poor choice of words!” Robin taunts before a twitch of his legs and they’re soaring through the air.
Swooping is not generally associated with wingless beings. Especially not with apes. Let alone an ape giving a piggy back ride to another ape.
But damnit if Robin doesn’t live up to his name and swoop right past the young Sonir who flares out her wings in shock and flutters around a bit in complete surprise. Robin has kicked off the side of a skyscraper and launched himself away before any further reaction can be mustered.
“You are a cruel, cruel man...” Alviara chides him as she laughs.
“Oh yes, by all means. Tell me how naughty I am.” Robin says with a grin over his shoulder and she flicks him in the forehead for that. He clutches at his heart and begins staggering in jest. Despite them being over twenty stories straight up with no railings he mock staggers harder and she slips off his back in time for him to ‘fall’ to the floor with a dramatic. “Blarg I am dead!”
“Could you get any goofier?” Alviara asks dumbfounded and Robin laughs.
“Not without going to a literal school for clowns. But I think I do pretty good without formal education.” Robin remarks and she scoffs.
“Tell me something, when it comes between The Undaunted and the rest of humanity... how far apart from the common man are you? Physically I know you’re near the peak of the peak. But behaviour wise?”
“We’re more chaos prone and a lot more energetic so we get up to a lot more. But it really depends on the person. Sure, there are broad averages, but you’ll never meet an actually average person. A normal human is a mathematical concept, not a real thing.”
“And those averages are?”
“Alone, a human is smart, adaptable, quick to learn and quicker to overcome. In groups we can be dumb panicky and downright incapable of understanding even the simplest concepts. There’s good and bad.” Robin explains.
“That sounds very normal. Peer pressure making monsters of people the galaxy over.” Alviara says before considering. “I guess it was a dumb request to be honest.”
“Then why did you ask it?” Robin asks.
“Well... you’d think that a species that came out of Cruel Space would be very different. But... well you’re Apex Tret with redundant biology basically. As a species. But The Undaunted you... you do things so very differently than most Trets. Like Cannidors or Apuk or Dzedin. You’re predators in a concrete jungle.”
“And like most predators when well fed and safe they get fat and lazy in a hurry. When humans become common throughout the galaxy the only way to tell the difference between Human and Tret will be when you watch them eat or some kind of disaster strikes.” Robin returns. “Besides, name one military that doesn’t make powerful predators out of the people they recruit.”
“Hmm... well are we counting armies in name only?”
“We’re counting armies that can be reliably expected to run into combat.”
“Not any that I know about. Even armies specializing in drone use and remote piloting prosthetic bodies for combat tend to have a certain assurance and quick reflexes.”
“Exactly.” Robin says before kipping up and standing next to her. “There are some things that are just universal to combat.”
“It still doesn’t explain how differently you humans are acting. First contact is generally a bit more... I’m not certain. You should be having a harder time of this or... I don’t know.” Alviara says and Robin shrugs.
“I’m hardly an expert on first contact situations.”
“You’re in one.”
“Am I though? Remember, Earth was sent a beacon to teach the languages and explain that the rest of the galaxy couldn’t come to us, we had to go to it. Is that normal?”
“No but...”
“Then why would we act in a normal way? We’re cut off from the homeworld and what resources it has. Which means it’s time to adapt or die. There’s also ways in which we have to test the galaxy, so we can learn from it and understand it. And you don’t stress test something by being gentle or predictable. You do it by pushing it to it’s limits.”
“Really?”
“At least that’s how I figure things. Do note I’m not part of the diplomatic core. Still... on the subject of diplomacy my hobbies seem to have...”
Robin is cut off when the swarm of Sonir Teenagers arranges itself around them. “Really!? It took you this long?”
“Not everyone had a communicator on and had to be chased down.” One of the girls says.
“Okay, you need to do something about that because communication is the most important part of being in a team. Otherwise someone WILL screw things up.” Robin remarks to them before turning back to Alviara. “Anyways, as I was saying, we’ve been following some of my hobbies. But not so many of yours, so in the light of getting to know each other more. Where to next?”
“Well, if that’s what you want...” Alviara says as she takes a couple of steps and leaps away. “Follow me!”
“To where?” Robin asks as he lands beside her moments later.
“You’ll see, but don’t think you’re the only one who can use Axiom to get around. It’s easy.”
“I’m aware of how easy it is. But I don’t see many people using it like that. Why?”
“People are a lot less eager when they think they might run into a wall.” Alviara explains.
“Hey wait for us!” A girl from the swarm of Sonir declares and the entire flight gives chase.
“The third wheels are catching up.” Robin notes calmly as she leads him through several more jumps and then... a rooftop garden. In a shadowed part of the dark city is a small rooftop garden. It’s dim phosphorant glow invisible from a street over, but these are clearly darkness adapted plants that thrive on the warmth in the air and the richness of the thin amount of ash that is always ever so slightly swirling about.
It then hits Robin that the garden is an inversion of the world itself. A single patch of life in a dark and dreary looking city, the opposite of the lava trenches of Skathac who are individual and relatively small scratches of concentrated death on a world otherwise fed keenly and deeply by it. Robin wonders what it would look like to have something from this garden escape and claim an entire skyscraper.
Would that even be a bad thing for a building to be covered in flowering vines? He supposed that depends on the flower.
“I... I didn’t expect this.” Robin admits before looking around. “The glow is so pale that the lights on the other buildings drown it out entirely.”
“A little touch of life. It’s a wonderful place to read. A place to calm down after a bad case.”
“Ah... that makes sense.” Robin remarks as he sees the Sonir swarm swooping down around them to look around. More than one of them seem to be completely surprised that the garden is here at all. “How did you find this place? You’re not a Skathac native from what I understand.”
“No, but getting lost can sometimes be an advantage. And a place to just think is useful.”
“Hmm... I suppose that makes sense and...”
“Are you one of the supervillains?” One of the girls asks interrupting him.
“Alright, do you girls understand just how rude this is?” Robin asks and there’s a pause. “I’ve played back a bit but following people around and having a full on search grid is going far too far.”
“It’s not too bad if we’re just following.”
“You’re getting very close to a crime though. So can you please knock it off?” Robin asks and there are some sighs of disappointment as the swarm flutters off. “Now, where were we?”
First Last
PS: Nothing like writers block to conk you on the head when you’re trying to type it out. Yeesh. I wanted to have more fun, I wanted to write references all over the place. But the moment I sat down to write my head went blank and it's stayed that way. I'm sorry.

