Mens nightstand organizer with gun holder

Despite his powerful connections, one of the most prominent gang bosses in New England simply disappeared without a trace. What happened to Danny Walsh?

2023.06.04 00:30 Polyphemus117 Despite his powerful connections, one of the most prominent gang bosses in New England simply disappeared without a trace. What happened to Danny Walsh?

As the Roaring Twenties drew to a close, it was obvious to the American public that the “noble experiment” of Prohibition was a complete failure. Despite the promises of religious leaders and lawmakers, the total ban on the manufacture and sale of all alcoholic beverages had led to an increase in crime and violence throughout the United States. A lucrative black market for illicit alcohol had created a climate that allowed organized criminal syndicates to flourish. Public sentiment was turning against Prohibition, and more and more voices called for its repeal. The shrewder gangsters realized that Prohibition would soon no longer be the law of the land and they would need to find alternate sources of income. As the more prescient mobsters made plans to go into alternate ventures such as gambling, sex work, narcotics, or labor racketeering, it was clear there would not be enough business to go around. Competition would have to be eliminated. The long established partnerships between Italian, Jewish, and Irish gangs began to fray. The former two, in many cases, conspired together against the Irish mob. Irish immigrants had arrived in the US earlier and possessed the advantage of already speaking English on arrival. Irish gangsters enjoyed exclusive connections with politicians and law enforcement officials- connections that the Italian and Jewish gangsters knew they would need for themselves once the country went “wet” again. Accordingly, from the years 1928 to 1933, there was a wholesale massacre of top-ranked Irish mobsters and bootleggers all over the United States. In St. Paul, MN, “Dapper” Danny Hogan started his car and was blown to pieces by dynamite planted by his Jewish counterparts. In New Orleans, the Italian mob gunned down Bill Bailey in a drive-by shooting. In Brooklyn, Charles “Vannie” Higgins was shot and killed in front of his 7 year old daughter. Similar stories were happening in many major cities throughout the United States.
Rumrunning in Providence, RI, was largely done by Danny Walsh. Born to Irish immigrants in 1893, Walsh was a true underworld success story. When Prohibition became the law of the land in 1920, he was a lowly clerk in a hardware store. Fast forward only five years, and Walsh was a multimillionaire with multiple country estates and luxury apartments in Providence. Walsh had assembled a fleet of boats and airplanes that supplied the thirsty Rhode Islanders with liquor under cover of darkness. His fortune grew further when he became involved in the lucrative world of horse racing. Even the stock market crash of 1929 hardly slowed down the bootlegging business. Despite a few minor brushes with the law- including a much-publicized 1929 incident when the Coast Guard killed three of his men- Walsh seemed largely untouchable. Like many gangsters of this period, he was something of a public figure, the local press often reporting on the exploits of his gang. Walsh consolidated his power by making connections with the elite of the both the upper crust and the underbelly. His friends in Boston included both the notorious mob boss Charles “King” Solomon and a fellow Irish-American powerbroker by the name of Joseph P. Kennedy- though you may be more familiar with his children and grandchildren. Known as a gangster who preferred to settle disputes with a handshake rather than a tommy gun, Walsh was reportedly respected and well-liked even among his fellow criminal kingpins. Someone clearly felt otherwise. On January 24, 1933, King Solomon was shot dead in the men's room of a Boston nightclub he owned. With Solomon dead, Walsh no longer had the protection offered by his alliance with a larger outfit. This may have been a contributing factor to what happened next. On February 2, 1933, Danny Walsh met six associates at the Bank Cafe in Pawtuxet Village, RI for a business dinner. These six men saw him off as he got into his car to drive home. They were the last people to ever see Danny Walsh. For several days there was no leads for any of Walsh's family, business partners, or underworld partners. Finally, an anonymous note was delivered to Walsh's brother Joseph- a ransom demand for $40,000 to be delivered to the Copley Plaza Hotel in Boston. While the idea of kidnapping a mob boss for ransom might seem laughable today, the “snatch racket” was hardly uncommon at the time, especially as the Depression forced more and more people into financial desperation. Criminal operations usually considered it more pragmatic to simply pay the ransom and recover their operatives rather than lose whatever talents or skills they possessed, which would cost them more money in the long run. Joseph and a few of Walsh's most trusted lieutenants complied with the demand, bringing $40,000 in cash to Boston and handing it around a hotel room door to a man they could not see. They returned to Providence and awaited word of Danny's release. Word never came. It became increasingly clear that Danny Walsh had vanished without a trace and was never coming back. Rumors spiraled in the press, the underworld, and even in an inconclusive federal investigation. There were reports of Italian men being spotted in the act of digging a large hole on one of Walsh's properties and sprinkling lime into it, but nothing came of further investigation. Some newspaper articles at the time gave lurid accounts of Walsh being stood in a tub of cement until it hardened around his feet and then hurled into the ocean- the first appearance of the “concrete shoes” trope that appears so often in gangster fiction. These, too, were dismissed as fabrication. The disappearance of Danny Walsh has entered Rhode Island folklore. As recently as 2017, unidentified remains found in the area have been seriously investigated as possibly being his corpse. This practice will no doubt continue until a definite ID is made. What became of Danny Walsh? In light of the wider wave of murders targeting Irish racketeers, it seems probable he was murdered. But who is responsible? Where are his remains? Was the unidentified man who collected a ransom at the Copley Plaza Hotel the real culprit or simply an opportunistic scam artist? It seems probable that anyone with firsthand knowledge of this crime is long dead. Perhaps one day a corpse will be found that will answer at least one question, but until then this remains unsolved. Danny Walsh is doubtlessly but one of many victims of violent crime from the “noble experiment” of Prohibition.

If you're interested in learning more about the story of Danny Walsh, here's a few good articles.
A writeup by the New England Historical Society
An article about remains that were investigated as possibly being those of Walsh
An interview with a descendent of Walsh

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2023.06.04 00:29 KdinTheKitty Marvel X Capcom (character list and ideas)

Characters
For a while I was creating a base roster of characters for a Marvel X Capcom game. Sort of like a reboot for the series. I included tons of characters for the base roster and would like to have reveals but have the game out and over time more and more characters from the base roster would be added so people can still play and have fun and give feedback. Characters wouldn't cost extra money as they are release these would be like free updates. Only after the main base roster is complete, new characters added will cost money as waves. I don't like the idea that you have to pay more money to obtain base roster characters. I did include Peter, Miles and Gwen because I feel like each of them can also use weapons and equipment from people spider people in the marvel spider-verse series. I really wanted to include some older characters as well as characters that connect to older Marvel versus games. Like instead of Hayato we have Black Hayato which is just a evil confused version of Hayato. I also wanted to focus on characters from Street Fighter and the X-Men/Mutants since they kind of are what started the series. I also wanted to have characters who would be good rivals like Sakura and Ms. Marvel being rivals. Also like Miles and Kimberly being rivals. I wouldn't have a cutscene story mode I'd have comic book art as there would be audio for each character talking. I love the idea for each character to have their own arcade/story mode and then have more event-stories that connect to the wild world of what's going on. Like having a story dive into the idea of collecting infinity stones, one where the Grand Master on Sakaar is running a fighting tournament similar to how in Street Fighter some organization is running a fighting tournament. Also I'd probably include a a story-esc mode that deals with a variant of how the character would be in the the opposite multiverse. Like if Ryu existed in the Marvel universe through like some sort of reality change how would he live and behave and when you finish the story you obtain that X-Outfit for that story. Thinking that if Steve Rogers existed in the Capcom Universe he would be with the STARS group in resident evil. Or having Akuma with the Ten Rings and Shang Chi with the Dark Hado. Or having Magneto be part of the Mega Man X universe with the Capcom Multiverse

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2023.06.04 00:11 anonymouspoopypants1 Looking for a new Front Pocket Daily Carry

Hi all, I posted this in wallets but thought I might try here as well. Is this something I need to be going custom on? Do you all have opinions on any of these? So far the Bellroy is the top contender.
My wife wants to get me a new wallet for Father's Day ($50 - $75 USD) to replace my Osprey London wallet similar to this. Love my current wallet as it was a gift from my grandmother just before her passing, but have come into some lower back pain and need to switch to a front pocket.
I carry 4-5 cards daily (Debit, Visa, Amex x3) plus ID and insurance cards. Cash is very limited to 1-2 bills if any at all. I prefer leather with an ID slot, but ID Slot is not necessary. I do not like the "Stack" type of a Ridge and others.
Current considerations have included:

Bellroy Slim Sleeve
- Not sure how the pull tab would work as I've never used a wallet with it, but seems perfect.
Saddleback Front Pocket ID
- I have seen conflicting comments regarding recent QC issues, Credit Card breaks, Warranty Misrepresentation, etc. but I'm intrigued nonetheless.
- The slim leather card wallet doesn't look like it would have enough card slots for my liking
House of Jack Slim Card Wallet
- Looks to serve the purpose, but haven't seen many reviews specifically regarding quality/longevity of the brand
House of Jack Ivar ID Bifold
- Also looks to be viable, but I'd be concerned with security if money is placed on the exterior. Same concerns about quality/longevity
Bryker Hyde Minimalist
- See a few issues in the reviews regarding the money clip
Ashland
- High end of the budget, all of their wallets seem to require stacking 2+ in a card slot
Aurochs Wave Bifold
- Not sure on card layout, but would be interested to hear first hand accounts
Popov
- Doesn't feel like it would give enough card slots and is high end of the budget.

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2023.06.04 00:10 Vulcann111 [H] 300+ Games [W] Steam Marketable Items (Cases, Gems, Keys, Skins, Trading Cards etc) and Wishlist

I have multiple copies for most of my games, Trades are mostly based on prices from gg.deals. Please notify me if my keys are not for your personal use (i won't take any responsibility if i wasn't notified) and also please clearly state what you have and want in exchange when making an offer, i have no interest in buying games for Keys/Gems etc. and i also have no interest in Alpha, Beta, Curator, Dev and Non-Steam Keys

Barter.vg Reddit Steam Profile SteamTrades

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2023.06.03 23:57 fazz34 The original Crossfire game released on June 1st, 1998 on the GLUBO PM

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2023.06.03 23:55 Hare__ Nothing wrong with a shy craven

While playing as Sardinia/Cicily, I had a well educated young heir named Galileo. As coptics under the religious protection of the Byzantines, learning was always the main focus.
As his grandfather Nestor who he would inherit the realm from neared his last days, Galileo spent his early years of life doing pilgrimages with the court, even through Arabia and Northern-Africa.
Before inheritance, the last wish of his grandfather was to have the small and safe realm embrace a new philosophy in the from of a faith like structure, that being "humanitas" which focused even more on education and true equality while not caring for outsider opinions if they were left alone. Respecting his wish, Galileo and other land holders in his grandfather Nestor's realm accepted the plea, even being still protected by the emperor after their change in outlook.
Galileo was... different. A shy patient craven, he easily got stressed out and kept quiet, gaining the nickname of "the silent". His early years of rule were marked by panic attacks and trying to get a grip on rule, but as time went on he got more used to the position of power. He coped by learning languages and going on pilgrimages to see the world and to learn. One of the places that had caught his attention was Alexandria, a place he would later in life rule over despite it belonging to a hostile power allied to an Empire.
Having been raised on the Alexandrian ideals of education, he was one of the smartest men to walk in his era, he had focused his life to developing his humble realm to a true power by the sea which would never have to worry about monetary issues. Indeed, his realms wealth could dwarf that of his liege and the neighbouring pope of Rome.
Despite being often called a coward and not being able to look others in the eyes, Galileo had a plan and it indeed was a long one. Having made many alliance through Europe and Namibea, the scholar who would have rightfully been stuffed into a closet somehow destabilized an entire Arab Empire by succesfully claiming Cairo and Alexandria, bringing univerity education to the Bysantines under the stewardship and more grounded values of his house.
Sometimes judging a book by its cover is a mistake. Indeed, he was such a coward that he ran fron death till past his onehundreth brithday and outlived a generation! (with 21 learning perks even after getting stewardship grinded a lot)

submitted by Hare__ to CrusaderKings [link] [comments]

2023.06.03 23:50 Antonio_Mortensen The Essential Travel Toiletry Bag: What You Need to Know

📷 The Essential Travel Toiletry Bag: What You Need to Know

Introduction

Traveling can be stressful, especially when it comes to packing. One of the most important items to pack is a toiletry bag. A good toiletry bag can make your trip more organized and less stressful. In this article, we will discuss the essential features of a travel toiletry bag and how to choose the right one for your needs.

Size and Capacity

The size and capacity of a travel toiletry bag are important factors to consider. You want a bag that is big enough to hold all of your toiletries, but not so big that it takes up too much space in your luggage. Look for a bag that has multiple compartments and pockets to keep your items organized. A hanging toiletry bag is also a great option as it can be hung up in the bathroom, saving counter space.

Material and Durability

The material and durability of a travel toiletry bag are also important. Look for a bag that is made of a durable material such as nylon or polyester. These materials are lightweight and easy to clean. A waterproof lining is also a great feature to have, as it will protect your items from any spills or leaks.

Security

When traveling, it is important to keep your items secure. Look for a toiletry bag that has a sturdy zipper or lock to keep your items safe. A bag with a TSA-approved lock is also a great option, as it will allow you to lock your bag while going through airport security.

Organization

Organization is key when it comes to packing a toiletry bag. Look for a bag that has multiple compartments and pockets to keep your items organized. A clear plastic bag is also a great option, as it allows you to easily see what is inside. You can also use packing cubes to keep your toiletries separate from your clothing.

Conclusion

A good travel toiletry bag is an essential item for any traveler. When choosing a bag, consider the size and capacity, material and durability, security features, and organization. With the right toiletry bag, you can travel with ease and confidence.
References:

Travel + Leisure: The Best Toiletry Bags for Travel, According to a Pro
SmarterTravel: 10 Best travel toiletry bags for Men and Women

Article Source: None

submitted by Antonio_Mortensen to u/Antonio_Mortensen [link] [comments]

2023.06.03 23:48 Vulcann111 [H] 300+ Games [W] Steam Marketable Items (Cases, Gems, Keys, Skins, Trading Cards etc) and Wishlist

Barter.vg Reddit Steam Profile SteamTrades

submitted by Vulcann111 to indiegameswap [link] [comments]

2023.06.03 23:47 MurkyBar9017 My brother molested and abused me when I was a child.

I'm a 38(F) and recently have been tortured by old repressed memories from when I was about 6 or 7 years old.
My brother, who is 6 years older than me, would lure me into his room at night by promising me he would hang out with me and let me play with his toys. I absolutely adored and idolized my brother. He not only was my big brother, he was always the golden child. He didn't do well in school, but he was the quiet obedient one... he was the easy child my parents adored. I was the loud opinionated child that would back talk even at an early age. So anyway, he would turn on these weird strobe lights he had on his nightstands (I guess to set the mood), then lay on his bed and force me to make out with him with tongue. I don't recall whether he would make me touch him or he would touch himself - the memories are just too hazy, but I do remember the kissing clearly.
These memories have tortured me for decades. I can go on for years without thinking about them, and then suddenly they resurface and stir up all kinds of confusing emotions.
When I was about 11, I confronted him and told him I remembered what he had forced me to do, and he denied it. Any normal brother would get upset about that kind of allegation, but he just got nervous and told me "You must have dreamt that, that never happened", but how could a 6 year old dream up that kind of thing, strobe lights and all???
Since then, I've never confronted him about it again. I also considered telling my mom, but she's nearly 70 now and it would absolutely break her heart, so I've decided not to. Plus, I've found it to be pointless to confront him again since he gaslit me the first time, and to be honest, I feel so much SHAME over this. My brother and I remained close throughout the years until a few years ago. Now we speak to each other only when we visit one another's homes about once every 2 or 3 months.
I've always wondered if this abuse was the catalyst to all my issues with relationships with men.
Also, he now has 2 children, a 9 yr old boy and 5 yr old girl, and as sweet as his boy is, I constantly worry about him doing to her what my brother did to me.

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2023.06.03 23:44 Administrative_Toe96 To the Last Man.....

