Florida lottery gainesville district office

Article: Here
Republican state Rep. Jim Lucas was arrested and held in the Jackson County Jail Wednesday morning after police said he drove while intoxicated and left the scene of a crash.
Lucas crashed his vehicle on Interstate 65, just north of Seymour, around midnight, an Indiana State Police spokesperson told the Indiana Capital Chronicle. Police said he left the scene in the crashed vehicle.
Seymour police officers found Lucas’ vehicle “a short time later at a different location,” according to ISP. Lucas was then located nearby and arrested by a trooper from the state police Versailles Post.
The 58-year-old was booked into the Jackson County Jail at 3:46 a.m. on preliminary charges of operating a vehicle while intoxicated and leaving the scene of a crash with property damage.
According to jail records, Lucas was released at 7:53 a.m. after posting $705 bond.
State police declined to provide a detailed police report, per ISP policy. Toxicology results were still pending Wednesday morning.
The Chronicle has reached out to Lucas’ office for comment. The Seymour representative is known for his Second Amendment and cannabis support, as well as repeated controversial social media posts.
GOP Gov. Eric Holcomb emphasized Wednesday that it’s up to the General Assembly to decide whether Lucas should continue to serve as a legislator or face other repercussions, separate from any criminal penalties.
“I won’t pre-judge the outcome before he’s offered his day in court,” Holcomb said. “I hope he gets the help that he needs.”
Lucas represents District 69 in Indiana which covers portions of Jackson, Bartholomew, Scott and Washington counties. Jackson County is roughly 70 miles south of downtown Indianapolis.
Lucas was first elected in 2012 and most recently championed House Bill 1177 during the 20323 legislative session. The measure creates a state-funded gun training program for school staff.

Hello, I took my son to take his road test in Florida a few weeks ago and we were told he can not take the test until March 1st of 2024. His permit was issued on 09/20/2021. My son was in a bad accident in which he broke his back and tore his PCL in his left knee on 02/07/2023. He was not found at fault but was issued a ticket for a learners license violation for not having a licensed adult in the front seat. Here is the thing though, he was not driving a vehichle. He was on a bike that is not registered or insured. Yes I know he should not have been on the road with it but he was. Its how all the kids around here get to each others house and ride in the woods. He was not driving recklessly nor was he speeding. I was told by the officer who wrote the ticket that it would not add points to his license so I paid the fine. Come to find out it added 3 points to his license. On the flhsmv portal its says he is eligible to take a safe drivers course, but I didnt think you could after the ticket has been paid. Any help would be greatly appreciated. He will be a senior this year and was looking forward to being able to drive this summer and to school next year. I have searched anywhere and everywhere and even emailed FLHSMV as well as called to only wait for hours to never able to speak with anybody or ever receive a response to the email I sent. Thanks

This is the best tl;dr I could make, original reduced by 72%. (I'm a bot)

Members of a culture-warring Florida school district spent a contentious eight-and-a-half hours at a school board meeting expressing their exasperation with the divisiveness plaguing the schools.
"No one is teaching your kids to be gay!" said former math teacher Alyssa Marano, who recently resigned from the Hernando school district.
As part of his own war on so-called "Woke" culture, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis has been helping Moms for Liberty members get elected to local Florida school boards.
Beginning with the 2022 passage of the Don't Say Gay law - which prohibits class instruction on sexual orientation and gender identity in kindergarten through third grade - DeSantis and the Republican-controlled legislature have devoted their tenure to demonizing LGBTQ+ people and making schools less safe for LGBTQ+ students.
DeSantis has gone to war with Disney over its opposition to the Don't Say Gay law, has launched numerous blindsides attacking "Woke indoctrination" in schools, and has taken control of the state's education system with handpicked administrators and the power of the bully pulpit.
The Don't Say Gay law - which has been expanded to all grades - has led to the banning of LGBTQ+ books in schools and the forced outing of students to their parents by school administrators.

