This is a compilation of two days' worth of testing & reviewing perfumes from Black Phoenix Alchemy Lab that I previously left in Indie of the Day comments. Please keep in mind that these are "first impression" style reviews, so I can't comment on throw or wear length. With the exception of I Know You're Watching Me, everything here came as a free sample included with my orders, and will be available in the GC.
Day 1
A Countenance Foreboding Evil (Patchouli, ylang ylang, blood orange, and vetiver). I didn't like this when I first received it, with no idea of the scent notes. Coming back to it today wasn't any better. Sweet and musty. Like an old attic that hasn't been kept totally dry. Dusty, fussy, and sickly sweet. Not a winner for me. I'm very patchouli skeptical and hate oranges. I vaguely recall maybe disliking ylang ylang as well. We just weren't meant to be. Destash.
Depraved (Earthy black patchouli swelling with apricot). There wasn't really hope for this one either. I don't loathe it, though. The apricot is nice and I could see how this might work for me layered with something else. The apricot has a nice tanginess to it that brightens the patchouli enough to be tolerable. Husband thinks it smells like vitamin C tablets. Probably nice on someone else. Destash.
Hecate (Deep, buttery almond layered over myrrh and dark musk). I was excited by the name alone and applied without checking the notes first. Internal monologue on applying this went something like, "Jesus that's sweet. Bubblegum? Or is it fruit punch!? Wtf am I smelling?" Then 10 seconds later, "Oh I like this what's in it 🥺". The almond is intense in the bottle but immediately calms down upon application. It's rich without being foodie. This one oozes confidence; sensual without being lusty. Piercing eyes and a quick wit. A very adult fragrance that says "I have arrived". The myrrh is resinous rather than dry. A hint of citrus brightens things up just a bit and the musk keeps everything grounded and warm and full. Absolutely lovely. Keeping.
Jezebel (A gloriously decadent blend of honey, roses, orange blossom and sandalwood). My nose must be getting better. I was able to identify honey, and not-quite-orange off the bat without the scent notes. This one is very smiley. A bright, happy fragrance. Positivity liquefied. Sunshine and flowers in your hair and an unselfconscious toothy grin. The rose and honey are so beautifully matched here, and the orange blossom is pretty and just east of true citrus. The sandalwood feels like an afterthought, but may simply be playing a supporting role to allow the rest of the notes to flourish. I'll wear this on days I need a feminine pick-me-up. Keeping.
Black Annis (A mixture of damp cave lichen and oak leaf with a hint of vetiver, civet and anise). I remembered liking this in the imp so I put it on without much further thought or care. It goes on spicy, almost smoky. There's a bite to it that's adjacent to black pepper. Later I forgot what I was wearing and was surprised to find I smelled black licorice - ah yes, anise. This one is complex. Musky, sweet, spicy, earthy, rich. There is a lot going on, but it's oddly harmonious. I think I like it, but Black Annis is such a singular experience that I can't quite wrap my head around it yet. This one will need further testing to be fully appreciated. In limbo.
Urd (Muscadine, black and red patchouli, cereus and nag champa). This imp was poorly behaved and splortched all over the side of the bottle upon opening. I instinctively spread the spillage onto my hand and wrist so as not to waste it. After 2 minutes I smelled like a headshop and promptly scrubbed it off. "Urd" might be exactly what came out of my mouth while crinkling my nose. 😖 Destash.
Jack (True Halloween pumpkin, spiced with nutmeg, glowing peach and murky clove). After my Urd experience, I decided to actually check the notes before diving in with this one. To me, Jack smells just like a fall themed candle from a place like Bath & Body Works. Maybe the candle is called Autumn Sweater. It's sweet. It's spiced. I don't know that I can smell pumpkin, but I don't know that I can't smell pumpkin - just like the candle. I feel like I've met the kind of woman who loves this perfume for fall. She's a perfectly lovely person, but we find we don't have much to say to each other. Destash.
Black Tower (Long-dead soldiers, oath-bound; the perfume of their armor, the chill wind that surges through their tower, white bone and blackened steel: white sandalwood, ambergris, wet ozone, galbanum and leather with ebony, teak, burnt grasses, English ivy and a hint of red wine). My last scent for the day. I let a friend sample this imp and liked it on them. I'm glad I gave it a try myself because I adore this. These long dead soldiers are ghostly, not embodied. The burnt grass and ozone in this add a perfect crispness to an otherwise heady scent. The smell has a vapor-like quality to it somehow. Like picking up a scent in the breeze after rain. The metal in this is gorgeous. I love BPAL's metallic notes and this is no exception. The ivy and wine sweeten things up just enough to keep this from feeling dismal. It feels like looking out on the sea from a high window in a drafty tower, wrapped in a thick shawl and holding a leather journal you're about to pour your heart out to. Gorgeous. I want 6 bottles of this. Keeping.
Day 2
I Know You're Watching Me (A smear of flushed, pearly skin musk splashed by a sophisticated vintage aldehyde perfume and drenched in the secretions of high-pitched arousal). I looked high and low for a decant of this. Upon application, it smells like extremely fragrant laundry. The way you dream your laundry would smell when your maids are finished washing and neatly folding it. As it dries, I start to get the faintest hint of honey, then something savory, but it's lurking quietly behind the aldehydes, which are now giving the impression of something almost lemony -but there's definitely no lemon. After some time I'm not sure if I'm getting the skin musk or secretions, but I'm definitely smelling a person. It smells like skin that is just developing a light sheen of salty sweat from exertion. It's sensual and absolutely lusty. But the bright, breathy aldehydes keep this very wearable as a daily perfume. It's perfectly clean and perfectly dirty at the same time. A housewife consumed by daydreams of carnal animal passion. Shockingly true to the description. Keeping & upgrading to full size.
Anteros (Throbbing red musk and shimmering chypre with saffron, sweet patchouli, Italian bergamot, red currant, and vanilla bean). Off the bat, the red musk is front and center, smelling of a swirling blend of warm, dry spices. The bergamot peeks out fairly quickly, smelling of orange wood. I almost don't recognize the chypre, as the spices totally dry it out. Anteros begins to take on a traditionally masculine quality at around this point. I get a hint of the patchouli but no red currant at all, which I'm pretty disappointed about. I think a bit of fruit juice would really brighten this up and round it out. The overall effect for me is bitter, dry spices and woods. It does seem to liven up a bit after a longer wear, but I've got a masculine-leaning chypre that I prefer on myself. Passing this on to my husband.
Harlot's House (Angel's trumpet, violet, white sandalwood, oude, copaiba balsam, angelica, white tea, olibanum, and oakmoss). This goes on as a riotous, bright floral. Sweet and lively. These harlots aren't the sultry, seductive type. They're sitting on bar tops and telling tall tales. They're doing the can-can while breathless with giddy laughter. Flushed and beaming and one more round of drinks. The olibanum gives a tartness to the florals, while the oak moss and sandalwood add a touch of sophistication. Truly lovely, upbeat, and with surprising depth. The angel's trumpet is simply gorgeous in this. On me this is a scent for leveraging feminine wiles and exercising inconspicuous power. However, my husband also enjoyed wearing this one. Keeping.
Mag Mell (The warmth of amber, the puissance of white ginger and the clarity of verbena, with fresh green grass, lush sage and cleansing droplets of summer rain). This goes on wet like a bar soap with the word "zest" or "spring" in the name. As it dries down, a wave of verbena threatens to overtake everything else. Luckily the verbena settles down almost as quickly as it appears, allowing the grass and sage to come out to play. The whole effect is very green, crisp, and breezy. The ginger only just peeks out here and there, very elusive and almost shy. I think it's the summer rain component that gives the "clean" impression. This would be a perfect scent on a sweltering day. With further wear, the bright herbaceous plant matter is softened by the amber. I think this would be an easy go-to during the warmer months for any gender. Keeping.
Port Royal (Spiced rum and ship’s wood mixed with the body-warmed trace of a prostitute’s perfume and a hint of salty sea air on the dry-down). My initial thoughts are "bitch, you smell like rum". Suffice to say, this is very rum-forward on application. It does feel like a beach party scent. You've got a hibiscus flower in your hair and by the end of the night you can't tell what's perfume and what's real rum, and you don't care. The wood in this isn't overbearing, it gives me the impression of the wood planks of a coastal pier; weather worn and salt crusted. Not sure if this scent is for me, but I'll give it another go on a warm day. In limbo.
Bayou (Spanish moss, evergreen and cypress with watery blue-green notes and an eddy of hothouse flowers and swamp blooms). This is all floral on me, with evergreen & cypress playing second fiddle somewhere in the background. It's a scent that feels humid, like sitting on the back porch and fanning yourself as you pick up the scent of trees heavy with blooming gardenias. I think I pick up other white florals as well, maybe jasmine. I am missing the water, the bayou itself, almost entirely. Gimme that murky swamp water. This is pretty, but I can't see myself reaching for it often. I'll use up this imp's ear but won't repurchase. Keeping.

Demographics

• Gender: female
• Race/Ethnicity: asian
• Residence: texas :(
• Income Bracket: ermmmm high enough that I won't get aid
• Type of School: large competitive high school
• Hooks (Recruited Athlete, URM, First-Gen, Geographic, Legacy, etc.): NONE BRUH

Intended Major(s): so I applied to a variety of majors depending on the school: my application was focused on business/finance but I applied econ to schools without a business major and engineering to a few schools for fun (I hate myself). I want to pursue pharma consulting-> biotech startup in the future, so I honestly felt like engineering OR business would help me with that.
Academics

• GPA (UW/W): ermmm my schools gpa is weird but I submitted a 4.28. I had all A's in all my classes though so yea
• Rank (or percentile): top 5% of my class (1000+ students)
• # of Honors/AP/IB/Dual Enrollment/etc.: took 16 ap classes in high school, no ib and no dual enrollment
• Senior Year Course Load: guys dont do what I did but I took ap lit, ap spanish lit (NEVER TAKE THIS CLASS), ap chem, apes, ap gov, ap macro, ap stats, deca (yea its a class for us)

Standardized Testing
List the highest scores earned and all scores that were reported.

• SAT I: took it twice, 1540 superscore (770 r and m)
• AP/IB: 5's on hug, bio, lang, whap, calc bc, calc ab subscore, 4's on apush, spanish lang (my proudest one), csp and a 1 on physics 1 (didn't submit)(we dont talk about it)

Extracurriculars/Activities
bruh I had to go look at my commonapp again for this LOL. gonna be vague so I dont get doxxed cause I know some sweaty little nerds from my school are on this sub.

1. created a medtech device designed to solve a social problem, started working w/ a biotech company to start producing and getting it into pharmacies (talked about this in a LOT of essays and I was super passionate abt it)
2. founder and president of my schools personal finance and startup competition club (most boring thing ever did not talk about it in ANY essay except my UC leadership one)
3. research w/ a professor as a mentor on the problem related to the medtech device I created, had a historical and marketing spin to it. I submitted it to the concord review but didn't hear back so it was kinda sad on my apps just writing submitted LOL
4. cofounded a 'nonprofit' (not really) basically holding national charity gaming tournaments. was super fun and prob one of my favorite ecs I did (also thought It was p unique)
5. captain of my schools science olympiad team- ive done scioly since like 5th grade and I genuinely enjoyed doing it even though I know its not really business related haha
6. internship at a medtech startup; worked on a project that was implemented in like 200+ clinics in a country in Asia. I hated this because I did it last summer and I had to wake up at like 5am to join meetings as the company is based in Asia T_T
7. manager at a cafe. SUPER FUN OMG it took like 15-20 hours of my week every week since junior year but I loved my job. it was definitely my fav ec ever and I genuinely grew so much as a person from working. HIGHLY RECOMMEND getting a job if you can, the extra money is nice too <3
8. president of an interest club at my school (think like art, crochet, board games, etc) basically a club for a hobby. dont wanna be specific. but it was one of the biggest clubs in the school.
9. varsity LD debate. I really only debated for like freshman, soph, half of junior year but I judged a lot of tournaments and wrote cases/cut cards for my team after that. kinda hated debate towards the end.
10. invested money into businesses in 3rd world countries and helped them to grow/expand their profit; received high returns. I used some of my income from my job for this. didn't take much time, was mostly a side thing

Awards/Honors

1. diamond challenge finalist- top 50/700+ global teams (basically this is a pitching competition)
2. taekwondo black belt, ITF
3. deca state qualifier grades 9,10,11 (LOL I SUCKED AT DECA)
4. national merit commended (I sold on the psat bruh)
5. league of legends plat (dont make fun of me I literally had NO other honors)