This story is related to my previous one here: https://www.reddit.com/HFY/comments/13xxyz8/a\_pile\_of\_spent\_plasma\_cartridges\_and\_a\_red\_cross/ I sat on my bunk nursing a nasty looking black eye given to me by our “Gracious host”. It’s funny how humanity has sprung forth from its homeworld, and the best remedy for a black eye is still a frozen bag of peas. This is bullshit, I don’t want to be here anymore then they want me to be here. This whole idea of cooperating for the “good of all” isn’t panning out. I need to put—— my train of thought is interrupted by the sound of klaxons. I put down the mostly frozen bag of peas and reach for my gear. Having drilled for this thousands of times in my 4 years since being drafted. It took my less than 30 seconds to dawn my armor. As I lifted my helmet and activated the display I saw red text scrolling across. “HOSTILE FORCES IN SYSTEM, FLEET ATTEMPTING TO REPELL. CONFIDENCE LOW. PLACING ALL TERRAN FORCES UNDER THE TEMPORARY COMMAND OF LOCAL FORCES” Fuck, this couldn’t get any worse. I just got into a bar fight with these lizards and now I have to take orders from them? What is command thinking? A new text message scrolled across my display. “ATTENTION ALL TERRAN FORCES, UNTIL FURTHER NOTICE YOUR ORDERS ARE TO GARRISON THE CIVILIAN SHELTERS IN THE F’RIX DISTRICT. DIRECTIONS ARE BEING FORWARDED TO YOUR COMMAND.” Great, that didn’t take long. Bet the— my thought was interrupted by Captain Armstrong. “Alright D Company, Lets stow the attitude and get to work. Our assignment is approximately 10 kilometers deep in the city. Hurry up and mount up and let’s get rolling. We’ll decide all the details when we get there” I grabbed my rifle and medical kit and heaved up from my bunk. “Jesus St. John, you look like I feel” Corporal Blankenship said with mirth in his voice “Fuck you, let’s just get this over with.” He’s easily the most annoying member of my team. Being a Navy Corpsman in the Terran Republic Marines isn’t all it’s made out to be. On one hand, you become family to them. They treat you as a brother even if you aren’t “one of them”. On the other hand, you might as well be in the Marines. “ Hey corpsman, do you think the fleet is going to be able to prevent a landing?” PFC Thompson yelled over the sound of shuffling gear “ Oh jeez PFC, I Don’t know. Let me call up the Admiral and check. Right after I do that I think I’ll also wish the enemy away as hard as I can.” “Dick” he shot back I set towards the door with my rifle in hand. As I approached the threshold an APC skidded to a stop. Several tons of steel, the APC wouldn’t have been out of place in any old war movie. The best way to move troops on the ground was still a fast and lightly armored box with wheels. The loading ramp defended and I proceeded to stow my rifle in the racks by the entrance. I took my seat at the back of the APC. I hate riding in these steel coffins. Although if we get hit the chances of me making it aren’t any better if I’m here or sitting in the driver's lap.The tires skidded as the last troops loaded in and took their places. Limited conversations were taking place. With time to think about the situation we were in everything became so much more real. Marines are still Marines though. It didn’t take long for jokes to start flying and ease the tension. A new message scrolled across my vision. “FLEET FORCES HAVE FAILED TO PREVENT THE ENEMY FROM GAINING ORBITAL SUPREMACY. RETREATING TO FORWARD OPERATING BASE LINCON TO RENDEZVOUS WITH OTHER FLEET ELEMENTS.” Fucking great. The APC skidded to a stop in front of the main entrance of the emergency shelter.“Everybody out!” Yelled Sgt. Newman He is the saltiest Marine I’ve ever had the pleasure of serving with. Straight to the point and no time for bullshit.I Exited the APC to find controlled chaos. Everywhere seemed like it was filled with figures in armor running to some location. Sgt. Newman was instantly called to the small Command post immediately forward of the Shelter Entrance. After a short exchange, he jogged back to us.“ Alright folks, We have been tasked with taking up position in the outer defensive line. This means we will get all of the action if there is any to be had today. Lets hoof it up there like a couple of Marines on leave in a whore house” Everyone chuckled, even me. I’ve been around Marines to long. We jogged to our new position and set up. My job was essentially to sit back and wait until someone got hurt after I helped set up the squad's plasma gun emplacement. “ORBITAL LANDING PODS DETECTED IN UPPER ATMOSPHERE. APPROXIMATE LANDING LOCATION UNKNOWN. PREPARE FOR DEFENSE OF THE PLANET” Here we go.“They won’t land here right Sgt. I mean we are just protecting the civilians” said PFC Thompson said with a clear quiver in his voice.“Stow that shit Thompson, if they do we’ll handle it” Sgt. Newman fired back. He didn’t look so sure. I’d never seen him actually look nervous. “KLAXION FORCES HAVE ENGAGED THE ENEMY———“ The rest was cut off. What was that? I’ve never seen the tactical net go down before. “LOCAL COMMAND NET OVERRIDE: DROP PODS DETECTED WITH TRAJECTORY CORRESPONDING TO OUR LOCATION” The silence of my squad was heavy and thick. We all knew what that meant. We were cut off from joint command and on our own. No backup. “ LOCAL COMMAND NET OVERRIDE: KINETIC BOMBARDMENT INCOMING TAKE COVER “ I threw myself to the ground and tried to bury myself behind the thick concrete barriers originally intended to prevent vehicles from leaving the roadway. A sound lack thunder followed me there. The ground shook, glass broke in the buildings above and heat washed over me. A wall of dust and dirt moved through our position obscuring everything. As my hearing returned I raised my head to see that most of the squad had recovered and was preparing to repel the enemy attack that was surely going to accompany this. “CONTACT!” Screamed our plasma gunner. The world became a place filled with bright lights and sizzling bolts. I looked around to see if my services were needed anywhere. “CORPSMAN!” The sound that all corpsman dread hearing because it means that one of our charges is hurt. Possibly fatally. I rushed over to the huddled mass of marines.“Move over dammit” I yelled as I pushed past the two marines who called me over.“He took a piece of falling debris ”What I saw in front of me was a mangled mess. I looked up at the wounded marine. From what I could see it looked like whatever hit him shattered his chest.“ Alright, We need to get him back to the aid station in the shelter I can’t do anything for him here. I need someone to come with me because I can’t carry the stretcher on my own. “Sgt. Newman “ Take Thompson, radio before you come back” The look he gave me was one of resignation. It was bad, really bad. He knew it, and he didn’t expect there to be a position for me to return to.Thompson and I grabbed the stretcher from my aid bag and assembled it. Carefully we rolled the wounded marine onto it. “ Suppressing fire “ shouted Sgt. Newman. We launched to our feet and took off running as carefully as possible. Plasma bolts sizzled past us as we approached the second and then final defensive line. We hurried into the entrance of the emergency shelter alongside several other wounded. We placed our charge down on the floor in the hallway. At this point, our job was done and we were to return back to our post. As I turned to go back another Sgt. Blocked my way. “The first defensive line is gone. Corpsman, Stay here. We are trying to consolidate at the second line but it’s not looking good. PFC Stay here as well. I’m attaching you to the Final line of defense. I need more marines if they break through the second line” I glanced at Thompson who was already moving to obey orders. The shock of what we had just been told hadn’t had time to set in. The training was what kept us both moving.I rushed into the field hospital to see what I could do. What greeted me was horror. Men bleeding, screaming, and dying. A field surgeon grabbed me.“I need you to hold pressure on this wound so I can go prep a the Emergency OR”I stared at him in confusion. OR? What do you mean OR? We’ve been here maybe 30 minutes. How the hell did one get set up here so quickly? I obeyed regardless of my disbelief. The Marine screamed out in pain as I applied pressure. There was blood everywhere. The next couple of hours were a flash of gore and death. We were caught in the middle trying to fight back the Grim Reaper as well as this new foe. By nightfall, the enemy had broken through the second defensive line and had drawn back before taking on the final line.It was quiet, so damn quiet. I wandered around the shelter. I couldn’t sleep. A tail as old as time. I came to A large room with bunks and voices. Inside were the people we are here to protect. Lizards, that's what most of us described the Klaxions as. They were basically bipedal reptiles. However, I found something in my heart while watching them clutch their children to their scaled faces. This is the first time I’d seen any civilians. They looked, and acted like us. Yes, they appeared different but they still clutched their young to their chest. Still comforted the old. My entire worldview that I thought was stable as a concrete high-rise came crashing down on my head. I thought these people were vicious killers of men. All of them, but they just aren’t. They are afraid just like us. One Motioned me over and held up a device. “What is your name Terran” the device spat out at me “St. John” “St. John, will you join me for tea?” “I uh—“ “ Please, it's the least we can do”I sat as a cup was placed in my hand, the tea was warm and steaming. After the Klaxion was done pouring my cup I lifted it to take a sip. It was full of flavor causing my sharp features to scrunch up with surprise. “First time having traditional Klaxion Tea?” “ Yes, it’s uh. Really good *chuckle* “ “ I’m glad you like it, do you have any news from outside the shel——“ Three thunderclaps shook the shelter. Screams rang out in the crowd.“Everybody down!” I yelled as I ran back to the adjoining hallway I didn’t get far before I ran into retreating elements of the final defense line. “Corpsman, take up position in the doorway and prepare to repel the enemy”I looked at him in shock. “Do it now goddammit!” Plasma bolts started flying down after the retreating marines. At their rear was Captain Armstrong carrying what seemed to be…… Thompson, PFC Thompson. He looked badly injured. The Captain rushed him inside the main shelter room and laid him down. Immediately the Klaxion rendered as much aid as they could. Although physically different. Both of our species knew that fluids leaving the body in a hurry was bad news and to apply pressure. As I turned back to the Captain he took a plasma bolt to the face. There wasn’t anything left. What was left was all over my face shield. “Here they come!” Shouted someone from the hallway.I heard screams, so many screams. Screams of terror, screams of anger, screams of rage. In the end, my Plasma rifle ran dry. I looked around me, spent plasma cartridges lay in piles. I heard footsteps behind me. The walking wounded had armed themselves with knives, sticks, and sidearms. Then they came into the entrance. I threw myself in front of the civilians out of instinct. An instinct given to all humans. To protect the innocent. As the plasma bolts ripped through my body, one must have clipped my spine. I could feel the pressure of the shots but nothing else. The room grew dark except for one spot. This must be the light everyone talks about.I’m sorry I couldn’t do more, but we did all we could.

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2023.06.03 23:42 acheesedanish [USA-OH] [H] Games and accessories for Nintendo Switch, Gamecube, 3/DS, PS5 controller and charger [W] Games and accessories for Nintendo Switch, Gamecube, 3/DS, Gameboy

All my games are NIB/sealed unless otherwise noted. Always willing to look at lists and am primarily looking for Nintendo items. I ship on Wednesdays.
Here is what I have to offer: HAVE
Switch *A Hat In Time *Aqua Moto Racing (CIB) *Azure Striker Gunvolt *Bad North *Battle World Kronos (CIB) *Ben 10 *Blacksad Under the Skin *Blazblue Cross Tag Battle *Brigandine *Clannad *Close to the Sun *Contra Rogue Corps *The Count Lucanor *Crayola Scoot (CIB) *Darksiders II *Dead by Daylight *Dead Cells *Diablo III Eternal Collection *Digimon Story Cyber Sleuth *Dimension Drive Limited Edition (PA-0149) *Disgaea 5 *DOOM *Dragon Ball Fighterz *Dragons Dogma *Fate/Extella Link *Fault Milestone One *FIFA 18 *FIFA 19 *FIFA 20 *Galak-Z The Void + Skulls of the Shogun *Gigantic Army *God Eater 3 *Hell Warders *Hellmut *Hotline Miami Collector's Edition (SRG-2280) *Hover *Ice Age Scats Nutty Adventure *Indivisible *Instant Sports (CIB) *Instant Sports Summer Games *Kotodama 7 Mysteries of Fujisawa *LA Noire *Layers of Fear Limited Edition LRG *Monster Hunter Generations *Mortal Kombat 11 *Mother Russia Bleeds *Mutant Football League *My Hero One's Justice *NBA 2K Playgrounds 2 *NBA 2K18 *NBA 2K19 *NBA 2K20 *New'n'Tasty Oddworld Abe's Oddysee Limited Edition *Northgard (CIB) *Nurse Love Obsession *Oddworld Stranger's Wrath HD Limited Edition *Oddworld Munch's Oddysee Limited Edition *Our World Is Ended Day One Edition *Payday 2 *Planescape: Torment & Icewind Dale Enhanced Editions *Poi *RBI Baseball 17 US Cover *RBI Baseball 17 CA Cover (CIB) *RBI Baseball 18 US Cover *RBI Baseball 18 CA Cover (CIB) *RBI Baseball 19 US Cover *RBI Baseball 19 CA Cover (CIB) *RBI Baseball 20 US Cover *RBI Baseball 20 CA Cover *Race with Ryan *Remilore: Lost Girl in the Lands of Lore *Reverie Sweet As Edition (PA-0569) *Riot *Risk of Rain 2 *Saints Row the Third *Saints Row IV *Samurai Shodown *Scribblenauts Mega *Scribblenauts Showdown (CIB) *Shantae Half Genie Hero Day One Limited Edition *Shaq Fu *Sid Meier's Civilization VI *Sine Mora EX *Skully *Slain Back From Hell *Sniper Elite III Ultimate Edition *Sniper Elite V2 Remastered *Soccer Tactics *South Park The Fractured Butt Whole *Sports Party (CIB) *Spyro Reignited Trilogy *Star Wars Jedi Knight Collector's Edition *Star Wars Jedi Knight II Collector's Edition *Star Wars Racer Collector's Edition *Star Wars Pinball *Steins Gate Elite Limited Edition (slight corner damage) *Steven Universe Save/ OK K.O.! *Street Outlaws: The List *Streets of Rage 4 Classic Edition *Streets of Red Devil's Dare Edition *Super Blood Hockey Standard Edition *Super Dragon Ball Heroes World Mission *Super Street: Racer *Tennis World Tour *Tennis World Tour Roland Garros Edition (CIB) *Thea The Awakening *This is the Police *This is the Police 2 *This War of Mine *Tiny Barbarian DX *TT Isle of Man - Ride on the Edge (CIB) *Uglydolls An Imperfect Adventure (CIB) *Umihara Kawase Fresh *V-Rally 4 (CIB) *Vampyr *Warriors Orochi 4 *Wasteland 2 (CIB) *Wild Guns Reloaded *WRC 8 *Xenon Racer *Yomawari: The Long Night Collection *Yu-Gi-Oh Legacy of the Duelist *Zombieland
Wii U *Bowser Wii Remote Plus *007 Legends *Adventure Time Explore the Dungeon Because I Don't Know *Adventure Time Finn & Jake Investigations *Amazing Spiderman (CIB) *Amazing Spiderman 2 (CIB, Walmart cover) *Amazing Spiderman 2 - CIB bad disc *Assassins Creed III (CIB) *Assassins Creed IV Black Flag (CIB) *Barbie Dreamhouse Party (CIB) *Barbie Puppy Rescue *Batman Arkham City Armored Edition (CIB) *Batman Arkham Origins (CIB) *Ben 10 Omniverse (CIB) *Ben 10 Omniverse 2 (CIB) *Book of Unwritten Tales (CIB) *Cabela's Big Game Hunter Pro Hunts (CIB) *Cabela's Dangerous Hunts 2013 *Call of Duty Black Ops II (CIB) *Call of Duty Ghosts (CIB - missing single insert) *Cars 3 Driven to Win *Croods *Darksiders II (CIB - nordic games cover) *Darksiders Warmastered Edition *Dues Ex: Human Revolution Director's Cut *Epic Mickey 2 (CIB) *Ducktales Remastered (CIB - no pin) *ESPN Sports Connection (CIB) *Family Party 30 Great Games Obstacle Arcade (CIB) *Fast and Furious Showdown (CIB) *FIFA Soccer 13 (CIB) *Funky Barn (CIB) *Game Party Champions (CIB) *Giana Sisters Twisted Dreams - Director's Cut *Hello Kitty Kruisers *Hot Wheels World's Best Driver (CIB) *How to Train Your Dragon 2 (CIB) *Injustice (CIB) *Jeopardy *Kung Fu Panda *Madden 13 (CIB) *Mario Party 10 Mario amiibo bundle *Marvel The Avengers Battle for Earth *Mass Effect 3 (CIB) *Mighty No. 9 *Monster High 13 Wishes (CIB) *Monster High New Ghoul in School *Monster Hunter 3 (CIB) *NBA 2K13 (CIB) *NBA 2K13 (CIB, bad disc) *Need for Speed Most Wanted U (CIB) *Nickelodeon Spongebob Squarepants Planktos Robotic Revenge (CIB) *Pac-Man and the Ghostly Adventures *Pac-Man and the Ghostly Adventures 2 (CIB) *Penguins of Madagascar (CIB) *Phineas and Ferb Quest for Cool Stuff (CIB) *Planes (CIB) *Planes Fire and Rescue *Rabbids Land (CIB) *Rabbids Land (CIB, bad disc) *Rapala Pro Bass Fishing (CIB) *Rayman Legends *Rayman Legends (CIB, bad disc) *Resident Evil Revelations (CIB) *Rise of the Guardians (CIB) *Rodea They Sky Soldier w/Bonus Game *Runbow Deluxe Edition *Scribblenauts Unlimited (CIB) *Scribblenauts Unmasked (CIB) *Scribblenauts Unmasked w/DVD (CIB) *Shantae Half-Genie Hero Risky Beats Edition *Smurfs 2 (CIB) *Sniper Elite V2 *Snoopy's Grand Adventure *Splinter Cell Blacklist (CIB) *SteamWorld Collection (CIB) *Tank!Tank!Tank! *Tekken Tag Tournament 2 (CIB) *Terraria *Transformers Prime (CIB) *Transformers Rise of the Dark Spark *Turbo Super Stunt Squad (CIB) *Walking Dead Survival Instinct (CIB) *Warriors Orochi 3 Hyper (NIB, seal is ripped) *Watch Dogs (CIB) *Wheel of Fortune (CIB) *Wipeout 3 (CIB) *Wipeout Create & Crash (CIB) *Zombi U (CIB)
DS *Game and Watch Collection CIB *Legend of Zelda Phantom Hourglass CIB
GameCube *Bloodrayne Disc only *Die Hard Vendetta Disc only *Beyblade VForce Disc only *Army Men Sarge's War Disc only *Black Gameboy Player (no disc) *MadCatz Controller
PS5 *DualSense Wireless Controller *DualSense Charing Station
Here is what I'm after: WANT
Switch Games *Advance Wars 1+2 *Bayonetta 3 *Bayonetta Origins *DC Super Hero Girls: Teen Power *Kirby and the Forgotten Land *Kirby Return to Dream Land Deluxe *Legend of Zelda Tears of the Kingdom *Lego Brawls *Live A Live *Mario and Rabbids Sparks of Hope *Mario Strikers Battle League *Metroid Dread *Metroid Prime Remastered *Pokemon Legends Arceus *Pokemon Shield + Expansion Pass *Pokemon Sword + Expansion Pass *Splatoon 3 *Tetris Effect: Connected *Triangle Strategy *Xenoblade Chronicles 3
Switch Accessories *Joy-Cons (yellow, mario red) *Joy-Cons Zelda Edition *Themed Switch docks
Gamecube *Mario Party 5 - CIB *Mario Party 6 - Manual only *Purple Gameboy Player (with or without disc) *Component cable *S-Video cable
PSP *Me and My Katamari
Wii *Animal Crossing City Folk with or without microphone
3DS/DS *Arkanoid *Atari Greatest Hits 1 *Atari Greatest Hits 2 *Break 'em All *Centipede Infestation 3DS - Case only *Deal or No Deal DS - Game only *Detective Pikachu 3DS - Case/artwork only *Elf Bowling 1 & 2 *Korg DS *Korg DS Plus *Mario vs Donkey Kong 2 DS - Game only *Pokemon Mystery Dungeon Gates to Infinity 3DS - Case and manual only *Pokemon Super Mystery Dungeon 3DS - Case and manual only *Space Invaders Extreme *Space Invaders Extreme 2 *Space Invaders Revolution *Tetris DS *Tetris Party Deluxe
GB/GBC/GBA *Gameboy Camera *Legend of Zelda: Oracle of Ages *Pokemon Pinball *Pokemon Gold *Consoles

submitted by acheesedanish to gameswap [link] [comments]

2023.06.03 23:16 WestwardNorthWindow [Ice Hockey] The Apocalypse, or: The 2023 NHL Draft Lottery

This is an ongoing drama, one that won't stop until probably next year or even longer. But before I get into the details of the drama, let's talk about the background, and the important information to know...
TW: Sexual assault discussion mentioned about halfway.
EDIT: Note: Please let me know if there are any inaccuracies. I tried to get all the facts straight, but I have memory issues and get stories mixed up. Also, I truncated some details to prevent this from being a few dozen pages long.

Hockey? NHL? What the fuck are those?

Ice hockey is a sport where 6 very large, burly men put swords on their feet and glide around on ice against 6 other very large, burly men who also have sword-shoes. They carry a stick to whack around a hard little circle of rubber and each other (most often each other) with the goal of hitting that little rubber past another large burly man into a 6'x4' net. A game takes place over 3 periods of 20 minutes each, and whoever hits the rubber circle most often in the opponent's Warhammer gaming table sized net is the winner of the game. There are 82 games during the 'regular season', and then they compete in the 'playoffs' for the Stanley Cup, which is worth at least $5.
The National Hockey League, or the Ligue Nationale de Hockey if you hate everyone else in North America, is effectively the world's highest level of ice hockey. People all over the world spend their entire youth lives training to have a shot at being drafted by an NHL team, from Belarus to England, from Canada to Australia. There are other leagues in the world, but they are more or less for people who are shunned in the NHL for whatever reason, people who have retired from the NHL but still play hockey for whatever reason (Jaromir Jagr, I'm looking at you), or people who aren't good enough to play in the NHL but still good enough to be paid to play.
There are 32 teams in the NHL at the moment, but the most important teams for this story are:
1) Chicago Blackhawks: I'm going to go over the Blackhawks later in this post. It's...a lot.
2) Anaheim Ducks: A team that was originally owned by Disney based on the movie The Mighty Ducks. No, I'm not joking. They were founded in 1993 and have had some close calls with the Stanley Cup, and won one in 2007. They finished the 22-23 season with the worst record possible, and one of the worst records in NHL history.
3) Columbus Blue Jackets: They're young, having only existed since 2000. They've never been in the Stanley Cup finals, and have never really had a good season during their existence. They finished second to last.
4) Seattle Kraken: They're the newest team, being founded in 2021. They're actually not relevant at all to this post; they're my team and therefore am obligated to mention them.

Okay, so sword-feet and stick hitting rubber circle. What is this about 'draft'?

In order to make it to the NHL, you have to be drafted by an NHL team. Being drafted is similar to how people used to pick each other for teams during recess. You know, where you kept getting picked last. Except if you get drafted, you get a contract worth potentially millions of dollars.
The draft takes place over a series of rounds, where each team picks one person each (unless they traded their draft pick, but this isn't relevant). In the first round, the teams with the worst record draft first, all the way up to the team that won the Stanley Cup. Then in the second round, it counts down from Stanley Cup winner down to the worst, third round is from worst to best again, and so on until the draft is completed (Usually 7 rounds).
HOWEVER, there is a twist...