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DAY ONE (TOKYO)
3:00pm-5:00p: Arrive at HND airport, Check into hotel, and Rest
​
DAY TWO (TOKYO)
9:00am-9:45am: Walk to 7-Eleven for breakfast
10:10am- 10:30am: Daiwa Nakameguro
10:30am- 12:30pm: visit Surrounding store (Tokyo Store Nakameguro, Traveler’s Factory
Nakameguro) buy Lunch at 7-Eleven
12:30pm-3:30pm: Go Thrifting in Shimokitazwa: Trefacstyle, 2 nd street, New York Joe, The thrift Tokyo, Florida
3:30pm-4:14pm: Shiro-Hige’s Cream Puff Factory
4:15p-5:00p: Gotokuji Temple
5:10p-5:45p: Got back to hotel
6:30p- 8:30p: explore Sinjuku and Go to Uogashi Nihon- Ichi Standing Sushi Bar
​
THREE (TOKYO)
7:30a-9:00a: Meguro River
9:00a-12:30p: explore and eat
12:30p-3:30p: Ueno Park, 古書 鮫の歯 samenoha books
yanaka, Sampota Café Nombiriya
3:30p- 6:00p: Shinjuku Gyoen National Garden
6:00p-7:00p: Dinner at 7-Eleven
7:00p-10:30: explore Sinjuku Night life
DAY FOUR (TOKYO)
9:00am-9:30a: Fuglen
9:30a-11:45a: Yoyogi Park, Meji Shrine
12:00p- 2:30p: Explore Harajuku
2:30p-3:00p: Shibuya Crossing
3:00p-4:30p: Shibuya Sky
5:30-7:00: Manten Sushi Marunouchi
​
DAY FIVE (Fujikawaguchiko)
10:00am: Check out of hotel
10:00am-12:00p: Eat and just chill and a café
12:00p-3:00 travel to Hotel
Explore surrounding area for rest of day
​
DAY SIX (KYOTO)
10:00am: Check out of hotel
10:30p-1:30p: Kawaguchiko Music Forest Museum,
Kawaguchiko Museum of Art
2:00p-8:00p: Take train to hotel in Kyoto
​
DAY SEVEN (KYOTO)
8:00a-5:00p: Explore Nara
​
DAY EIGHT (KYOTO)
8:30a-9:30a: Nanzen-Ji Temple
9:30a-10:30a- Walk Philosopher’s Path
10:30a-12:00p: Geisha District Gion Post Office, Hanami Koji
12:00p-2:00p: Yasaka- Jinja Shrine
2:00p-3:15p: Gion Tsujiri- Tea Store, Maccha House Kyoto Kawaramachi
3:15p-7:00p: Kiyomizu- dera Temple
7:15p-8:15p: Dinner at CoCo Ichibanya Makagyo- Ku
​
NINE (KYOTO)
6:00a-8:00a: Arashiyama Bamboo Grove
8:00a-11:30a: Eat and Sanso Garden
11:30a-1:00p: Saga Toriimoto Preserved Street
1:00p-4:00p: Fushimi Inari Shrine
4:00p-7:00p: Explore Ninenzaka and Sannenzaka
​
DAY TEN (OSAKA)
10:00am: Check out of hotel
10:30-11:30: Eat
11:30am- 1:00pm: Arrive in Osaka
1:00p-2:00p: Lilos Coffee Roasters
2:00p-4:00p: TeamLab Botanical Garden
4:00p-5:15p: Check into Osaka Hotel
​
DAY ELEVEN (OSAKA)
8:00am- 9:15a: Namba Yasaka Jinja Shrine
9:30a-11:15a: Kuromon Ichiba Market: Bluefin Tuna Stand
11:15a-2:00p: Osaka Castle
2:00p- 5:00p: explore and eat at Dotonbori
5:00p-9:00p: Explore Amerikamura Free market, Go to weekend market
​
DAY TWELVE ( TOKYO)
9:00a: Check out of hotel
9:00a-10:00a Get Breakfast
10:00a-2:00p: back to Tokyo
2:00p-4:00p Get Lunch
4:00p: Check into Akihabara Bay Hotel
4:45p-7:30p: Shop at Daiso , Muji
7:30p-9:00p: Tsukiji Outer Market
​
DAY THIRTEEN (TOKYO)
9:00a-11:45a: TeamLab Planets Tokyo
12:00p-3:00p: LUSH Shinjuku spa
3:00-6:00p: Shopping: Nintendo Store
6:00p-9:00p: Make reservation for DEDESUKE waygu beef
​
DAY FOURTEEN (TOKYO)
10:00am: Check out of hotel
10:30a-3:00p: Explore, eat, have fun
3:00p-?: got back home
​
I will be traveling solo and this is my first time in Japan. Also, apologies if my itinerary is disorganized and all over the place. Any criticism, tips, etc. is super highly appreciated.
​
I am super flexible and willing to change or eliminate mostly everything expect the Temple visits, LUSH spa, and the TeamLab botanical/ planets. Debating on sneaking in the Studio Ghibli Museum if I can get tickets for early June.
​
as for the questions:

1. Age old question of is it worth is to buy a 7 day JR pass or should I buy individual tickets?
2. does anyone have a travel Visa credit card and find it easy to reload a sucia card? Will it be charged as a cash advanced or normal transaction?
3. How much in cash should I physically carry?

I am a district substitute. Meaning I work for one school and sub in different positions around the school. I mainly work as a long term substitute and as office help. I am required to work 6:30-2:30 (school day is 7:20-2:20) M-F. I receive full benefits but since I’m hourly I do not get paid in the summer. I am working summer school throughout June but in July and the first weeks of August I will be without pay. Would I be able to apply for unemployment for this period in Missouri? I tried googling but it seems like every other state has something set up for this situation and MO doesn’t.
Edit: I guess the worst that could happen is I apply and they tell me I don’t qualify. I have a side job it just won’t pay all the bills. But negotiating with different offices would probably fix that quickly.

I'm a straight, white male teaching in a right/far right community.
Had a 9th grade girl born in Kenya approach me today asking why I don't teach about politics anymore (district rule for obvious reasons - right or wrong as it is) because she just learned about Mississippi's trying to reenact Jim Crow laws, Florida's nonsense, and she really would like some guidance trying to understand what is happening.
Aside from feeling like a shitty teacher when you're called out for sacrificing integrity for employment, how would you respond?

I could write an essay on this situation, but will try and boil it down to a paragraph. Feel free to ask for info.
I am an 8th grade teacher (Florida, United States) at a Title 1 school (a school with a high percentage of students/families in poverty). Last week we hosted an 8th Grade Week in which students could pay to participate in activities. I won’t list the multitude of ways in which this was a shit show. The one thing I am taking a strong stance on is Movie Day. 80 students paid $15 each to watch a movie in the auditorium with snacks provided. Due to no fault of the school, Movie Day was canceled because the district didn’t say until the last minute that the movie choice was not approved. Ok, so we refund the money, right? Students were told that day that we would. But instead the principal turns around and decides to give students a tumbler mug instead of a refund. I have strongly vocalized my opposition to this, but in turn have been berated by my principal (for an hour this morning, no exaggeration, she even had someone cover my class) that I am making a big fuss over nothing, casting shadow on her integrity and that students and parents prefer the mug over the refund (bullshit). She says any dissatisfied parents should call her and state they want a refund. I said it’s unfair to put the onus on the parents when a refund should have been the automatic response to the cancellation of the activity. So, AITA for continuing to insist we give the refund? My principal has no intention of doing so, so I plan to email the district school board next. Before doing so I figured I’d get some good ol’ Reddit input. Would you be satisfied with a mug in place of cash refund?