Letters of Recommendation
calculus bc teacher- 6/10 me and him were pretty good friends id say? we would joke around and make fun of my other friend in class. he knew I was a hard worker and smart, but I wouldn't say we were super close.
apush teacher- 7/10 I actually read this one haha (she sent it to me). I really love her, and I genuinely liked apush and would participate in class to an extent. I wouldn't say its the BEST letter out there but It was decent and nice <3
piano teacher- 8/10 she has known me since I was 5 and I LOVE this woman. she is the sweetest person ever, seen me grow through the years. she also let me read her letter, so I know that it was really sweet and honestly quite beautiful.
counselor rec- 5/10 I think my counselor lowkey hated me. he was opping me so hard at the beginning of the year abt my schedule, and I had to fight him a few years ago to take bc without having taken ab calc LOL. I dont think it would have trashed me, but he has definitely written better letters for people.
Interviews
I only had a few interviews and ironically I didn't get into any of the colleges I interviewed for LMAO
georgetown- 8/10, I think me and my interviewer def clicked and I thought my responses accurately presented myself how I wanted to. he was super chill though, and he told me I would do great wherever I go <3
penn- 2/10, my interview was like 20 minutes long bruh. the guy was reading off a list of questions, he didn't really ask my like follow up questions on anything. I liked my answers for the most part but I dont think the overall interview was very good.
mit- 8/10, i REALLY liked this interview, I had a lot of really great responses and me and him clicked over liking boba lol. I also kinda gave him an idea about his professional life so maybe points for that?
princeton- 7/10, the guy was super chill and young so it was much easier to talk to him. it was kinda weird tho he emailed me asking for a photo of myself so he could recollect his memory a few days after the interview? idk man but he seemed nice and he sent me what he wrote. was kinda a mid report but not anything bad so w
dartmouth- 6.5/10, she was also young. she also just read off a list of a few questions, not really any follow up. interview was 25ish minutes and we didn't really connect although I thought I had decent responses.
Essays
commonapp essay- 8.5-9/10. it was about my relationship with a family member, and I really REALLy liked this essay. it was probably the most genuine and raw thing I've written, and I got it reviewed by a few trusted adults. one lady told me that I shouldn't submit this essay, but I felt like honestly writing anything else would not represent myself as truly as this did. im glad I stuck to my gut haha
uc essays-6/10 i hated these essays with a PASSION I hated how I wrote them, I wrote about the most BASIC things ever (like the talent essay I wrote about freaking music. like bruh every asian is gonna write about music). idk what any uc saw in these lol
supps- 7-9/10 I wrote about some really quirky shit for a lot of them, I had to grind all my rd apps the 2 weeks of winter break after getting rejected from penn ed haha. was not fun dont recommend DO UR APPS BEFORE AND DONT EGO IT LIKE ME
honestly for essays, just stay true to yourself. dont try to be someone else, dont say things because you think they will get you in. to some extent, yes you have to do that- but if you genuinely believe in yourself or something you've written, stick to your guts.
Decisions (indicate ED/EA/REA/SCEA/RD)
Rejections:

• ed- penn (wharton) (got straight up rejected ed)
• ea- mit (business) (deferred ea-> rejected rd)
• rd- every single ivy- applied econ or business to all
• rd- georgetown (business)
• rd- northwestern (engineering)
• rd- uchicago (business economics)
• rd- johns hopkins (biomedical engineering)
• rd- stanford (econ) ngl after ivy day this was my last hope and it genuinely crushed me when I got rejected haha
  
• Waitlists:
  
• umich (lsa/business)
  
• nyu (stern)
  
• ucsb (forgot what I applied for ngl)
  
• williams (econ)
  

withdrew all my waitlists except for duke as I wouldn't pick any of them over berkeley.
Acceptances:

• ea- texas a&m (engineeering)
• ea- ut san antonio (econ)
• ea- ut austin (business)
• ea- iu kelley (business)
• ea- uva (I applied business but I think you reapply after a year, so I was admitted to the l&s college I think)
• ea- usc (business) (applied ea, got deferred, then accepted rd)
• rd- vanderbilt (engineering w/ $6k stipend)
• rd- ucsd (engineering)
• rd- ucla (business economics)
• rd- uc berkeley (got in to l&s)
• rd- duke (biomedical engineering) initially waitlisted accepted attending!

Additional Information:
I know imma sound like a fuckin loser nerd typical senior who got into a t10 and suddenly has 'wisdom' but like genuinely. this process is so fucked up and weird and you genuinely dont know how tf its gonna turn out. I applied to WAY too many colleges, and ended up having to rush them all haha. I guess it worked out in the end and I would LOWKEY recommend shotgunning but If you do decide to shotgun please don't do what I did.
I was initially committed to berkeley, and at first I was super upset. I know that sounds stupid, but for someone who has had their eyes set on the Ivy League/t10's since she was 5, it was genuinely upsetting. I remember literally bawling my eyes out on the airport floor when I got all my rejections one after the other on ivy day because I was so upset haha. I understand what it feels like, but honestly after a few weeks I felt much better and was actually excited to go to berkeley (I literally JUST bought merch too LMAO). like the college you go to is really what you make of it, and yes I know its not like I was going to squidward cc, but even berkeley felt like it wasnt enough for all the blood, sweat, tears I had poured in over the years. but things happen for a reason, and I do think I would have been 100% happy at berkeley had I not gotten off the duke waitlist (I had literally 0 hope for it, I wrote the shittiest LOCI ever too LOL). I know im kind of rambling, but basically this process doesn't define you and you can and will find reasons to be happy at the college that you get into and decide to go to. I know it feels like life is ending but everything will work out eventually, even if you don't see it now. be proud of where you go, and happy that those people saw your value and wanted to admit you.
if anyone has any questions def lmk! my dm's are open <3 and if you think you know me, no you don't

I recently came off of a blast of 400mg for 12 weeks about 5-6 weeks ago. I was taking .5mg adex twice a week with pins. Half way through the blast I got bloods done and estradiol came back 46 pg/ml.
Well I've found blood work from my trt dose of 200mg a week with .25mg adex twice a week with pins and my estradiol was at 25 pg/ml.
After my blast I went back to my trt dose of 200mg and like a complete idiot stayed at .5 mg adex twice a week. I don't know what I was thinking but my diet was out of control and I was drinking more than I should have due to stress from life (wife, kids, and my business).
I was having really painfull nipples for the last 3 weeks and again, like a complete moron without getting bloodwork done, I upped my adex to .75mg twice a week for one week.
A couple of days before the last .75mg dose I was experiencing crippling anxiety, brain fog, intrusive thoughts, suicidal, felt like I was sick but wasn't, overall body aches, extreme dehydration even though I drink a little more than 1 gallon of water a day.
I'm not due for bloodwork yet, but I can get some done this coming week.
Is it safe to assume I have crashed my e2? Nothing else in my routine has changed, nothing new added or taken away. I am also not on any other medications.
It's currently been roughly 10-11 days of dealing with these symptoms and 8 days since my last adex dose.
On hand I have extra test and hcg I can take. I can also get some dbol but it won't be here for a week.
What do you guys think?

Wadup everybody i ran a 21 week cycle of 700-800 test e and 300 mast and tossed in some dbol mid way for a few weeks. I did a half ass pct maybe for 2 weeks, here’s some results of blood work after 4 months off cycle. My test came back so low so now im starting pct today last pin was in oct. Any advice for pct to get levels higher, after i complete a better pct should i assume levels to recover around the 8 month mark since last pin.
It’s now May i did clomid 50 mg daily in february for 13 weeks that helped me get back in the gym and starting to have morninh wood again however i’m starting to get the urge to pee throughout the night which is a symptom of Low T. Is my T recovering? Am i ready to get blood work done again hoping my t is recovering. Do i start icing my balls Lol. I really want to hop on again but if i don’t recover it’s def not worth it.
Blood work results from feb with no pct last pin was october.
RBC 5.64
Cholesterol A 5.06 mmol/L
LDL Cholesterol A 3.49 mmol/L
HDL Cholesterol A 0.92
Chol/HDL (Risk Ratio) A 5.50
Non HDL Cholesterol 4.14 mmol/L
Pituitary Function Follicle Stimulating Hormone (FSH) 4.2 <9.5 IU/L
Luteinizing Hormone (LH) 2.7 1.1-8.8 IU/L
Test came back 9.2 before naturally was 22.5

Has this happened to anyone before? I started a cycle of 500mg of test, 400mg of primo, and 75mg of Anadrol per week. I have had absolutely no strength gains or increased energy I hear people talking about. I did this for two and a half weeks, and gained 15 pounds in those weeks (what im assuming is mostly water weight). The anadrol made me lethargic AFFF all the time. The chronic fatigue was so bad I stopped the anadrol and switched to 50mg of Dbol after the first two and a half weeks. Its been two weeks on Dbol now. So after over a month of the same amount of test and primo, and 2 1/2 weeks anadrol then two weeks of dbol, Ive seen no strength gains at all. My diet is extremely clean. Im sleeping well, drinking plenty of water, and training properly 5-6 days per week. I dont know whats wrong. I got all my gear from a VERY reputable source. Any advice? I feel like all of it has just been a waste. Any advice? Anyone heard of this before or have any experience/tips?
I did about 3 or 4 cycles 10 years ago and got massive strength gains back then. Unfortunately, I was in my early 20s and didn't keep up with fitness afterwards and lost most of the results. Now is very different.

***Please put yourself in my shoes and don't try to dox me! I will be more than happy to help you out if you PM :) Edit: new doxing record. 2 hours 💀💀💀
I've always wanted to make one of these because I never see any results for int'l or Canadian students. You really only need one acceptance, and you never know what will happen! Before you come for me for not having safeties, I did, and they were in Canada. You can find those results on the bottom of the page.
Demographics

• Gender: Female
• Race/Ethnicity: White + Jewish
• Residence: Canada
• Income Bracket: $100-150k. Applied for aid.
• Type of School: Small, non-feeder public school
• Hooks (Recruited Athlete, URM, First-Gen, Geographic, Legacy, etc.): N/A, anti-hook by being an int'l seeking financial aid
• Intended Major(s): Economics, Public Policy, Women's Studies, Education (depends on the school. Usually listed a combo of the first 3)

Academics

• GPA (UW/W): ~96/100.0 (UW), No weighted
• Rank (or percentile): N/A. Top 10% if I really need to estimate.
• # of Honors/AP/IB/Dual Enrollment/etc.: Maxed out on rigor in 9th and 10th grade. School offers limited APs and only starts in 12th. I took 4 out of the 7 APs my school offered in 12th. This part worried me, but I genuinely didn't want to take classes I had no interest in (biology/chemistry).
• Senior Year Course Load: AP Economics, AP English Literature, AP Computer Science A, AP Physics 1, Regular Pre-Calculus, Regular Calculus, Gym, Human Geography

Standardized Testing

• ACT: 35 (36E, 36M, 33R, 34S)
• AP/IB: Self-studied three APs. All 5s.
• Other (ex. IELTS, TOEFL, etc.): N/A

Extracurriculars/Activities

1. Student Rep for District of Education (11-12)
2. Co-Founder @ Girls Empowerment Project (10-11)
3. Lead @ Economics Non-Profit (10-12)
4. DECA Club Co-President @ School (9-12)
5. State Officer for Education NPO (12)
6. Co-Founder of Women's Care-Package Drive @ School (10-11)
7. Jewish Culture Club Co-President @ School (9-12)
8. Misc. Filmmaking/Photography (10-11)
9. Girls STEM Camp Counselor (12)
10. Meme Account (10)

Awards/Honors

1. Top 3 Placement @ FBLA Canada (National)
2. Winner of Filmmaking Contest (State/Regional)
3. DECA Finalist (State/Regional)
4. 2x Waterloo Math Contest Distinction (International). Top 25%, nothing special.
5. Published in blog (National)

Letters of Recommendation

1. Comp Sci Teacher (7/10 - I read it): Had him for 3 years. It wasn't "WOW", but it described me as a kind, helpful, and hard-working person.
2. Humanities Teacher (7/10 - I would assume. Didn't read). Teachers at my school don't know how to write rec letters since no one applies abroad.

Interviews

• UPenn: 3/10... First interview. Non-evaluative. The guy was the main interviewer for Canada, so he had 20+ years of interview experience and told me to "stop feeding him answers". Ouch.
• Harvard: 5/10. It was mid. Nothing special.
• Dartmouth: 9/10. In-person for 1.5 hours. He said he'll try his best to get me in.
• Princeton: 7/10. In-person for 1.5 hours. Interviewer was 70 years old, but I tried my best to relate to him.