Public opinion of TriMet's decisions have been pretty mixed, mostly because TriMet's decisions are so convoluted that they can be a real challenge to understand. In reality, Metro and Portlanders need to have a bigger civic conversation about the future of TriMet, looking at the big picture. We have 3 looming existential crises of TriMet to be concerned about that are bigger than revenue dips, crime, or homeless people.
Civic leaders and the public are focused on a quick "fix" for TriMet revenue drops - even though we've seen this coming for a long time, it's very predictable that TriMet's Board of Directors acts at the last minute. Also, very predictably, TriMet's Board opted for a fare increase because over the previous 20 years that's been a go-to answer to every problem (except for that one time they killed Fareless Square). The politically appointed boards of TriMet and Metro lack the unique specialized knowledge of the issues I'll bring up here. If TriMet knows about these larger issues, they're obviously burring it from public view. In the short term, increasing fares is like putting fresh paint on a house that's on fire; in this situation, that paint is HIGHLY flammable.
First - fare hikes as a tactic is a brain-dead move. Just the most utterly stupid and self-sabotaging response to a looming budget shortfall. I'm dwelling on this because it illustrates their terrible decision-making, which is functional proof they have no idea what they're doing. Some of the core reasons for this:

• Increasing fares reduces utilization. Higher cost means fewer people ride, which will decrease the ridership revenue. It will also marginally increase the number of people who won't pay (funny story, some of those who don't pay actually can't afford to). TriMet isn't a monopoly or inelastic service, and plenty of other choices exist that didn't exist 20 years ago: an actual bike share, scooters, electric bikes, UbeLyft, shared vehicles, and more bike paths. Before the pandemic, it was common that I would bus into downtown for work and then take a Lyft home because it wasn't all that expensive, like $8 more than a bus ride - TriMet's price increases make a system that wasn't very competitive simply less compelling.
  
