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TL;DR: A collision shop did not do the work they charged me and my insurance for and compromised the integrity of my car, despite having multiple chances to fix it.
This may be a little lengthy. I (20f) hit a deer on Feb. 21st. This is my first accident and/or incident with the car (2013 Honda Accord, if that helps) of any kind. The poor thing busted my radiator and I was leaking coolant. I called State Farm, got their recommendation on a collision shop, then towed my car there. The shop had my car for over a month (Mar. 21st was the estimated completion date, yet my car was not actually ready until Mar. 26th), and had very poor communication with us throughout the entire duration. One $6k bill later, I finally go get my car and it was missing a very obvious cosmetic detail. They tell us they’re out of that specific color tape, and they’ll let us know when it’s in. It takes two weeks until we hear anything back from the shop. During these two weeks, I was running a quick errand and I noticed I couldn’t get my car to start to drive home. I assume I need a new battery, and have a friend jump me. That was the only thing out of normal that I immediately noticed. About a week later, I take my car to the collision shop for said cosmetic detail. About 15mins go by, and a guy comes to ask if I’ve been having any problems with the vehicle. I say yes, mention that I think I need a new battery, and he said the car won’t start again. He leaves to attempt to jump it, then comes back again about 10mins later and says he tried jumping it from a battery and from another car (using my personal jumper cables in the trunk ?) and nothing will get it to start. He told me he doesn’t think its the battery, but instead sounds like I have no gas yet I had half of a tank. He says him and a couple guys are going to wheel my car in front of their gates so that they can close, and basically tells me I’m on my own and to have a great day. I go back inside to call my mom and figure out what I should do for no longer than FIVE minutes when the same guy comes back in and tells me he got my car to start. As we’re walking, he’s telling me that he messed with the fuel line to see if gas was getting to my engine (it was) and when he “put it back”, that’s when my car started. I don’t know much about the inner workings of engines but even then it didn’t sound right to me. We get to my car and I notice there’s a smell coming from my engine (not burning, not chemical, just different). He doesn’t say anything about it so I assume it’s okay, then go on my way. As I’m pulling into my driveway, I start to see little tendrils of smoke just briefly coming from my hood. I have my stepdad come look at my engine, and he starts cursing like a sailor! There are bolts, screws, and brackets missing left and right. My radiator support, which they charged us for a new one as well as the labor of installing it, was in fact not new and instead had donned a plastic piece on top to obscure the damage from view. Said plastic piece was not secured into my car at all, just placed. I still had my old (and damaged) core support. My inner fender liner on the passenger side did not have a single bolt or screw securing it ; you could shake it by hand. My radiator was secured into my car by a single bolt (you could shake that too), and there looked to be evidence of another (or the same?) coolant leak. And this is just upon first glance! The integrity of my car was obviously impaired, and I could have been significantly more injured if I had gotten into another accident since I did not have full shock absorption, which is my biggest grievance. We took pictures of everything we noticed and immediately got in contact with State Farm. Upon rebounding with the collision shop later, the manager (who was the same guy who couldn’t get my car to start) did not look AT ALL surprised. He 1. told us he would bring the car back and look at everything himself 2. said he was “having problems with one of their technicians” and 3. told my stepdad that he took the gas tank out of the vehicle (where he told me fuel line), and said the car started when he put it back. Again, there was about a five minute duration from when I left him with my car to when he came in and told me it started. The shop has my car for another two and a half weeks or so, then we get it sent to a Honda dealership for a third party inspection. They discover that there were holes in my air condenser, my front suspension wasn’t secured properly, my splash guard was missing, my alignment was off, and I still had barely any coolant. Another $2.5k later (now an $8.5k repair. from a deer.) and I have the car as of May 16th. What should my next steps be in reporting the collision shop? Is it worth suing? These people sent me away three times in an unsafe vehicle with no problem; how do I fire back at them? Any advice helps, and I can post photos if needed. Thanks!