Can someone tell me if I am overreacting/pregnancy hormones, or if I had a right to be mad at this?
For about 5 years, my husband and I lived in Florida. Florida was always a bit red, but we lived there before DeSantis got into office, so it was manageable, especially living in a blue city. Everything went downhill once Desantis was elected.
My husband and I had a dream from the start of our relationship to move to Colorado, and once Florida politics got worse and worse, we decided to just up and move. Especially since we were starting to talk about having kids. I refused to have children in a state that has no human rights. Plus, as a bisexual, very pro choice woman, it was not the place for me. My husband agreed. The only reason he liked Florida was because of the warm weather, he has some chronic pain ailments and the cold weather makes them worse.
Anyway, I think from the time we moved, my mom held on to a glimmer of hope that I or we would move back. Always dropping little comments that I could move back in with mommy if my marriage doesn't work out (which I would never do). Trying to bait me by sending me photos of the beach saying "don't you miss this?" (no. Mountains > oceans. Plus, I can fly two hours to California, have a beach AND human rights! Win win!). Bragging that it's 80 degrees in February in the hopes that I'll say I miss it. This continued even after my husband and I bought a house here, basically showing the long term commitment of staying here. Her argument is because we live in a slightly red area of Colorado, it's "basically the same" as Florida and may as well come back. Um, no, it's not. At all. The city leans slight red and is surrounded by blue areas. It's been incessant little comments since we moved in 2021.
The "funny" thing is, my mom is a democrat. She hates Desantis. But, she loves the warm weather. And has, verbatim said "As much as I disagree with his politics, as a post menopausal, straight white woman, they don't have much of an impact on me". I like the warm weather too, as does my husband for reasons mentioned above. But human rights matter more to us, so if the cold becomes too much ever, we will move to California.
Now, I'm pregnant. Yay!! This has only made her comments much worse. We don't have any family in this state, BUT my husband and I are both self employed, doing very well financially, and we will both have the ability to be stay at home parents as we set our own schedule and have savings to not work for up to a year. My husband is extremely hands on, and I know he will do everything I do less breastfeeding and birth. I do not underestimate how hard parenting is, but I think I have an advantage being that we can both be stay at home parents, we can afford a post pardum doula, and my husband isn't a loser man child that sees childcare as "women's work".
I know this sounds dramatic, but I would literally rather be a single mother in a dingy studio apartment on welfare vs move back to Florida. This is truly how strongly and angry I feel about it.
The last time my mom made a comment relating to us moving back to Florida, I snapped. I lost it. I told her it's evident that she cares more about selfishly seeing me/her grandkid, then she does them having human rights (especially so if this child is a girl). She cares more about seeing me, than me having rights, and me being in a place that makes me happy. I said it's disgusting how she can care so little about politics that don't directly impact her life, especially as she was a teacher all her life, mostly teaching students of very marginalized backgrounds. I said "you literally live in the North Korea of the USA and you want me to come back??!" It was a very heated convo and we haven't spoken in a week.
If she genuinely and whole heartedly wants to see me and her grandkids more, nothing/no one is stopping her from selling her home and moving to Colorado. But ohhhhh noooo its cold here!!!!!!! It snows here!!!!!!! I don't know anyone there!!!!!!!!!!! It's more expensive!!!!!!!!!!
Is Colorado perfect politically? No, no location is perfect. But I love it here for reasons beyond politics. It is the most scenic and beautiful state I have ever seen. I take two to three hikes a week, and can't wait to do more 14ers once not pregnant. The people here are so much nicer too. Overall, there's very little I don't like here.
Any outside thoughts would be appreciated, but either way, it felt good to get this off my chest.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The fatal flaws of light rail in Portland.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Another narrative on the same story.