• Across Portland we need to go through a process of austerity and downsizing government. I absolutely support Wheeler putting a pause on rate increases, but for God's sake, we have far too much largesse in every layer of government. If you need to learn what I'm talking about, read my old article on Parks & Rec. So many divisions/agencies have doubled their staff while reducing service levels. It's bonkers. Cutting throats needs to be an imperative. This is because the great majority of public sector employees in Oregon and Portland are incompetent, redundant, and only exist because Oregon and Portland have been reluctant to use automation. And I don't mean the cutting-edge AI stuff, I'm talking about people who still handle business processes as if they're paper forms. I could tell so many stories from my professional experience - but you'll have to take my word for it for now: culling this bureaucracy is the right move, and until there's a significant downsizing, the political class is taking none of the financial crisis or cost of living situation seriously.
  
• TriMet's operating budget/revenue is primarily Payroll Taxes, not passenger revenue. About 20-30% of TriMet's budget comes from people buying fares, whereas the bulk of money TriMet needs comes from payroll taxes that businesses pay directly. Because of this, transit activists (including myself) have been proponents of increasing the payroll taxes marginally to make TriMet free for riders. Of course, fareless transit comes with a wide variety of new and different problems (that's an article for another time). Still, when you understand that only a sliver of revenue comes from fares, increasing the fare simply results in a marginal increase in revenue. The much bigger problem is going to businesses investing outside of Metro, and changing workforces that 1) won't pay payroll taxes reliably, 2) don't need people to go into the office. Think about the longer-term game here: is TriMet's board going to increase fares as utilization drops and payroll taxes continually diminish? (See my point above about how their default answer is "yes" because it's the only politically expedient answer.)
  

Reading comments about the fare hikes, most of the public thinks TriMet is dealing with a safety or utilization issue. Both of these are 100% true: soft-on-crime progressives have wholly obliterated the working class perception of TriMet safety - there are so many different ways this has happened, but we should thank so many people in the media and political class: Ana del Rocio's crying wolf about racism in fare inspections (and the media entertaining it), or Mike Schmidt deinstitutionalizing of the justice system, or Legislature's inability to act on the massive mental health crisis and drug addiction crisis in Oregon. No matter the underlying cause, we have a system where deranged violent mentally ill tweakers can be disruptive on the train, but working-class people face a $250 fine if they can't afford a $2.50 ($2.80) ticket. TriMet is less safe, especially the light rail and bus lines. We could hypothetically talk about various policy and infrastructure changes, such as turnstiles and security guards - but pragmatically, this won't do shit when our society has adopted a philosophy of transforming the urban core into an open-air insane asylum and opened the doors to the prisons. This safety issue is well beyond TriMet's scope, and even if there was consensus among TriMet and Metro to solve this, the entire justice system and Legislature is still broken.

Fare Hikes and Utilization is the Red Herring - Let's talk about TriMet's future

In reality, multiple design choices made decades ago set us up for failure. But we also have to thank brain-dead progressive lunatics and corrupt politicos who have steered our transit decision-making into the ground.
There are three specific issues I'm going to talk about, with each becoming more consequential and disastrous for TriMet:

• Hub and Spoke Design and the need for a redesign of the entire system to fit new commuting/transit patterns
  
• Portland Light Rail's short cars are a capacity problem not worth the price tag to fix
  
• Autonomous vehicles are here, and it's just going to get worse for TriMet
  

The strategic design of TriMet's system is broken, and it's been broken before.