The Lottery

So in order to prevent teams from 'tanking', aka losing on purpose in order to get the best draft pick, the league came up with the Draft Lottery. After the season has ended, every team that didn't make the playoffs participates in the lottery. Whoever wins the lottery will jump up 10 spots in the draft. Teams who were worse during the season get higher odds. This year, the team with the best odds are the Anaheim Ducks, at 18.5% chance of winning, since they sucked hard and it wasn't even on purpose.

Okay, enough. Why is the 2023 draft important?

This year is one of the most important drafts in recent NHL history. The current highest-rated prospect is Connor Bedard. Bedard is...good. Like, really good. Like, really, REALLY good. Top NHL players are saying that Bedard already has the best shot release in hockey right now at least...and he's only like 17 years old. I won't go into it much further, but Connor Bedard is the type of player that can lead teams to the Stanley Cup by just being on the team. People are comparing him to Wayne Gretzky; if you need context for who that is, he's considered one of the best sports-people of all time out of all sports.

Side Show -- The Chicago Blackhawks, and Why Everyone Hates Them

The Blackhawks, which I'm going to call the Hawks, are an old team. They've been around since the 40s as one of the 'original six', teams that have been around since the modern NHL was a thing (well, not really, but it's not relevant). Yes, the NHL only had 6 teams until the 1960s, which is when they finally expanded into more markets, which then snowballed into what we have now (32 teams).
The Hawks have had...a rough recent history. They effectively had a dynasty for most of the 2010s, winning the Stanley Cup 3 times, and a lot of it had to do with their talent. Before the 2010s, the Hawks sucked. That is, until they drafted amazing players like Jonathan Toews (pronounced "taves", not "toes") and Patrick Kane, who helped boost them to the Stanley Cup in the 10's. These picks were already controversial; people like to claim that the NHL favors original six teams because they're massive markets, which means more butts-in-seats, which means more money. So the Blackhawks getting so many first round, top-3 picks was...suspicious to most.
But all of this is overshadowed by the sexual assault and subsequent cover up.
During the 2010 season, one of their cup-winning seasons, a player named Kyle Beach, was sexually assaulted by a member of the coaching staff. He brought it forward to the organization who did their best to make sure that the coaching staff was safe and sound. Kyle Beach never broke into the NHL aside from the 2010 season -- take that information for what it is. In 2021, Kyle Beach sued the Blackhawks for their mishandling. An independent investigation found that the Blackhawks knew about the sexual assault, and did nothing to the perpetrator. The perpetrator went on to commit more acts of sexual assault against young players.
The punishment that the Blackhawks faced? Nothing major. They were fined $2 million. Which...is basically nothing, considering they made $222 million that year. So, like...1%.
This punishment was a slap in the face to teams like the Arizona Coyotes, who lost draft picks (which means losing players that could turn their organization around) because of a much, MUCH less severe violation (In their case, the Coyotes were performing physicals on potential draftees before they were drafted, which is a violation of the NHL constitution). Other teams have lost players because of similar circumstances -- the first one that comes to mind is the Boston Bruins, who dropped a player because it came to light he had hazed, abused, and hurled racial slurs at a black autistic classmate while he was playing in the junior leagues.
Needless to say, this further fueled conspiracies that the Blackhawks were getting special treatment because of their status as an original six team, and how big the Chicago market is.
From the /hockey subreddit:

Didn't the NHL originally fine the Devils $3 million for the Kovalchuk stuff a decade ago? What a joke. [Context: Kovalchuk was a high-level player, and the Devils tried to do some sneaky-shady stuff in order to keep him.]
Coyotes lost high picks for getting extra physical data, Devils got fined $3m and two picks for cap circumvention, and we got fined $250k for calling out George Parros for being the joke he is. And all the Blackhawks get for covering up rape is a $2m fine?? What a fucking joke [Context: This is a Rangers fan, and the Rangers called out George Parros, leader of the Department of Player Safety, for doing nothing about player safety. They were fined $250k for making mean comments.]

It doesn't really help that Chicago fans have a poor reputation. In the NHL, Chicago fans have a reputation for being drunk fair-weather fans. Before 2010 Chicago had a rough time filling up their arena to half-way. During the 2010s? Sellout arena, every game. Going into the 2020s, when their team started sucking again, they're back to struggling filling seats.
So the hockey fandom in general doesn't really like Chicago, but how does this all tie into the 2023 Draft?

The Lottery (for real this time)

As mentioned before, the 2023 season was potentially a huge season for struggling teams like the Columbus Blue Jackets or the Anaheim Ducks. Getting Connor Bedard would turn around entire franchises, overnight.
Going into the draft, the heavy favorites to win the lottery were the Ducks at 18.5%, the Blue Jackets at 13.5%, and the Chicago Blackhawks at 11.5%. The other 13 teams had basically less than 10% odds.
The draft lottery was televised, and millions of people watched ESPN and TSN to see the results from all over the league. Top teams in the west were praying that the lottery winner would go to the Blue Jackets so they wouldn't have to face Bedard, and top teams in the east were praying the lottery pick would go to the west for the same reason. Everyone universally had the same sentiment though:

Anyone but Chicago.

The hosts go down the line to show the new draft lineup, starting from 16 and going down. Nothing seemed to change in the lineup; teams hoping for ajump up were sadly disappointed but knew they never really had a chance anyways.
The hosts get to the top 5. The reveal the 5th pick is...Montreal. Montreal fans speak French-Canadian sadly, or whatever it is Quebecois folk do.
The fourth pick is revealed. The San Jose Sharks. Sharks fans chomp sadly. Or drink their Starbucks sadly. Idk, I'm not rich enough to live in San Jose.
Then something curious happens. They cut to a commercial break, but the ESPN broadcasters say something very curious. "An upset for Columbus! It's down to Anaheim or Chicago!" Suspicion arises. The card for 3rd place wasn't revealed, how could they have known that Columbus was the 3rd pick? Conspiracy talk bumps up in the live Reddit thread. People were already saying that Chicago won the lottery. They just knew.

Nice of ESPN to state Columbus will pick 3rd before Daley ever even showed it and they went to commercials “It will be either Chicago or Anaheim”….
Elliotte Friedman tweeted out who got pick 1 and 2 during the commercial break. Said tweets have now been deleted.

The NHL lottery comes back on after commercials and reveal that CBJ wins the 3rd pick to no one's surprise. All that's left is two envelopes, one with a '2' the other with a '1'. They begin to open the '2' envelope. The hockey world goes silent, as whoever gets the 2 spot means that the other won the lottery...

The Worst Timeline

The worst-case-scenario happens. Chicago, universally hated in the hockey world, wins the draft lottery. Duck fans are outraged. Blue Jacket fans are outraged. Literally every fanbase is outraged.

hockey 9/11
why has god abandoned us
If you didn't think Chicago was getting Bedard here is your lesson of how fucked up the world is
Fuck this
Can't lose that media market now that Kane and Toews are gone!
Never forget that the Coyotes had to forfeit a first round pick for talking to a prospect before it was permitted, while Chicago protected a fucking rapist and got no reprecussions.
Coyotes: asks prospects what they ate and to wear shorts? Forfeit draft picks Blackhawks: cover up sexual assault and lie your asses off? Have a Bedard
Draft HoF talent 1st overall -> Go on a dynasty and win 3 cups -> Trade HoF 1st overall -> Draft another HoF talent 1st overall.
He went to the least deserving team.

Individual team subreddits were no better. Every fan from every team, aside from Chicago, were seething and chomping at the bit. There is an ongoing conspiracy about the NHL favoring Chicago now, and people are actively calling for the NHL commissioner's resignation.

Living in a Post-Apocalypse Wasteland

It's been barely a month since the bomb dropped. Food is hard to come by. Hope is lost. People fight each other for the barest scraps of undamaged cloth to keep warm at night since the sun was blacked out.
We don't know what will happen. Life is moving on, but is it really life if there's no will to live?
In seriousness, no one wanted this outcome. Even some Hawks fans hated this. It's hard to say what will happen to the NHL now. Some people are saying that Connor Bedard will get drafted and refuse to play for the Blackhawks, demanding to be traded. Some say he'll disappear to Europe and play in the Swedish league or the KHL to avoid the Blackhawks contract. Others say he'll be a fool to avoid the NHL and just take what he's got, and demand a trade later.
No one knows what Connor Bedard is thinking. He's not really said anything. But we do know that the world of hockey has been shaken to its core. If Bedard plays, Chicago will be a force to be reckoned with for years. If he avoids Chicago, it'll be a legendary act of defiance that will 100% cause the NHL to invent a rule to prevent that from happen again.
But for now, I must return to my fallout shelter. It's not healthy to stand in the radiation for too long.

submitted by WestwardNorthWindow to HobbyDrama [link] [comments]

2023.06.03 23:11 TheCurserHasntMoved (Sneakyverse) The Drums of War Chapter 5: The Line

First Previous Next

In a bustling mining town:

Jax had been enjoying himself. The war stories and barely believable tales of antics of the Humans he'd served with he told in the coffee parlors were popular among the intoxicated of both sexes, though the admiration and further libations from the men were far less captivating than the rapt attention a very pretty woman with a lithe figure and strong tail gave him. Comely indeed, and she would come to listen to him. Though it seemed to onlookers that he had captivated her, it was her dark pools of eyes that he had dove into, and found them deep and inescapable. She kept those eyes trained on him so long as he spoke, and so he spoke, seeing in those depths possibilities.
Indeed, Jax had begun to expect that if he were to ask Rae to accompany him to the upcoming autumn festival, she might not reject the notion. Even with troubling rumors about somebody attacking a neighboring nation, and the sudden vanishing of the Star Sailors from Star Council space were far from his mind, and the minds of the other coffee parlor patrons. It was in this ease and comfort that he and many other Numiindan residents found their lives shattered by horror.
It began with the burning streaks of the wrecked Space Defense Force, more law enforcement than military, fell from the sky. He was just in the middle of a story about the time his buddy Erin had gotten stuck in his own armor when he stopped and said, "Does anybody else smell smoke?"
There was a general testing of the air by the group of variably intoxicated patrons, followed by a fruitless checking of datapads for the news. "Network's down," somebody in the small crowd said.
"Well, we'll just go outside and take a look," Jax said, and Rae subtly clasped his hand. Outside, the pair squeezed each other's hands so hard they hurt. The sky was streaked with gashes of billowing black smoke of destroyed ships and fighters, and what destroyed them was descending while raining hot plasma down on anything that looked vaguely like it might be fortified.
"The Ancestors preserve us," Rae whispered.
"I'm not going to wait on them," Jax said, "we need to get under cover now, and not just the lounge!"
Someone in the crowd said, "The mines! There are some pretty big chambers down there, and it's like, miles of rock to burn through."
"Good plan," Vex said, "If they're doing areal lances like that they don't care about collateral damage, everyone, split up in groups of three or four, and get as many people as you can to get to the mines."
"What if they follow us down?" Rae asked.
"We'll flood the mines. Hopefully they can't swim."
An hour later, a press of over a hundred panicked elderly and children were running along behind Jax. The majority of the parents and other adults had elected to buy time. Jax had to focus on his mission, save the civvies, get them under cover, to keep from bolting off to join them. "As long as the pups are alive," he muttered.
The sounds of shouting and plasma lance discharges spurred him and Rae on, and though he was obliged to lead the way, she insisted on bringing up the rear. She insisted that none of the injured were left behind. Then, they saw it, salvation. The gates to the mines, and behind them, the shaft plunging down beneath the rock. There were miners with plasma cutters and force axes at the gates, and Jax knew better than to relax. Even as the miners swung the gates open and escorted their panicked charges to the shaft elevator.
"We're getting ready to flood the main shaft, and everything but the vents to the largest chamber," one of the miners said, "get everyone up against the back wall, and pray the Ancestors remember us."
Jax just nodded and gripped his crowbar as he scanned the road they had run down saying, "I'm going to need fighters. We have to hold out until the Republic gets here."
"The Republic? You think they'll come?"
"Of course," Jax said with steel in his voice, "of course."
The next day, Jax held a meeting with the others he was thinking of as the leaders, or maybe other fighters, to tell them what he thought and hear what they thought in return. They had swam to an air pocket in one of the flooded tunnels and held their conversation in the dim light of a portable glow lantern to keep the civvies from panicking at what might be said. There Jax and Rae floated with Kai, a miner and the one who had suggested sheltering in the tunnels, Mei, an engineer in from the big city to help design an upgraded refining facility, and Ash, a man reluctant to divulge his past.
"So, we have about eight hundred civvies, none of whom are in fighting shape, no weapons, no food, and a highly defensible position," Jax opened, "I believe our first priority should be arming ourselves so we can raid the surface for food."
"The first aid kits are barely adequate. They're made to deal with maybe a localized plasma burn from a cutter malfunction, or to put temporary splints on a broken limb. Not lance wounds and to stabilize breaks for healing," Rae murmured softly.
"I did a little scouting," Kai said, "Just popping up in the vent covers, they didn't see me. I saw my house. What's left of it. Anyway, I know how to get to where there are some weapons we could get if we're quick. If we're quiet."
"The flooding did significant damage to the mines," Mei muttered. "I haven't seen any signs that it's getting worse, but the quakes will probably keep on. We will have to reassure the civilians. If they bombard the town from orbit though…"
"There's not much we can do about that," Jax said firmly, "so let's focus on what we can manage. Weapons, food, medicine."
"Blankets," Ash said, "The people are cold, scared. Blankets will help with morale. Survivors. There might be survivors."
"Weapons, food, weapons, blankets, and survivors. Okay, that's a start. Who wants to tell them?"
"Will the Republic really come?" Ash asked.
"They will come," Rex said firmly.
"I can tell them," Rae said as she reached out to clasp hands with Rex. He let her squeeze his hand once, and they dove down into the water to swim back to the main chamber.
The people were understandably stressed at the news that their only protectors would soon leave them alone, but they were reassured when Rae explained that they planned on raiding the surface for supplies and planned to be gone for a few hours at most.
Later, Ash was skulking around a police station, or at least the charred remnants of one, while Jax tried to see him doing so from inside the vent cover. He had been a little aprehensive of the man's claims that he could scout the building unnoticed, but the proof of the meat was inside the shell, so he took a chance. It paid off.
"All clear," Ash whispered from outside Jax's field of view.
"You made your point," Jax said, "good work."
"It's… it's not good in there."
Jax opened up the vent cover, and dropped to all fours to creep his way to the shattered building, and his companions did so behind him.
They squeezed through a gap in the rubble and slowly shifted the rubble until they had tunneled their way to the basement stairs, which they descended immediately. They tried to ignore the singed and shattered corpses of the police officers as they crawled past or over them. They failed at this. They had marginally more success in ignoring Rae's vomit at the grizzly task.
In the basement they found chemprop weapons, magacs, plasma casters, and long distance tasers in rifle and pistol configurations, as well as some light flak armor and personal shields. "Don't bother with the casters or tasers," Jax ordered as he wrapped his hands around the familiar shape of a rifle stock, "Terrans use these for a reason." The others deferrred to his experience, and Rae went to check the other basement rooms for medical supplies.
When she cried out, Rex and the others rushed into the adjoining room, but found no danger there. Only the chief of police, a magac pistol lay at his feet, and the wall to his left was painted in a sanguine splatter. "Nim," she almost moaned in grief.
"You knew him?" Ash asked.
"My uncle."
The others murmured their apologies, none of them strangers to such loss in the past day, and Ash pulled a discarded coat over the man taken by despair. "We have to make sure the people don't decide that this is a good idea," he softly murmured.
"Okay, see what else we can find for supplies here. Kai, can we get to a clinic from the tunnels?"
"Three of them."
"We'll hit the nearest one first, then we swim out to the bay and see if we can get anything from the fishery."
Then, they once again committed to the grizzly task of crawling through the rubble.
The clinic was miraculously intact, only a little exterior fire damage from the fighting, but it was also guarded. The invaders hadn't expected anyone to actually attack with weapons, as thus far most resistance had been fierce but only armed with improvised weapons. The two guards were relieved of their duties by magnetically accelerated iron chunks that left golf ball sized exit wounds in their backs before they even knew they were under attack. Inside, there was not only a treasure trove of medical supplies, which Rae directed them to take only the most versatile or in most dire need, but there were also prisoners in one of the exam rooms. They had injuries that indicated that they were painful but not lethal. Jax was furious.
The fishery offered enough food for the next few days, and their triumphant return kindled hope in the sheltering civilians that they might just hold out.

In low orbit over Numinda:

Acolyte-Lord Gukea-Sarvon surveyed his glorious conquest. Glad he was to have received orders to seek out resource rich planets, for instead of wasting his talents spilling unworthy blood to sate the thirst of Axzuur, he had instead found a race worthy of toiling for his glory. They could never be true warriors, Five days, and he had obtained control over the system and planet. Truly, the pathetic resisance offered by their so-called fleet had dismayed him, but the reports of the ferocity with which the males and some of the females on the orb below fight against his warriors armed only with what is to hand, and sometimes merely tooth and claw, excited him greatly.
It would be pleasing to elevate the lion's share of Axxaakk serfs to more worthy work, to more… worthy services. This new acquisition would even free up many serfs to become warriors, even, which would mean more sacrifices to Axzuur, which would mean greater favor. Although, there were still pockets of resistance across the planet. Even though his forces controlled the communication infrastructure for the planetary and superluminal networks, these pockets seemed to somehow act in concert to keep vital positions outside the Axxaakk's rightful reach.
It would seem that a mere scout group was insufficient, so he was being reinforced by, Acolyte-Lord Narrex-Quinn, who had been reassigned to a subjugation group including a battleship, three frigates, and their escorts. This should provide sufficient warriors and equipment to properly subjigate the planet, freeing Acolyte-Lord Gukea-Sarvon up for the much more pleasant task of crushing the next planet's defenses. Just two days of further drudgery until Acolyte-Lord Narrex-Quinn arrived to take on the unenviable task of crushing the indipendent spirits of the new serfs. At least he had a few specimens for his own research in the best methods to do so to occupy his time.
Two days later, Acolyte-Lord Narrex-Quinn had sent his counterpart sprawling off of his own dais with a metalic backhand slap, "WHY ARE YOUR ESCORTS NOT INTERDICTING HYPERSPACE EXITS AROUND THIS POSITION?"
Acolyte-Lord Gukea-Sarvon staggered to his feet in a fury, "BECAUSE MY SCOUT FLOTILLA WIPED AWAY ALL RESISTANCE IN LESS THAN A DAY!"
"Observe," Acolyte-Lord Narrex-Quinn said coldly as he slammed a data crystal into an input, and the display screen lit up with the scene of a Terran fleet engaging an extraction fleet, and far from being swept away, they were fighting the extraction fleet to a slow defeat.
"Is that a stone temple?" Acolyte-Lord Gukea-Sarvon blurted out.
"It is."
"Why?"
"To show they can," Acolyte-Lord Narrex-Quinn said with disgust.
Acolyte-Lord Gukea-Sarvon's eyes went wide as he asked, "How did that curiser take hits from behind."
"The Terrans apparently use kinetic weaponry, they fired the munitions in a slingshot trajectory while another ship forced it to maneuver into the line of travel."
"The calculations involved…"
"It is my belief that this is not even the main fighting force of the Terran military, for observe further," Acolyte-Lord Narrex-Quinn twisted the crystal to display a split video of several systems on the screen. "These look like merchant vessels with guns strapped to them, and Priest-Lord Tiglach-Pilexer agrees that is likely the case. These fleets are likely auxiliaries sent out to probe our strength while the Terrans gather their true forces."
"Thank you for relaying this, I shall indeed run hyperspace interdiction at the next world."
"Your orders have changed. We are to extract what we can, and carry it off to the Dominion. The expeditionary fleet is insufficient."
Acolyte-Lord Gukea-Sarvon resisted the urge to spit upon the floor. "I too have information. These… these mammal-worms are worthy of at the very least toiling underneath the Axxaakk. Though their forces are defeated, the people fight on, just as the serfs did before they were broken and rebuilt to Axzuur's glory, may the stars tremble at his step."
"They are mammals, hold hostage their young, as we do for an unruly serf."
"This is a good plan, brother."
"We must not allow the Terrans to surprise us as they did Acolyte-Lord Xamxi-Avav."
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2023.06.03 22:52 EliasEnglishDay P.U.RE. I - Book Drew McIntyre's return in 1000 words.