Essays

• Common App: Original that I submitted to Yale REA (4/10). It was all over the place and used a really complex metaphor. I rewrote it for RD schools and got feedback from u/ScholarGrade. Got it rated a 8/10-8.5/10 (yes, I am financially irresponsible and did pay for the basic essay rating). No other college counselling... just that one essay rating.
• Supplementals: Mixed bag. My "Why Major" was probably my best essay and would rate it a 9/10. The rest were about girls empowerment, dialogue to bridge polarization, dress codes, photography, etc. I did have some puns and humor here and there.

Decisions (only the US ones - I'll put my Canadian ones in the add'l info).
Acceptances

• Univeristy of Pennsylvania - Wharton School

Waitlists

• Princeton University
• Dartmouth College (the interview really made me love the school, but I am still very grateful for the waitlist)
• Columbia University (applied for aid. Super unexpected)

Rejections (lol.. i am coping)

• Harvard University (this school doesn't exist)
• Brown University
• Yale University (REA)

Additional Information

• Know the fit. Schools are looking for people who would thrive at their school. Wharton REALLY values leadership and most of my activities were leadership-related. My Penn AO wrote me a note after my acceptance: "I am so impressed by the depth and breadth of your leadership. From the [EC] to [EC] to the [EC], you have certainly left your mark on the [hometown] community. I cannot wait to see how you thrive as a leader and changemaker as you explore Business Economics & Public Policy at Penn!" Yale values collaboration and I am very independent, so that could've been a small factor leading to my REA rejection.
• Have a narrative (at least try. Don't push it). I knew that people applying for my majoschool would have lots of business-related extracurriculars about financial literacy. I took a personal route instead and connected everything I did to gender equality in leadership. I alluded to this A LOT in all my essays. I wanted to show that I wouldn't be another finance-bro.
• Help others. After I submitted all my essays, I helped my classmates edit their essays/applications. At one point, I remember thinking "why am I helping them if they're my competition...". But I still ended up helping them because relationships are very important to maintain throughout this process. People will remember you for how you made them feel (and not necessarily for your acceptances). Kindness prevails and so does compassion. Be nice in class and in your community - it'll pay off!
• Updates. Sent updates to all my schools about DECA Int'l Qualifier, another local filmmaking win, and progressions in my ECs. Doubt they read this, but I'll just put this here for more context.
• Canadian acceptances (most are based on GPA, but for the supplemental-based ones, I spoke about the first 2 ECs + DECA): University of Toronto (Rotman Commerce), York University (Schulich), Queen's University (Commerce), Western University (Social Science), Carleton University (Public Affairs). Ghosted by Western Ivey AEO (result: ??).

Obviously, I don't know what got me in, but I really do think my Common App Essay tied everything together. Thanks for reading and good luck to any underclassmen. PM if you have any questions. Go Quakers 💙💙 (potentially... if they give me more aid)!

***I'm gonna get doxxed, but yolo (dm me if you need help or want more info on my application)
Demographics
Gender: Male
Race/Ethnicity: Asian (Indian)
Residence: Southern U.S.
Income Bracket: $100-150k
Type of School: Semi-large, public school (~2000 kids)
Hooks (Recruited Athlete, URM, First-Gen, Geographic, Legacy, etc.): N/A
Intended Major(s): Computer Science
Academics
GPA (UW/W): 4.0/4.0 (UW), High Weighted GPA
Rank (or percentile): 1/~600
of Honors/AP/IB/Dual Enrollment/etc.: 1 Regular, 22 APs, 3 Dual Enrollment Classes (Lin Alg, Diff EQ, Multivariable Calc.), Rest of my classes were Honors/Pre-AP
Senior Year Course Load: AP Art History, AP European History, AP Gov/Econ, AP Physics C, AP Environmental Science, AP English Literature
Standardized Testing
SAT: 1550 (750RW, 800M)
AP/IB: 5s and 4s
Other (ex. IELTS, TOEFL, etc.): N/A
Extracurriculars/Activities
1 Independent Research
2 State Officer for CTSO
3 STEM Non-Profit
4 Intern @ Startup
5 Researcher @ T10
6 Researcher @ T20
7 World Science Scholar
8 AI Club President @ School
9 CS Club President @ School
10 Freelance Tutor
Awards/Honors
1 Special Award @ ISEF, 2x ISEF Finalist
2 Oral Presentation Winner @ National Junior Science and Humanities Symposium
3 2x American Junior Academy of Science Fellow
4 1st Author of 3 Research Publications
5 2nd Place @ DECA ICDC
Letters of Recommendation
CS Teacher: 10/10, knew him really well, helped him out a bunch w/ classwork/other activities
English Teacher: 6/10, was a good student in her class? not sure if I was the best student, but definitely liked her class a lot (and did fairly well overall)
External Rec #1 (Professor): 10/10, worked in his research lab, 1st author of paper
External Rec #2 (Mentor): 10/10, worked at his startup, built some really cool software
Interviews
MIT (EA) - 5/10, super nervous for this interview (was my first one), ~45 mins and not sure if I connected well with my interviewer
Harvard - 7/10, pretty good, run-of-the-mill interview; ~1hr
Duke - 10/10, 2hr interview
Yale - 7/10, got a really late interview request (~2 weeks before decision came out), she grilled me on Shakespeare for almost the entire time lol
Princeton - 10/10, connected well w/ interviewer
Georgia Tech Stamps Scholarship Semifinalist Interview - 8/10, got finalist status (didn't attend weekend)
UT Austin CSB - 10/10, 1hr 30 min convo w/ interviewer
UPenn M&T - 6/10, average interview
Essays
Common App Essay: Finished common app before school yr started. I thought it was a solid 8/10.
Supplementals: Started these around a week before they were due for all of my schools (I got deferred from MIT lol). Was super stressed and definitely crunched for time. For the ivies I applied to, I thought they were fairly good (7/10). For schools I didn't really care all too much (and thus spent very little time on) about they were around a 4/10. In particular, I spent an extraordinary amount of time (relatively) on my supplementals for Harvard, MIT, and UPenn.
Decisions
Acceptances:
UTD (w/ full ride + stipend)
Texas A&M ($3k/yr lol)
Georgia Tech (EA w/ Stamps Finalist, did not attend weekend)
UT Austin (EA w/ Turing Scholars, Computer Science + Business Honors)
UCLA
Rice (w/ Full Ride + 20k Research Stipend)
Cornell (w/ Hunter R. Rawlings III Cornell Presidential Research Scholar)
Duke
Yale
Stanford (Update: Committed!)
Waitlists:
Carnegie Mellon
UPenn
Princeton
Columbia
Harvard
Rejections:
MIT (EA deferred rejected, dream school)
Caltech
UC Berkeley
Additional Info:
Put a few extra science/research awards + Coca-Cola Scholar. Talked about special family circumstances.
Reflection/Advice:

1. The college admissions process can be unpredictable but it isn't random: Your essays, personality, and extracurriculars are extremely important. There are tons of people on this subreddit with extraordinary qualifications that definitely are capable of performing well at a T10 school, but many don't gain admission. My best advice to anyone is focus less on maximizing your awards/ECs and focus more on enjoying what you do. Throughout high school, I've found great enjoyment and fun in all the activities I participate in. Your essays should reflect that you are a genuine person who has a personality outside academics—what do you do for fun?, are you kind to other people around you?, are you curious?, etc.
2. Don't place so much emphasis on landing a top school: Trust me, there's (most probably) going to be a point where you're getting rejection/waitlist after rejection/waitlist. I was in the same position, but what I came to realize amidst these rejections was that I would've been happy at my state school as well. Your activities shape you as a person—if you're genuinely passionate about them, it doesn't matter whether or not you get into a college because of them, you still gained valuable skills/learned something.
3. You're probably not going to get into your dream school: My dream school was MIT. My second dream school was Harvard. My third choice was Stanford. I didn't get into my first two choices, and some of the smartest people I know who have far better credentials than I could ever attain (ISEF 1st place winner, Olympiad Qualifiers, RSI, etc.) didn't get into their dream schools. That's completely fine! Like I said before, college admissions is unpredictable, but not random. Before shotgunning or applying to a bunch of schools, remember that there's a high chance you may not get into the school you want to.

I'm going to end this section off with a translated quote from one of my favorite movies of all time (3 Idiots): Don't pursue success; pursue excellence, and success will follow. I think this perfectly encapsulates my experience with college admissions. I've found that the common theme between several HYPSM admits I know is that they didn't care about college admissions until their senior year; instead, they focused on being excellent at what they enjoyed doing. If you do the same, there's a higher chance (although not guaranteed), that you will land one of your top choices.
If you want help in the admissions process, finding research, or tutoring, feel free to private message me, I'd love to help :)

NOTE: I have not officially committed, but I will update this post by mid-April with my final decision!
ANOTHER NOTE: I COMMITTED TO PENN LSM!!! ROLL QUAKE
I wanted to make this because I haven't seen too many stereotypical-demographic BS/MD applicant results here. there's also so much (good and bad) that I've learned about this application process along the journey, and I'm here to give that advice to you earlier than I learned it through experience. so get ready for a super long post :)
some abbreviations that I'll be using:

• UG: undergrad
• SF: Semifinalist
• RF: Regional Finalist
• UW: unweighted, W: weighted
• AO: admissions officer
• CA: Common App

​
Demographics

• Gender: M
• Race/Ethnicity: Asian
• Residence: Western US
• Income Bracket: I don't qualify for need-based financial aid
• Type of School: Small, semi-competitive charter school
• Hooks (Recruited Athlete, URM, First-Gen, Geographic, Legacy, LGBTQ+, etc.): N/A
• Intended Major(s): medical anthropology, BME, tech & society, health/medicine, neuroscience and business ;) (very school-dependent, so PM me if you wanna know specific details)

​
Academics

• GPA: 4.00/4.00 (UW), 4.86/5.00 (W)
• Rank (or percentile): N/A (school does not do class rank/percentile)
• Honors/AP/IB/Dual Enrollment: 5 Regular, 8 Honors, 14 APs, no IB/DE
• Senior Year Course Load: Post-AP Science, Post-AP Foreign Language, Post-AP Math, AP Research

​
Standardized Testing

• SAT: Did not take
• ACT (submitted to every school):
  • One-sitting: 34 (36E, 34M, 36R, 31S) (one-sitting is sometimes required for BS/MDs)
  • Superscore: 35 (36E, 35M, 36R, 31S)
• PSAT: 1470 (710RW, 760M)
• AP: APUSH (4), Bio (5), Calc AB (5), Calc BC (5), Chem (5), English Lang (4), English Lit (4), Euro (4), Human Geo (4), Psych (5), Research (N/A), Seminar (5), Spanish Lang (5), US Govt. (5)
• Other: I took the CASPer and got 4th Quartile (more on this in the "Interviews" section)

​
Extracurriculars/Activities (I only included these 10 for CA, but I included many more for BS/MDs and scholarships. PM me if you want the full list of ECs I used for my BS/MDs)

1. international 501(c)(3) in disability tech and education-related areas (3 years). a legitimate passion project that's changed the course of my life (and defined my career aspirations).
2. computational epidemiology research with in-state university's professor (3 years). first-authored preprint, research used weekly by CDC for one of the most impactful national epidemiological projects in recent history. with that being said, I did NOT compete in any science fairs/symposiums nor did I publish in any journal or present at any conference.
3. policy advocacy for topics related to #1 EC (<1 year). co-wrote multiple position papers on international level with multiple UN major groups. this wasn't a "resume builder," but I could only begin this so recently due to age restrictions.
4. instrument #1 (13 years). performed numerous national concerts for this. wrote 1 essay on how this has uniquely shaped my thinking processes and what I want to keep exploring in college.
5. instrument #2 (8 years). played with local symphony for 6 years. wrote 1 essay on this and how it's also uniquely shaped my thinking processes and what I want to keep exploring in college.
6. foundepresident of medicine-oriented youth club with hospital affiliation (3 years).
7. hospital summer volunteering and language translating/rad tech shadowing (4 months).
8. shadow at doctor's office (2 years). also observed some procedures, wrote informal meta-analyses on common conditions to show to doctor.
9. very small intersectional science-humanities research program (1 month long). was able to write many of my "why major" and "why school" essays based on the insight I gained from this.
10. music museum volunteer (<1 year). wrote this to end on a lighter note and give a foot-in-the-door for AOs regarding some slightly resume-related but also exploratory activities.