Seven
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In 1945, Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac were students at Columbia University and were lodging in Joan Vollmer’s apartment on West 115th Street. Kerouac, a Catholic who had gotten in on a football scholarship described Ginsberg as “this spindly Jewish kid with horn-rimmed glasses and tremendous ears sticking out…burning black eyes”; the two men had a brief, awkward affair. Their friend William Burroughs was living nearby, on Riverside Drive, and after Kerouac and Ginsberg set him up with their landlady, he moved in, too. The gaunt and lanky Burroughs was more than a decade older than Ginsberg and Kerouac, and already seemed, Ginsberg recalled, to have the “ashen gray of an old-age cheek.” The younger pair admired him, Ginsberg wrote, like “ambassadors to a Chinese emperor.” Kerouac hailed him as “the last of the Faustian men.” Burroughs returned the compliment by introducing the other members of the “libertine circle,” as they dubbed themselves, to drugs, sailors, porn, bathhouses, and Wilhelm Reich.

After leaving Harvard in 1936, Burroughs had enrolled at the University of Vienna’s medical schools, Reich’s alma mater, with vague plans of becoming a psychoanalyst, but his stay was dominated by the administration of arsenic shots for the syphilis he had contracted in America, which left him feeling nauseated and depressed. He left after a semester. Back in New York, Burroughs was analyzed by Paul Federn, who had been Reich’s first therapist but whom Reich came to consider his nemesis. Burroughs was institutionalized in 1940 after he chopped off the tip of his finger in a Van Gogh - like gesture of unrequited love (Bellevue psychiatrists diagnosed him as a paranoid schizophrenic). Burroughs’s parents gave him an allowance of two hundred dollars a month on the condition that he seek further help, and in 1946 Burroughs was undergoing narco-analysis with Dr. Lewis Wolberg, who used nitrous oxide and hypnosis to stimulated the unconscious.
Burroughs would return from his sessions with Wolberg to practice “wild analysis” on his friends, interpreting their dreams from the comfort of a wing chair. He also played a game that parodied the Reichian character analysis that he’d become interested in. The group would play an adaption of charades to facilitate the exploration of the onion layers of their personality armor. Burroughs referred to these exercises in amateur dramatics as “routines.” For example, underneath Burroughs’s public persona as the distinguished heir of an important St. Louis family lurked a prissy, lesbian English governess (“My dear, you’re just in time for tea. Don’t say those dirty words in front of everybody!”). Scratch the governess surface and you reached Old Luke, a gun-toting, tobacco-chewing sharecropper from the Deep South (“Ever gut a catfish?”). The last stratum, at his very core, held a silent Chinaman, a contemplative, impassive character who sat meditating on the banks of the Yangtse. Ginsberg’s hidden self was “the well-groomed Hungarian,” and Kerouac liked to play the naïve American lost in the sophistications of Paris.
Alfred Kinsey met Burroughs, Ginsberg, and Kerouac on one of their nocturnal trips to Time Square through their friend Herbert Huncke, the male prostitute who coined the term “beat” and introduced Burroughs to recreational drugs. Kinsey paid Huncke
Taking advantage of the proximity of Cott’s office to his father’s home, and still buzzing in the mouth, Ginsberg chose to come out during a posttherapeutic visit. “You mean you like to take men’s penises in your mouth?” his father said unsympathetically. But Cott thought homosexuality a perversion, as Reich did, and was working toward establishing heterosexual primacy rather than trying to persuade Ginsberg to come to terms with his queerness. “Frankly I won’t trust that kind of straight genital Reichian,” Burroughs wrote in disgust at this dogmatism. “Feller say, when a man gets too straight he’s just a god damned prick.”
Cott terminated Ginsberg’s therapy after three months because he continued to smoke pot against the doctor’s advice. Ginsberg though cannabis an integral part of his aesthetic education; Cott feared that it would lead to a psychotic episode. The summer he quit therapy, Ginsberg began experiencing auditory hallucinations. “It was like God had a human voice,” Ginsberg wrote of his transcendental experience, in which he discovered his calling as a poet, “with all the infinite tenderness and mortal gravity of a living Creator speaking to his son.” Consumed by a desire to share his amazing experience, Ginsberg crawled out onto his fire escape and tapped on the next-door neighbor’s windows, declaring to the two frightened girls inside, “I’ve seen God!”
His father, still reeling from the discovery of his son’s sexuality, feared that he was suffering from the paranoid schizophrenia that had caused his mother to be institutionalized in Pilgrim State, a mental hospital on Long Island. She also heard voices, feared her husband was trying to poison her, hallucinated Hitler’s mustache in the sink, and thought spies were following her. When Ginsberg entered Reichian analysis, she was reportedly banging her head against the wall so ferociously that the doctors recommended a lobotomy.