We start the night after SummerSlam. Seth Rollins is still the World Heavyweight Champion after successfully defending his title against Finn Balor. On the Raw after SummerSlam, Rollins is jumped in the ring when Drew McIntyre's music hits and he makes his big return. He clears the ring and sends the heels running. He comes face to face with Rollins and the two have a respectful face off.
The next week, McIntyre is confronted by The Judgement Day, Balor challenges McIntyre to a match between the two of them, and the match is made official and is also a number one contenders match where the winner will get a title shot against Seth Rollins. Later that night in the main event, McIntyre and Balor have their match. There's attempted run ins by Dominic and Priest who both eat a double Claymore, McIntyre goes for the Claymore on Balor when Ripley distracts from the apron, Balor hits the shot gun drop kick into the corner and goes for the Coup De Grace, McIntyre rolls out of the way and then hits a Claymore for the 1-2-3. Immediately after the match, Judgement Day try to attack McIntyre when Rollins runs out and clears the ring with a chair, he's swinging wildly and ends up accidentally blasting McIntyre as well. The show closes with Seth looking at McIntyre with a sort of apologetic look while McIntyre is seething.
The next week on Raw it's announced that Seth Rollins vs Drew McIntyre will take place at Clash At The Castle 2 in Cardiff Wales on September 2nd, Rollins kicks off the show and calls for McIntyre to come out and explain himself. McIntyre comes out and immediately the two go face to face and are yelling back and forth off mic at each other, McIntyre lifts the mic to speak and instead just drills Seth with a Glasgow Kiss and stands over him as Seth lays unconscious.
We get to Clash At The Castle and the main event is the match for the World Heavyweight Championship, Seth Rollins vs Drew McIntyre. The match starts off fast paced with Seth dumping Drew outside to the floor, he then follows it up with a suicide dive driving Drew into the table, Seth then rolls back in the ring and hits another suicide dive again driving Drew into the table. Seth rolls back into the ring and goes for a third suicide dive but is instead caught by Drew and Belly to Belly suplexed across the announce table. Drew throws Seth back into the ring and goes for The Claymore but Seth counters it into a roll up for a close two count, the men pop up and Seth goes for the Pedigree but Drew powers him up onto his shoulders and hits Seth with a White Noise for a close 2 count. Drew begins to slap at Seth who's staggering to his feet, Seth then fires back with a forearm strike which angers Drew who goes for a clothesline, Seth ducks it and goes for a rip cord knee but Drew shoves him away, Drew goes for the Claymore but Seth avoids it and Drew accidentally blasts the ref.
Ref is down, and Drew is shocked, he turns around into a super kick from Seth, another one, and then a Stomp. Seth goes for the cover but the ref is still out, Seth goes over to the ref and is trying to pick him up when he turns around and is blasted with a Glasgow Kiss. Drew looks around and realizes the referee is down and slides out of the ring and grabs a steel chair, he looks around at the crowd and gets back in the ring and stands in the corner holding the chair. He again looks around the arena at the crowd with a look of conflicting and sadness before he takes a deep breath and has a killer look in his eyes, he steps forward and blasts Seth with the chair. He then just beats the ever loving hell out of Seth with the chair, just laying into him over and over again with the chair as it breaks into multiple pieces. Drew throws the chair out of the ring as the ref starts to stagger to his feet. Drew gets in the corner does the countdown and drills Seth with the Claymore and pins him 1, 2, 3.
Drew takes the title and celebrates as medical officials check on Seth.
The next week on Raw, it's announced that Seth will not be on Raw as he's still recovering from his injuries, but the new Champion is here tonight and he's going to come to the ring to celebrate and explain. Later that night the ring is set up with a table with champagne, Scottish memorabilia, man playing the bag pipes, and then Drew comes out and pretends to be the valiant warrior babyface champion before nailing the bag pipe player with a Glasgow Kiss. He then starts to clear the ring of all the nice celebratory items before grabbing a microphone. He says that ever since Clash he's just been asked "Why Drew, why?" And he says it's very simple, 1 year ago he was screwed over in front of his hometown crowd and had the glory stolen out of his hands and this year he was willing to do anything to prevent that from happening again.
The next week during an interview McIntyre is jumped by the returning Rollins and the two have a brutal brawl ending with McIntyre power bombing Seth through the announce table. The rematch is then set for Extreme Rules in a last man standing match.
Drew is able to win the brutal battle after he Claymores Seth head against the ring post and keeps him down for 10. Drew then goes on to have a monster heel run Champion before dropping the title at WrestleMania to either Rollins, or maybe a well built tweener Gunther.

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2023.06.03 22:35 d8sconz The life and times of John Marmon, the Hokianga Pakeha Maori - Chapter 6

Chapter VI
The first land we sighted after leaving Sydney was the Three Kings, New Zealand. We had run before a fair wind up to this time, and had come into what was regarded as a good whaling ground. Now every eye was scanning the horizon, since a bottle of grog was promised to the man who should first sight a whale. I had been on the port watch since I came on board under Mr Hawkins, the chief mate, and one evening, just as our watch below was ending, I went aloft to see the sun set. Against the broad, red horizon I saw some dark objects spouting and tumbling. In an instant I had shouted “Whales ho!” to claim the bottle of grog. “Where away?” was the skipper's question. “On the lee bow, sir.” For an instant he scanned the spot with his glass, an anxious moment for me lest I should have mistaken a shoal of porpoises for a school of whales, and not only lose my prize but expose myself to the ridicule of my fellow sailors. “Right you are, it's whales, sure enough; you have won your grog, lad.”
We had no time to lose; the night would soon be on us, and our chance would be lost. Down went the boat with Ned Farne, our harpooner, in the bows ready to launch his weapons when opportunity offered. On came the school, tumbling and blowing, throwing jets of water ten or fifteen feet into the air, causing a very grand yet terrible scene. At length they got almost within range; the boys were pulling like mad to keep up with the pace the whales were swimming at. We saw Ned rise up in the bows, poise his arm back for an instant, then launch the harpoon straight for the huge back of the fish that was nearest to him. The aim was true, the missile was buried over the barb in the soft blubber beneath the outer skin, and away went the whale dragging the harpoon rope after it so rapidly that they had to pour water upon the side of the boat to prevent it from igniting, through the violent friction. Again the huge creature rose to breathe, and another harpoon was driven into it, causing it once more to rush away through the water at lightning speed. Darkness fell over the scene before they had killed it, and the boat remained by the carcase all night to prevent it sinking. When morning came it was a busy scene on board, preparing to cut it in and try it out. At length the task was completed, and five large sacks of oil were secured; not a large yield certainly, but the foretaste of better things, we hoped. We cruised over the same ground for several days, but saw no more whales, accordingly we stretched across to Curtis' Island, about 500 miles to the north-east, where in about a month we got five or six more, some of them giving very fair yields of oil. After this we ran down upon Norfolk Island, where we fell in with the Mercury, schooner, Captain Barnet, also on a whaling cruise from Tasmania. From her we shipped two additional hands, and then made for Moreton Bay, on the coast of Queensland. Here not a solitary fish was to be seen, therefore we ran back for our old ground off Curtis' Island. Scarcely had we arrived when we fell in with a heavy gale from the north-east, raging for twenty days, in which we had to heave to, not being able to show a rag of sail. On the 21st day, when the wind began to lull, we found ourselves off the Three Kings, a drift of more than 500 miles. We had shipped such heavy seas, and the force of the storm had been so great, that our tryworks had been carried away, and three of our boats stove in. Therefore we bore up for the Bay of Islands, where we arrived on the 10th of April, 1811, anchoring as before off Te Puna. We were the only vessel in the bay at the time, though others entered during our stay.
The same day that we reached our anchorage a chief named Taua Makia came aboard to take care of us and watch over our interests, lest we should be swindled in trade or otherwise maltreated. This considerate proceeding was not disinterested, but the ‘consideration’ expected was not large. The Skipper ordered a boat to go ashore and bring a load of gravel to serve as shot for our guns since this had been omitted in the ship's supplies, and the natives were not to be trusted, even though we had a protector. The news had spread like wild-fire that a ship was at anchor in the bay, and already scores of canoes were being launched to pay a visit to the pakeha, but we loaded our guns, and pointing them astern, ordered all the visitors to keep back, which, after a little demur and grumbling they did. Nevertheless, all throughout our stay, they never desisted in the attempt to get on board, considering it a gross breach of hospitality on our part to deny them the privilege. As our example was imitated by Captain Walker, of the Endeavour brig, that came in a few days after us, having on board two missionaries for Tahiti - Messrs Davidson and Williams - the natives concluded that in us they had got a very bad and uncivil customer to deal with.
Meantime we had commenced work upon the repairs of the vessel. Nearly all our spars had been carried away, together with our jibboom and some of the bulwarks; we had lost every boat but one, and small leaks were demanding attention, We bad two sawyers on board, and as Captain Walker had three whom he lent us for the time, our skipper thought it best to put the ship thoroughly to rights here, in place of putting back to Sydney. Accordingly, the sawyers went ashore, rigged up the pits, and commenced work vigorously. But the Maoris did not exactly see the force of this. They imagined that we were concocting some diabolic scheme of destruction against them in making such extensive preparations, which they considered as in some way identified with our worship. They pulled down the works and threatened to kill the sawyers if they attempted to resume operations. But a volley from the vessels soon scattered them, and a strong guard being picked from the crews of both ships, they were hereafter permitted to labour uninterruptedly. During this time, I had considerable liberty granted to me to go ashore, or to go fishing with Taua Makia. The first time I availed myself of the former privilege, I received as great a scare as ever I had in my life. Three of us had been wandering about in a bit of bush near the Keri-Keri River, trying to find our way back to the saw-pits, when suddenly we issued upon a cleared space, in which were a few houses and patches of cultivation. Before the entrance to one of the whares stood a band of females crowned with chaplets of green leaves, and wringing their hands. One of these, an elderly woman, who seemed to act as chief mourner upon the occasion, and had a chaplet of dog's hair round her temples, different from the others, advanced in front and began to throw her arms about, raising her head and eyes to heaven. Whilst doing this, in a very plaintive quavering tone, she commenced a wailing song, in which she was joined by her companions. I was afterwards initiated into this, and now give a specimen of a funeral lament: -
Taku hei he piripiri (my fragrant bundle the piripiri) Taku hei moki-moki (my fragrant bundle the mokimoki) Taku hei tawiri (my fragrant bundle the tawiri) Taku kati taramea (my sweet juice of the taraniea) Te hei o te pounamu (the companion of the greenstone) I haramai ai - e (is gone - alas, upon) I runga te angai-ia-ana (the angai-e-).
It was the tangi, or wail for the dead. But at this period I knew nothing of Maori customs or ceremonies, and my very hair began to rise with horror as I thought perhaps they might be celebrating some human sacrifices. Our fear kept us quiet. In the thick bush we lay watching the scene, overshadowed by the gloom of a gigantic kauri-tree, and wishing ourselves anywhere but in our present predicament. When the sorrowful song was ended, and the females had entered the whare, we noiselessly strove to retrace our steps, and chance favouring us, we came out a mile or two from where the sawyers were at work. As I afterwards discovered, no duty is so sacred or so obligatory as the interment of the dead, no trouble being considered too great, no expense too excessive, no lamentation too extreme to testify to the respect in which the deceased was held on earth, and to raise him in the estimation of the mysterious spirits to whom he had gone. Taua Makia sometimes went with us fishing to induce the prey to come upon hooks by the constant chanting of Karakias or incantations, supposed to have a very potent influence over the finny tribe. I cannot say we were ever very successful when he was with us, since the noise he made and the fishing gear he would insist upon employing were neither conducive to lure the fish to our bait, nor to hold them when they were hooked. But this, of course, may have been merely an ignorant pakeha's prejudice, since many a lusty kahawai or schnapper, have I caught with a hook made from a dead man's bone. Don't wince, reader; better, is it not, to be put to some use after death, than to feed a legion of hungry worms.
We began to mix a little with the natives when ashore, and I grew more familiarised with their ways. We attended their baptisms, He Tohi, and gave presents to the infant, that it never enjoyed; we consulted the Niu, or divining sticks, whether we should reach home in safety; we were present at their marriage tauas, when the bride was carried off by main force sometimes minus her clothing, finally we were guests at their hakaris, or feasts, and could vouch for the excellence of Maori culinary skill. But we shall have enough of these in the course of the narrative, the reader shall eat and drink to his heart's content but at present we must keep to the thread of our story.
In a fortnight the sawyers had finished their work ashore, a week more completed the repairs aboard, and whatever little trade we had carried on completed, the skipper thought of standing out to sea again. In some mysterious way or other, I had offended the old bosun of our ship, and he had persecuted me with most relentless malice. Nothing I could do was right, the rope's end was my daily sauce, and complaints about my laziness were continually being carried to the captain. At length one day, irritated by their constant occurrence, he said when another of my misdeeds was laid before him, “String him up then, and give him a dozen.” This was just what the bosun wanted; and in a trice he strung me up to the mast, and a good round dozen I received, being only released when nearly fainting with pain and shame. He had got the best of it just now; my day of retribution came again. Now, this method of instructing me in navigation was by no means to my taste, and as two of our men had absconded the day previous, concealed, as was thought, in the bush, I imagined I could emulate their example, perhaps, to join them. At least, I should first go to the Endeavour, as she lay nearer the shore, if not, the bush it must be. Therefore, waiting my opportunity, about 3 o'clock one morning I slipped overboard and swam noiselessly to the companion ship. As I came alongside puffing and blowing, thoroughly exhausted with the long swim, and almost inclined to give up the business, the carpenter, who was acting as bosuns mate in the Endeavour for the time, saw me, and flung me a rope, by which I climbed on deck. I told him my story, and as he was a decent sort of a fellow, he was slipping me quietly along the deck to the foc'sle, when the second mate saw us and demanded to know what I wanted there. With my usual readiness, I invented a tale of a morning swim and exhaustion, but the story would not hold water, and the captain was informed of my arrival. As soon as morning broke he sent over to the Harwich, telling Captain Simmons that I was on board his vessel, and about nine our skipper came over with two men to take me back. Reluctantly enough I went, as I knew a flogging was in store for me, but to my surprise the captain only took me into his cabin and rated me soundly for my foolhardiness in risking my life thus, telling me I escaped a flogging by his having discovered many of the bosuns stories to be untrue. My condition was now better on board, as I was taken aft, and kept under the captain's own eye. My enemy, the bosun, was speechless with rage, yet he was powerless now to do me harm.
About a week after this the Endeavour sailed, Captain Walker having come on board the Harwich and taken a very friendly farewell of our skipper, and a fortnight afterwards we followed suit, going back to our old cruising ground at the Three Kings. The weather was very uncertain and squally, so that we did not see any whales; therefore we stretched over to Norfolk Island, and speedily were busy at work.
The first day we arrived we secured three whales, which we cut in and tried out, the third day two more, and the fifth day another. Then our luck seemed to change, and not a solitary fish could we see for an entire month. We tried all our former grounds, Curtis' Island, Moreton Bay, Three Kings, to no purpose, only when off the East Cape did we catch sight of a small whale, which we secured but only got one barrel of oil from it. The weather now began to be very stormy; winter was at its depth, and the air was piercingly cold. Therefore Captain Simmons concluded to break the cruise, to run for Sydney, discharge his cargo of oil, and commence anew. Another consideration, also, was that several of the men were very ill with scurvy and dysentry - in fact, the crew was only at half at its usual complement, therefore the cry was “about ship,” and “Sydney ho!”
It was whilst running home before a fine fresh breeze, that one night we were knocked up by Mr Hawkins singing out, “Ship on fire on the weather bow.” The shock was electrical. Everyone bundled out of their hammocks and rushed on deck. There on the horizon was a grand and terrible spectacle. A large ship was burning from stem to stern, lighting up the gloom of the winter's night for miles around, throwing a deep lucid glare over the inky ocean. The flames were bursting up the hatches, were licking the masts and spars, were peeping out in little forked tongues through the portholes. The captain ordered lights to be burned at the masthead, blank charges to be fired from the guns every minute, and the jolly-boat to be manned and to go in search of survivors. In an hour our efforts were rewarded by three boat-loads of fear-stricken men boarding us and asking reception. They informed us that the burning ship was the “Lady Lucy” from Sydney to London, that she had caught fire when a week out, from a burning candle falling into an oil cask, and that over 50 lives had already been lost through the capsizing of two of their boats. Captain Simmons made them welcome, and a few days after we reached Sydney, where they were taken in hand by the Government and forwarded home by the next vessel. Thus ended my voyage in the Harwich, perhaps the most pleasant of all my trips.