​
Awards/Honors (I only included these 5 for CA, but I included many more for BS/MDs and scholarships. PM me if you want the full list of awards I used for my BS/MDs)

1. Prestigious youth social entrepreneurship award #1 ($5K, summit, 1 of 30 globally, for EC #1)
2. Prestigious youth social entrepreneurship award #2 ($5K, summit, 1 of 30 nationally, for EC #1)
3. Prestigious youth social entrepreneurship award #3 ($3K, summit, 1 of 52 nationally, for EC #1)
4. External $10K Scholarship
5. Rensselaer Medal ($160K RPI scholarship, selected by my counselor for this in junior year)

​
Letters of Recommendation (yes I needed 10 for BS/MDs 💀)

• Teacher 1: I've messed up a few times in their classes but learned from my mistakes. I've always been extremely attentive and they know the perseverant journey I've had in their classes.
• Teacher 2: we've known each other since middle school since they also supervised a school club I was in. they've supported me at my concerts and know me on a personal level, not to mention that they know how I've persevered and helped others persevere through academic setbacks.
• Teacher 3: we've academically known each other since middle school. I've always been very attentive and contributive in their classes and got student of the year for one of them.
• Teacher 4: one of the best people I've ever known. they've supported me at my concerts and know me personally, not to mention that they know that their classes have changed how I view the world.
• School Counselor: I've developed a very solid connection with them since the beginning of junior year and they're one of the most supportive people to me.
• External 1 (#2 EC's Research Mentor): I've shown my initiative to always learn from them and be inventive, and they're always interested in hearing about my academics/other ECs.
• External 2 (Doctor I shadowed): I've always asked questions while shadowing and they always welcome me to closely observe even during some procedures.
• External 3 (Lead of Organization Collaborating with my initiative, not submitted to CA): could talk about my path to collaborating with their organization, tangible impact we've had on our community together.
• External 4 (Lead of Organization Collaborating with my initiative, not submitted to CA): could talk about my work in the community and with their org (also huge medical facility in the community), individual anecdotes that are heart-touching.
• External 5 (Supervisor for #6 EC): could talk about my perseverance in founding/leading, innovative ways to expand club, and my traits that would prep me to become an excellent physician.

​
Interviews

• Traditional UG:
  • Duke (my only traditional UG interview; late-February, virtual): Interviewer was very intrigued by my work, we had some parallels regarding our fields of work and overall goals. I also mentioned something so specific about Duke that brought back lots of nostalgia for them and sparked a mini conversation that made them aware of how I would fit in at Duke (so DO YOUR SCHOOL RESEARCH to a T).
  • Georgia Tech Stamps (full-ride) SF (Kira Talent; early-February, virtual): I had prepped a lot for this, but my interview did not go very well (super bummed about this but it was completely my fault). However, I have to say that they do a very good job of showing you the infinite opportunities that they offers as a community, including putting you in contact with numerous Scholars/alumni and hosting several info sessions.
  • Emory Woodruff (full-ride) Finalist (2-part interview):
    • Kira Talent (early-March, virtual): pretty reasonable and short (~30 minutes). same type of content prep as GT Stamps interview, but the practice with the GT Stamps one definitely helped me regarding verbal prep.
    • Group Interviews (late-March, in-person): very interesting, honestly kinda fun. they mainly test your ability to work on-the-spot WITH OTHER PEOPLE given a certain prompt and discern your natural leadership abilities (not being too overpowering but also never staying silent).
• Scholarship (can't share too many details on this post due to confidentiality):
  • Coke Scholar RF Interview (late-January, virtual): very comforting and conversational. I fit into the mindset of the community with ease, and appreciated how much they had read up on me.
  • Private In-State Scholarship (late-January, virtual): pretty intense interview, but I felt fairly confident about this one. Also appreciated how much they had read up on me, and asked for my opinion on pressing issues statewide.
• BS/MD (can't share too many details here due to confidentiality):
  • Creighton "BS/MD" (early-February, chose to have it in-person): VERY VERY relaxed. it consisted of 1 med student conversation for ~20 minutes where they ask about experiences on your application. overall day was also very welcoming/informative, and I really appreciated how much my interviewer had studied my application.
  • VCU BS/MD (late-February, virtual): very well-rounded experience. MMI was very conversational.
  • RPI/AMC BS/MD (early-March, virtual): surprisingly not too intense, required the same amount of prep as VCU, started off meh but got better as the interview went on.
  • Arizona BS/MD (early-March, virtual): very conversational, but slightly disappointed because I couldn't mention a few details that would've made my answers more potent.
• CASPer Test (late-January): I started prepping 6 days before my test with no game plan whatsoever. I binged youtube videos, did dozens of practice scenarios, memorized the test's format, and nailed down my typing speed, and ended up getting 4th Quartile (highest possible score). In hindsight, many of my peers (who got into other BS/MDs) and I said that taking the CASPer actually helped them prep for their MMIs the most. PM me if you need tips on how to prep (or cram) for this.
• Brown Video Portfolio: very fun to make. got to express the non-academic and non-EC/artsy side of me, show my humor, and be very inventive.
• NOTE: since the beginning of junior year, I've also talked to A LOT of alums/current students at nearly all of the BS/MDs, scholarships, schools, and programs I applied to (LinkedIn is actually useful??). I highly recommend doing this, as they aren't necessarily "interviews," but very informative, nonjudgemental conversations. PM me for tips regarding this.

​
Essays

• context: I started writing 1 week after my junior year APs finished. in total, I wrote 90 essays for UGs and BS/MDs and at least 25 for scholarships.
• I would say that my essays really differentiated me versus any other component of my application. I'm really proud that I wrote some banger hooks and my essays nailed down themes that were very central to who I am, what change I want to make, my approaches to tasks, and how I want to try new things. tip: don't be afraid to experiment with the format of your essay, as long as it contains a fairly evident, overarching theme. I would advise that each applicant reads this post to understand the AO perspective of essays and letters of recommendation.
• My CA personal statement focused on my journey and reasons for creating EC #1, and incorporated some humor, a very appealing hook, and a cohesive theme that applies to all of life.
• My BS/MD personal statement focused on a specific, seemingly-unconventional experience that reflected various of my clinical experiences and therefore my motivations to enter medicine. it was a slightly untraditional approach, but it seemed to relatively work with 4 invites from 12 programs (not counting PLME since they don't do interviews).

​
RESULTS (NOTE: I've also attached my BS/MD decisions as a Sankey diagram to visualize that process better: [link])

• Acceptances:
  • Georgia Tech (EA II w/ Stamps SF, but did not advance to Finalist round post-interview, which I was pretty sad about).
  • UNC Chapel Hill (EA w/ Honors Carolina and Accelerated Research Program).
  • Emory (RD w/ Woodruff Scholarship Finalist. Did not receive Scholarship post-interviews but received half-tuition because of Finalist status).
  • VANDERBILT!!! (RD w/ $250K CORNELIUS VANDERBILT SCHOLARSHIP (+ $8K National Merit Finalist Award), a dream since 9th grade).
  • Duke!! (RD).
  • PENN LSM (Wharton + Neuroscience)!!! (RD, seriously my DREAM UG PROGRAM FOR 3 YEARS, got in without any LSM or even penn UG interview and nearly cried when I got in so ARE YOU KIDDING ME).
  • Pitt (Rolling w/ Frederick Honors College and $80K Merit Scholarship).
  • Hofstra (EA II w/ Rabinowitz Honors College and $148K Presidential Scholarship).
  • VCU (Rolling w/ Honors College and $146K Presidential Scholarship).
    • ACCEPTED BS/MD!!! (AHHH I GOT INTO MEDICAL SCHOOL)
  • Creighton (Rolling w/ $112K Magis Award + $8K Roman Shaffel, S.J. Award).
    • Accepted "BS/MD" (would take VCU's BS/MD over this).
  • Temple (Rolling w/ Honors College and $80K Provost's Scholar Award).
  • In-state Safety (Rolling w/ Honors College and some scholarship money).
  • Arizona (Rolling w/ Franke Honors College and $72K National Merit Finalist Award).
  • Baylor (RD w/ $92K Distinction Award).
  • Rochester (RD w/ $35K Bausch + Lomb Honorary Award).
  • GW (RD w/ $125K Presidential Scholarship).
  • COCA-COLA SCHOLARSHIP ($20K + summit + massive alumni network)!!! (Another literal dream since 10th grade, I still cannot believe it).
    • I submitted an update to all of my schools upon becoming a RF and Scholar, respectively.
• Rejections:
  • Pitt BS/MD (Round 1, PSA: I don't recommend applying to Medicine GAP (this program) or Penn State's PMM program unless you have a (near) perfect SAT/ACT and UW GPA).
  • Hofstra BS/MD (GHOSTED Round 1, sooo mean for what).
  • Temple BS/MD (Round 1).
  • Baylor BS/MD (Round 1).
  • Case Western BS/MD (Round 1, also withdrew from traditional UG consideration).
  • Syracuse BS/MD (Round 1, also withdrew from traditional UG consideration).
  • Rochester BS/MD (Round 1, kinda sad because I loved my essays).
  • GW BS/MD (Round 1).
  • Arizona BS/MD (post-interview). I have a lot of emotions with this decision, especially since it was my last decision and was closest to my home state.
  • Yale (SCEA, initially hurt since I had grown to love Yale a lot, but didn't really care about the rejection afterwards).
  • Harvard (RD).
  • Brown (RD, rejected from UG and PLME rippppp).
  • Robertson Scholarship (Round 1).
  • Private In-State Scholarship (became a SF, but rejected from becoming Finalist post-interview).
    • This was one of the most upsetting moments of the cycle, especially because of a lot of factors led me to think that I would advance, but I still would receive a $60K scholarship in total from them if I chose to stay in-state
• Waitlists:
  • RPI BS/MD (RD w/ $160K Rensselaer Medal Award, post-interview).
  • Northwestern (RD, accidentally wrote Harvard instead of Northwestern on my essays so yikes).
  • Case Western (RD, even though I chose not to be considered for UG post-BS/MD rejection lol).

​
Additional Information
I included 9 other honors (20-30 words each) and lots of press-feature links regarding my #1 and #2 ECs (90% of the links were for my #1 EC). I also included my other experiences in research and shadowing and gave brief specifications (which medical speciality, when, how many hours, some specific things I did).
​
Reflection/Advice
before someone comes at me, I did not use ANY familial connections to find/improve my ECs. my #1 strategy is to cold-email, which I've talked about in a past comment here.
writing this post is very emotional. I was one of those kids that began college admissions research WAY too early, meaning I've been HOOKED onto the whole process for an absurd amount of time. as a consequence, I developed a version of "duck syndrome" and couldn't do anything but always compare my activities/accomplishments to others and think that others were effortlessly taking on everything while I just grinded. over time, I've realized that this feeling is EXTREMELY common amongst a majority of competitive applicants. if you take away one thing from this post, it's to try not to fall into this, as it's extremely unhealthy. please try not to compare yourself to others, stay away from deep college research until at least middle of sophomore year, and know that there is genuinely no one factor that differentiates "accepted" from "rejected." and frankly, that's the unfortunate truth of college admissions: we don't know how many variables exist that AOs factor into their decisions, and that's why admissions is SO RANDOM. for that reason, just continue to refine your own craft, and (this is cliché but) "display the best version of YOURSELF."
this cycle was nothing short of a rollercoaster (for me and others). I've had some (delusional) moments where I thought I would get into most of my schools, but I've had many more moments where I thought I should start preparing for my safety school, because ___ is lacking in my application (I was fearing that lack of school involvement would be evident, since I've never done DECA/HOSA/FBLA and hold very little involvement in school clubs). there was a point when my fears started coming true: my first 7 legit results were all rejections. in these straining moments, I asked myself is "What else could I have done?" at least 10 times per day. and the answer is nothing. and I'm extremely grateful that the final results proved to be a balance of all outcomes.
my motto for the whole year was "just get through it." I pushed through each application with my 100% and didn't settle for any less effort. I GUARANTEE you, if you try as hard as you can to shoot for the stars, you'll land closer to them than if you never tried as hard. it's very possible that you won't see the results immediately, but you will eventually.
my biggest realization about college admissions: you're applying to an institution to take advantage of their resources/traditions/culture in order to further your own aspirations and catalyze what change you want to make in this world. to optimize this, you have to vibrantly display what you think are the most important aspects that define WHO you are, and also what you would use at the institution to actualize those aspirations. after you've tried your hardest to do so, it's up to each program to consider whether you would thrive in their specific environment or not.
ultimately, my decision of bs/md vs. LSM comes down to a few things, but is primarily based on how hard I'm willing to work for med school and go through an even more grueling process than these past few months. however, for me personally, I believe that LSM's resources can provide me an experience like literally no other, and also provide me with some flexibility regarding if I still want to pursue medicine or go into consulting first or even another healthcare field. so yes, I'm leaning toward LSM right now.
edit: in fact, I'm still shocked because I, as a non-legacy, ORM, no FGLI, got into WHARTON with 0 economic ECs or classes (I don't think my organization or policy work really count as legit business ECs either). So literally ANYTHING is possible in college admissions. ANYTHING.
finally, I'm now also launching a consulting program (essays, standardized test prep, internships, initiative building, BS/MD and scholarship interview prep, etc.). this includes some free sessions, but I'm still finalizing this with my team, who are all '24 coke scholars accepted into and attending some of the most prestigious programs nationally and aiming to pursue medicine, biotech, CS, IB/consulting, poli sci, and much more. PM me if you would like more information.
otherwise, also feel free to PM me questions related to my application, experiences, or just admissions in general. also lmk if y'all want me to make another advice post and I will write my heart out. I hope to keep making much more admissions content in the very near future.
thanks for listening to my ted talk :)