If you looked at a map of TriMet's bus and rail system, you'd see a design pattern often referred to as a "Radial Design" or sometimes a "Hub And Spoke" design. The Hub and Spoke strategy is building our transit system around centralized locations to connect to other routes. For Portland the idea is to go downtown (or sometimes a Park and Ride) where you can connect to your next destination. This is why the majority of bus routes and all the max routes go downtown, to our Transit Mall and Pioneer Square.
Downtown planning was a smart idea in the 1960s when it was coupled with Main Street economic theory and prototype urban development zones - all of this wrapped up in the 1972 Downtown Plan policy. During these decades, the primary economic idea of urban revitalization was that downtown cores could provide better business climates and shopping districts that amplify economic activity synergistically. In other words, packing all the office jobs and luxury shopping in one area is good for workers, business, and civic planning.
All very smart ideas in yester-year, so TriMet became focused on serving the downtown business community myopically. This myopia became so paramount that it was considered illegitimate (actually taboo, borderline illegal) if you used a Park & Ride facility to park and NOT ride downtown. Amanda Fritz once explained that we couldn't expand Barbur Transit Center because that would result in students parking at Barbur Transit Center and riding the bus to PCC Sylvania. This view implies that TriMet exists only to service downtown workers, not the students, not the impoverished mom needing to go to a grocery store.
How does TriMet's hub and spoke design represent its purpose?
Portland's unspoken rule of transit philosophy is that jobs pay for the system (remember, business payroll taxes pay for most of it), so TriMet should be focused on serving people utilizing it for their job - employers pay for it, and they get value out of it. But this is both unspoken (never said aloud) and largely unobserved. The whole idea of TriMet as a social service to serve low-income people, to help impoverished people - well, those ideas were just lukewarm political rhetoric that is tossed out as soon as some Undesirable with tattered clothing reeking of cigarettes gets aboard - then Portlanders jump right back "this is for workers only!" Sadly, there hasn't ever been a public consensus of why TriMet exists because I could equally argue that TriMet's purpose isn't serving the working class; it's actually vehicle emissions reductions - but here, too, reality contradicts that this is the purpose for why we operate TriMet. TriMet's real purpose seems to be "Spend money on lofty capital projects" and if we want to be cynical about it, we can elaborate "…because large capital projects enable grift, embezzlement, and inflating property values for developers."
We haven't always depended upon a hub and spoke design. A great article from Jarrett Walker written in 2010 on his Human Transit blog explains in "The Power and Pleasure of Grids"

Why aren't all frequent networks grids? The competing impulse is the radial network impulse, which says: "We have one downtown. Everyone is going there, so just run everything to there." Most networks start out radial, but some later transition to more of a grid form, often with compromises in which a grid pattern of routes is distorted around downtown so that many parallel routes converge there. You can see this pattern in many cities, Portland for example. Many of the lines extending north and east out of the city center form elements of a grid, but converge on the downtown. Many other major routes (numbered in the 70s in Portland's system) do not go downtown, but instead complete the grid pattern. This balance between grid and radial patterns was carefully constructed in 1982, replacing an old network in which almost all routes went downtown.

Over the years the grid pattern was neglected in favor of a downtown-focused investment strategy. To a real degree it made practical sense: that's where the jobs were. But again, this is the presumption that TriMet and Mass Transit ought to service workers first, and there's not much consensus on that. But while we can't decide on TriMet's purpose, we can absolutely agree on one important thing: Downtown is dead.
No 5-star hotel is going to fix it. (As of writing, I'm not even convinced that this mafia-connected bamboozle of public fraud will open.) No "tough-on-crime" DA to replace Mike Schmidt, like Nathan Vasquez, will fix downtown. It's not JUST a crime problem: most of the problems we deal with today mirror the problems facing Portland in the 1960s, especially our inability to invest in good infrastructure people actually want to use. That's on top of crime, vandalism, and an unhealthy business ecosystem.
IF we want to maintain TriMet (and that's a big IF, for reasons I'll explain below), then it will be focused on something other than downtown. We need to move back to a grid-design transit system, as this is a much easier way to use transit to get around the city, no matter your destination. If TriMet continues to exist and operate fleets in 20-30 years, this is the only way it exists - because it will just be too inconvenient to ride downtown as a side quest to your destination, especially as we look at 10, 20, 30, 40 years from now.
Of course, we can only transform some parts of the transit infrastructure this way, and there are no uplifting and moving train tracks here. So light rail doesn't have a future in the grid system - but even without the grid system, light rail is doomed.