Ginsberg phoned up Dr. Cott, his former therapist, and told him, “It happened, I had some kind of breakthrough or psychotic experience.” Cott, who followed Reich in rejecting the talking cure, and who was obviously still angry at Ginsberg for choosing pot over therapy, said, “I’m afraid any discussion would have no value” and hung up on him. Soon afterward, when Ginsberg was involved in a car chase in a stolen vehicle that ended in a dramatic crash, he was encouraged by a law professor at Columbia, where he was still a student, to plead insanity. Dr. Cott appeared in court to testify to his mental instability, and two months later Ginsberg was admitted to the Columbia Presbyterian Psychiatric institute, where he stayed for eight months.
During Ginsberg’s hospitalization, Burroughs wrote to Jack Kerouac to ask him to find out from Ginsberg what the “gadget made by Reichians” looked like. “I want especially to know its shape and if there is a window, and how one gets into it.” Kerouac doesn’t seem to have been much help in providing a blueprint. Burroughs built his first accumulator in the spring of 1949 when he was living on a rented farm in Pharr, Texas, with Kells Elvins, a friend from his Harvard days. They were both enthusiastically reading Reich’s The Cancer Biopathy and decided to build an accumulator in the orange grove Kells owned in the Rio Grande Valley. Built without recourse to any plans, the resulting device included some curious innovations. “Inside was an old icebox,” Burroughs explained, “which you could get inside and pull on a contrivance so that another box of sheet steel descended over you, so that the effect was presumably heightened.” It took them a few days to construct the box. The result was eight feet high, much taller than the ones Reich manufactured: “It was a regular townhouse,” Burroughs recalled.
The pair took turns sitting in the accumulator and obtained, Burroughs wrote, “unmistakable results.” Burroughs wondered what the Mexican farm laborers thought of this strange box that they entered “wrapped in old towels,” and came out of feeling “much sexier and healthier,” “with hard-ons.” Burroughs and Kells also made one of Reich’s smaller shooter boxes, with a funnel, which they used as a supplement to the big box. Their DIY was, Burroughs admitted, “a very sloppy job,” but it still have a powerful “sexual kick.”
"I have just been reading Wilhelm Reich’s latest book The Cancer Biopathy,” Burroughs wrote excitedly to Kerouac. “I tell you Jack, he is the only man in the analysis line who is on that beam. After reading the book I built an orgone accumulator and the gimmick really works. The man is not crazy, he’s a fucking genius.” Kerouac described Burroughs enthusiastically promoting the box in On the Road (1955). According to Kerouac, Burroughs said, “Say, why don’t you fellows try my orgone accumulator? Put some juice in your bones. I always rush up and take off ninety miles an hour for the nearest whorehouse, hor-hor-hor!”
Burroughs used an orgone box on and off for the rest of his life. (There is a picture of the rock star Kurt Cobain waving through the port-hole of Burrough’s last box, a scruffy, patched-up shed that he kept in the garden behind his house in Lawrence, Kansas.) In the 1970s he wrote an article for Oui magazine entitled “All the accumulators I have owned” in which he boasted, “Your intrepid reporter, at age thirty-seven, achieved spontaneous orgasm, no hands, in an orgone accumulator built in an orange grove in Pharr, Texas. It was the small, direct-application accumulator that did the trick.”
….
Perls concluded that any positive claims for the orgone box were attributable to the placebo effect. “I invariably found a fallacy,” he said of the orgone box users he met, “a suggestibility that could be directed in any way that I wanted.” Reich, Perls thought, had made a major contribution in giving Freud’s notion of resistance a body, but he erred in trying to make a verifiable reality out of the libido. “Now resistances do exist, there is no doubt about it,” Perls explained, “but libido was and is a hypothesized energy, invented by Freud himself to explain his model of man.” He thought Reich had hypnotized himself and his patients into the belief of the existence of the orgone as the physical and visible equivalent of libido.