I have spent hours in contemplation, corridors exploring and goblins bespoiling, hurling any variety of darts and darting about piety unfurling. Throughout this time, I have sacrificed time and essence, facing the facts and flensing my feelings at hand and have concluded: Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup was never meant to be played. This is a game in the vein of NetHack, where you can die in one turn, even turn 1, from fall damage dismounting your horse. DCSS is not quite that immediate. Make no mistake, your fate is still more or less predetermined (all roads lead to the Morgue) but there's an illusion of choice about how to get there. This game you can get blasted/incapacitated in one turn by Jessica/Sigmund/GrindeIjyb/gnoll with a wand/etc, even the turn they enter your line of sight, dying if not that very moment then the next couple thereafter.
It's quite a charming setup, at the very least. 3 stats, STR, DEX, INT. 3 defenses, AC/SH, EV, Will. 3 resources, HP, MP, Piety. 3 to the power of three, 27. 27 Species, 27 Backgrounds, 27 Gods, your pick of counting Demigod or Pakellas (RIP and hats off to the other deities strewn wasted on the design floor). 27 levels down the road to the Orb of Zot (counting Temple and the entrance), 27 side branches/portals (+/- 2 depending on how you count them), 27 levels of a Ziggurat, 27 as Skill and XP level caps. 27²⁷ ways of meeting your demise. Why though? It all boils down to how you decide to play the game. Or, perhaps better said, test your fortune and/or patience, as the three rough archetypes: armor-clad Warriors of great Strength, nigh-untouchable Rogues of nimble Dexterity, sagacious Mages of studious Intelligence.
The charms go away (RIP Shroud of Golubria, gone too soon) once you get to playing. For starters, Warriors are unviable, all the weapons except axes are single target and you're going to get mobbed. So, play a Rogue, this is a Roguelike, after all. Be a sneaky stabber and eliminate enemies one by one. Stabbing is unviable, Stealth is never guaranteed and Short Blades fall off in endgame. So, play a spellcaster. Spellcasting is unviable, your starter spells are all low level and you're never guaranteed to find a good spell book. Even Sif Muna and Vehumet all randomly gift their spells. Kikubaaqudgha doesn't guarantee a high level spell book until maximum piety, but your getting there is highly unlikely. Plus, casters get interrupted by armor. So, play a Warrior...
This is maybe a bit unfair. Let's try this going the other direction. Spellcasting is unviable? Play Enchanter. The plan: combo your Stealth with stab-enhancing spells. Splat! Your spells fall flat against phantoms and named mobs. Let's try warrior-rogue. Hunter. The plan: snipe foos before they get to you. Still not viable. Any armor slows your ranged attacks, so the advantage of fighting at range is a trap. The mob closes the gap because your longbow attack speed is 1.7 (casually approach player character), and since you're not wearing anything with meaningful AC you get shredded. YASS (Yet Another Stupid Splat). Fustibali got nuked some versions back, too, so no genius ranged+shield shenanigans here. Sure, Qazlal gives you SH, but only at high piety, and "Now all of China knows you're here." Last chance. Mage-warrior. This is hypothetically the best route to go, both because what the line of what counts as magic is blurred thanks to God abilities, and because thanks to the game design you don't have to be locked into a fixed skill progression. The plan: bombard the dungeon, run out of MP, start the melee bloodbath. Whoops, all splats! Your skills are spread too thin between Armor, Fighting, Dodging, Spellcasting, your magic school(/schools!) of choice, Invocations, Evocations because the game autoskilling decided to boost that wand of paralysis you found on D3 (congratulations, though you already let it get to your head), and your weapon of choice.
Speaking of which, here's the biggest heaping, steaming pile of death yak manure hitherto seen and perhaps the best encrapsulation of everything thus far. All the weapons suck. This is not a skill issue, not completely, at least, this is by design, and I bring forth as evidence the consensus opinion as documented on the wiki at time of writing. •Short Blades? Fall off past Lair, utterly useless in Zot. Plus, "'Pure' Stealth is less viable than other offensive skills. The enemy always has a chance to wake up... and training only Stealth means you can't deal with anything that wakes up. Plus, enemies often spawn in packs, and if one enemy detects you, they all wake up." •Long Blades? "Since Long Blades scale with dexterity, they are relatively better on Dodging-focused characters." You can't dodge everything, and riposte was ripped posthaste, which means you don't get to train Dodging to better survive and stand a slightly better fighting chance than a Frozen Rampart in Gehenna. •Maces? "Maces & Flails have no special gimmicks." Sure, ogres can 1HKO you with Giant Clubs, but you can't wield em, and even if you did you either: (1) are also training Throwing for Large Rocks and are getting torn to pieces from lack of plus sized armor, (2) are a Formicid but still staggering under the weight because "Whether you actually want to use [a giant club] is another story. Until they get enough skill, characters will suffer with slow speed and low accuracy." For the roster as a whole, maces and flails being the most basic and uninspiring weapons means it's easy to ooga booga, and if the name of the game is dungeon CRAWL then flailing around o-tabbing just doesn't cut it, pun intended. •Staves? "Once your character obtains a high skill level, the fact that staves are 'skill-friendly' doesn't matter. I.e. if you have 20 weapon skill, you'll do more damage with a great mace than with lajatang." •Polearms having reach is nice, but you're still not 2HKOing anything besides D1 mobs with em past ~D8 and if you've got a two-hander you're only adding another head to the hydra, speeding up your HP loss compared to meleeing it with any other weapon. •Axes? Death trap. General advice says play like a scaredy cat (sorry, "follow The Velvet Path") and don't engage anything. The very first point on "Escaping from (and avoiding) trouble" is "Don't move towards enemies." From "Weapon Choice": "Even with an axe, it's good practice to fight 1v1 or in hallways". It's the JoJo predicament. I need to stay away from trouble, but I can't reduce them to corpses without getting closer. A 27-tined Lernaean Rake of a Morton's Fork. Worse stats, 1v1ing means no cleaving, no guarantees on Flaming brand for hydras in Lair. •Unarmed? "No enchantment, brand, or artefact properties. At low skill, if you don't have a transformation, Unarmed Combat is relatively weak." Being a punch bucket is loads of entertainment ("fun" is subjective here), and having Ol' Reliable one ' press away is nice, but in most cases you're giving up venom or a randart resist. Pretty meh, except for ghouls, octopodes, felidae, and trolls. •Throwing? Actually is in a good spot as a skill, I'd say. Unless you're a Kobold or Spriggan, in which case no more silver javelins, and your quickest way past malmutators. I will never understand why silver boomerangs were deleted. Good luck finding ammo, though! Going Gladiator means your nets will be shredded by D4 and your javelin mulched by D5 if you're planning to use them with any degree of regularity. So much for being a class whose main shtick is starting you off with some heavy-duty throwables! The wiki: "Throwing is closer to Evocations than a traditional weapon skill. Since ammunition is so limited, you cannot use Throwing weapons for every fight." I might not agree all the way with that first point, but if Throwing is indeed "not a weapon skill" (despite having cross trained in previous editions with Slings) then that only serves to prove my point about all the weapons/weapon skills being hot trash.
The fact that the weapon skills cross-train, taunting you with false encouragement that "you got this, sport, all these disparate martial disciplines can't be so different," on top of the fact that the weapons were subpar anyway, only serves to highlight that they are all just terrible. The idea is to ease transition from switching over, "should they come across an attractive weapon. One great example would be Short Blades; a quick blade is useful, but less so once enemies get higher and higher AC." So lemme get this straight: the highest DPR (the one exception being attacks against sleeping enemies aka high-tier stab) Short Blade, is STILL a worthless weapon? "A dagger of venom can take you to Lair with 0 skill investment. This isn't because daggers are good, but because the venom brand is so powerful in the early Dungeon." In short, it's a crutch. You're carried. Git gud. All your training as a Brigand or Enchanter or Venom Mage means nothing, confound the stabs, 'cuz sooner or later you'll just switch to the Flaming Scimitar you looted off an Efreet, exactly as intended. Congratulations. Oh boy, time to put a whole nother skill under 100% training to get to 1.0 delay, never mind that by this point flaming bats, blink frogs, and flying skulls are just zipping around everywhere at Mach 0.6 DecaAut anyway, and you still can't hit them with your fancy new weapon anyway both because of their absurd EV and for your lack of Skill! Truth is, the game was rigged from the start.
My advice? Find an orb, any orb, Guile, Mayhem, Energy, what have you, and cut your losses. Abscond with one of them, not the portable Sentinel Marking Pan-lord-summoning booby trap that is the Orb of Zot. Your life is worth more that wasting your time on that. Touch grass; I promise Fedhas's wrath will not be incurred if you're doing that away from this miserable dungeon. Go upstairs to the outside! Your health will thank you for it. Else, you desperately die, you rot and reanimate, only adding to this terrible turbid torpor. Zot comes for us all.
_Done waiting.
Claw's ghost wails menacingly.

x

Press: ? - help, v - describe, . - travel, g - get item
Here: Claw's ghost (fire blocked by a runed translucent screen)
Item here: a scroll of torment.
The floor, splattered with blood, sweat, and tears.

v a

The ghost of Claw the Vexing, an amateur Troll Salt Elementalist of Rue.
It looks harmless.

Hello guys I’ve ran 5-6 cycles in my life. Mainly 16-20 weeks. On this cycle I just began (2 weeks in) it’s kind of a lighter cycle. 600mgs of Test-Cyp and 300mgs of Deca weekly. And I recently came across some Injectable Dbol (ran dbol several times but always oral never injectable) I’ve been shooting 50mgs of injectable dbol daily. And about a week ago I got a sore throat nothing major. And I figured it would dissipate after 6-7 days. Now I’m the 7th day in and it’s left my throat and hit my nose and chest only getting worse. OBVIOUSLY I’ve had many colds/flu like this before but usually disappear after a week and this one seems to be dragging out longer than normal and I was just curious if there may be a correlation between this and the cycle. I’ve researched and pretty much any AAS keeps ur body from producing as many white blood cells as it normally would. (Slightly suppressing the immune system) but again I’ve ran a good bit of cycles and many of them was way heavier than this one. I’ve ran 75mgs of anadrol and 1400mgs of sustanon with 700mgs of deca when I was younger and never experienced this “roid flu” so some insight would be great thanks

Hi guys this is a random shout and a bit of a long story but here goes..
(Also im aware of mistakes ive made etc)
So me and my mate did a cycle last year, he did alot more then me test 400, dbol, deca high doses..i did 400mg test c 16 weeks and anavar 30mg towards the end..
No i didnt get bloodwork im well aware now i should of done so, it was more of an impulse at the time, throughout the cycle i went on feeling, but managed to drop dropped 4% bodyfat ate clean,no alcohol, got a 6pac and got pretty shredded! The plan was to PCT.. both of us at the same time on the 6th of january.
However my mate killed himself just after christmas and i went under with grief and kind of lost the plot abit..
What ive done instead of PCT (i read alot of storys on the internet, and i have life commitments so i need to function) is ive dropped down to a trt dose of 180mg and i am self administrating via UGL.. cruising basically
Chest and bacne is there not getting any worse but not getting any better! Prob started mid january..
But just lately i have lost all drive to do anything.. diet is slipping, missing the gym, kind of lost all motivation, i am not in the financial position atm to get private bloods and because im in the UK i have no idea what my doctor would say, i enjoy the mental clarity, productivity and my body image with test but i am just absolutely lost. I dont know if its my dose, im depressed, im grieving or what..
Im doing Test E mon weds fri btw! .2 60mg
Thanks for reading this!! 🫶