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

I recently reached out to my councilperson to complain about the drag racing and illegal ATV/Dirt Bikes that joy ride up and down Ben Franklin Pkwy most nights of the week. Much to my surprise, I received a response. It outlines a lot of what is said in this sub regarding the contradictory laws/regulations about who the police can and cannot pull over and when. I have not yet looked up the bill referenced in the message, but would be interested to hear if anyone has any insight (Bill No. 210423).
​

We have reached out to the PPD regarding the current directive in addressing the illegal activity of atv’s and dirt bikes. Last year the ATV detail was activated but unfortunately there are policies in place that makes enforcement difficult. Currently, atv’s and dirt bikes are not classified as motor vehicles in the code so officers have restraints in pursuing them. Generally, the officers would have to follow them until they run out of gas or parked which allows confiscation and a $2000 fine. Or, if an illegal firearm or weapon is spotted on them then full pursuit is permitted. Council President Clarke has conducted outreach safety meetings throughout the 5th District and Council passed a bill that helps regulation (Bill No. 210423). There are also talks of using certain technology to help enforcement.
In the past 2 years, the PPD has confiscated more than 1000 illegal atv’s and dirt bikes but clearly more action needs to take place. As the summers approaches we are prioritizing this issue and hopefully we can move forward with getting further results to change this illegal behavior. We will inform you of any progress or updates with regards to this issue. I appreciate your concern, thank you so much.