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2023.06.03 22:23 Joadzilla Georgia probe of Trump broadens to activities in other states

https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2023/06/02/trump-georgia-election-investigation-fulton-county/
An Atlanta-area investigation of alleged election interference by President Donald Trump and his allies has broadened to include activities in D.C. and several states, according to two people with knowledge of the probe — a fresh sign that prosecutors may be building a sprawling case under Georgia’s racketeering laws.
Fulton County District Attorney Fani T. Willis (D) launched an investigation more than two years ago to examine efforts by Trump and his allies to overturn his narrow 2020 defeat in Georgia. Along the way, she has signaled publicly that she may use Georgia’s Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations (RICO) statute to allege that these efforts amounted to a far-reaching criminal scheme.
In recent days, Willis has sought information related to the Trump campaign hiring two firms to find voter fraud across the United States and then burying their findings when they did not find it, allegations that reach beyond Georgia’s borders, said the two individuals, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to talk candidly about the investigation. At least one of the firms has been subpoenaed by Fulton County investigators.
Willis’s investigation is separate from the one at the Justice Department being led by special counsel Jack Smith, but the two probes have covered some of the same ground. Willis has said she plans to make a charging decision this summer, and she has indicated that such an announcement could come in early August. She has faced stiff criticism from Republicans for investigating the former president, and the ever-widening scope suggests just how ambitious her plans may be.
The state’s RICO statute is among the most expansive in the nation, allowing prosecutors to build racketeering cases around violations of both state and federal laws — and even activities in other states. If Willis does allege a multistate racketeering scheme with Trump at its center, the case could test the bounds of the controversial law and make history in the process. The statute calls for penalties of up to 20 years in prison.
“Georgia’s RICO statute is basically two specified criminal acts that have to be part of a pattern of behavior done with the same intent or to achieve a common result or that have distinguishing characteristics,” said John Malcolm, a former Atlanta-based federal prosecutor who is now a constitutional scholar at the conservative Heritage Foundation. “That’s it. It’s very broad. That doesn’t mean it’s appropriate to charge a former president, but that also doesn’t mean she can’t do it or won’t do it.”
Among Willis’s latest areas of scrutiny is the Trump campaign’s expenditure of more than $1 million on two firms to study whether electoral fraud occurred in the 2020 election, the two individuals said. The Post first reported earlier this year that the work was carried out in the final weeks of 2020, and that the campaign never released the findings because the firms, Simpatico Software Systems and Berkeley Research Group, disputed many of Trump’s theories and could not offer any proof that he was the rightful winner of the election.
In recent days, Willis’s office has asked both firms for information — not only about Georgia but about other states as well. Trump contested the 2020 election results in Georgia, Arizona, Michigan, Nevada, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin.
Ken Block, the CEO of Simpatico Software Systems, declined to comment on what he has turned over to investigators. A lawyer for the Berkeley Research Group also declined to comment. A spokesman for Willis declined to comment on the investigation. Lawyers for Trump also declined to comment.
It is unclear if Willis will seek indictments of people for alleged actions that occurred outside Georgia, such as those who participated in the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol. RICO experts say it’s unlikely she will do so. But, these experts said, the law allows Willis to build a sweeping narrative of an alleged pattern of behavior to overturn the 2020 election, with Georgia as just one piece. Evidence and actions outside the state, such as Trump’s statements from Washington that inspired some of the rioters and the parallel efforts to overturn other states’ results, could be presented as additional evidence that helps establish that pattern.
“The Georgia statute is broadly written” to allow the inclusion of violations of federal law as well as some other states’ laws, said Morgan Cloud, a law professor at Emory University in Atlanta and expert on the state’s RICO law. “For example, acts to obstruct justice committed in Arizona might be relevant if the goal of the enterprise, of the racketeering activity, was to overturn the 2020 presidential election nationally, as well as in Georgia.”
Cloud added that prosecutors in Georgia must prove only that two racketeering crimes occurred under the state RICO statute, but that other facts could be used to explain the breadth of an alleged scheme.
An ambitious prosecution
Willis’s investigation has already come under scrutiny as a test of applying state criminal laws to actions that revolved around a federal election — and that in many instances resembled constitutionally protected speech. The probe has prompted a debate, even among those who believe Trump’s efforts were improper, as to whether prosecutors will be able to prove that Georgia crimes were committed.
Her potentially sweeping application of Georgia’s RICO statute could amplify those questions. RICO allows prosecutors to target leaders of alleged criminal enterprises who in previous generations eluded convictions. In Georgia, it can be applied to many patterns of activity that are crimes under state or federal law, such as dogfighting or drug dealing, obstruction or conspiracy — going far beyond its origins as a tool to fight organized crime.
Several legal experts said they expect Willis to home in on possible false statements by Trump and his allies to government officials — one of the crimes that can be prosecuted under Georgia’s RICO statute.
In 2015, Willis attracted national attention as a deputy district attorney by using RICO to prosecute a massive cheating scandal in Atlanta’s public schools that sent eight teachers and administrators to prison.
Prosecutors in Georgia have obtained RICO convictions where the pattern of racketeering activity included actions in other states. In one notable case, prosecutors in Richmond County got convictions for several men they accused of kidnapping a Sam’s Club manager in a robbery scheme in 1998, stuffing him into the trunk of a car, driving to South Carolina and killing him by setting the car on fire.
In the Trump case, Willis has said she is focused on the phone calls Trump made to multiple Georgia officials seeking to reverse his defeat, his campaign’s efforts to persuade the Georgia legislature to declare Trump the winner, the gathering of Trump’s electors to cast electoral college votes for Trump after Joe Biden had been declared the winner in the state, and the Trump campaign’s potential involvement in an unauthorized breach of election equipment in rural Coffee County, Ga.
Dozens of people participated in those efforts, according to reams of emails, texts and deposition transcripts from the House investigation into the Jan. 6 attack: Trump lawyers such as Rudy Giuliani, Jenna Ellis, Sidney Powell, Ray Smith and John Eastman; senior advisers including then-White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows; Jeffrey Clark, then a senior official at the Justice Department; and Georgia GOP leaders including the party chairman, David Shafer, and its then finance chairman, Shawn Still.
Multiple legal experts have said persuading a jury that those actions broke the law could prove difficult. The debate reflects the unprecedented nature of Trump’s attempt to overturn the 2020 election. While the effort immediately prompted calls to hold him and others criminally responsible, identifying laws that apply to such a scenario has proved challenging — and could help explain why Willis’s investigation is in its third year. That dynamic applies both to the Georgia investigation as well as the special counsel’s federal probe.
Most of those scrutinized in the Willis investigation have maintained that they did nothing wrong. They had every right to pursue claims of anomalies, many have said, particularly given how close Biden’s margin of victory was in Georgia, two-tenths of 1 percent.
“There’s not a single thing that I did in pursuit of election integrity that I have any regret or concern about,” Shafer said in a recent GOP address.
“It’s dangerous,” said Malcolm, the Heritage scholar, referring to the investigation in Georgia of contingent electors. “What you’re doing is tainting political activists who are trying to play a part in an election, who are trying to help their candidate, and all of a sudden you’re launching a criminal investigation.”
Norm Eisen, who served as special counsel to the House of Representatives’ first impeachment of Trump, over his pressure campaign with Ukraine, cautioned that it’s too soon to judge the investigation, but said he believes the overall case is a “strong one.”
“Either skepticism or belief is premature because we are not privy to all the evidence that the district attorney has amassed at this point,” said Eisen, a criminal defense attorney and senior fellow at the Brookings Institution. “It just depends on the evidence.”
Eisen was among the authors of a lengthy examination of the applicable law in the Fulton investigation, concluding that possible crimes, besides racketeering, included making false statements and conspiracy to commit election fraud.
Malcolm said he agrees with the report’s conclusion that Trump is at substantial risk of being charged. But he said he believes much of its analysis is “slanted and misguided.”
Trump’s call to Georgia
Willis launched her probe shortly after Trump’s Jan. 2, 2021, phone call to Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger (R), during which Trump said, “I just want to find 11,780 votes.” That number would have given Trump exactly the votes he needed to reverse Biden’s victory.
While Trump has been widely rebuked for that comment and others during the roughly one-hour call, it’s unclear to some legal analysts if uttering those words broke the law.
Trump did not spell out that he wanted Raffensperger to break the law; nor did he directly ask the state official to find the votes, which might have given Willis a clearer path to seek a felony charge against him, such as solicitation to commit election fraud. Instead, the comment could be interpreted as the president simply spelling out the math that would allow him to reverse Biden’s victory.
Trump may have hurt himself, however, in his appearance last month at a town hall broadcast by CNN, during which he explained that he called Raffensperger to tell him, “You owe me votes because the election was rigged.” Willis could offer the statement as evidence of Trump’s intent for Raffensperger to switch votes, several legal experts said.
“Subjects of criminal investigation aren’t usually reckless enough to go on national television and admit their corrupt intent,” Anthony Michael Kreis, a constitutional law professor at Georgia State University, wrote on Twitter after the appearance. “But Donald Trump just handed Fani Willis a new piece of evidence and tied a bow on it.”
Willis has also investigated appearances by Giuliani and other Trump allies before Georgia lawmakers in the days immediately after the 2020 election, during which they described fantastical conspiracies of voting machines swapping Trump votes for Biden votes and poll workers in Atlanta triple-counting suitcases full of ballots.
It’s a felony in Georgia to make a false statement in a government matter, but Willis must prove that Giuliani and the others knew that what they were saying was false. Giuliani was not speaking under oath, so there is no exposure for perjury charges, and some legal experts say he might also be protected under the First Amendment.
Willis may also examine the actions of Clark, then the acting assistant attorney general for the Justice Department’s civil division, who wanted to send a letter to Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp (R) and state legislative leaders falsely claiming that the department was investigating “significant concerns” in the 2020 election, and urging them to call a special session of the General Assembly to appoint Trump’s electors to cast Georgia’s electoral college votes. Senior Justice Department officials blocked Clark from sending the draft.
Whether the Republican electors who convened to cast electoral college votes for Trump on Dec. 14, 2020, broke the law is perhaps even murkier.
Georgia was among seven states where the Trump campaign and local GOP officials arranged for alternate electors to convene with the stated purpose of preserving legal recourse while an election challenge made its way through the courts. Willis has offered some form of immunity to 12 of the 16 electors, according to three individuals with knowledge of the investigation. Not counted among those with immunity are Still, now a Georgia state senator, and Shafer.
Shafer helped organize the meeting and presided over it. Still has been described in news reports as having blocked members of the media from entering the room before the meeting started. Prosecutors have apparently focused on those activities in their questions to various witnesses, according to three other people with knowledge of the interviews. Prosecutors have also inquired about who mailed the electoral certificates to Washington, they said.
One of Shafer’s lawyers, Holly Pierson, wrote in a letter to Willis that Shafer had no knowledge that Trump allies would propose, later in December, to use the alternate elector certificates to block the counting of electoral votes for Biden in the Jan. 6 joint session of Congress. It is not even clear if the plan to thwart the joint session had been hatched by Dec. 14, 2020, the day the electors met. The House committee did not refer Shafer or Still to the Justice Department for federal prosecution. Pierson declined to comment.
As the nation waits to see what, if any, charges Willis will seek, one key question is what evidence she has gathered that Trump, his campaign or allies knew about all the different efforts to reverse Biden’s victory. And that’s just the first step — getting to trial and persuading a jury may present even more formidable challenges.
“Proving all this beyond a reasonable doubt,” Kreis said, “that’s going to be the hard part.”

submitted by Joadzilla to gamefaqs261 [link] [comments]

2023.06.03 22:17 GoastRiter [GUIDE] Living Large in Los Santos: Unleashing Chaos. Making Friends and Rediscovering the Thrill of GTA Online!

If you're reading this, perhaps you're like me. You have most things you want in GTA Online. You've "done it all". And now you're bored.
But... have you *really* done it all? Turns out, most of us haven't. There's so much to do in this game, and it's easy to get stuck in old habits that prevent us from discovering everything there is to do in Los Santos!
So I began writing down all my ideas for having fun in the game, and basically use these suggestions as guidelines to always find something new to do. It has completely reinvigorated my joy for the game, and I hope it can help you do the same!
If you're having trouble with motivation or inspiration, then I suggest picking something at random from the list and just doing it! You might disccover that you love it, just like I did!
And if you have anything more to add, please share your comments so that we can all help build this list together. :)

Let's go!