Hi All,
I'm looking for any help where possible please from anyone with the hormone knowledge to do so and ive sot some bloods where required (even though Dr has missed e2) .
Can anyone please help with reading y story and seeing if you can help at all please 🙏🏽
Firstly, some initial background about me:
I'm male, 43 years old, 5'8, approx 13.5 stone, just got back into training approx a year ago again after a 10 year break (as had kids and just unfortunately let things slip!), had an injury just before Xmas and just getting back into lifting/cardio now👍🏽.
History:
When was much younger (approx 23/25yrs old) I dabbled with anabolic steroids (stupidly) as wasn't too sure with what i was doing... trained with another guy who assured me that he knew wat he was doing.
Long story short, i did a course of deca and test, just 1 pin p/w, didnt seem like a big pr major course for a 6 week period, felt as if had deca dick off it... i waited a while and visited Dr whom said body would sort itself out...
I dont think it did, after getting help was advised yrs ago to do a course of test (sustanon) and did a basic PCT - shot of hcg and then nolvadex/clomid for approx a wk or so (Please note that it was a different time 10/15 yrs ago and couldn't just go upto somebody and starting asking about loss of libido/deca dick/erection issues as can now) so literally did the best i could.
Anyway years passed, I'll agree I got real lazy had different jobs and me and my partner had 2 children, so I thought I'm OK 👍🏽, however years later and and after having symptoms of low T, usual symptoms of brain fog, tiredness, no morning wood, no erections (unless days) ED, PE, achy balls at times... balls feel soft but not small... read that loss of hair on legs is a sign which i have on one leg lower down , joint pain and just tenderness and loss of strength etc... breathing issues (hearts got checked out by ecg and it was fine).
I decided to get checked out and drs reluctantly agreed... after a lot of persistence!
I eventually managed to get an appointment and after getting results saw testosterone was at a measly 9.6 nmol.
I complained this was low and got the nonsense that 'you're within reference range' you don't need anything.
Waited 3/4 months and I managed to get private medical care and got checked out again. Gave Ultrasound, Kidneys and Prostate check which were all fine. Had other bloods checked as follows:
Sodium: 138 (133-146 mmol/L) Potassium: 4.2 (3.5-5.3) Urea: 6.6 (2.5-7.8) Creatnine: 86
LH: 6.7 (1.7-8.6 IU/L) FSH: 6.9 (1.5-12.4 IU/L) Prolactin: 194 (86-324 mu/L) Testosterone: 10.9 (8.64-29 nmol/L)
Thyroid: Free T4: 19.8 (11-26 pmol/L) TSH: 0.79 (0.27-4.2 uU/ML
So as you can see from above, Test levels showing at 10.8 nmol, still low 😕.
Urologist prescribed testosterone and wanted me to be on Testosterone Undecanoate 1 x 3 months. Was on this for 3 months and didn't agree with me had some side effects and came out in weird rashes, caused major PE also so got off asap and wished to change to Sustanon.
Now when I did this as anabolic steroids when younger, didn't have any issues with it. However, as this was prescribed not UGL and medically, they prescribed 1 x 3 weeks! (250mg). Needless to say this was a ridiculous protocol, compared to 1 x 1 week in my younger years! I managed to decrease the time to 1 x 2 weeks! However still awful. This resulted in a major rollercoaster of going up and down constantly with mood changes and just downright horrid to be on. I just had to get off ASAP.
As a wise man once told me "Going to the NHS for TRT is like going to the butchers for a haircut". He wasn't far wrong!
Decided to come off for fertility reasons and till i can afford proper care or inject myself as guessing would need a few smaller injections per week i.e Sust - 1 .03 x 3 times pw. Dr gave me nothing to come off with in terms of PCT.
I acquired some HCG just in case it would have been a bumpy ride along with Nolvadex. Felt literally horrid after coming off the test which was expected. So administered a good 2/3 weeks of HCG after the adequate time needed for injections to clear out if system, then did as follows:
Week 1 - M 2500 iu, T - 500iu - 29/05 Week 2 (EOD) - Sun - 500 iu, Tues - 500iu, Thurs - 500iu - Sat - 500iu - Wk 3 - Mon - 850iu, Wed - 1000iu, Fri - 850 iu.
Felt much better and then was going to start Nolva, but had some ocular side effects and then was told HPTA may just fire up anyway and they may not be needed, so didn't want to risk my eyesight so took the decision to proceed without this.
I waited a few months, had some weakness in muscles coming back and some major itching for some strange reason (when initially administed HCG). However, months passed and slowly started getting back to normal without requiring test from NHS!
So since August 2023, been TRT free, just recently had my NHS appointment to see endo, did fasted bloods this time and they are as follows:
Hb - 156/L (135-180) Calcium adjusted 2.35 mmol/L (2.20-2.60) ALT 53 iu/L (<40) TSH: 2.3 miu/L (0.20-4.00) FSH: 8.0 iu/L (1.0-9.0) FT4: 17.1 pool/L (10.0-20.0) Prolactin: 254 mu/L (<550) Testosterone: 12.4 nmol/L (8.0-30.0) 25 OH Vit D - 38 nmol/L (50-100) SHBG: 16 Ha1bc: 27 mmol/mol (20-41)
Understand that Vit D is low (probably as ran out of Vit D tabs and its been winter and liver enzymes a little high, so getting LFTs in due course but I believe this is because diet not been great.
Endo advised that just need to lose weight and test should increase, which I believe is the generic answer.
I'm now getting back into gym and doing cardio - walking everyday at dinner time, cutting down on all fats and increased healthy fats (i.e almond butter, salmon, tuna and fish oils etc) and changing lifestyle again.
Can anyone comment on the latest bloods though please?
FSH looks a little high? SHBG low? Test increased a little but still low? Prolactin high? Is this a cause for concern? Any additional areas?
Endo forgot to post Oestradiol/e2! I'll chase him up about this but believed it was 116 when last checked and then when came off TRT measured at 70 pmol, however think this will have increased by now too but what figure is optimal with this?
Any help would be greatly appreciated! 👍🏽👌🏽

hello,
Information: i'm a female.
Currently, I've been on test p for three months in preparation for a powerlifting meet. My plan was to add dbol into the last three weeks. Before adding dbol, my body weight was 2 lbs over the upper limit of my weight class. After one week of adding dbol, my weight increased by approximately 2 lbs, leaving me 4 lbs above my weight class. I have no prior experience with water weight cuts while on dbol. Can anyone suggest if it's possible to do a normal water weight cut while on dbol (due to water retention issue)? If it's impossible, I will consider stop dbol and then go with the water cut. Many thanks!

Hello everyone! As a returning player after a year and a half, I am very excited to see that a lot of other players are waiting for the realm rework to come back to the game. While I think it will be great for the game, there are other problems that have been neglected for a long time, and I would like to make sure I am not the only one that feels this way. I have some ideas, but would love to see what everyone thinks. Also, they are not in any specific order, just what came to mind when typing this.

• Guild rework: This one is definitely on top of everyone's mind, and there were already a lot of great ideas that Deca didn't listen. To try something different, I would propose a small participation in the current seasonal missions. Maybe something simple, like just doing "x" dungeon with 2 members of your guild would be cool. Maybe even adding a seasonal guild chest, where you could easily store pots and items to share with the guildies. And this even opens space to a seasonal reward chest, for completing every guild related quest.
  
• HP scaling changes: One of the main reasons I loved this game was the obvious impact that running a dungeon with 85 players had when compared with running the dungeon with 15. Yeah, we all know this was change for theoretical "better loot drops" (was for the $$$), but I still hate that it's absurd how much faster and safer it is to run an endgame dungeon with less than 20 players. I really think that the HP scaling changes should be reconsidered, so that one player has a lot less impact, and a big group with diverse players is at least decently viable.
  
• O3 counters: So since I came back to the game, I was really surprised when my guildies told me that there was no more counters in the fight. I was actually so excited. But what they actually meant by that is there are no more sick counters. What the hell?? Like I understand that people intentionally hit guards to "parse" and it was kinda toxic, but completely removing it for a silence + 1 invulnerable phase is horrendous. Now it's just a complete waste of everyone's time. I would also like to add how lazy this is, since by using 3rd party shit we can see how much damage someone did to guards, Deca 100% can access that too, so why didn't you just apply the sick counter to the people that blasted the guard????
  
• General UI and particles: I think this one is a lot more personal, but I would love a particles revamp. I like to play the game with a lot of things disabled or with very low opacity, and one thing that has been bothering me recently is how much new stuff isn't affected by them. As an example, the damn Umi scepter. No, I do not want to see 5 gigantic piles of fireworks and a bunch of squares rotating around them. This also applies to things like polarity particles, huntress traps etc. Not only would this help lower end pcs, but my sanity. Also let me completely disable the emotes, I do not like seeing 40 white bags and 3 cats every single time I finish a dungeon. This also applies to fights that there is still shit happening after boss dies (aka crystal cavern).
  
• Kogbold Steamworks and the Invulnerable Spam: When I came back, I was very hyped to see a new exaltation dungeon as added for the vitality stat, and after doing it once I confidently said I liked it. After doing 3 I convinced myself it was the worst thing ever. Why the hell everything has at least one Invulnerable phase??? IT IS SO DAMN ANNOYING!!! Like why the minions need it? Why the mini boss has to go invulnerable every time it changes his attack pattern?? Why the crystal shild thing that protects the boss has to be invulnerable for so long??? Why the boss animation have to take so long???? Why the boss needs a hole drama movie before exploding at the end???? I really don't know how this left testing. It really surprises me that it has already received changes, and it was worse before. But please, please, please change this dungeon, so people can at least exalt vitality without losing their will to live.
  

Well there is definitely more things I would like to point out, but this is already really big. Thanks to everyone that read all this, and I hope this generates a healthy discussion between everyone, so we can all pray our loved game gets better and more people can enjoy it.

I just had bloodwork done as reference before starting a new cycle, and my free test is very low. Reference range for the bloodwork is 9-47 pg/mL for men, and I got 3.7 pg/mL.

• Total test, SHBG, LH and FSH are well within range.
• SHBG, the usual suspect in these cases, is 48 nmol/L, and the range for men is listed on the test as 12-75, so it seems normal.
• E2 is 13.1 pg/mL, a little lower than usual for me but within "normal range" apparently. Although I don't know, because the normal range comes listed as 0-40 for men, and we all know that zero E2 will fuck you up.
• I don't have an albumin test, but from what I know, albumin binds testosterone really weakly compared to SHBG.
• I'm not dehydrated.

So anyway, any ideas as for why my free test is so low? Could the test be a fluke?
Additional info: I've only ever done test + HCG cycles in the past. Some dbol long ago. Last cycle was more than 8 months ago. I don't usually do any PCT, my values usually come up fine by themselves a couple of months after being off.

Warning for slight mentions of violence/pedophilia and general ick

The Many Tales of the Shatters Discord

As we all know, Discord can be home to both some of the most interesting and simultaneously low stakes drama apart from possibly RP forums, although both platforms do seem to have many similar traits and ideals going on. Likewise, video game communities in general, especially of the MMORPG variety, also tend to be hotspots for both pointless and intense drama themselves. Combining both in a pot would obviously spawn an unholy writeup in and of itself, but the ingredient X that makes me want to really catalog some of the brain-numbing tales of a pixel-based gaming discord? Yes, that would be the internet authority gained by being a Discord Moderator™. While this is the point in time that I usually would say grab a snack and drink, it really isn’t the best kind of phrase to use as this writeup is going to be more of a 9 course meal due to the many similar, but not exactly concurrent or even directly related dramatic situations, instead of one big course. Think of a music festival; different bands and performances at different times just with the same stage. A quick disclaimer as well, I was very involved in this community so while I will be trying to be as unbiased as I can, the majority of these tales are from my viewpoint and there are always two sides of the story. Furthermore, to preserve privacy, I will be using placeholder names in sections and censoring names in screenshots. It’s easy to find out who said what, especially if you are part of this community, but let’s respect the privacy of everyone for the sake of this writeup and keep these tales for what they are, entertainment. If you know any of these people or want to do any digging about who said what, nobody can stop you, but I will be keeping it to myself as should you.

Realm of the Mad God

Some background information to start with; what is the Shatters Discord and what is RoTMG? A quick summary would be that it is a “raiding” Discord server for the roguelike game Realm of the Mad God, and I’ll break down all this terminology so that the average internet user can understand, and even comprehend the degeneracy I’ll be describing. Realm of the Mad God of a 8-bit style, bullet-hell MMORPG, where you take your character in a world called a realm, where you must defeat monsters and bosses in order to face down the “final boss” Oryx, who has 3 different fights of increasing difficulty. Death in the game is permanent, with your character and the items held being gone forever on death. You do have the ability to have multiple characters at a time, and a vault to save valuable items, and upward progression is determined by maxing out a character's stats through potions and higher tier gear, both obtained through completing dungeons. There are many other factors to learn, but key ones to know would be that stat increase potions only affect the character they are used on; progress starts from 0 upon death; with there being 8 stats to farm, hence the terms 0/8 to 8/8. The only other way to permanently increase stats would be to complete certain end-game dungeons using an 8/8 character, with one called the Shatters being the one in question today. This information is obviously a gross oversimplification of the game and how to play, but it should help you understand the many bites of drama in question.