Sir David
Far across the Capital city from the impromptu Sarkin wedding feast Sir David and Ariane were walking around the Imperial district, hand in hand, lazily enjoying the light breeze and the warm sun as they played tourist.
Sir David couldn't help but glance over at Ariane constantly, both to enjoy her, and to listen to her next piece of interesting information.
One place he had some mutual hobbies with Ariane was in history, and Ariane had devoured human history and mythology by the truck load once she'd gotten access to the Tear's internal comm net. Her reading speed and retention rate was truly something you had to see to believe.
She'd also proved she was quite crafty in the arts and crafts sense. After she'd found out about the minotaur of Greek myth, she'd set herself to work designing some new outfits that mixes ancient Greek and traditional Agela fashion, then partnered with Mama-san the Pavorus tailor aboard the Tear to produce them.
The result in this particular case was a stunning white dress that was just sheer enough in some places to be more than a little distracting, while not being at all lewd or erotic. Or anything but conservative by galactic standards.
Sure, with a slit in the skirt to her upper mid thigh, and some actual cleavage, she was showing off more skin than an Apuk girl might on average, but anything more than a micro bikini could be considered 'conservative' by galactic standards. Paired with her usual concealed shifter belt which showed off her waist and the sheer intensity of her curves in a delightfully subtle way, she'd then left her bountiful golden hair curly and put it up with a pair of pins.
The total effect between the colors of her body, her rich caramel skin, the blue of her eyes, her shining golden hair, and the various whites and creams of her not quite toga made her look the part of an actual goddess of Greek myth. Ari was an absolute gem of a woman, and was just as beautiful in sweat pants as she was all done up... but Sir David certainly appreciated the results when Ariane took the time to get all gussied up.
It was only due to David's sheer force of will and decades of self discipline that he wasn't all over her like a teenage boy on his prom date to use an American idiom. The temptation alone was... intense. The desire was strong.
Yet.
Sir David wanted to hold back. For his own sake. For Ariane's sake. He wanted to build a bond in more than mutual physical desire... and he had to remember what being... touched... was like. How to touch. How to accomplish the physical parts of being a lover.
He could hear Mary scolding him for ignoring her when she'd told him to seek out someone else to help keep his life fulfilled and happy... letting what were once well developed skills in how to be a partner, how to be a lover, how to be a friend in a context outside the military, atrophy deeply. Then again, could Mary have known just how badly her death was going to hurt him? She'd have likely scolded him for that too, but still. He just couldn't give the old girl up... and with Ariane around to stand next to the ghostly love of his life, and not in place of... well. Maybe Mary would forgive him for waiting just a little bit longer to find the right woman.
That more women could quite easily follow was... something that was becoming somewhat intriguing to David. There was, after all, near limitless potential in the galaxy.
Perhaps he was talking to Jerry too much about such things in the Ward Room after the female officers had mostly left for the evening, but the man made a persuasive, if somewhat self-serving argument in the name of plural marriage in the galaxy. Sir David himself didn't have a religious or moral objection to such things, and considering he already had more or less agreed with his... girlfriend for lack of a better term. Fiancée perhaps. That she would be his second wife per galactic terms, to respect the mother of his first children made the question of a third or fourth wife seem... much easier than simply considering a second. If the right woman showed up... why not?
"Oh! David! Look!"
Before David can be completely shaken from his thoughts he's been dragged through an ornate gate set into a stone wall into a garden. David's eyes wander the place and automatically map out the details. They're just passed through a stone wall onto a platform resting on what appeared to mostly be a natural hill, with a small set of steps leading down to the actual ground level and the stone path that ran through the grass.
The garden itself is quite large, and beautifully crafted with paths, not just of stone but within the plants themselves winding naturally through the stunning blooms and leading towards what appeared to be an altar at one end of the garden and a large set of stairs at the other.
The stairs lead up to a balcony, over which loomed a fortified building some distance behind it. David recognized it as an old fort, in a style endemic to older Apuk architecture that David had seen a few times with Ariane so far this morning while touring the Imperial district.
David makes his second sweep of the area, now looking for even more fine details this time around. Looking up a bit higher finds ten statues lining the area, each paying homage to a larger statue of a woman in armor behind the altar.
She was posed with a warblade that was nearly as long as she was tall, and she appeared to have been very tall in life, regardless of how the sculptor had scaled her up. Still, the detail in the sculpture was remarkable. The warrior woman's smile warmed the garden that was clearly a memorial like she was standing there with them that moment, no matter how long it had been since her death.