The fatal flaws of light rail in Portland.

I want to preface this by saying I like light rail as a strategy, it's not a bad system or bad civic investment. I could write another 5,000-word essay on why Seattle did an excellent job with light rail and the specific decisions Portland made wildly incorrectly. In transit advocacy the wacktavists inappropriately categorized skeptics of Portland's light rail as some soft bigotry - as if you're racist if you don't like Portland's light rail - even though, ironically, most light rail systems tend to be built for the preference of white culture and white workers, precisely what happened here in Portland and most cities (but this is all a story for another time).
Portland's light rail system has a capacity problem and has dealt with this capacity problem quietly for the last 20+ years. When you see the capacity problem, you can quickly understand this light rail system won't work in the future. All the other smart cities in the world that designed light rail realized they needed big long trains to move many people. Portland decided to limit the train car length to the size of our city blocks to save construction costs - and this has always been a fatal flaw.
Portland's highest capacity train car is our Type 5, according to Wikipedia it has a seating capacity of 72 and an overall capacity of 186 per train car, meaning each train can accommodate up to 372, but even these numbers seem unreliable (*edit). Let's compare:

• Washington DC has 6-car trains capable of carrying 120 passengers per car, or 720 per train.
  
• Salt Lake City has a 4-car train capable of carrying 230 passengers per car, or 920 per train.
  
• Seattle's Link system has a 3 or 4-car train, each capable of carrying approximately 200 passengers per car, so 600 to 800 per train.
  

Portland's light rail lines have roughly the same people moving capacity as a single lane of a highway, maybe marginally more, maybe marginally less. These other cities have a light rail system that can move the same amount of people as an entire 3-lane highway.
You might suspect that Portland could simply run trains more frequently - but nah, that's impossible because the trains run through the central core of downtown Portland, and they're blocked by the real interfaces with road traffic and bottlenecks. TriMet/PBOT/Metro has offered rosy ideas that we could hypothetically run cars every 90 seconds, 2 minutes, 4 minutes, or 6 minutes (depending upon who you ask) - but these are garbage numbers invented out of thin air. For example, you could stand at Pioneer Courthouse Square at 4:50pm on a Wednesday in 2016 - there was a train opening doors to load passengers, and you could visibly see the next train at Pioneer Place Mall pulling into the station behind. Trains were running at approximately a 3 to 4 minute at peak - but on paper, TriMet will claim anything, as they don't give a shit about lying to the public. But the bigger problem is that trains were full. You might have to wait 90 minutes to find a train that offers a seat. And god forbid you had a bike.
I'm not making this very real capacity problem, Metro even acknowledges:

At the busiest hours of the day, 40 light rail trains must cross the river and traverse downtown – one train every 90 seconds. As the region grows and the demand for light rail increases, the region will need at least 64 MAX trains through downtown every hour, more than one train each minute. Our current system can't support that change.

Suppose you're silly enough to trust government propaganda. In that case, you can read the details of Metro study on this in 2019. If we assumed their numbers added up, it's just fucking impossible to run 62 trains per hour, because passenger loading and unloading can take a full minute (sometimes longer). So unless we want to apply substantial g-forces onto the passengers, the train isn't accelerating out of the stops fast enough. Not to mention how unreliable this whole system would be if a sole tweaker, bike rider, or person with a stroller held up the system for 2 minutes.
This is why the bottom line needs to be upfront about capacity - quoting Metro's study here:

Today MAX is limited to 2-car trains because of the length of downtown city blocks. A tunnel could allow for longer trains if the stations outside the downtown core are retrofitted. In the long-term, this could greatly increase MAX capacity.