The Shatters

As one of the very first endgame dungeons, The Shatters was originally designed by a player on the Wildshadow Forums (The original developer of RotMG), and was for a long time, one of the most difficult dungeons during that time period. It should be noted however though that this version of the dungeon was easily cheesed, and players of RotMG know that once the game transferred hands to the current owner, DECA Games, many of the content updates featured reworks of many original dungeons as the overall skill level of the players rose alongside new items and classes available to play. Keep this in mind when the terms “Old Shatts” and “New Shatts” are mentioned, as the old version was objectively broken, easily cheesed, and fairly boring compared to the reworked dungeon. Despite this, many veterans, such as myself, have fond memories of the old version.

The Shatters Discord

The Shatters Discord, created in late 2018, follows the format that most RotMG raiding discords for this game do and while other servers may vary slightly, I will specifically describe the hierarchy of this server for clarity's sake. The Owner of the server appoints Admins, who then appoint both a Moderation team and a Raid Leading Team. The Raid Leading branch of the server Consists of Head R(aid) L(eaders), Veteran RLs, RLs, and Almost RLs; users who want to try their hand at leading raids are Trial RLs. With HRLs being the most senior with the most authority and (supposed) experience, Raid Leaders will start a discord voice call that other players join and give callouts for the rest of the players to safely beat the dungeon boss(s), and collect their loot in an organized, efficient manner that is generally not seen in the general game, and is far safer for players learning a new dungeon. The ease of this is due to DECA allowing players to purchase “keys” to certain dungeons for real money, both serving as a way for discord servers to host private dungeon raids, and as a cash cow for DECA themselves. On the moderation side, are the Officers, Securities, and Helpers. These people generally “verify” users, forcing you to link a username to a discord account to help prevent bot spam, and make sure the users in the current dungeon are also in the raid’s voice call. It should be said that nobody gets paid for any of these positions, but drama brews easily when terminally online people get any kind of perceived authority, so on to some tales from the crypt.

Staff Meetings from Hell, European Style

One thing to note that is pretty common among any large player base video game, is the ebb and flow of active players, which is very noticeable in games that have a large population specifically in one country or region. RotMG, at least based on Steam’s player tracking database, is one where there is a spike in players in the evening when players in the North America region play, and a spike in the morning where the European players get online, which of course from my perspective. Anyhow, Shatters Discord was, and is largely based in the US time zones, with another smaller faction that plays during European peak times, creating a bit of two waves of raids that would happen, however the server would always be far more active when the US players got online just due to basic lack of raid leaders in a european based time zone. Staff meetings also were a thing, and generally would be used to discuss upcoming game events, changes to promotions, new staff rules, and general housekeeping matters pertaining to people involved; this sets the stage for our next course of drama, which also happens to be the first one that I happened to be involved in, so it's very near and dear to my heart, especially due to the absurdity of it all. A certain Raid Leader by the (fake) name of B lived over in Europe, forgive me for not remembering the exact country, but he was very outspoken about the lack of Euro RL’s and would continually ask for changes to be made for it easier for Euro based RLs to be accepted. It really wasn’t a bad suggestion, as it was tough for him in general to get feedback for his runs due to the lack of online higher staff members, but the fact of the matter is trying to push through a change, no matter how beneficial it could be, does not work if you come across as abrasive about it, and B was very, very passionate regarding this issue. And so, when the next staff meeting in question happened, the issue was again brought up, and dismissed; the crux of the issue was really that the people who wanted to be a raid leader in the timezone in question simply did not have the chops, and the admins were firmly against a specific euro raid leader role. In all fairness to the server, the application process for staff roles was very thought-out and effective in weeding out people who wanted the role just for power's sake and the admins and members who designed it knew this. So when the immovable object of “my way or the highway” upper staff meets the unstoppable force of a determined European boy, what happens? Why, a over two and a half hour voice call of back and forth nonsense that I was told boiled down to “You’re wrong and I’m right” from both sides.. After the dust settled, B eventually stepped from his post and started a new RotMG raiding server; which was moderately successful for a period of time before being nuked by another admin for the fun of it. Ah, the circle of life.

The Drunk Bus

A relatively drama free section, but important for the next one, would be the inception and quick downfall of what the staff members at the time called the Shatters Drunk Bus. As the majority of the staff members at the time were college students in the 21-25 age range, a certain raid leader had the idea to create a drinking game while doing the dungeon. Take a drink if somebody rushes a section of the map, if a raid leadestaff member dies, if you’re taken out by a notoriously dangerous enemy. The first and second gathering not only proved to be incredibly fun for the people involved, but left the other random raiders who had the misfortune to join these runs incredibly confused as staff members employed more and more ridiculous and outlandish strategies in the run at their BAC rose throughout the night. It was also discovered at that time who could not hold their liquor, and many screenshots were posted of members’ drunken ramblings, some more authentic than others. It could be said that for certain disliked members of the server, the cracks would begin to show in their facade due to this event. Eventually, in the eyes of some members, the Bus began to get a little bit long in the tooth and lose its charm after the second or third wave, and it eventually fizzled out as a team-building activity, especially after the dungeon was reworked.

Everyone Loves Mental Illness

Like most communities, Shatters Discord was home to some very interesting people if I wanted to enter the competition for the understatement of the century. Our person in question, a user by the name of D, was a well known figure and not really in the good way. An outspoken furry with a questionable relationship to pretty much everybody in the server, he was understandably a lightning rod for drama. To break it down, he was a good enough raid leader to get to VRL status, but was never really mature enough to be considered for anything past that. Over time, be it because of the uncomfortable comments to underage members of the server, a less than PG-13 fixation with Judy Hopps from Zootopia, or a relationship with alcohol that was either fake or liver-killing depending on who you ask, he began to become very unpopular, very fast. Things really began to ramp up during a stretch of time where every time a raid happened that he led, a user by the name of Fresceno would join and began to spam the chat, as well as the in-game messages of other raid leaders with death threats towards D, usually for being a furry. This went on for a good week, with most of the staff understandably concerned about the harassment; while D was weird, there were only two or so people that had a genuine issue with him. Myself, like the majority, just thought he was an overall odd guy with interests that we didn’t understand nor like. Investigations continued, until the unthinkable happened, the culprit was caught and it was the last person you would expect: Himself. You heard it right folks, the call was coming from inside the house the entire time. And while there was some major detective work involving matching users not in the call to associated friends, guild members, the way it was discovered was really kind of underwhelming looking back on it. Shatters Discord, like most, has a policy of staff members not being allowed to cheat, or use modified clients. The way this is enforced is relatively easy in that if someone is suspected, they are basically ambushed by Securities and/or Officers right after they end a raid, and made to share their screen before they can exit the game. During that time they may be asked to view their options for telltale signs of a modified client, use certain commands that only cheaters would be able to use, or simply just open their game directory to make sure that the game files don’t have any extras. Usually closing the game would be automatic demotion, as would be finding evidence of cheats. However, during a “Hack-check” for D, upon going to the main menu, the username listed was not D, but Fresceno. Yikes. He ended up leaving the server only coming back occasionally to be weird or troll depending on the day, and was eventually perma-muted, and banned. This was the last that anyone heard of him before interest was renewed when his unholy DM’s got posted onto the RotMG subreddit for all to see, with the following drama both unimportant to me and not actually allowed to be linked due to Rule 13. If you happen to find the thread in question or know this person’s actual username, please keep it to yourself. For what it's worth, I do hope that the man at least gets some therapy, as there seemed to be a lot going on in the guy's life that he was most likely projecting about, but I’m not qualified to really say what he truly needs besides maybe a break from the internet. Maybe that's all we really need.

VRLs and the art of Entitlement

A permanent fixture of this server, and really most hierarchies, but made exceptionally worse due to online nature, would be infighting; specifically the arguments that would break out between the Veteran Raid Leaders and the Head Raid Leaders. At this point in time, the VRLs spent most of the time doing their weekly required runs one day, and using the rest of the time arguing in a channel about who had the chops to be promoted, or just complaining about how useless everybody else was. While raid leader promotions where intended to come as a leader was able to you know, lead more effectively, nepotism ran rampant, and this era of VRLs was more concerned with promoting people they liked as opposed to promoting people who led better, which the HRLs at the time did not take kindly to. At peak degeneracy, it was not uncommon to step away from the channel (#vrl-chat) and come back an hour later to nearly 500+ unread messages, a few muted members and multiple pings. It became such an issue that even when some poor soul actually got a promotion, he would be thrust into a channel with multiple people flaming each other out, the original reason long since forgotten, and no direction or guide on what his promotion actually entailed. Arguments and complaints were so commonplace, the channel description actually got changed to reference this fact instead of the usual serious descriptions. Promotions eventually had to become voted on due to lack of organization and the aforementioned nepotism with many people leaving due them not getting the promotion they felt they should have gotten. And when clashing with less experienced raid leaders didn't work, the VRLs at the time would just clash with HRLs, throwing accusations of the HRLs forcing people through who didn’t deserve the promotion, or taking away their own permissions; this was an especially sore spot for many staff members at the time as the vast majority of the upper staff members were largely inactive compared to the VRLs and below. While the role camping and inactivity of many staff members was a huge cause of animosity for many, it should be noted in normal people terms that people got mad at other people for voicing their opinion despite not being online enough. It sounds absolutely insane to put it that way, because it is. A nice cherry on top for this section would be the drama surrounding name change permissions. In most raiding discords, your nickname is locked to your RotMG in game, but the permission to change names was given to VRLs at the time, under the guise of being able to covertly sneak into runs to give surprise feedback to any other raid leader; staff members usually have a prefix before their name, so they would be bumped to the top of the voice channel without this permission. And with any other permission, it was eventually abused(or rightly revoked, depending on who you ask.) And if we have learned anything from this section, it is that a blowup was imminent. An official announcement was made, and the drama cork popped. Arguments, pings, DMs, pretty much the works regarding this change; no matter where you stood on this ridiculously miniscule issue, you left the conversation unhappy. The VRLs cried that since only one person abused the permission, the single person should be punished, while the higher staff at the time were dead set that while it wasn’t enough for a demotion of the specific person, the permission had to be taken away in order to prevent further abuse. At the end of the day and a few thousand messages later, the permission stayed taken away, leaving only bitter views of other people, and one person who straight up stepped down due to it being such a huge deal. (It really wasn’t, since the permission was reinstated maybe a month and a half later.) And yes, some pretty top shelf memes were made about this situation.

Death of a Vanity Role

Discord is serious business. Discord roles are serious business. And with being totally serious business comes people that are very serious about discord roles.insert pic of general here. A common thing that would happen for people quitting the game or leaving the community would be that they would get a personalized role for their departure provided that they served as a staff member for over a year. The role didn’t provide any bonuses, it just gave your discord name the color of your choice with the role name usually being some sort of in-joke or reference from your tenure. Now this generally was not that big of a deal at first as higher staff members generally just didn’t leave, but eventually the amount of vanity roles began to pile up; this usually would not be a big deal either, but as the server organized its authority based on the power each role had, it could be said that there was incentive to keep the amount of roles low and consolidated. The tipping point eventually came when a HRL decided to step from his post for school and real-life time commitments, and decided that his vanity role would be given the permission to still view and type in a “staff-only” chat, instead of just the former staff and friends chat that was available for all former and staff members alike. Fairly quickly, a few people noticed this and didn’t think too much of it, until people started to take it personally. Not only was there discontent with someone having a special colored name, but they get to see a private channel as well? It is believed at this time that an admin was not a fan of vanity roles, and most woke up the next morning to the near complete purge of all vanity roles barring a handful of exceptions that didn’t come from the year-tenure source. As usual, there was some bickering, but as the people most angry about the change would be the next in line to get their own personalized discord role, the outrage over this largely blew over within a day or two however it did serve as a way for people to have a reason to dislike other staff members, which was a hobby in of itself for many.