Perls found that users of orgone boxes usually exhibited some paranoid symptoms. “Then I had another look at the armor theory,” Perls went on, “and I realized that the idea of the armor itself was a paranoid form. It supposes an attack from, and defense against, the environment.” Perls criticized vegetotherapy for encouraging the formation of paranoid features by encouraging the patient to “externalize, disown, and project material that could be assimilated and become part of the self.” Orgone energy, Perls concluded from his investigations into the orgone box, was “an invention of Reich’s fantasy which by then had gone astray.” The realization that the Reich he had met in New York was different from the one he had known in Europe, and that orgone mysticism was at the crackpot end of science, was tinged with melancholy. “The enfant terrible of the Vienna Institute turned out to be a genius,” Perls wrote in his autobiography, “only to eclipse himself as a ‘mad scientist.’”
In his own elaboration of character analysis, which he called Gestalt therapy, Perls turned the idea of armor around: where Reich had come to see character armor as a defense against a hostile external world, Perls saw that same layer of self as a shield for one’s own true drives - a straitjacket designed to safeguard against explosions of excitement from within. Thus, it wasn’t a shell to be crushed but something integral, to be owned. (Laura Perls said they tried to convince Rosenfeld to give up his box, that he could increase his physical vitality and mental agility “entirely on his own, without external devices.”) He wanted his patients to be aware of their bodies, to feel the present vividly in the “here and now,” to be “authentic,” to act on their desires.
Perls got his patients to act out their feelings so that they could assimilate and take responsibility for them. He had originally wanted to be a theater director - he’d been a student of Max Reinhardt’s when he was growing up in Berlin, and he’d become closely associated with the avant-garde Living Theatre troupe in New York. Julian Beck, a founder of the Living Theatre, explained to Perls’s biographer, Martin Shepard, of Gestalt therapy, “[Perls] had something in mind that was halfway between the kind of performance we were doing [direct spectacle, aimed at challenging the moral complacency of the audience] and therapeutic sessions.”
“You are my client,” Perls told one female patient. “I care for you like an artist, I bring something out that is hidden in you.” He described therapy as if it were a magic trick; the rabbit he claimed to pull out of the hat was a person shorn of the “neurosis of normalcy” and all the bourgeois niceties associated with it. This person, he hypothesized, was confident enough to be selfish, to act on rather than repress all her desires, whatever the social consequences. All the energy that others wasted on repression and concealment, Perls thought, should be available for creative self-expression. Another of Perls’s patients recalled, “Fritz loved some types - open bastard-bitch - open defenses, that type. He didn’t like anyone who would placate him or be too good to him or used good-girl or good-boy defenses - that drove him up the wall.”

Perls’s views ,and some of his methods, were much indebted to those pioneered by Reich in the thirties: Perls would habitually accuse his patients of being “phony” and was deliberately aggressive, much as Reich had been with him. Yet, his observations about the paranoid deviations in Reich’s terminology and thinking were painfully perceptive, precisely because he had built on those very ideas.
In 1951, Perls, Paul Goodman, and a Columbia professor of psychology named Ralph Hefferline published Gestalt Therapy: Excitement and Growth in the Human Personality. Rewritten by Goodman, and bearing all the hallmarks of Goodman’s exasperating style, the book blends Reich’s ideas about energy blocks and flows with Sartre’s cafe philosophy to create an American brand of existentialism turned therapy. The authors intended their self-help book to provide the reader with the tools for revolution: “In recommending [these experiments] to you,” they warned of their mass-market therapy, “we commit an aggressive act aimed at your present status quo and whatever complacency it affords.” They promised immediate liberation, without the hard grind of political struggle; all you had to do was unleash your “authentic” self.
The “excitement” to which the subtitle of the book refers is a generalized libido, an elan vital that is seeking various outlets, not all of them sexual. Life, for Perls, was a series of “unfinished” or “undigested” situation, frustrations that were all waiting their turn for satisfactory closure. “After the available excitement has been fully transformed and experienced, then we have good closure, satisfaction, temporary peace and nirvana,” Perls summarized his position. “A [mere] discharge will barely bring about the feeling of exhaustion and being spent.”
It sounded very like the Reichian orgasm. But for Perls, excitement was no longer exclusively genital, as it was for Reich, and this shift only served to open up numerous other slipways to pleasure. In Reich’s view, the libido theory was an inviolable article of faith. In broadening its range to celebrate oral and anal pleasures, Perls heralded a polymorphously perverse and heretical vision - one that, ironically, would prove particularly amenable to exploitation under capitalism.