Do you see that trick? Build a tunnel, yes - but the entire system has to be retrofitted. Literally every light rail station would need to be redesigned, the lines themselves recalculated for larger heavier trains - and extending platforms at Willow Creek might be simple enough, but how in the living fuck is Metro going to afford to expand the Zoo stop? Doubling the size of that platform would cost $500 million alone.
If the city weren't full of cheap dipshits, we would have elevated or buried our light rail lines in the 1980s or 90s, enabling longer train cars to run. Yes, we all knew back then that it was the best practice not to have light rail running on the street - it's less safe, less reliable, runs slower, and limits train car size. Oops.
Just to keep TriMet's own bullshit inflated utopian vision, it would mean spending another billion dollars just to unfuck downtown, bypass an aging bridge, and potentially allow a marginally higher volume of trains - which again is a band-aid on a mortal wound.
The real buried lede is that to add extra train cars means retrofitting all the stops in the system - that's tens of billions of dollars. You can argue costs, but Metro knows we need to do this. It means shutting down the system for a year or years while construction and retrofits happen. It's fucking outrageous. Is this system worth of people per line worth 20, 30, or 40 billion dollars? Fuck no, it ain't. Again, if we had a raging metropolis of industry and commerce downtown, we could reasonably entertain the idea for a moment - but we don't and never will again.
Some folks might argue that if we kill off the light rail system we'd lose out on all those lucrative Transit Oriented Developments. Originally the public was told that Transit Oriented Development strategy would cause a massive infusion of private investment because the light rail was so damn lucrative and desirable for Richard Florida's Creative Class. Turns out the Creative Class is now called today the Laptop Class, and they don't give a flying fuck about street cars, light rail, or walking scores - because most can't be bothered to put pants on during their "commute" from bed to desk. TOD was all a fantasy illusion from the beginning, as multiple studies about Portland commuters showed that college-educated white folks riding Max were equally comfortable riding their bike as a substitute for the same commute. All of these billions of dollars was to accommodate white fare-weather bikers. So here's my hot take on transit: pave over the rail lines and put in bike lanes, and boy, then you'd have a bike system to give folks like Maus a hardon. But of course, Bike Portland would complain because their focus isn't biking; they exist only to favor all poorly thought utopian transit ideas.
Another group of Max/TOD advocates would claim that TOD is better for disabled and impoverished people. And yeah, there's truth there, but see my entire argument above about the Hub & Spoke design of TriMet being the antithesis of transit as a social service. If you believe that TriMet should serve low-income people, you must advocate for a bus-centric grid design.
But even if you're a die-hard believer in light rail - there's another inevitable reality coming that is the nail in the coffin.

Autonomous vehicles will replace mass transit faster than the automobile replaced the horse.

I work in advanced technology, and the thing about tech is that the public and politicians deny that it's going to be there until the majority of the public finally experiences it. You could say this about personal computers, internet, cloud compute, electric cars, smartphones, distributed ledger (cryptocurrency), AI, and driverless vehicles.
Schrodinger's technology doesn't exist until it's measured in an Apple store or your mother asks you for tech support.
No one thought AI was really real until ChatGPT did their kid's homework, and today most people are coming to terms with the fact that ChatGPT 3.5 could do most people's jobs. And that's not even the most advanced AI, that's the freeware put out by Microsoft, they have paywalls to access the real deal.
In 2018 I rode in my colleague's Tesla in self-driving mode from downtown Portland to Top Golf in Hillsboro. We started our journey at the surface parking lot on the west side of the Morrison Bridge. He used his phone to tell the car to pull out of the parking spot and to pick us up. Then he gave the car the address, and it drove us the entire way without any human input necessary. The only time he provided feedback was to touch the turn signal to pass a slow car on the highway. People think self-driving isn't here - but it is - and it's gotten exponentially better and will continue to do so. People will complain and moan about idealized, utopian, pedantic "level 5" full self-driving, how none of it exists or could exist, as a Tesla passes them on the road and the driver is half asleep.
Of course, Portland and every major city have also thought deeply about self-driving technology, and a few places have implemented self-driving solutions - but so far, none of these are really at scale. Though it will be a short time before cost-conscious cities go all-in.
TriMet kicked around the idea of using an autonomous bus for a leg of the trip of the Southwest Corridor project, connecting a segment of the light rail route to the community college. It was bafflingly stupid and short-sighted to think they could use it in this niche application but that it wouldn't open the floodgates for a hundred different applications that eviscerate TriMet's labor model. The simplest example of autonomous operation would be to operate the light rail systems - because they don't make turns, all we need is an AI vision service to slam on the breaks if necessary - that technology has existed for 20+ years. We could retrofit the entire train system in about 3 to 6 months - replace every Max operator with a security guard, and maybe people would ride the Max again? But I digress.
Let's speculate about the far-future, some 5, 10, or 20 years from now: your transit options will expand significantly. The cost will decrease considerably for services using automated vehicles.
You'll look at your options as:

• Drive to work: fastest, takes $100+ worth of gas a month, but you also need $50+ for insurance and $500+ for the monthly car payment, plus those surprise maintenance and broken windows. Also, do you pay for parking? Pick a number for how much it costs to drive your personally owned and manually operated vehicle to work each month.
  
• Autonomous vehicle service: price TBA, but think of how much an Uber costs when you don't have to pay the driver, you don't have to pay for gas. An Uber that runs for $20 today would likely be $10 or less. So, to and from work 20 times a month, $200. $300? Ok, let's just say it's $400 a month. It's still all cheaper than owning a car and driving it to work. No parking fees, and it picks you up quickly enough that it's not a nuisance.
  
• Mass Transit: $150 per month, but ugghhh it's slow, it smells like piss, a guy jacked off in your hair, and you can't schedule a meeting for the first 30 minutes of your anticipated workday in case you miss a connection - and it breaks so often the government actively hides the reliability data from the public and media.
  

Just a few years into this future we'll see a brand new trend, one that already exists: a shared autonomous vehicle like a privately operated bus. For example, Uber Bus - it already exists as a commuter option in some cities, it's just not autonomous yet. The significant benefit of an autonomous bus is that these shared vehicles will utilize HOV lanes very commonly, and commuting in an autonomous vehicle will be as fast as driving to work in your manually operated car while also being less expensive.
Simultaneously automobile accidents in autonomous vehicles will be virtually non-existent, and insurance companies will start to increase prices on vehicles that lack AI/smart assisted safety driving features. Public leaders will see the value of creating lanes of traffic on highways dedicated explicitly to autonomous vehicles so that they can drive at much higher speeds than manually operated traffic. Oregon won't lead the way here, but wait until Texas or one of the Crazy States greenlights a speed limit differential, and self-driving vehicles have a speed limit of 90, 120, or 150 miles per hour. You might think "accidents would be terrible and deadly" but there will be fewer accidents in the autonomous lane than in manual lanes. At this point, it will be WAY faster to take an autonomous vehicle to your work.
Purchasing power of consumers will decrease while the cost of vehicles will increase (especially autonomous vehicles), making ownership of any vehicle less likely. Frankly, the great majority of people won't know how to drive and will never learn to - just like how young people today don't know how to use manual transmission. However, fleets of autonomous vehicles owned by companies like Tesla, Uber, and Lyft will benefit from scale and keep their autonomous bus fleets operating at low cost. This will lead to a trend where fewer and fewer people will own an automobile, and fewer people even bother learning how to drive or paying the enormous insurance cost.... while also depending upon automobiles more than we do today.
Eventually, in the distant future, manually driven vehicles will be prohibited in urban areas as some reckless relic from a bygone era.
Cities and public bodies don't have to be cut out of this system if they act responsibly. For example, cities could start a data brokering exchange where commuters provide their commuting data (i.e., pick-up point, destination, arrival time). The government uses either a privatized fleet or a publicly owned fleet of autonomous vehicles to move as many people as possible as often as possible. Sort of a publicly run car-pool list - or a hyper-responsive bus fleet that runs for the exact passengers going to exact locations. A big problem companies like Uber, Lyft, and Tesla will have is that they'll lack market saturation to optimize commuting routes - they'll be able to win unique rides, but the best way they can achieve the lowest cost service model is these super predictable and timely commuter riders. The more data points and riders, the more optimization they can achieve. These companies can look at the data for as many people as possible and bid for as many routes as possible - optimizing for convenience, time, energy usage, emissions, etc. The public will voluntarily participate if this is optimized to get the cheapest ride possible. If the government doesn't do this, the private sector will eventually.
As a parallel, no one today even considers how Metro runs garbage collection. No one cares. And if you didn't like Metro's trash service, if you needed a better service for unique needs, you go procure that on your own. Likewise, you wouldn't care about the quality of the commuting trip as long as it's up to some minimal standards of your class expectations, it's reliable, nearly as quick as driving your own vehicle, and it seems reasonably affordable.
If the public ran this data exchange, fees could subsidize lower-income riders. This is a theory on what a TriMet like system or mass transit system could look like in a primarily autonomous world where most people don't own their own or drive an automobile.
This system would be far from perfect, opening up all sorts of problems around mobility. However, it's hard to see how autonomous vehicles will not obliterate the value proposition of mass transit.