Ariane sighs with pleasure at both the exquisite sculptures around them, but also the skillful display of horticulture, taking a brief moment to sniff a vibrant blue bloom before pulling up her guide book.
"Let's see... Yes, this is the Memorial Garden of the First Battle Princess. Hmm. Some warning in the Apuk language I can't read, where's the... ah! Here we are!"
Ariane grins at her success at finding what she was looking for and starts to read the contents of the page to David.
"Princess Mira'Tok Crownborn was the title that she ended her life under many thousands of Centris standard years ago at the dawn of pre-space flight modern Apuk history. Mira'Tok was the first to receive a crown directly from the hand of the woman who would become the first Empress of Serbow, and is the predecessor of every battle princess to ever wear a crown."
The Agela woman's eyes glimmer as she continues to read, clearly excited by both the history and the craftsmanship around them.
"The statues displayed around her are her ten companions, her battle sisters... and there's a twelfth statue behind her, of the Sorcerer Dus'Kvun, her husband. Not to deemphasize him, but rather their display rotates with the Princess being displayed forward by day, and her husband by night when bioluminescent plants from the dark forest naturally light the garden up! Seems the statues automatically rotate into their different positions after sunset and at dawn. The guide suggests this was a commentary on the two halves of martial supremacy on Serbow... and a more traditional depiction of both male and female."
David arches an eyebrow and leans over to read over Ariane's shoulder a bit. "Really, she was the first? Interesting... How old is the statue then? It's incredible. Almost like she's about to start laughing and tell us a story about her adventures."
Ariane nods. "She was famous for doing just that. This garden is a few thousand years old, commissioned early in the current Imperial family's reign. Mira'Tok was named a... it's hard to pronounce it, so I'll just translate, a sword saint. So like the kensei from Japan on Earth that we discussed the other day. So Mira'Tok is a religious figure as well as a historical and martial figure. So this memorial garden was dedicated as an official war shrine of the Apuk Imperial military. What's the mean though?"
Ariane flicks through a few more screens, focused entirely on learning something new about the place they'd found themselves in.
"Here we go! As an Imperial War Shrine, the garden of the mausoleum plays host to a variety of ceremonies annually including the Empress praying for the Imperial military, officers being commissioned or promoted, and senior enlisted swearing fresh oaths of enlistment. To be offered or granted permission to swear your oaths in the garden is a significant honor and marks out either a highly distinguished, or extremely loyal individual with many years or service... or the type of fresh face who's on the fast track to bigger and better things. It's not automatic even for battle princesses who take up Imperial military service."
Ariane pushes her communicator towards David, pointing to a specific paragraph. "Ooh, look! Apparently it's not uncommon for the Empress to turn up unannounced and receive the oaths of those permitted to make their oaths in Mira'Tok's mausoleum personally."
Sir David raises an eyebrow at that. "Dear God, I don't think her majesty ever surprised anyone to take their oaths of service personally... though she did knight me and award me my Victoria cross personally, as was the standard of the age. To take an oath of service personally like that from her warriors. That's truly special for those Imperial officers and enlisted who are privileged to offer their oaths like that I'm sure. To make oaths of loyalty and service personally to your liege. Ye gods and little fishes, it's right out of a fairy tale!"
"I know! Isn't it great?" Ariane clearly suppresses a squeal, doing her best to remain respectfully calm in this sacred space.
Suddenly however, a concerning thought struck Sir David.
"Say, Ari, are there any issues with us being here as outsiders? This is, as you say, sacred ground."
Ariane puts her nose back in her communicator and reads through a few pages quickly.
"Well it says this shrine isn't considered super popular to visit because it's small and somewhat out of the way, though many warriors make pilgrimage here to entreat Mira'Tok's blessing and invoke her courage, so this part of the war shrine is proudly open to the public. Though offworld visitors are of course asked to be respectful to the gardens and the spirits of the Princess, her husband and her shield sisters. In fact... as a warrior yourself you should be able to access the inner shrine if you'd like. There's apparently some rare artifacts related to Mira'Tok, and there's usually a few Wardens, retired senior members of the Apuk Imperial forces, around who are always happy to chat with a fellow warrior. While they nominally guard the shrine, apparently they also give regular discussions and talks about the history of this place, the Imperial military, and Mira'Tok. It's by appointment only, but they also only need like thirty minutes notice."
David nods, looking around again and admiring some more of the sheer effort that had gone into this beautiful little slice of serenity in the capital.
"Sounds like we should register for one of their talks if they wouldn't mind an audience of two. Heh, registering for a tour from wardens of a tower in the capital city of an Empire. It's so familiar it's almost a touch nostalgic."
David gestures upwards at the tower that was clearly the inner shrine.