In 1952, Perls, his wife, Goodman, Isidore From, Elliott Shapiro, and two others founded the New York Institute for Gestalt Therapy, headquartered in the Perleses’ apartment and with treatment rooms at 315 Central Park West. The seven founding members met on a weekly basis for group therapy. There was no bureaucratic hierarchy and everyone, including Perls, was subject to the honest criticism that was seen as the key to self-discovery. It was a very public form of character analysis: members of the group would draw one another’s attention to every repression or hang-up, none of which was to be tolerated.
Elliot Shapiro, an ex-boxer and the head of a psychiatric school attached to Kings County Hospital in Brooklyn, brought a friend to one session; Shapiro’s friend said he “had never witnessed the aggressive and profound battling that went on in those groups. Nobody, virtually nobody, was safe at any time.” Shapiro recalled, “We hammered at each other, and hammered, and hammered - every week. And it was the most vigorous hammering you can image….If you could live through these groups and take the corrections, the insults, the remarks…” Not all the participants had sufficiently thick skins to take such brutal candor. The psychotherapist Jim Simkin left the group because he felt that everyone was “loading elephant shit on him,” as did Ralph Hefferline, a coauthor of Gestalt Therapy.
To promote this new school, Perls traveled from city to city, introducing an audience of psychiatrists, social workers, and other interested parties to his “here and now” philosophy. He taught groups in Cleveland, Detroit, Toronto, and Miami how to be sensitive to their bodily needs and to follow their impulses, to be honest and unalienated. He’d be sharp and confrontational as he pushed his awareness techniques on the participants: What are you doing now? What are you experiencing? What are you feeling? Isadore From, who was part of the original New York group, remembers that these occasions were often very dramatic, with “a lot of shaking, trembling, anxiety” - effects that he thought were the result of the audiences’ hyperventilating under the strain of Perls’s relentless goading and questioning.
The New York Institute of Gestalt Therapy also ran public seminars, including one by Goodman, “The Psychology of Sex” (“What you can’t do, teach,” he said with a laugh). Following Reich, it was thought that neurosis could be treated by exposure to sexual pleasure. Goodman made this his area of expertise and people with sexual problems were often referred to him. One was a man who was worried about the quality of his orgasms after prostate surgery. Another thought he might be homosexual; the bisexual Goodman got his penis out and demanded that the patient touch it to help him make a diagnosis. In so doing he was no doubt influenced by Hitschmann, the Viennese analyst who once asked Perls, then tormented by sexual inadequacy, to show him his penis .
In one of Goodman’s group sessions, when someone complained of the lack of sexual companionship, Goodman went around the circle and set up a week’s worth of dates. “See, that wasn’t so difficult,” he reassured her. He was not beyond offering his own neurosis-busting services to patients of either sex, and once agreed to accompany a patient who invited him on an all-expenses-paid trip to Europe. He joked about setting up a College of Sex so as to put his vast experience to educational use. “I’m a sociopath,” he wanted a potential client. In a diary entry written in 1957, Goodman looked back on the previous decade and concluded that he’s made a “false cultus-religion (an obsession)” of sex: “The sexual act itself had just about the meaning of a ritual communion sacrifice.”

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Activities
🏎️ Racing System - Feel confident enough to take on other people in the city to challenge them to a streetrace? Look no further, we have this available for all our players!
🎳Bowling - Wish to hang out and chill for bit while competing for fun? Try out bowling with you buddies, for some relax time.
⛳Golf - Who doesn’t like a chill/relax time playing a good game of golf? Enjoy your free time playing alone or with friends to just kill some time while you just chilling.
🎱 Pool - Want to take a break from your hard work? Compete with your buddies in pool or even chill out by yourself. Grab a drink and have fun!
💪 Arm Wrestling - Always wanted to see which person is stronger? Why not try and challenge each other in a arm wrestling battle. May the strongest person win!
🎣 Fishing - Pass your time with some relaxing fishing, simple but clean fishing expierence for everybody to access.
🦌 Hunting - Always loved to hunt some animals? We have a legal hunting system for you to enjoy! Head up north to check it out.
🛹Skateboarding - When you first fly in our city you will receive a skatingboard for free! This will be your simple way to travel around our city. Near our Tinsel Apartments (And a few more spots blipped on our map) you can always rent a car if you wish to do so.