Another narrative on the same story.

As the working class moves to autonomous vehicles, transit agencies will collect fewer and fewer fares - prices and taxes will rise, creating a cycle of failure. As a result, some cities will make buses self-driving to cut costs. It could start with Tokyo, Shanghai, Oslo, et al. Again, it's unlikely that Portland or Oregon will be the first movers on this, but when cities start laying off hundreds of mass transit operators and cutting fares to practically nothing, there will be substantial public pressure to mimic locally. It will be inhumane, it will be illiberal, to make those impoverished bus-riding single mothers pay premiums. As most of the fleet becomes autonomous, responsive, and disconnected from labor costs, the next question arises: why do we still operate bus routes? Why big buses instead of smaller and nimble vehicles?
This alternative story/perspective leads to the same outcome: we figure out where people are going and when they need to get there - then dispatch the appropriate amount of vehicles to move that exact number of people as efficiently as possible.
But our local government getting its act together on all this is outside the world of possibility.
In a practical sense, we're going to see history repeat itself. Portland's mass transit history is about private and public entities over-extending themselves, getting too deep in debt on a flawed and outdated idea. As a result, the system collapses into consolidation or liquidation. Following this historical pattern, TriMet/Metro won't respond to changing conditions fast enough, and laughably stupid ideas like cranking up taxes or increasing ridership fares will continue to be the only option until the media finally acknowledges these groups are insolvent. I just hope we don't spend tens of billions of dollars propping up this zombie system before we can soberly realize that we made some mistakes and these vanity-laden projects 20 and 30 years ago need to die.
You see, the biggest flaw with TriMet isn't the design, it needs to be outpaced by technology, it's that the people making decisions at TriMet and Metro are going to make the politically expedient decisions, not the right decisions. They won't redesign, and they won't leverage technology for cost savings, so this charade will just get going along until the media simply declares they're insolvent.
Back to fares for a second - the media happily reprints TriMet's horseshit take about "The higher fares will bring in an estimated $4.9 million in annual revenue starting next year, the report says." Just sort of amazing to me there's no skepticism about this number - but most spectacular is no media considerations about alternative solutions. For example, I could tell TriMet how to save $9,548,091 next year - a useless program primarily utilized by white middle-class folks who own alternative methods of transport - and this would inconvenience way less transit-dependent people than raising fares. But, that's off the table - we're not even developing a decision matrix for when we kill the blackhole of money known as WES.

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.

What coincidental timing.
Looks like CNBC is airing a special on Ryan Cohen our beloved Papa the day before earnings.
Whether it will be a hit piece or a fair profile remains to be seen.
I hate to give any traffic to CNBC, but just wanted to throw this out there as a heads up.
On the positive side, it could bring more exposure and more hodlers into the fold.
I hate this effing market, but love this roller coaster ride. Best game ever. Every dollar lost by the hedge funds, shorts, banks, impotent and complicit so-called regulators, and other crooked SOBs, is another point added to the high score.
Can’t stop. Won’t stop.
https://www.cnbc.com/video/2023/05/25/making-of-the-meme-king-preview.html
Edit - went to x-post and see it was picked up 3 days ago on another sub - I searched here to see if it had been, and did not see it - Mods, if this is old news feel free to delete.
I think it would be great to keep this in the front page for days after, highlighting all the crookedness.