The Great Rework

As I have hinted before, not only was the dungeon rework a major milestone for the game, but it was a major milestone for the server. DECA, while they do get blasted for being money hungry occasionally, did have enough foresight to let the community test out the rework before it went live on the testing server; while Old Shatts was easily cheeseable using safe-spots, and abuse of game mechanics to skip entire sections of the dungeon (Rest in peace, lavawalking), New Shatts was bullet-hell to the core. Complex shot pattern, tough enemies, and a variable map layout made it nearly an hour to complete upon release. While the dungeon itself is now well respected as a challenging run, it was absolutely bonkers upon release compared to the old version. The early versions had groups of 40-45 ending with only 5 people completing the final of the three bosses; and while testing did give the community a head start, there was really only a handful of people that could reliably lead other people, which makes sense as even the best players where still learning since the dungeon was, you know, brand new? A couple arguably hilarious situations happened during this transition period; one of which was the absolute outrage from the wider community regarding saved loot spoils and “exaltations”. As mentioned before, Old Shatts was a snoozefest compared to other dungeons, and it was very easy to rack up exaltations with very little risk to your character, at the expense of little chance of good loot. To go a bit more in depth, an Exaltation is earned by completing an end-game dungeon with an 8/8 character, and completing a set number of these will permanently give you a stat boost on the class that you complete these milestones with. As stated before, stat potions are limited to the character that uses them, but completing 75 Shatters on lets say, an 8/8 Knight, would give you a +5 permanent boost on your “Attack” stat on the Knight class for the future; other endgame dungeons would boost your other stats in this same manner. So when the new, harder, longer dungeon was released, the community was understandably pissed off when it was discovered that player Exaltations would not be reset, leaving new players or new accounts with a far steeper hill to climb with they wanted to completely max out this specific stat. Further on after some player feedback DECA did make it so the second boss also would give you an exaltation point, but the veteran players did have quite a chuckle about this, especially considering many people did weeks straight of the pre-reworked dungeon in order to get easy exaltations, and got away with really no consequences, besides having their dungeon completions reset to zero, which does not affect their exaltations. This also raised complaints, but then again the player base tends to complain about everything. While there were other shenanigans going on in the wider playerbase, the Discord specifically well, had some internal discord. The question had to be asked, as the largest raiding discord dedicated to the Shatters dungeon, how was the transition going to be handled? To answer your question, not as poorly as anyone imagined. Due to the player base also being largely unfamiliar with the dungeon, and the testing servers being incredibly laggy and unreliable, the first few months largely just had runs going on with everybody kind of learning at the same time. Many people sprung up who had a knack for the tougher style of dungeon this was, which required much more micrododging and phase recognition and the community slowly caught on, with runs nowadays being an average of about 25 minutes, which is pretty much par for the course for the endgame. And of course for every player that caught on quick, there were just as many veterans that actually used this transition to largely stop playing the game, although my personal opinion is that the players who thought they had it in the bag gave us the most amusing screenshots of them all.

Detroit Mute City

Circling back to the Discord server itself, one channel lurks in the depths, festering, as the root of all drama and evil, at least according to certain people. And that would be a channel called: #former-staff. It seems simple enough, a channel for both current and former staff members, and a few other random friends and users to talk and mingle about whatever they feel, with permissions linked to a colorless role called “Friends”. And to put it simply, the channel was just an absolute black hole for brain cells. Now parted from any kind of implied responsibility of being a staff member, most people who step down and don’t end up leaving the community completely take up the hobby of what the kids call “Shitposting in Former”, which is generally regarded as being as inflammatory, disturbing, rude, and/or argumentative as possible in the former staff channel usually coupled with posting horrible memes or calling people out for past mistakes. Think of a Festivus Airing of Grievances, except all the time and worse, usually ending with someone getting muted, kicked, or their “friends” role removed until further notice. The part that really makes this worth writing about not what you would expect however. In a large discord server with lots of different roles and channels, permissions can get a little murky. Maybe someone can type in a channel despite being muted? Maybe another channel has default permissions that don’t match another, but trying to fix it breaks everything? It was a fairly regular occurrence for something to be broken, and someone only taking the time to fix it (and the inevitable chain of other broken things) when someone would use unforeseen permission bugs to bypass a role removal or mute. This image posted in a mod channel a while back pretty much sums it all up.

American Chunnibyou in London

Some people are passionate about the game, and some people are passionate about a community. But some people are more passionate than other people. Some people will dodge plans or go to bed an hour later to play some more games or work on their interests. Some people may prefer to work a night shift instead of a day shift if it means they get more time to play games with their friends. Some people may give up real romantic relationships, jobs, and spout death threats when someone disagrees with them online. You can see where this is going. Usually, when people have an idea in a group setting they work together to find the best way to implement it going through stages of compromise. But that doesn’t really work when the person in question is just well, on a different wavelength? At this point in time, the Shatters Discord was trying to integrate another dungeon called Moonlight Village into its repertoire to increase server traffic both due to a declining interest in beginner friendly Shatters runs, as well as the game itself having less players compared to Old Shatts. And at the helm, was an HRL by the name of L. And what L lacked in what seemed like basic human interaction skills and not typing like a robot, he made up for in sheer grit and passion for the server itself. Now this chunk of drama is not to flame the guy for putting in work; you’d be a fool to ignore the fact that he put an immense amount of time into updating old guides, streamlining channels and generally trying to make the server itself a better place. The one thing that internet effort cannot do however, is help you interact effectively with your peers and not seem completely unhinged when things don't quite go your way. The saga begins with some good old fashioned trolling, and our boy L does not take it well; he is outwardly antagonistic towards trolls, and since he doesn’t exactly get along the best with other staff members, things start to unravel real quick. Audio is leaked of him melting down over a trolling attempt towards the server, DMs are leaked of him making death threats towards another staff member. It's really just surreal to watch, but the good ol’ boys over in #former-staff take notice, and soon the channel is flooded with people complaining that he should be banned for breaking the rules and being toxic; after a night of discussion, L is demoted, which still leaves a bitter taste in everyone's mouth but we can at least rest easy now someone shown to be unstable is out of a position of power, right? Not quite. The server has a feature called “Modmail”, where you can submit comments about raid leaders, server suggestions, and really anything towards the staff team as a whole via a bot; Our boy L soon drops a multiple paragraph message with a list of demands such as the server admins making a statement to clear the air about his demotion. He then gives a deadline for his terms to happen, and ends the message ominously. This message is obviously leaked, and everyone nervously awaits the fateful day. D-Day approaches, and everyone is called to the attention of L’s YouTube channel; while he in the past has posted RotMG guide and weird fanfiction to the server, a video release is scheduled for the deadline of his demands. While there was originally talk of a voice chat party in case something does go down, all the former boys and staff members alike proceed to go into DEFCON 5. The live footage waiting room gets upwards of 40-50 people waiting for the release, players are biting their nails in anticipation for the expected unhinged rant, and as the clock winds down to 0… The video plays a Microsoft Paint animation of the fursona of one of the server admins. Confusion sets in. Has L gotten the last laugh, or is he well and truly on the verge of breaking down? It is assumed to be the latter, as the video description contains a link to a google doc, with the sole content of said document being 60+ pages of a gif of a brick being thrown at the profile picture of an officer he got into an argument with prior to his demotion. Not much else to heard from L after this, most likely as it was clear that nobody truly wanted anything to do with him besides turn him into the next server lolcow, and he went off to start his own Moonlight Village raiding server, which as we can all expect, proceeded to get nuked as per RotMG discord tradition.

Promotion Drama 2: Electric Boogaloo

Promotions, especially higher staff promotions, have always kind of been a touchy subject in the Shatters Discord. Historically, there were four server owners; One who was the true owner, and 2 others, with the third being yanked up relatively quickly soon after the inception of the server. It should be noted that while server admins have the vast majority of permissions, only “owners” have the administrator privileges clicked on. It became a bit of a running joke that owners don’t get promoted, not only because the actual server owner is inactive as hell and he has the final say, but upper staff promotions in general never really happened, with even a new HRL being a pretty big deal, at least early on. Because of this, nepotism promotions and simply being around the longest are historically the way everyone has moved up, and it’s very tough to be demoted for inactivity if you are high enough on the totem pole. For example, one of the original owners was literally MIA for 2 years straight and it was just universally accepted that he was gone forever, until he randomly came back. Moving on, two raid leaders, Z and R, have always had an oil and water relationship. It arguably began when R got to the HRL position before Z did, and the hatred continued to fester, mostly due to out of touch that R seemed to be about certain subjects, further exasperating Z. Arguments continued throughout the months, mostly consisting of people getting their feelings hurt, justified or otherwise, until both were promoted to admin. The sibling rivalry continued until it ended rather anticlimactically, with Z promptly ghosting with no explanation to anyone, confusing the vast majority of people to this very day. And finally when it seemed things couldn’t get anymore unexplainable, R is promoted to full owner of the server, despite really not being able to consistently complete the dungeon that the server he moderates is based on. After so many years, so many worthy people, and so many missed promotions, people had to ask R; How did you end up getting the promotion to owner? “I really just kind of asked for it after a while.” Some say that Z is rolling in his grave to this very day.

The Last Airbender, or something like that?

There was always a very clear difference between players that were staff during Old Shatts, and people who acquired their role after the rework was done. Like the youngest of 90’s kids hearing a legal adult say they were born in 2002, the concept of actually having to play the game to get their weekly run quota done was incredibly jarring for some. And while there was a pretty large quota grace period for all staff members once the rework dropped, the mass exodus of staff members who had no real desire to learn the new dungeon was well in effect within a month, making the differentiation between the Old Guard and new staff members pretty obvious. Coincidentally, the Discord Music Bot, Rhythm, also was shut down at this time leading to the whole departure of being called Rhythmgate, because of course everything major has to have “-gate” after it. Anyway, as the server continued to chug along, less and less people from the old days continued to stick around, and many just decided to just step down even if they still played the game; when your buds leave there isn’t as much of an incentive to play online policeman. Circling back on the main point of this section, one of the longest running jokes in the server was who was going to nuke upon leaving? As mentioned before, mass deletion of roles or channels by disgruntled admins was very commonplace due to the incredibly toxic community the game has; so of course the question had to be asked whenever someone mentioned stepping down and doing a last hurrah, will you be deleting the Raider role? One Officer in particular, who we will refer to as K, decided to do just that. One of the last remaining players from the staff of the old days, K crept into the server in middle of the night, and proceeded to delete the role that about 25,000 people had, as well as post his own exposé on the Realm subreddit about the people that he hated, which hilariously enough is what brought our acquaintance D into the limelight as described a few sections above. While this didn’t exactly cripple the server as it's pretty easy to just have a bot hand out the role, it was absolutely hilarious for the peanut gallery and served as a send off for a certain squad of players who enjoyed soup.

The End, for Now

That concludes my stories and involvement in this community. I started playing the game right before the initial COVID lockdown, and ended up meeting some really great people, both in real-life and online due to it. I still check in relatively regularly, but I don’t play a whole lot of RotMG anymore due to long hours, but I’ve always wanted to do a writeup on some of the ridiculous drama that went on in this server. It originally started with an iceberg chart with a few inside jokes, but realistically it wouldn’t make a whole lot of sense unless you were part of the community, so this one is for all of you instead. If any other tales come up, perhaps I’ll write about them in scuffles, who knows. As far as the current state of the server? It has, alongside the game itself, been on a steady decline, mostly due to no lackluster attention by the DECA, and the rework of the dungeon as described above making the server's format not meshing well with the players who run the dungeon. Last time I checked in, many of the raid leading roles have actually been consolidated into just general organizers, and the hierarchy of the server is vastly different than it was during my tenure. The question of raider retention and how the restructuring affected it isn't very dramatic however, and is a question that I do not have the answer to. However the server is in fact chugging on and runs do seem to be happening and game updates are on the horizon, so maybe a revival will happen, who knows?

When is the best time to check tesosterone ? Right before next pin ? If yes what numbers i should have? I'm on trt and deca and hcg i did s blood test second day after tesosterone injection and is 3,460 ng/dl .

When is the best time to check tesosterone levels ? Right before next pin ? If yes what numbers i should have? I'm on trt and deca and hcg i did s blood test second day after tesosterone injection and is 3,460 ng/dl .

I been blast and cruising since June last year because I can't cope with terrible mood during pct and after (had 400 test 3 months post pct) and during this period of time I've been B&C I had not terrible but something that makes me not want take my shirt off acne so I ordered some accutane and my question is would it be OK for my liver to run small doses like 20 mg/day while using: Tbol 40mg Deca 500mg EQ 500mg Test 200mg
I've been running winny and anavar with 300mg test before and this gave me terrible acne too. Same with cruise dose only too. Not sure why I'm so prone to acne. Tried AI at different protocols which gave me terrible mood swings and suppression of gains, back pain