🎰 Casino - Is gambling something you love to do? Then you are at the right place! Our city offers a fully working service with Blackjack, Slot Machines, Roulette, 3 card poker & Lucky Wheel. You can win a 1 of 1 car from the wheel if lucky! Those are extremely rare cars because you can’t win or buy those anywhere else!
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Public Jobs
🚕 Downtown Cab - Are you that person who loves to drive around a lot? Why not check out our taxi job! Get decent payment while making sure your customers getting from A to B. Just make sure you drive safe!
🏡Gardening - Have you always wanted to help people keep their garden clean? Then this is the ideal job for you!
🧑‍🌾 Farming - Are you that person who loves to farm? Look no further who got you covered! Head up north to check out our farming system, give yourself some good chill vibes.
🚚PostOp - You will be picking up packages from companies. Make sure to deliver them to earn yourself some reputation to unlock a new feature!
🚐 Gruppe6 - Are you ready to pickup some moneybags while proctecting these bags? Then this is for you! With a fully selfmade reputation system which you earn some after each job completed. Higher Rep will unlock new features! Be aware of any risk!
⛏️ Mining - Always been fascinated by earning some money from mining? Look no further and grab your pickaxe and start mining while earning yourself some reputation at the same time.
🛻 Tow Driver - Work for the city of Los SAntos as a Two Truck Driver. Pick up abandoned cars around the city and take them back towards the impound for a bit of cash. Or simply help out the police by towing cars.
🚛 Sanitation - Help the city of Los Santos stay clean by collecting trashbags from the garbage containers. Once you finished your job you get a decent payment and also gain reputation after! Keep a look out though, you might find something helpful while working!
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Whitelised Jobs
👮 Law Enforcement - Do you have it what it takes to keep the streets clean from all the criminal activities and secure safety for the people living in Los Santos? Make sure get your application
🚑 Emergency Medical Services **- You know every live matters, and wish to take care of all the civilians in our city while saving people in the process? Then check out our EMS application, we need you!
🧑‍🌾 Mechanic - Do you love to work on cars & help out our civilians with broken cars or simply tune their cars towards their liking? Then you should check out our mechanics in the city!
⚖️ Law - Become a Lawyer, Judge, or even the district attorney for the state and fight or represent the people of Los Santos. They may be the lowest of the low, but someone has to defend them, and for the right amount of money, you very well maybe that person. Besides, it’s innocent until proven guilty, and you’ve made it your life’s goal to prove they’re innocents, even if they were caught red-handed.
🚐 Real Estate - Always wanted to sell houses and make some decent money while doing so? We got you covered with our amazing looking house
🗨️ And a lot more!
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City Pictures
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So to sum up this story i live in Florida and i was driving to work on 05/13/24 at around 9:20am and i am driving down a highway that has tow lanes southbound and two lanes northbound, I was headed southbound in the left lane headed to work going 45mph in a 45 zone. Suddenly a truck pulled out from a parking lot on the far right side of the highway attempting to get into the turning lane on the very left side, however he didn’t have a chance to go and though i slammed on the brakes it wasn’t enough clearance so i still hit him; my drivers side nailing right next to his back license plate. He immediately got out of the car and was starting to get aggressive with me so i called my dad and he arrived before the police did just to make me feel safe. Three officers arrived and ALL THREE of them declared it his fault and so did my insurance but i found out today that he’s trying to say it’s my fault and that i hit him in the turning lane so there has to be an investigation where someone is going to look at both of the vehicles. I’m just worried about what is going to happen if he is saying it’s my fault because with just pictures without any context it kinda looks like i rear ended him(pictures not allowed in this forum) Is there anything i can even do? and if it’s still his fault will he get penalized ? and is he able to attempt to sue me for injury even if it’s his fault?
also note that i am under my parents policy and they have me covered for pip and not collision so my insurance progressive told me we have to be in contact with their insurance
p.s sorry for so much i for and questions i’m very new to the whole adulting life and trying to figure what to do and who to go to/trust

Twice in two days, a pit bull has lunged at me with my 3 year old in tow. I live in a luxury type apartment, that’s supposed to have breed restrictions, they even require you to send a photo of your pet before move in, I triple checked my lease before I signed it.