Break Your Habits: Most people have a routine that they repeat over and over again until they get burned out and bored with the game! Your number one goal for having fun must be to break your old habits!
Grind Less: If you've played for a long time, there's absolutely zero reason to grind big piles of useless money. People often develop bad habits where they finally grind so much that they forget to have fun. The "wonder" of the world completely vanishes when everything becomes about optimal times and optimal routes and optimal mission rotations. Relax! Start exploring everything that the game has to offer instead! Dare to do the "less optimal" routes, and have the courage to stop stressing about the "time efficiency" when you do the game's content. Sure, perhaps you can do a mission in 2 minutes with an Oppressor Mk2, but why not relax, put on a podcast, and do a relaxing 5 minute drive instead? Relax and have fun!
Switch Off the Business Mindset: Why grind at all? Why do businesses at all? What do you really need the money for, whatsoever? If it feels like grinding, do something else that's more fun for you! Stop thinking about the money and start thinking about the real-world fun you're having! Start actually enjoying all the things you've previously grinded for! Perhaps you might enjoy treating GTA as a racing simulator where you mostly do challenges/race maps instead? There's so much more to do that isn't purely related to earning money!
Accept All Invites: When you see invites to races, challenges, missions, etc, accept them! You will broaden your horizons about what you can do in the game, and you will often make the newbies very happy! Of course, if it turns out they're a hopelessly stupid newbie who keeps dying and never improves, then sure, I'd suggest leaving the heist to save your time and sanity. But most of the time, the other players will be smart enough to learn quickly. You can easily make great, new friends this way!
Protect the Newbies: If you see someone doing a sales mission in a public lobby, why not fly over there in a powerful airborne vehicle (or heck, a missile-equipped Toreador car), and then follow them as their bodyguard against any griefers that may appear!
Join People's CEO/MC: You can list yourself as "looking for work" via the interaction menu, which will alert other people that there's someone looking for work in the session. You can then join them and help people out with their missions, which is often a fun and relaxing activity for a while!
Get a Crew: Look around for a crew of like-minded people. They exist. There are crews that specialize in heisting with competent players. There are crews that focus on racing. There are crews for Arena War. There are crews that only do LS Car Meet challenges/races. There's even crews specialized in doing sales missions together, by helping each other with business sales, if that's your thing! Finding a group of people with a compatible mindset and interests really pays off in the end!
Switch Sessions: You can jump between multiple public sessions until you find one that matches your mood. Perhaps a nice, quiet sessions without griefers, perfect for doing sales missions? Or maybe one where there's a group of people that are actively doing something fun, which you can join in on? Don't just settle for your session. Explore what's out there!
Do the Stupid Things: Grab your friends or some randoms, and challenge each other to do the most stupid and random things you can think of. The game is a sandbox. So start acting like it! For example, why not challenge each other with things like "everyone starts at the beach without any vehicles, your goal is to get to the Senora Desert convenience store, and you're only allowed to use stolen vehicles, the first person to reach the desert wins", or how about "everyone jumps from the Maze Bank Tower and your goal is to ride your parachute all the way to the ferris wheel". Is that even possible? Who knows! Let's find out!
Become a Map Creator: If you've had fun making random challenges in freeroam, why not make them into more formal challenges, by creating actual maps? The map creator is very advanced. You can modify the world, add checkpoints anywhere you want, you could make a bicycle race, add pedestrians, enable weapon wheel usage, add parachute jumps, stunt jumps, survival modes, etc. Go wild!
River Racing: The game has two epic rivers that start at the "Alamo Sea" (desert lake) and head west out to the ocean. Why not do a race with some friends? Get the Blazer Aqua amphibious quad bike and start at the desert, then race through one of the rivers, which is full of fun jumps. Next, decide on a destination (such as the Del Perro Pier) and do the rest of the drive on roads to see who gets there first.
Stop Flying: Whenever a game lets you fly, you end up skipping huge amounts of content and world design and just flying directly above it all. That's nice if you want to get somewhere efficiently, but it really breaks the game's immersion. Try driving everywhere instead!
Learn to Fly: Many players are awful at flying (especially the helicopters). Why not practice your flying skills? Perhaps try landing your helicopter at very tight spots, on rooftops, and other fun locations!
Use Motorcycles: They're more thrilling than cars, because crashing actually has consequences. They're also very fast and agile, which feels awesome while driving through the city!
Oppressor MK1: Fly around the map, trying to create your own challenges such as flying over the water or climbing Mount Chiliad.
Climb the Mountain: Find various fun vehicles and attempt to climb Mount Chiliad in them. There's lots of fun to be had with motorcycles at the mountain!
BMX Tricks: There are so many skate parks and BMX bicycle stunt locations in the city. Why not look at some BMX stunt videos for inspiration?
Throw Away the GPS: Stop staring at the minimap while driving! This is super fun. Let's say that you need to get to Simeon's shop. Instead of opening up the world map and setting a map marker and following the GPS line like a lemming, try to train yourself to navigate the city! Drive the streets, look at the surroundings and actually navigate! It's so much fun and you'll feel way more relaxed. The city will also feel way more immersive. You can even modify the minimap via "Settings: Display: Radar = Blips", which hides the map so that you can't see the shape of the streets by glancing at the minimap anymore. You can even disable it completely, but unfortunately it also hides the healthbar if you do that.
Use First Person: You can change the game's camera mode to first person, which is a really unique and immersive way to play the game. Steal some cars and go cruising! It will feel like an entirely different game when you get used to it!
Take Selfies: Find beautiful locations and attempt to take great screenshots, with perfect framing and composition! You can use the game's built-in snapmatic camera, or you can use your regular screenshot key instead! Collecting photos of your adventures is a nice way to remember where you've been!
Businesses: There are so many businesses in the game, and it's easy to forget about them after a while. Look at your businesses and begin doing their sourcing and sales missons again! Most of us quit them because they're very grindy, but after a long time away from them, they'll feel fresh again. And they'll feel much more relaxing if you vary between your different businesses and you only do one or two missions at a time, to never get bored.
Nightclub: Do the promotion/popularity missions, which involve going around town and promoting the nightclub, or helping to remove unwanted or drunk guests from the club. All of that improves your popularity, which improves the passive income you're earning from the club!
Get the DJs: The nightclub has multiple DJs. Why not unlock them all? Their missions are very fun, and you'll earn new music for your club.
Bunker: Why not do some manual supply missions, just to relax and have fun? Sure, the optimal way to make money with the bunker is to buy the supplies and do "better" things with your time instead of sourcing supplies, but why does everything have to be about ultimate efficiency all the time? If you're a long-time player, you already have lots of money and you need new things to do!
Contact Missions: So many people don't even know that you can get missions by calling NPCs on the phone. It's named "contact missions" and they can be very fun. I recommend calling Dax and doing "Request Work" from him, because his missions are very varied and after you've done enough you get various important rewards, such as upgrades for your Acid Lab business.
CEO/VIP Work: When you're a CEO, you can start SecuroServ missions via the interaction menu. There's lots of fun ones! For example, why not get your favorite car, relax and do the Sightseer mission, seeing where the map markers will take you while you enjoy the relaxing drive? The mission gives you 15 minutes, which is plenty of time to take the scenic route.
Terrorbyte Missions: Another forgotten relic! The terrorbyte has lots of fun missions which are very good for variation. They used to be the best "active" way to earn money in GTA. Most players who grinded those missions have only done the "optimal rotation", but how about actually doing all of the available missions for fun?
Rockstar Jobs: There are so many high-quality maps, races and challenge modes in the game. Explore the official list of RockstaCurated jobs in the game's pause menu. There's a ton of them!
Community Jobs: There's a ton of cool community maps in the game. Remember to favorite the ones you liked so that you can easily start the same again!
Auto Shop: Do the customer car customization and delivery jobs, and do the heists! They can be done solo.
MC Club: Do the customer motorcycle customization and delivery jobs.
Vehicle Warehouse: Do the Import/Export car theft and sales missions. Be sure to use the trick that ensures you only get high-end cars (permanently fill the warehouse with every worthless sourced car in the game, then you will only get high-end cars after that).
Acid Lab: The best passive income business in the game. Spend some time doing Dax's contact missions to fully upgrade your lab's efficiency and it will become very profitable. Then mix up your gameplay between both sourcing Acid supplies or buying them. And do the sales missions.
Franklin's Agency: Do the Dr. Dre story missions, then do 201x Security Contract missions until you've unlocked the highest amount of passive daily income (it goes up by $100 every time you do a mission, capped at $20,000 after having done 201 contracts).
Payphone Hits: They're unlocked after doing at least 3 Security Contract missions. Then you can pick up assassination contracts from ringing payphones. They're very profitable.
Weekly Time Trials: Do the camotorcycle time trial and the RC car time trial every week, they're a good way to learn how to drive and they give a nice bit of money! Remember that you can hold a key to respawn at the start of the race before the time has ended, if you're sure that you won't make it in time.
Daily Objectives: In your interaction menu, look at the Objectives and complete them. They're a good way to be inspired to do things you might not do otherwise.
Daily Collectible Hunts: G's Cache (hunt for the hidden street cache), Kosatka submarine treasure hunt, Street dealer (find it and sell to it every day), etc.
Get a Fresh Look: Create a new character outfit (clothes, hairstyle, tattoos, mask).
Use Different Weapons: Challenge yourself to use different weapons than the same old, boring weapon you always use. For example, how about only using the Heavy Revolver? Make those shots count!
Modify Your Weapons: Change their styles and attachments.
Tune Your Precious Car: You might have a "perfectly tuned" car that you've been driving for years and that you're always using. Why not modify it a bit? Put a different livery on it, and some different colors at least? What felt "fresh" two years ago would just be contributing to a feeling of "staleness" today. Freshen things up!
Ride of the Day: Most long-time players have around a hundred vehicles, but most of them collect dust. Why not set fun "challenge" rules for yourself, such as randomly selecting a vehicle and using only that vehicle on that real-life day?
Outfit of the Day: Why not make it your goal to create a new character "outfit of the day" (or week) whenever you log in? It's a great way to get a fresh feeling every time you play!
Minigames: How about some Golf, Tennis, Darts or Arm Wrestling?
Gang Attacks: Find a gang and eliminate them!
Stash Houses: Find the stash houses and raid them for resources for your businesses.
Parachute: Go somewhere high up and do a parachute dive! Better yet, look for the Junk Energy Skydives challenges on the map, or do Dom's parachute challenge (which is a special skydive at a random location).
San Andreas Flight School: Do the flight school challenges! They're at the Los Santos Airport, at the airplane icon!
Gun Range Challenges: Complete the Bunker's and Ammo-Nation Gun Range shooting challenges!
Gun Range with Friends: Challenge a friend to the gun range mini-games, where you compete to see who is the most accurate!
MC Club Missions: Form a MC club with at least one friend, then ride in formation and start MC missions via the interaction menu.
MC Businesses: Yes, they're the most hated businesses in the game, but why not do them a little bit? You could do a little bit of supplying and a few small sales missions, to ensure that you have small sales. Or, team up with friends and take turns helping each other do larger sales.
Racing: Do Open Wheel, Stunt Races, Transform Races, and Regular Races. There are so many different kinds of races in the game! The transform races are the newest feature, and are very cool, since you might drive a supercar down the street to the airport, then transform into a plane and fly through the sky, and other epic things, all in the same race map!
LS Car Meet: Do the challenges, races and rank up your LS Car Meet rank. Try to win the Prize Ride!
Lobby Car Meets: You can try arranging car meets with other people in the lobby, to check out each other's cars! Just beware of griefers. You may want to do it in the LS Car Meet building to avoid the griefer explosions, or just switch to a lobby with cooler people.
Arcade: Play the arcade games and try to beat them! Some of them have hidden rewards for completing the game or completing certain challenges.
Achievements: Look at the pause menu's Stats - Awards section, and pick some award that you'll try to complete! There are so many fun challenges in there, such as attempting to parachute for more than 3 minutes, or robbing every store on the map (you can see the checkmarks on the map to know if you've robbed those stores).
Stunt Jumps: There are 50 stunt jump locations on the map, which unlock a few rewards and are also really fun to complete!
Unlock Vehicle Colors: You may have noticed that certain colors are locked behind challenges, such as winning a certain amount of races. Why not finally unlock those colors you've always wanted but were always "too lazy" to unlock? You'll get to enjoy some flashy, new vehicle colors!
Arena War: Very fun, but unfortunately hard to get a group going for it. But if you can get a group, Arena War is super fun.
Freemode Battles: Join a large lobby and just do whatever you want while you're waiting for freemode battles, which start every 20 minutes and will alternate between Business Battles and Freemode Challenges. Then attempt to win those battles! Events will only trigger when there are at least 4 players outdoors, and they cannot be in the same CEO/MC.
Ride with Strangers: Pick your nicest car and then drive around and invite strangers to either ride with you or do impromptu street race 1v1 challenges.
Freemode Map Markers: Look at the map. There are icons and glowing markers everywhere on the map/streets. Visit whichever icon is nearest your current location and see what's there! Remember that you can go "On Call" (queue) for public races/missions while you're waiting for them to fill up, which lets you stay in Freemode while you're waiting.
Weekly Bonuses: Look at the Rockstar Newswire to see what the weekly bonus money is, and focus on doing that business/event for a while, to earn some money!
Max Your Stats: Get all your stats to maximum! Most people haven't finished Strength, which can be gradually maxed for fun by simply punching every civilian you see.
Invade the Military: Invade the military base at Fort Zancudo with some friends, and make it your mission to steal a Lazer jet plane.
Heists: Do some heist preps or full heists for fun! Many of them can be casually setup while solo, which is very relaxing! Most of the newer heists can even be completed while solo!
Change Your Heist Routes: You don't have to always do the same approach over and over again. Most heists have a lot of different approaches. For example, have you ever successfully completed the "Silent and Sneaky" approach at the Casino? Start exploring the different possibilities out there!
Yellow Mission Markers: The yellow letters/markers on the map show the location of significant storyline missions (such as ULP, Agency, Acid Lab, etc). Visit those locations and start completing the stories that GTA Online has to offer!
Do the Jobs: Go to "Online - Jobs" in the pause menu, and explore the available options!
Answer the Calls: There are so many fun missions for English Dave, the various DJs at the Music Locker, the Casino staff, etc. In most cases, you'll also get some kind of reward if you finish them all! You might even get them to stop calling you when you've finished everything, which is a nice reward in itself!
Check Your Texts/Emails: There's a lot of "mini missions" that arrive via emails/text messages. For example, Simeon asks you to steal certain cars every day. There's also an early game treasure hunt which starts through an email.
Use Quick Join: There's an app on your phone named "Quick Join". It queues you for a rapid, random job. It's a great way to explore new content, meet new people and to help them with the queues for their own missions.
Browse the Internet: There are a ton of funny parody websites in GTA Online's internet browser. Explore what's out there!
Watch TV/Movies: Have you seen all the TV shows and cinema movies yet? If not, relax and have some fun! :)
Customize Your Phone: You can change the theme, background, ringtone and other settings for your in-game phone. Why not change things a bit?
Don't Be Annoyed: The phone calls and missions may seem annoying, but try actually relaxing and doing them. Listen to the phone calls. Call the NPCs. Do their missions! They are pretty nice and chill activities which gives you something to do in the game and some challenges.
Use a Gamepad: If you're a PC player, you'll know that most of the game is too easy, since the aiming and enemy difficulty was balanced for console (gamepad) players. Try using a gamepad on PC! Not only will your driving and flying be massively improved, you'll also have a much more fun fun time when fighting enemies, since you can't just "360 No Scope" everything with your superior pointing device anymore. You'll even get immersive rumble that lets you feel the engine of your cars! How cool is that?! The game's options lets you finetune the sensitivity and aiming mode, and true professionals will use "Free Aim" which completely disables the auto-aiming.
Meet Different People: If you're mostly a heist person, look for someone who loves cars and start hanging out with them to absorb some of their passion for another aspect of the game. You might learn to love car tuning too!
Trade Prices: Many vehicles in the game have trade prices which give you a massive discount on the vehicle if you complete the challenge first. So set your eyes on a nice vehicle and do its challenges for fun! The discount you're earning will be like earning a huge sum of money that you put towards that specific vehicle. For example, a 2 million dollar discount on a vehicle you wanted is the same as if you had just earned 2 million dollars that you decided to spend on that vehicle! So don't sleep on the trade price discounts! They're a fun challenge with a very high monetary value!
Bunker Research: If you have a bunker, try doing the research! You can unlock a ton of cool and super useful vehicle and weapon modifications! The explosive and incendiary ammo are must-haves.
Mobile Operations Missions: The Mobile Operations Center is a forgotten business. It exists in your bunker, but you can request it via your Interaction Menu. Enter the truck's trailer, and then start missions from the computer in the command room!
Avenger: Take your Avenger out for a drive! It's an extremely powerful, heavily armored aircraft and can be customized with various fun additions.
Relaxing Yacht: Why not purchase or upgrade your yacht, and chill on it for a while with some friends? It even has lots of fun water vehicles parked in the water at the yacht, and helicopter pads for easy travel.
Yacht Missions: You can start the fun "A Superyacht Life" mission series from the captain on your yacht. You'll even get a fun Yacht Captain outfit if you complete them all as host.
Special Vehicle Work: The Vehicle Warehouse provides various epic missions whose "main" purpose is to unlock trade prices on various weaponized vehicles, but the missions themselves are fun too. Most players only do the specific missions for the vehicles they wanted to buy. Why not complete them all at least once, or play them again for fun?
Collectibles: The map is full of collectible items, such as USB music sticks, playing cards, action figures, signal jammers (to unlock the best hacker for the Casino heist), etc. Why not relax and do them all for fun? They all unlock something fun or useful!
Dream Vehicle: Relax, do some research about vehicles are available in the game, and set your eyes on a new "dream vehicle". Then work towards earning it and pimping it just the way you want it! Having a goal is fun!
Test Drives: Check out the weekly test drives at the "Luxury Autos" shop, at Simeon's "Premium Deluxe Motorsport", and at the "LS Car Meet". You might find your new dream vehicle!
Collect Vehicle Sets: You might have fun building specific collections, such as all Benny's vehicles in the game, etc. Setting goals for yourself about specific vehicle collections gives you something to strive for, and means that there's a lot of new things you'll need to buy and tune, which will keep you busy for a while!
Sell Vehicles: Let's be honest, there are a lot of stinkers in your collection. Why not sell them? Just beware of the game's daily sell limit. The limit will be hit somewhere around 30-40 cars sold in 24 real-life hours. I'd suggest only selling 1-5 cars per real life day, which ensures that you'll never face the anger of Rockstar, and you'll have more time to make deliberate choices about which vehicles to get rid of. You'll also be getting roughly 50% of your previously spent money back for each sold vehicle! I'd recommend forcing yourself to drive a vehicle for a while before selling it, and looking at its customizations to see if you'd like it if you changed its style a bit, so that you're absolutely sure that you don't want it.
Organize Your Vehicles: A lot of people have a complete mess in their garages. Why not begin sorting your cars, such as placing all your best cars at the premium display spots in your office garage? Perhaps organizing the floors by vehicle type? You can have lots of fun and you'll get a much better overview of your available vehicles.
Relocate Yourself: If you've been staring at the same, old, boring spot for years, it could be fun to move! Most players choose the ugly, industrial, "optimal" locations. Why not relax and move to the beautiful beach instead? The Lombank office, the Insert Coin arcade, the Vespucci Beach MC clubhouse, the Del Perro Nightclub, the Strawberry auto shop, and the Vespucci Canals agency are all very beautiful locations with amazing interior and exterior design and great views! They're also very well placed for all of their business purposes!
Browse in Person: When you're looking at real estate on the internet, things look very boring and impersonal. Why not take a drive around the city and look at the "real estate for sale" map markers in person? Perhaps you'll find a great new location for your home! However, if it's a multi-apartment house, I recommend checking YouTube for the various room views, to find the room with the best view before you buy it.
Upgrade Your Properties/Businesses: If you haven't yet upgraded all of the equipment for a business, it's a great idea to upgrade it to improve its efficiency and safety. Or how about changing the interior design for fun, to replace the "same old daily view" with a fresh new look?
Buy Every Arcade Machine: There are so many fun minigame machines for your arcade. Why not buy them all and pimp that place out? It's a nice place to relax, and even get some rewards for completing the games.
Get All Passive Businesses: Why not work towards getting and fully upgrading all of the passive incomes in the game? Such as the Nightclub (which automatically generates money in the safe based on popularity, and generates MC business products to sell from its basement), the Acid Lab (which can be restocked with a simple phone call to Mutt, and has easy sales missions), the Arcade (which generates $5000 per in-game day when you've filled all of its interior slots with arcade machines, which can all be the same machine if you want), the Agency (which generates up to $20000 per in-game day based on how many Security Contracts you've completed), Street Dealers (finding the daily street dealer is much faster than regular sales missions, and they pay more than regular missions), Bunker (you can resupply it via one click with the Master Control Terminal in your Arcade, and then simply sell the product when it's still less than 25% full, thus guaranteeing a single sales vehicle every time). An added bonus of having passive businesses is the fact that they let you do other things in the game, such as doing racing and other fun challenges, while your businesses passively produce for you!
Start Fresh: Did you know that your online account has two character slots? You can actually start fresh by simply withdrawing all of you banked money to your primary character, so that there's $0 in the bank. Then create a new character, which will begin at $0. Then relax and enjoy the ride of building a new empire. I suggest doing things differently this time. For example, if your primary character owns every business, why not just focus on a specific business this time, such as the CEO businesses (cargo crates), or just the vehicle warehouse, etc? Take this opportunity to simplify and avoid grinding, while still building a new playstyle to keep things fresh! Why not skip the Kosatka, so that you don't have the "easy Cayo Perico money" either? This slower, more deliberate, old-school way of making money will ensure that you have lots of fun, and you can set your own goals for what vehicles you want to save up money for on your new character! If you get tired of the grind, just switch back to your primary character again and enjoy the wealth. You can even delete your secondary character again to start fresh as many times as you want to.
Spend Your Money: Having $100 million unused in the bank is just a completely pointless number, and is basically worth the same as having $0 in the bank if you aren't even using it. Unless your goal is to collect a specific amount of money for fun, I'd instead suggest that you actually start spending absolutely all of your money! Because if you can succeed in being perpetually slightly low on cash, you'll have much more reason to care about doing your businesses when you do want to buy something, which in turn drives your motivation to play again! Having a huge stash of money is bad for your motivation to play! Having a huge sash of money is like having an endless "Rich Daddy's Credit Card" in your wallet. Get rid of that credit card, buy a bunch of fun stuff, and enjoy the game more as a result!
Play the Story: The vast majority of GTA Online players have barely touched the offline story. Why not relax with the story from time to time, gradually making your way through the epic offline story that started it all?
Take a Break: If you're truly not finding any fun anymore, then take a break, perhaps a few weeks or a month is all you need to enjoy the game again! They also release content updates roughly twice per year, so you'll always have something new to return to in the future! :)

submitted by GoastRiter to u/GoastRiter [link] [comments]

2023.06.03 22:15 GoastRiter [GUIDE] Living Large in Los Santos: Unleashing Chaos. Making Friends and Rediscovering the Thrill of GTA Online!