"It's just like the Tower of London back home in some ways, right down to the wardens. The Yeoman Warders of the Tower back on Earth are all retired senior enlisted military personnel. Next you'll tell me they keep a local species of black bird here. Still, this other part of the shrine, the inner shrine, I can gain access to it? But you made it sound like you couldn't? Why's that?"
David gazes over at the now blushing Ariane.
"No such luck on the black birds. As to the inner shrine... It. Ah. Access to the inner shrine is limited to warriors and their... well. It says husbands but considering you're the warrior I'm sure they'd make exception for your spouse but we aren't married and I-"
Sir David leans over, cups Ariane's cheek and chastely kisses her on the lips, a mark of affection Ariane eagerly returns with a loving sigh.
"Ooh..."
"Maybe I'm not so worried about that any more. Forgive an old man his foibles my dear... besides. I'd say you're at least my fiancée, and I. Well I don't want to presume, but I'd be. It."
David feels his tongue tangle a bit as he remembers he hadn't expressed a lot of his feelings on this subject to Ariane yet.
"I... Ari. I'd be a fool not to marry you. I think I might have done you a great disservice in not being more clear about that. I ah. Yes. It's. You're to be my wife. If you'll have me of course... Bollocks that came out wrong."
Ari looks back at David, her long lashes fluttering as she gives him a coy smile.
"You're impossible sometimes you know that?"
"I'm unfortunately aware."
"I love that about you. I suspect Mary did too. Yes David. I'm going to be your wife. You're going to be my husband. There's no need to ask, it's set in the stars and has been from the moment we first made eye contact when you came to rescue me. Because for all your desire to take it slow, I've utterly failed to honor your desires and I fall more and more in love with you with every passing minute of every passing day. How can I not? I'm a girl who loves fairy tales after all, and here at last is my gallant knight to carry me away. I do prefer the human style role swap honestly. Much more fun to be carried off on horseback by you instead of carrying you off. Makes me feel all delicate."
The first kiss was nice. The second kiss was like nothing else David had ever experienced in his life apart from kisses with Mary, and in that second kiss he wasn't worried about having to remember how to be a lover to someone anymore.
Ari's lips warmed him from the tips of his ears down to his toes, making him melt just slightly as they embrace among the flowers, which seem to bloom all the more brightly in the face of such a passionate act of mutual affection, turning up to the couple ever so slightly as if they were the sun itself.
Then the spell is broken by a sharp wolf whistle and a leering cackle from nearby.
"Hey sister, care to share some sugar?"
Three well dressed Apuk, with what David recognized as gang markings peeking over their collars or out of their sleeves saunter through the gate, slowly spreading out.
"Told you girls I smelled a man. Cute too... So what's the slice sister, you the first wife?"
"S-Second. I'm his second wife." Ariane stutters for a second but quickly gets more confident in her tone, her powerful body tensing.
One of the toughs, a woman with poorly maintained reddish purple locks, looks at the senior tough, a woman with vibrant green hair that's clearly much better taken care of.
"...Why are you asking? We just want to have a little fun right? Make this trip up to the Imperial district worth it?"
"Yep, and all the better if sister here is willing to share. Might even make some easy credits girlie."
Ariane tenses a bit more, as her cheeks color with what David recognizes as anger. Then he notices Ariane's hand subtly going towards the controls for her shifter belt.
"Did you seriously just ask me to whore my husband out to you dirtbags?"
"Hey now, dirt bag's a mean way to put it!" The gang leader's tone takes on an oily, play acting hurt tone as the three women begin to spread out a bit more. "Might just hurt my feelings, and you know girls, when my feelings are hurt there's just about only one thing that'll really quench the fire it starts in me."
"...Bout a liter of this bitch's blood boss?" Says the redhead again, leering at Ariane as she speaks.
The gang leader's smile gets extra toothy, making her look like she was part Cannidor for a moment.
"Yep, and a couple rounds with old boy over there while she bleeds out on the stone. Hey. Call some more of the girls over, I think this might end up being a grand old time."
First Last

I’m 22/F and graduated a year ago from college. I’ve been feeling a bit bored.
I’m commuting to work in NYC and living at home with my parents. All my friends have boyfriends and don’t really want to do fun things. I’m feeling like I need to do something fun and cool while I can, I don’t feel like there’s anything to miss here back home.
I know eventually I’ll want to come back here to be near family, but does anyone have any ideas of what they would do in this situation? I was thinking of moving to a new state but I have to be in NYC for work 2x a week. My company has offices in California and Florida I could try out for a year possibly. I’m planning a couple of trips but I’m limited on PTO and money.
I was thinking of taking a week here and there to work virtually in a new state. I’d have to do it alone which kind of scares me but seems like the only option. I’ve also been trying out new hobbies and went on Bumble BFF for new friends, but I feel like it’s hard to keep up my ideal lifestyle while living in my parents’ house. It’s too expensive in nyc to move out for me right now so I just feel stuck.
Anyone else in this situation?