The problem arises when the other day I was riding in a moving car with my window rolled down and this young, lanky dude was walking this massive brown pit bull, which went absolutely feral, growling, pulling as hard as it could and literally foaming at the mouth when I made eye contact with it for not even a second as the owner struggled to gain control of it.
The literal DAY before that, a man was walking by my apartment with his pitbull as I was putting my 3 year olds shoes on on our patio. Luckily I noticed it soon enough, but it had attempted to pull at us just as I scooped him up as fast as I could.
My 3 year old is begging to play outside but I really don’t feel safe. How is this allowed when they would not even consider letting me move in without a picture of my 9 pound cat? I am actually terrified to even take out the trash because these people have to know that their dogs are aggressive, but are so willing to bring it in a 5ft space with a child?

I just wanted to rant about how terrible it is to work in Carmel. Most of the time I park in front of the place I am going to be working. Sometimes that's not possible so I have to find street parking elsewhere. It seems like almost every parking space has signs saying the space is reserved. I do not understand why this is.
Today I got yelled at for parking in front of someones house. I told them to have the city write me a ticket or I'd race the tow truck. I just needed to leave my car there for 30 minutes while I helped an old lady with her phone. I came back to see them taking pictures of my car. I am not bothered about the photos, I just think they were trying to intimidate me.
I don't understand why people spend so much money to live in such a beautiful little town and work themselves up so much about trades people working to make their neighbors lives a little easier.

Author’s Note:
Upvotes and comments go a long way in helping me reach a larger audience <3
First
Inside GB-2
“Huh, that wasn’t there before,” Ron said, pointing to a new hole in the wall – another passageway.
Henry turned to look where Ron pointed. Sure enough, there was a new doorway. It must’ve been a section that opened after they restored the power. “Huh, yeah. Let’s check it out.”
He went through, finding a short hallway past it and another room just beyond. Henry signaled for his team to form up, preparing to breach. As they stepped in, they found themselves in a brightly lit room filled with various types of furniture – empty pedestals, comfortable-looking single couches, and empty desks with opened cabinets.
Henry stepped further into the room, eyeing the oddly arranged furniture. The single couches were lined up in neat rows, all facing the same direction – towards the empty desks. It was like some sort of waiting room, but for what?
“Is it just me, or are these couches set up weird?” Isaac asked, voicing the question on everyone’s mind. “I mean, who lines up a bunch of single couches like this?”
“Strange, indeed,” Sera agreed. “They seem arranged as though for spectators, yet naught lies before them to behold.”
Like a movie theater, Henry thought. However, there weren’t any screens or holograms to watch. If there was a clue, it would probably be within the couches themselves.
Dr. Anderson approached one of the desks. “Perhaps this was some sort of office or workspace? The desks and cabinets certainly suggest that.”
Isaac then decided to touch one of the seats, eliciting no reaction. He pushed further, sitting down on one of them. At that point, the couch began to adjust its form to better suit Isaac’s envirosuit, as if able to optimize its comfort for the user. Then, a nozzle slowly stretched up from the seat’s headrest area, stopping just short of Isaac’s neck. “Woah!” Isaac bolted up as the nozzle bonked against his helmet.
“Neural interface, maybe?” Henry wondered. “I think we should leave this to the researchers… unless you wanna volunteer as a lab rat?”
“Hell nah,” Isaac vigorously declined the offer. “Hey, there isn’t anything on my helmet is there?”
Henry dusted off the back of Isaac’s helmet with his glove. “Nope, you’re clear. Just gotta hope it ain’t grey goo.”
He could see the dread and uncertainty through Isaac’s visor. Henry gave him a pat on the shoulder. “Well, think about it this way: if it really was grey goo, it would’ve gotten to us – or the Spiranids, for that matter – long ago. C’mon, let’s secure the next room.”
With a nod, Isaac fell in line behind Henry as they moved towards the doorway leading to the adjacent room. Peeking inside, it couldn’t be further from the rest of the room’s they had encountered so far; not at all what they could’ve possibly expected inside an ancient, high-tech alien facility. It was expansive, with a layout that reminded Henry of a high-end restaurant. Comfortable booths lined the walls, while tables of varying sizes filled the central space. The furniture looked almost human – perhaps even indistinguishably so.
The room was tinted with a soft, cozy yellow light. The warm and inviting ambiance felt soothing compared to the clinical feel of the previous areas. The lighting, combined with the plush booths and elegant tables, gave Henry a nostalgic impression.