Break Your Habits: Most people have a routine that they repeat over and over again until they get burned out and bored with the game! Your number one goal for having fun must be to break your old habits!
Grind Less: If you've played for a long time, there's absolutely zero reason to grind big piles of useless money. People often develop bad habits where they finally grind so much that they forget to have fun. The "wonder" of the world completely vanishes when everything becomes about optimal times and optimal routes and optimal mission rotations. Relax! Start exploring everything that the game has to offer instead! Dare to do the "less optimal" routes, and have the courage to stop stressing about the "time efficiency" when you do the game's content. Sure, perhaps you can do a mission in 2 minutes with an Oppressor Mk2, but why not relax, put on a podcast, and do a relaxing 5 minute drive instead? Relax and have fun!
Switch Off the Business Mindset: Why grind at all? Why do businesses at all? What do you really need the money for, whatsoever? If it feels like grinding, do something else that's more fun for you! Stop thinking about the money and start thinking about the real-world fun you're having! Start actually enjoying all the things you've previously grinded for! Perhaps you might enjoy treating GTA as a racing simulator where you mostly do challenges/race maps instead? There's so much more to do that isn't purely related to earning money!
Accept All Invites: When you see invites to races, challenges, missions, etc, accept them! You will broaden your horizons about what you can do in the game, and you will often make the newbies very happy! Of course, if it turns out they're a hopelessly stupid newbie who keeps dying and never improves, then sure, I'd suggest leaving the heist to save your time and sanity. But most of the time, the other players will be smart enough to learn quickly. You can easily make great, new friends this way!
Protect the Newbies: If you see someone doing a sales mission in a public lobby, why not fly over there in a powerful airborne vehicle (or heck, a missile-equipped Toreador car), and then follow them as their bodyguard against any griefers that may appear!
Join People's CEO/MC: You can list yourself as "looking for work" via the interaction menu, which will alert other people that there's someone looking for work in the session. You can then join them and help people out with their missions, which is often a fun and relaxing activity for a while!
Get a Crew: Look around for a crew of like-minded people. They exist. There are crews that specialize in heisting with competent players. There are crews that focus on racing. There are crews for Arena War. There are crews that only do LS Car Meet challenges/races. There's even crews specialized in doing sales missions together, by helping each other with business sales, if that's your thing! Finding a group of people with a compatible mindset and interests really pays off in the end!
Switch Sessions: You can jump between multiple public sessions until you find one that matches your mood. Perhaps a nice, quiet sessions without griefers, perfect for doing sales missions? Or maybe one where there's a group of people that are actively doing something fun, which you can join in on? Don't just settle for your session. Explore what's out there!
Do the Stupid Things: Grab your friends or some randoms, and challenge each other to do the most stupid and random things you can think of. The game is a sandbox. So start acting like it! For example, why not challenge each other with things like "everyone starts at the beach without any vehicles, your goal is to get to the Senora Desert convenience store, and you're only allowed to use stolen vehicles, the first person to reach the desert wins", or how about "everyone jumps from the Maze Bank Tower and your goal is to ride your parachute all the way to the ferris wheel". Is that even possible? Who knows! Let's find out!
Become a Map Creator: If you've had fun making random challenges in freeroam, why not make them into more formal challenges, by creating actual maps? The map creator is very advanced. You can modify the world, add checkpoints anywhere you want, you could make a bicycle race, add pedestrians, enable weapon wheel usage, add parachute jumps, stunt jumps, survival modes, etc. Go wild!
River Racing: The game has two epic rivers that start at the "Alamo Sea" (desert lake) and head west out to the ocean. Why not do a race with some friends? Get the Blazer Aqua amphibious quad bike and start at the desert, then race through one of the rivers, which is full of fun jumps. Next, decide on a destination (such as the Del Perro Pier) and do the rest of the drive on roads to see who gets there first.
Stop Flying: Whenever a game lets you fly, you end up skipping huge amounts of content and world design and just flying directly above it all. That's nice if you want to get somewhere efficiently, but it really breaks the game's immersion. Try driving everywhere instead!
Learn to Fly: Many players are awful at flying (especially the helicopters). Why not practice your flying skills? Perhaps try landing your helicopter at very tight spots, on rooftops, and other fun locations!
Use Motorcycles: They're more thrilling than cars, because crashing actually has consequences. They're also very fast and agile, which feels awesome while driving through the city!
Oppressor MK1: Fly around the map, trying to create your own challenges such as flying over the water or climbing Mount Chiliad.
Climb the Mountain: Find various fun vehicles and attempt to climb Mount Chiliad in them. There's lots of fun to be had with motorcycles at the mountain!
BMX Tricks: There are so many skate parks and BMX bicycle stunt locations in the city. Why not look at some BMX stunt videos for inspiration?
Throw Away the GPS: Stop staring at the minimap while driving! This is super fun. Let's say that you need to get to Simeon's shop. Instead of opening up the world map and setting a map marker and following the GPS line like a lemming, try to train yourself to navigate the city! Drive the streets, look at the surroundings and actually navigate! It's so much fun and you'll feel way more relaxed. The city will also feel way more immersive. You can even modify the minimap via "Settings: Display: Radar = Blips", which hides the map so that you can't see the shape of the streets by glancing at the minimap anymore. You can even disable it completely, but unfortunately it also hides the healthbar if you do that.
Use First Person: You can change the game's camera mode to first person, which is a really unique and immersive way to play the game. Steal some cars and go cruising! It will feel like an entirely different game when you get used to it!
Take Selfies: Find beautiful locations and attempt to take great screenshots, with perfect framing and composition! You can use the game's built-in snapmatic camera, or you can use your regular screenshot key instead! Collecting photos of your adventures is a nice way to remember where you've been!
Businesses: There are so many businesses in the game, and it's easy to forget about them after a while. Look at your businesses and begin doing their sourcing and sales missons again! Most of us quit them because they're very grindy, but after a long time away from them, they'll feel fresh again. And they'll feel much more relaxing if you vary between your different businesses and you only do one or two missions at a time, to never get bored.
Nightclub: Do the promotion/popularity missions, which involve going around town and promoting the nightclub, or helping to remove unwanted or drunk guests from the club. All of that improves your popularity, which improves the passive income you're earning from the club!
Get the DJs: The nightclub has multiple DJs. Why not unlock them all? Their missions are very fun, and you'll earn new music for your club.
Bunker: Why not do some manual supply missions, just to relax and have fun? Sure, the optimal way to make money with the bunker is to buy the supplies and do "better" things with your time instead of sourcing supplies, but why does everything have to be about ultimate efficiency all the time? If you're a long-time player, you already have lots of money and you need new things to do!
Contact Missions: So many people don't even know that you can get missions by calling NPCs on the phone. It's named "contact missions" and they can be very fun. I recommend calling Dax and doing "Request Work" from him, because his missions are very varied and after you've done enough you get various important rewards, such as upgrades for your Acid Lab business.
CEO/VIP Work: When you're a CEO, you can start SecuroServ missions via the interaction menu. There's lots of fun ones! For example, why not get your favorite car, relax and do the Sightseer mission, seeing where the map markers will take you while you enjoy the relaxing drive? The mission gives you 15 minutes, which is plenty of time to take the scenic route.
Terrorbyte Missions: Another forgotten relic! The terrorbyte has lots of fun missions which are very good for variation. They used to be the best "active" way to earn money in GTA. Most players who grinded those missions have only done the "optimal rotation", but how about actually doing all of the available missions for fun?
Rockstar Jobs: There are so many high-quality maps, races and challenge modes in the game. Explore the official list of RockstaCurated jobs in the game's pause menu. There's a ton of them!
Community Jobs: There's a ton of cool community maps in the game. Remember to favorite the ones you liked so that you can easily start the same again!
Auto Shop: Do the customer car customization and delivery jobs, and do the heists! They can be done solo.
MC Club: Do the customer motorcycle customization and delivery jobs.
Vehicle Warehouse: Do the Import/Export car theft and sales missions. Be sure to use the trick that ensures you only get high-end cars (permanently fill the warehouse with every worthless sourced car in the game, then you will only get high-end cars after that).
Acid Lab: The best passive income business in the game. Spend some time doing Dax's contact missions to fully upgrade your lab's efficiency and it will become very profitable. Then mix up your gameplay between both sourcing Acid supplies or buying them. And do the sales missions.
Franklin's Agency: Do the Dr. Dre story missions, then do 201x Security Contract missions until you've unlocked the highest amount of passive daily income (it goes up by $100 every time you do a mission, capped at $20,000 after having done 201 contracts).
Payphone Hits: They're unlocked after doing at least 3 Security Contract missions. Then you can pick up assassination contracts from ringing payphones. They're very profitable.
Weekly Time Trials: Do the camotorcycle time trial and the RC car time trial every week, they're a good way to learn how to drive and they give a nice bit of money! Remember that you can hold a key to respawn at the start of the race before the time has ended, if you're sure that you won't make it in time.
Daily Objectives: In your interaction menu, look at the Objectives and complete them. They're a good way to be inspired to do things you might not do otherwise.
Daily Collectible Hunts: G's Cache (hunt for the hidden street cache), Kosatka submarine treasure hunt, Street dealer (find it and sell to it every day), etc.
Get a Fresh Look: Create a new character outfit (clothes, hairstyle, tattoos, mask).
Use Different Weapons: Challenge yourself to use different weapons than the same old, boring weapon you always use. For example, how about only using the Heavy Revolver? Make those shots count!
Modify Your Weapons: Change their styles and attachments.
Tune Your Precious Car: You might have a "perfectly tuned" car that you've been driving for years and that you're always using. Why not modify it a bit? Put a different livery on it, and some different colors at least? What felt "fresh" two years ago would just be contributing to a feeling of "staleness" today. Freshen things up!
Ride of the Day: Most long-time players have around a hundred vehicles, but most of them collect dust. Why not set fun "challenge" rules for yourself, such as randomly selecting a vehicle and using only that vehicle on that real-life day?
Outfit of the Day: Why not make it your goal to create a new character "outfit of the day" (or week) whenever you log in? It's a great way to get a fresh feeling every time you play!
Minigames: How about some Golf, Tennis, Darts or Arm Wrestling?
Gang Attacks: Find a gang and eliminate them!
Stash Houses: Find the stash houses and raid them for resources for your businesses.
Parachute: Go somewhere high up and do a parachute dive! Better yet, look for the Junk Energy Skydives challenges on the map, or do Dom's parachute challenge (which is a special skydive at a random location).
San Andreas Flight School: Do the flight school challenges! They're at the Los Santos Airport, at the airplane icon!
Gun Range Challenges: Complete the Bunker's and Ammo-Nation Gun Range shooting challenges!
Gun Range with Friends: Challenge a friend to the gun range mini-games, where you compete to see who is the most accurate!
MC Club Missions: Form a MC club with at least one friend, then ride in formation and start MC missions via the interaction menu.
MC Businesses: Yes, they're the most hated businesses in the game, but why not do them a little bit? You could do a little bit of supplying and a few small sales missions, to ensure that you have small sales. Or, team up with friends and take turns helping each other do larger sales.
Racing: Do Open Wheel, Stunt Races, Transform Races, and Regular Races. There are so many different kinds of races in the game! The transform races are the newest feature, and are very cool, since you might drive a supercar down the street to the airport, then transform into a plane and fly through the sky, and other epic things, all in the same race map!
LS Car Meet: Do the challenges, races and rank up your LS Car Meet rank. Try to win the Prize Ride!
Lobby Car Meets: You can try arranging car meets with other people in the lobby, to check out each other's cars! Just beware of griefers. You may want to do it in the LS Car Meet building to avoid the griefer explosions, or just switch to a lobby with cooler people.
Arcade: Play the arcade games and try to beat them! Some of them have hidden rewards for completing the game or completing certain challenges.
Achievements: Look at the pause menu's Stats - Awards section, and pick some award that you'll try to complete! There are so many fun challenges in there, such as attempting to parachute for more than 3 minutes, or robbing every store on the map (you can see the checkmarks on the map to know if you've robbed those stores).
Stunt Jumps: There are 50 stunt jump locations on the map, which unlock a few rewards and are also really fun to complete!
Unlock Vehicle Colors: You may have noticed that certain colors are locked behind challenges, such as winning a certain amount of races. Why not finally unlock those colors you've always wanted but were always "too lazy" to unlock? You'll get to enjoy some flashy, new vehicle colors!
Arena War: Very fun, but unfortunately hard to get a group going for it. But if you can get a group, Arena War is super fun.
Freemode Battles: Join a large lobby and just do whatever you want while you're waiting for freemode battles, which start every 20 minutes and will alternate between Business Battles and Freemode Challenges. Then attempt to win those battles! Events will only trigger when there are at least 4 players outdoors, and they cannot be in the same CEO/MC.
Ride with Strangers: Pick your nicest car and then drive around and invite strangers to either ride with you or do impromptu street race 1v1 challenges.
Freemode Map Markers: Look at the map. There are icons and glowing markers everywhere on the map/streets. Visit whichever icon is nearest your current location and see what's there! Remember that you can go "On Call" (queue) for public races/missions while you're waiting for them to fill up, which lets you stay in Freemode while you're waiting.
Weekly Bonuses: Look at the Rockstar Newswire to see what the weekly bonus money is, and focus on doing that business/event for a while, to earn some money!
Max Your Stats: Get all your stats to maximum! Most people haven't finished Strength, which can be gradually maxed for fun by simply punching every civilian you see.
Invade the Military: Invade the military base at Fort Zancudo with some friends, and make it your mission to steal a Lazer jet plane.
Heists: Do some heist preps or full heists for fun! Many of them can be casually setup while solo, which is very relaxing! Most of the newer heists can even be completed while solo!
Change Your Heist Routes: You don't have to always do the same approach over and over again. Most heists have a lot of different approaches. For example, have you ever successfully completed the "Silent and Sneaky" approach at the Casino? Start exploring the different possibilities out there!
Yellow Mission Markers: The yellow letters/markers on the map show the location of significant storyline missions (such as ULP, Agency, Acid Lab, etc). Visit those locations and start completing the stories that GTA Online has to offer!
Do the Jobs: Go to "Online - Jobs" in the pause menu, and explore the available options!
Answer the Calls: There are so many fun missions for English Dave, the various DJs at the Music Locker, the Casino staff, etc. In most cases, you'll also get some kind of reward if you finish them all! You might even get them to stop calling you when you've finished everything, which is a nice reward in itself!
Check Your Texts/Emails: There's a lot of "mini missions" that arrive via emails/text messages. For example, Simeon asks you to steal certain cars every day. There's also an early game treasure hunt which starts through an email.
Use Quick Join: There's an app on your phone named "Quick Join". It queues you for a rapid, random job. It's a great way to explore new content, meet new people and to help them with the queues for their own missions.
Browse the Internet: There are a ton of funny parody websites in GTA Online's internet browser. Explore what's out there!
Watch TV/Movies: Have you seen all the TV shows and cinema movies yet? If not, relax and have some fun! :)
Customize Your Phone: You can change the theme, background, ringtone and other settings for your in-game phone. Why not change things a bit?
Don't Be Annoyed: The phone calls and missions may seem annoying, but try actually relaxing and doing them. Listen to the phone calls. Call the NPCs. Do their missions! They are pretty nice and chill activities which gives you something to do in the game and some challenges.
Use a Gamepad: If you're a PC player, you'll know that most of the game is too easy, since the aiming and enemy difficulty was balanced for console (gamepad) players. Try using a gamepad on PC! Not only will your driving and flying be massively improved, you'll also have a much more fun fun time when fighting enemies, since you can't just "360 No Scope" everything with your superior pointing device anymore. You'll even get immersive rumble that lets you feel the engine of your cars! How cool is that?! The game's options lets you finetune the sensitivity and aiming mode, and true professionals will use "Free Aim" which completely disables the auto-aiming.
Meet Different People: If you're mostly a heist person, look for someone who loves cars and start hanging out with them to absorb some of their passion for another aspect of the game. You might learn to love car tuning too!
Trade Prices: Many vehicles in the game have trade prices which give you a massive discount on the vehicle if you complete the challenge first. So set your eyes on a nice vehicle and do its challenges for fun! The discount you're earning will be like earning a huge sum of money that you put towards that specific vehicle. For example, a 2 million dollar discount on a vehicle you wanted is the same as if you had just earned 2 million dollars that you decided to spend on that vehicle! So don't sleep on the trade price discounts! They're a fun challenge with a very high monetary value!
Bunker Research: If you have a bunker, try doing the research! You can unlock a ton of cool and super useful vehicle and weapon modifications! The explosive and incendiary ammo are must-haves.
Mobile Operations Missions: The Mobile Operations Center is a forgotten business. It exists in your bunker, but you can request it via your Interaction Menu. Enter the truck's trailer, and then start missions from the computer in the command room!
Avenger: Take your Avenger out for a drive! It's an extremely powerful, heavily armored aircraft and can be customized with various fun additions.
Relaxing Yacht: Why not purchase or upgrade your yacht, and chill on it for a while with some friends? It even has lots of fun water vehicles parked in the water at the yacht, and helicopter pads for easy travel.
Yacht Missions: You can start the fun "A Superyacht Life" mission series from the captain on your yacht. You'll even get a fun Yacht Captain outfit if you complete them all as host.
Special Vehicle Work: The Vehicle Warehouse provides various epic missions whose "main" purpose is to unlock trade prices on various weaponized vehicles, but the missions themselves are fun too. Most players only do the specific missions for the vehicles they wanted to buy. Why not complete them all at least once, or play them again for fun?
Collectibles: The map is full of collectible items, such as USB music sticks, playing cards, action figures, signal jammers (to unlock the best hacker for the Casino heist), etc. Why not relax and do them all for fun? They all unlock something fun or useful!
Dream Vehicle: Relax, do some research about vehicles are available in the game, and set your eyes on a new "dream vehicle". Then work towards earning it and pimping it just the way you want it! Having a goal is fun!
Test Drives: Check out the weekly test drives at the "Luxury Autos" shop, at Simeon's "Premium Deluxe Motorsport", and at the "LS Car Meet". You might find your new dream vehicle!
Collect Vehicle Sets: You might have fun building specific collections, such as all Benny's vehicles in the game, etc. Setting goals for yourself about specific vehicle collections gives you something to strive for, and means that there's a lot of new things you'll need to buy and tune, which will keep you busy for a while!
Sell Vehicles: Let's be honest, there are a lot of stinkers in your collection. Why not sell them? Just beware of the game's daily sell limit. The limit will be hit somewhere around 30-40 cars sold in 24 real-life hours. I'd suggest only selling 1-5 cars per real life day, which ensures that you'll never face the anger of Rockstar, and you'll have more time to make deliberate choices about which vehicles to get rid of. You'll also be getting roughly 50% of your previously spent money back for each sold vehicle! I'd recommend forcing yourself to drive a vehicle for a while before selling it, and looking at its customizations to see if you'd like it if you changed its style a bit, so that you're absolutely sure that you don't want it.
Organize Your Vehicles: A lot of people have a complete mess in their garages. Why not begin sorting your cars, such as placing all your best cars at the premium display spots in your office garage? Perhaps organizing the floors by vehicle type? You can have lots of fun and you'll get a much better overview of your available vehicles.
Relocate Yourself: If you've been staring at the same, old, boring spot for years, it could be fun to move! Most players choose the ugly, industrial, "optimal" locations. Why not relax and move to the beautiful beach instead? The Lombank office, the Insert Coin arcade, the Vespucci Beach MC clubhouse, the Del Perro Nightclub, the Strawberry auto shop, and the Vespucci Canals agency are all very beautiful locations with amazing interior and exterior design and great views! They're also very well placed for all of their business purposes!
Browse in Person: When you're looking at real estate on the internet, things look very boring and impersonal. Why not take a drive around the city and look at the "real estate for sale" map markers in person? Perhaps you'll find a great new location for your home! However, if it's a multi-apartment house, I recommend checking YouTube for the various room views, to find the room with the best view before you buy it.
Upgrade Your Properties/Businesses: If you haven't yet upgraded all of the equipment for a business, it's a great idea to upgrade it to improve its efficiency and safety. Or how about changing the interior design for fun, to replace the "same old daily view" with a fresh new look?
Buy Every Arcade Machine: There are so many fun minigame machines for your arcade. Why not buy them all and pimp that place out? It's a nice place to relax, and even get some rewards for completing the games.
Get All Passive Businesses: Why not work towards getting and fully upgrading all of the passive incomes in the game? Such as the Nightclub (which automatically generates money in the safe based on popularity, and generates MC business products to sell from its basement), the Acid Lab (which can be restocked with a simple phone call to Mutt, and has easy sales missions), the Arcade (which generates $5000 per in-game day when you've filled all of its interior slots with arcade machines, which can all be the same machine if you want), the Agency (which generates up to $20000 per in-game day based on how many Security Contracts you've completed), Street Dealers (finding the daily street dealer is much faster than regular sales missions, and they pay more than regular missions), Bunker (you can resupply it via one click with the Master Control Terminal in your Arcade, and then simply sell the product when it's still less than 25% full, thus guaranteeing a single sales vehicle every time). An added bonus of having passive businesses is the fact that they let you do other things in the game, such as doing racing and other fun challenges, while your businesses passively produce for you!
Start Fresh: Did you know that your online account has two character slots? You can actually start fresh by simply withdrawing all of you banked money to your primary character, so that there's $0 in the bank. Then create a new character, which will begin at $0. Then relax and enjoy the ride of building a new empire. I suggest doing things differently this time. For example, if your primary character owns every business, why not just focus on a specific business this time, such as the CEO businesses (cargo crates), or just the vehicle warehouse, etc? Take this opportunity to simplify and avoid grinding, while still building a new playstyle to keep things fresh! Why not skip the Kosatka, so that you don't have the "easy Cayo Perico money" either? This slower, more deliberate, old-school way of making money will ensure that you have lots of fun, and you can set your own goals for what vehicles you want to save up money for on your new character! If you get tired of the grind, just switch back to your primary character again and enjoy the wealth. You can even delete your secondary character again to start fresh as many times as you want to.
Spend Your Money: Having $100 million unused in the bank is just a completely pointless number, and is basically worth the same as having $0 in the bank if you aren't even using it. Unless your goal is to collect a specific amount of money for fun, I'd instead suggest that you actually start spending absolutely all of your money! Because if you can succeed in being perpetually slightly low on cash, you'll have much more reason to care about doing your businesses when you do want to buy something, which in turn drives your motivation to play again! Having a huge stash of money is bad for your motivation to play! Having a huge sash of money is like having an endless "Rich Daddy's Credit Card" in your wallet. Get rid of that credit card, buy a bunch of fun stuff, and enjoy the game more as a result!
Play the Story: The vast majority of GTA Online players have barely touched the offline story. Why not relax with the story from time to time, gradually making your way through the epic offline story that started it all?
Take a Break: If you're truly not finding any fun anymore, then take a break, perhaps a few weeks or a month is all you need to enjoy the game again! They also release content updates roughly twice per year, so you'll always have something new to return to in the future! :)

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2023.06.03 22:02 MedusaNegritafea 40 Basic Rights Women Did Not Have Until The 1970s

What men wanna go back to and blame feminists for erupting. And this is just for WHITE WOMEN, imagine how bad it was for BLACK WOMEN.
40 Basic Rights Women Did Not Have Until The 1970s
40 NO LEGAL ABORTIONS FOR ANY REASON
39 WOMEN COULDN'T GET INTO THE MILITARY AND GIRLS COULDN'T ATTEND MILITARY ACADEMY
38 COULDN'T PROTECT THEMSELVES AGAINST WORKPLACE SEXUAL HARASSMENT
37 NO PAID MATERNITY LEAVE
36 THEY COULDN'T SERVE AS ELECTED OR APPOINTED JUDGE
35 COULDN'T BE ASTRONAUTS
34 COULD NOT BE ADMITTED INTO AN IVY LEAGUE UNIVERSITY
33 COULDN'T GET THE MORNING AFTER PILL
32 WEREN'T ALLOWED TO GET BIRTH CONTROL PILLS AFTER THEY WERE GOVERNMENT APPROVED
31 INTERRACIAL MARRIAGE WAS ILLEGAL
30 WOMEN COULDN'T SERVE ON A JURY
29 WOMEN COULDN'T SERVE ON THE SUPREME COURT
28 UNMARRIED WOMEN COULDN'T LEGALLY LIVE WITH MEN
27 WOMEN COULDN'T PURCHASE ATHLETIC SHOES
26 COULDN'T OBTAIN A DEGREE IN WOMEN'S STUDIES
25 WOMEN COULDN'T BE IN THE OLYMPIC GAMES
24, 23 WOMEN COULDN'T OWN A BANK OR BANK ACCOUNT
22 WOMEN COULDN'T DISCUSS SEX OPENLY
21 WOMEN COULDN'T ADOPT A BABY AS SINGLE WOMEN
20 WOMEN COULDN'T BE CEO OF A FORTUNE 500 COMPANY
19 COULDN'T PRACTICE LAW - women weren't accepted into university law programs. 90% of law firms refused to interview women who applied for placement in their firms.
18 WOMEN DIDN'T HAVE A VOICE - women's voices didn’t have any impact on policy or what people thought. While countless women fought for women’s suffrage and other rights, most males, especially in professional careers, wouldn’t listen to what women had to say.
17 WOMEN WEREN'T ABLE TO GET ANY JOB - before women started demanding gender equality for jobs, women could only apply for specific positions such as secretary or teacher.
16 WOMEN COULDN'T SEEK A DIVORCE ON GROUNDS OF DOMESTIC VIOLENCE - Before 1970s, getting divorced was difficult. Women had to prove that their husband had wronged them in order to obtain a divorce. Some reasons, such as adultery, became acceptable. Other reasons were not seen as acceptable, such as spousal abuse.
15 WOMEN COULDN'T BREASTFEED IN PUBLIC - Breastfeeding in public is a controversial topic today, however, before the 1970s, this topic was not even a controversy because it simply wasn’t allowed. Mothers were not allowed to breastfeed their children in public.
14 NO EQUAL EDUCATION - not only weren’t they allowed to obtain a law degree or go to ivy league colleges, they faced discrimination in the educational setting in many other ways. Many men thought girls just couldn’t handle higher education. Some felt girls weren’t smart enough to obtain a certain level of education. Many people felt women belonged in the kitchen more than school.
13 WOMEN COULDN'T HAVE THEIR OWN MIND - their ideas and opinions weren't considered valuable. Tasks acquired by women were what men felt they were capable of such as childcare, cleaning, cooking. Wives needed husbands’ permission to do many things, including getting a job.
12 THEY COULDN'T CARE ABOUT EDUCATION MORE THAN MARRIAGE - starting in the late 1960s women began to focus more on their higher education than getting married and starting a family right out of high school. This idea became a drastic change from a few years before when women often got married young because there wasn’t much for them in higher education.
11 NO WOMEN IN DC - before the 1970s, women did not have political positions in Washington DC.
10 THEY RALLIED AGAINST THE MISS AMERICA PAGEANT - in 1968, many US women protested the Miss America pageant complaining they wanted to be treated as people and not objects. They stated that the Miss America pageant promoted sexism.
9 WOMEN FOUGHT FOR THE RIGHT TO PROTEST - before the 1960s women rarely held marches and protests. If they did they saw hostility from males and other women. It started to change when men joined in the women’s protests for their rights and equality matters.
8 COULDN'T RECEIVE DIRECT CONSULTATION ABOUT PHYSICAL AND MENTAL HEALTH - women didn’t receive direct consultation about their health from doctors even if they were sick. A wife had to have her husband speak with the doctor on her behalf.
7 SHE COULDN'T REFUSE SEX FROM HER HUSBAND - in the 1970s state courts began to realize that there was something called marital rape. However very few states would do anything about it until the Violence Against Women Act of 1994.
6 WOMEN COULDN'T FILE FOR DIVORCES, WHEN THEY COULD IT WAS A LONG AND TEDIOUS PROCESS - Many people question the reason that the divorce rate is higher today. One of the biggest reasons is because women have the right to get divorced without needing proof of abuse or infidelity. Lawmakers came up with the No-Fault Divorce Act in 1969. This act allowed women to obtain a divorce easier as they no longer had to prove their partner’s fault.
5 *WOMEN COULDN'T CELEBRATE 'INTERNATIONAL WOMEN'S DAY' * - IWD started in the early 1900s. No one acknowledged it. That changed in 1970s when President Carter said States would celebrate IWD Day on March 8th.
4 PREGNANCY COULD CAUSE YOU TO BE FIRED FROM A JOB - Pregnancy Discrimination Act passed 1978.
3 WOMEN WOULDN'T BE ACKNOWLEDGE FOR RUNNING BOSTON MARATHON - first woman to run in the Boston Marathon was Kathrine Switzer in 1967. At the time, the Boston Marathon didn’t acknowledge women and she was attacked, spit on, and taunted.
2 WOMEN CONTINUED TO FACE WORKPLACE DISCRIMINATION - organizations started focusing on enforcing Work Equality For Women. The 1964 Civil Rights Act stated employment places could not discriminate based on gender or race, women continued to face work discrimination and inequality.
1 NO CREDIT CARDS - Legally banks could deny women credit cards until 1974 with the passing of the Equal Credit Opportunity Act. Women's application's got 'denied' or told to bring their husband’s signature on form. If the woman wasn’t married, the bank would request she bring a male, such as her father or brother, to co-sign the application.

submitted by MedusaNegritafea to u/MedusaNegritafea [link] [comments]

2023.06.03 21:55 Accomplished_No33 10 Welding/Fabrication projects that can make you money??

Metal Garden Gate: Create a custom garden gate using metal fabrication techniques. Design and weld together a sturdy and decorative gate to enhance the entrance of your garden.
BBQ Grill: Build your own BBQ grill using metal fabrication. Construct a durable and functional grill with adjustable grates, shelves, and a firebox for an enjoyable outdoor cooking experience.
Metal Sculpture: Let your creativity shine by designing and welding a metal sculpture. Use various welding techniques to bring your artistic vision to life, whether it's an abstract piece or a representation of a specific object or animal.
Custom Bike Rack: Fabricate a custom bike rack to safely store and organize bicycles. Consider the space available and design a rack that accommodates multiple bikes securely.
Metal Furniture: Create unique and sturdy furniture pieces using metal fabrication. Design and build items such as chairs, tables, or even a bed frame to add an industrial touch to your home or office.
Trailer Modifications: If you have a trailer, consider making modifications to enhance its functionality. Add racks, storage compartments, or specialized holders for equipment, bikes, or tools to make your trailer more versatile.
Metal Wall Art: Fabricate decorative metal wall art to add a focal point to your interior or exterior spaces. Cut, shape, and weld metal pieces together to create intricate patterns, silhouettes, or scenes that reflect your personal style.
Custom Fire Pit: Build a custom fire pit for your outdoor gatherings. Weld together a durable metal frame, add a mesh or solid metal enclosure, and incorporate safety features like a spark guard and proper ventilation.
Metal Wine Rack: Construct an elegant wine rack using metal fabrication techniques. Design a wine rack that can hold multiple bottles securely and add a touch of sophistication to your kitchen or dining area.
Car Restoration: If you enjoy working on automobiles, take on a welding and fabrication project to restore an old car. Repair body panels, fabricate custom parts, and weld them in place to bring a classic car back to its former glory.

https://preview.redd.it/0s960qwmyu3b1.jpg?width=197&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=92351af4f066d709c9dbd4b5b2a44a940b3d3116

submitted by Accomplished_No33 to Welding_Fabrication [link] [comments]

2023.06.03 21:43 Environmental-Wish53 I Cast Fist

As promised, the second one-shot of the day. This is the idea I had bouncing around in my head this past week. Now, onto the other actual story in a different universe. Tally Ho, Lads!!!!!!
~~~~~~~~~~
Magicians. Wizards. Sorcerers. Witches. Warlocks.
Supreme figures of power and authority. Renowned, respected, and feared across the galaxy. One spell cast from a middling rank alone is enough to collapse buildings. Novice rank figures are enough to cripple medium-sized towns, with Masters and above veritable threats to cities, nations, planets, and solar systems, depending on which rumor you wish to believe.
But above them all is a lone figure so strong, so fearless and brutal, that the mere whisper of their name is enough to cause the most hardened of magic duelists to tremble and quake.
No one knows where this figure came from. His origin is as mysterious and untraceable as the creators of the universe. Multiple divination attempts have been tried to uncover the secrecy surrounding this ominous individual. All have failed. All ended in a magical backlash so severe that it effectively crippled the diviners.
But every so often, when the rumors subside and the promising threat of this thing’s existence slips from memory and disappears into the vast streams of time, a wizard of legendary power steps up to the plate to assert their will over others.
More often than not, those who attempt to do so are stopped well before they can achieve their goals by other likeminded magicians, or independent groups that still fear the storng one's return.
The last recorded incident where the mysterious titan physically engaged with a galactic-level threat happened some two-thousand years ago. The far-reaching effects of that incident have yet to be forgotten by the select few "immortals" blessed, or cursed, with bearing witness to a sliver of such an event.
Such is the gravitas of this Savior.
But in the Year of Our Birth 8962.20 I, alone, bore witness to a fight between the Savior and his foe.
I could scarcely believe what was to come. Gods above, I couldn’t even comprehend the level of power soon to be casually thrown back and forth between the Tyrant and the Savior.
If the galaxy was a building, the terrible impacts and energy emanating from their blows would erase it from existence. Luckily, or perhaps through fate, the Savior set down a mysterious device that formed a protective bubble around me and bade me to stay within, lest I be erased as well.
Gulping loudly at the danger so calmly explained, I sat down and whispered a prayer to my Gods to watch over me and keep me safe from this monumental battle.
If they could, that is.
The Savior squared off with the Tyrant, his imposing suit of armor darker than the void. His helm smooth and perfect, with a visor the color of a raging sun. On his right thigh sat an odd device in the shape of an upside down “L”, if you pointed the long leg down and the short leg behind you.
It sat snugly in a carrier appearing to be made of the same material as his armor, while on his other thigh rested a small pouch with two slim rectangles stuck in a vertical position. Strapped around his waist was a knife sheathed in what looked like the remnants of a dying star, its handle made of a dark organic material the color of rust.
The more I observed the two facing each other, the more confused I became. Where the Savior appeared to be armored like a knight with unusual weaponry, the Tyrant was wearing robes typical of magical types, but there was something odd about the way they moved in thebreeze. Like they were alive.
The Savior’s voice broke my confusion, commanding silence from all so as to be heard.
“This is not the first time I have taken down someone like you.” He said. His voice firm like the mountain.
“It may not be” answered the Tyrant in a voice better served in a musical performance, “but where those insignificant worms were terrified of your mere existence, I have learned that you aren’t any special than that inferior thing hiding behind your shield.”
His revelation appeared to have no effect on the Savior, but that was because he was too far away to see his hand twitch ever so slightly.
Me, on the other hand, I don’t take insults very well. Call it a…quirk of a warrior race. In response to his provocation, I exposed my private bits and relieved myself on the ground.
In his direction…while making eye contact.
Clearly my provocation was more effective as a catastrophic ball of molten plasma struck the shield and exploded. I was unharmed, thankfully, but the ground around me turned into a large pond of boiling, glowing mud.
Yet over the fading sounds of the explosion, I could hear loud barking laughter. I turned to see the Savior doubled over letting out the most undignified sounds imaginable. “Hee”s and “Haw”s and “Haha”s filled the air, causing the Tyrant to grow ever more infuriated, yet still failing to act on the opportunity presenting itself to attack.
“Your disrespect astounds me, cur!” The Tyrant shouted. “You are no better than that savage animal that can’t even relieve themselves properly!!!”
The laughing slowly ebbed away until the tense silence returned.
“Well, I reckon I’ll just have to adjust your worldview. Maybe by smacking you upside the head with this here multi-tool.”
From out of seemingly nowhere, a short-handled shovel with a serrated edge appeared in his hand. Why the Savior called it a multi-tool baffled me as the shape clearly resembled the common shovel, just shorter.
“Ha! What do you think that peasant’s tool is going to do to me? I have conquered planets. Harnessed nebulas. Compressed supernovas into the size of a pebble.” As if on cue, a massive beam of energy was released from his hand.
I watched in slow motion as the beam crossed the distance between them and struck the Savior square in the chest.
Yet not a sound was heard. Nor was any damage seen. The man simply stood there and…absorbed it? I couldn’t believe my eyes! The power of the stars taken as if it was nothing more than a squirt of water.
“Ohhhh. That tickles. Been a long while since someone last shot me with a supernova.” He chuckled. “Not bad for an opening shot. Let’s see how you handle it.”
As fast as lightning, he drew the “L”-shaped object from its carrier and, using both hands, pointed it at the Tyrant. This was when I noticed there was a small lever on the bottom.
“I wonder what that’s fo-“
My thought ended as abruptly as it started when the same energy beam that came from the Tyrant shot out from the end of the device.
Almost as quick as the Savior, the Tyrant formed a shield around his body and attempted to sidestep the beam of power. It seems that unlike the Savior, ol’ Mr. Tyrant is only capable of dishing it out.
“How do you like them apples?” The Savior barked out as the Tyrant barely escaped his death.
“You…you…you absolute cowardly beast! How dare you steal my technique!!!” He shrieked. “Fight me properly, insolent whelp!”
“Oh buddy, I don’t think you want that. I’ve been keeping people like you in line for as far back as your records go.” The Savior brought his fist to his chin as if a solution presented itself.
“How about this, you give up and let me teach you how to be humble, making sure you put your power to good use instead of whatever it is you’re trying, and failing, to do.”
The Tyrant scoffed. “Are you seriously offering me the choice to grovel at your feet and learn humility?!?”
“It’s not a choice. You either give up, or you die.” Any brevity or light-heartedness left his voice. I felt the cold sensation of impending doom creep its way into my bones.
I have been on the receiving end of many threats and fights that easily could’ve ended my life, but this promised something else entirely.
Clearly the Tyrant understood the threat as well for it took him half a minute to formulate a response. A response in the form of a blinding flash of light and loud crashing of metal on metal.
Just as fast as the beam of energy before, the Tyrant crossed the distance and engaged in a brutal assault filled with deadly flurries of a cruel looking bladed weapon wreathed in the shadows of decay.
I watched as the Savior drew his own knife, revealing a glorious light that rivaled the sun. Its edge whipped like a barely restrained flame, reaching out at every opportunity to slake its thirst with the blood of the Tyrant.
Like an instructor teaching an unruly student a lesson, the Savior instantly turned the flow of the battle and expertly put the Tyrant on the defensive. Short, concise movements filled with immense unbridled power threatened to eviscerate the Tyrant’s body.
Beads of sweat poured from what parts of his face were exposed, revealing a smooth-skinned creature with two eyes, a pair of thin lips, and slimy skin.
“You’re one ugly motherfucker, you know that right?” The Savior’s offhand remark instilled a rage in the Tyrant yet to be seen. He let loose a wave of energy that forcibly threw them both hundreds of yards apart.
As they both appeared to size each other up once more, the light grew dim. I looked up and saw a massive meteor appear through a magical portal in the sky.
“Try to stop this, human.” With a single flick of his wrist the Tyrant sent the massive rock hurtling towards the Savior. A human, whatever that means.
I watched the object fly closer to its target and feared that despite the insane rumors surrounding the Savior, this would be the end of him.
I closed my eyes and prayed that he survives, for if he dies, I’ll be on the chopping block next.
I waited for the inevitable shock and awe of the meteor striking the ground, but it never came. I opened my eyes and saw a cloud of dust instead. In the middle of it all stood the Savior, proud and unfazed.
“The gloves are off now, kid.” He shouted ominously. “You wanted a ‘proper’ fight, well...you’re gonna get one.”
Now it was his turn to take the fight to the Tyrant. Almost as fast as his opponent, he shot forward and struck out with his knife, forcing the Tyrant to draw his blade once more and defend himself.
Except the Savior pulled out his “multi-tool” as well, and with a mighty CLANG he struck the side of his face and sent him careening into the nearby trees.
“Told you I’d be giving you an adjustment. Feel like giving up yet?”
I watched in awe as the Savior manhandled the Tyrant like he were a toy. There was no contest as to who would come out on top of this fight. Even with the destructive power wielded by the Tyrant.
“You…ack…you piece of shit. I’ll make you pay for…urgh…that.” The Tyrant drug himself out of the wreckage of trees and attempted to dust himself off. The Savior was having none of it though. He dashed forward once more and started his assault anew.
Using both the multi-tool and knife, he delivered a series of cuts and contusions and blunt force trauma that made me cringe.
He let go of his tool and used the free hand to grab the Tyrant, dragging his battered body back into the open.
With an unceremonious toss, the Tyrant found himself prone and facing towards the sky. The Savior strode over as confident as could be and picked up the creature once more.
“I told you to give up and let me show you how to be humble. I even said I’d make sure you’d put your power to good use. But nooOOoooOOO, you just had to stick to your guns.” He shook his head.
“Whatever. I’d be fine with beating you to a pulp and calling it a day, but you let slip that you know what I am. Meaning you likely know how to find others like me, including my home. You understand why I can’t let that happen, right?”
The Tyrant nodded weakly, fear evident in his eyes.
“Good. That makes this next part easier.” The Savior stood the Tyrant up and dusted him off.
“This will be my parting gift to you. As in, parts of you here, there, and waaaaayyyyy over yonder.” He pointed in the distance.
The Tyrant looked confused for the briefest of moments as he turned to follow the direction the Savior pointed, before the human reared back and swung his fist with all his might.
“I. CAST. FIST!!!”

submitted by Environmental-Wish53 to HFY [link] [comments]

2023.06.03 21:39 Emet22 Gender equality laws need to be removed to restore gender relations

In particular, workplace equality laws saying that you cannot discriminate by gender in your hiring practices. You could say this applies to both men and women, but everyone knows it mas made for women.
The problem is that women today think that they are "financially independent" and fully able to do the jobs that men do and be in the workplace. This is extremely inaccurate, and completely overlooks the fact that the entire workforce is under threat of intimidation and coercion from our culture and government to promote women in the workforce (especially prestigious positions of power and income), and literal billions of dollars of taxpayers money towards womens organizations that promote this as well.
Most women, especially young women, believe that they are making it all on their own and that women were freed from their shackles of the previous centuries, and allowed to work and be financially independent. What they do not know, is that they have the full force of the government at their backs propelling them into it. Before the government jumped in, the free decisions of business and individuals in the marketplace found that the most efficient outcome was for men and women to occupy such and such positions, and get paid at different rates. Business's, to their detriment sometimes, value profit above all else. Productivity. There is no room for petty sexism in business. There never was. Women getting paid $0.66 to the dollar compared to men, was the efficiency of the market working out; a product of free people making decisions they believed worked best for their business. If a business believed that it worked better for their bottom line to hire all men (or all women for a certain position) it is their prerogative to do so.
But now, that is not the case. Companies are under a microscrope to ensure they are hiring women in almost all aspects of the workforce that aren't highly based in physical labour. If they are found to be breaking that hiring practice, they are fined, or shut down. This has been going on for 50 years, so long that at this point people have forgotten that they are effectively forcing companies to hire women against the companies own best interest. If a company has even a hint of preference towards men, modern culture gives them so much negative publicity it would be suicide to fight against them. So not only do companies make an effort to hire women, they also design their jobs more accommodating to women, more feminine. This makes the job market as a whole less productive. This is only speculation on my point, but the decade employee wages started lagging behind productivity, was the decade gender equality laws were passed. Adding more women to the workforce, diluted the avg workers wage without adding productivity. correct me if I'm wrong.
Not only is this bad for everyone, but it confuses young men and women. In relationships, women do not appreciate men because they think they can be everything men can be. The relationship between men and women since the dawn of humanity had men as the provider, but now women no longer appreciate them for that because they are doing it themselves. The government is trying to force-ably undo the male provider relationship. What few realize, is that this is a system that is based on force, coercion, and intimidation. Not only in the workplace, but the government provides women with financial safety and security with endless social programs. Women do not realize that they are not "free" from men because of their own abilities. It is entirely, 110%, coming from the government. Government has force-ably replaced men, and few realize it, and most women certainly do not.
Anytime I bring up this topic, many women immediately say I am trying to ban women from the workplace. But that's not true, I'm trying to remove unfair laws, not create more. I'm not saying to create laws that prevent women from working, I am saying to stop forcing companies to do things they do not want to do, and let people decide what is best for themselves. But the fact that most women believe that these laws, forcing people to do things, is the only way they can remain employed, is all the proof I need that these women know they are less productive than men and the only way that we can make it worth it for companies to hire them, is under threat and force.

Comment if you agree. If there is any law we men (and women) need to be working towards overturning, it's this one. For the sake of mens rights, and all of society, these "equality laws" alone affect society in ways that most do not comprehend, because it's so far reaching.

submitted by Emet22 to MensRights [link] [comments]