“Well, I’ll be damned,” Ryan remarked. “Think they got any cheesecakes?”
If it wasn’t for the alien decor and helping of sleek devices scattered around the room, Henry would’ve thought they were back home. Hell, there was even a bar, filled with exotic liquors that could probably fetch millions at an auction – or give them the trip of their lives. Beside it however was something unusual. Where he might’ve expected a path leading to the kitchen, he instead found a wall with a slight, rectangular-shaped recess that was just big enough for a tray.
He glanced at Isaac, who returned a knowing look. “Replicators,” Isaac said.
Henry smirked. “Personally, I’m partial to synthesizer, but to each their own.”
They gathered around the wall, which didn’t seem to respond to their presence. Taps on the wall didn’t seem to do anything, either. Henry considered probing further, but decided against it. “Alright, let’s not take any chances. We’ll make a note of this for the research teams to analyze later. Let’s keep looking around.”
Henry split apart from the others, pairing with Ron as they continued to walk around the room. They soon came across another doorway on the far side of the room, which opened up into a short corridor that led into multiple sets of doors. Each had a symbol on the wall beside the doors – one that depicted the basic figure of a person.
Ron pushed open one of the doors, taking a peek inside. “Looks like even the Gatebuilders needed restrooms.”
Finally! “Alright, let’s take a quick break here. Bring everyone else over.”
Thankfully, the amenities within were easily comparable to those of modern society. The toilet looked like a toilet, and the sink resembled a sink. Even in a space as mundane as this though, the Gatebuilder’s technology was evident: self-cleaning surfaces and enough technology to put a high-quality Japanese bidet toilet to shame. At least, that was just from the look of things. Henry didn’t think now would be the best time to check whether the restroom had ass-washing robots or not.
After a few minutes, Henry regrouped with the rest of the team around a central table in the ‘restaurant’. Dr. Anderson was already present, his archaeological kit opened and a spread of alien items organized on the table.
“Ah, Captain!” Dr. Anderson noticed him approaching. “We found cabinets that weren’t empty. Most of the artifacts appear to be personal effects.” He held up a necklace, emphasizing his point. “Jewelry, memorabilia, and some other artifacts that I – admittedly – can’t quite describe.”
Dr. Anderson pointed his pickup tool at a small disc laid out on a padded mat. “It hasn’t shown any active properties yet. It’s rather peculiar; it seems to be a solid disc. Lightweight, unblemished surface, no visible markings or etchings.”
“Have you tried touching it directly?” Henry asked.
Dr. Anderson frowned, manipulating the claws of his pickup tool. “Well, not directly.” Catching the implications in Henry’s query, he continued, “I’ve checked for radiation, toxins – all clear. While I’d advise against direct contact, I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t the least bit curious.”
Henry nodded. Yeah, the Doc was probably right, but what was discovery without risk? He reached out and picked it up, rotating it in his hands. As his gloved fingers brushed against the surface, the disc suddenly emitted a soft glow.
Henry flinched slightly, almost dropping the disc in surprised. As he fumbled with it, the disc seemed to respond to his touch. Suddenly, a series of objects materialized on the table, appearing out of thin air.
“Oh, shit!” Ron exclaimed. “It just… spawned a bunch of stuff!”
Henry stared at the new items. Several containers, probably holding some kind of food, were still sealed tight and impossibly effective at insulating its contents. It was crazy to think that the food inside might still be hot after who knows how long.
Next to the containers was a bracelet. Possibly normal, possibly enchanted or integrated with technology they couldn’t hope to understand. There was also a bottle of some bright blue liquid – probably for drinking, but there was no way to be sure until Perdue tested it. And then there was the picture, showing a strikingly human couple, holding each other underneath a gorgeous alien sky. It reminded him of memorabilia people would sometimes keep in their wallets, though why humans were there was a mystery.
The last object the disc spat out was a thin, transparent sheet. Coincidentally, it was about the same size as a smartphone. If he had to guess, it probably had the same function as one, too.
“Incredible,” Dr. Anderson gawked at the items. “The disc must be the Gatebuilders’ version of a wallet, somehow using dimensional storage technology!”
“Akin to the Holding Bags,” Kelmithus noticed. He peered into his own Holding Bag, his expression indicating that he was connecting the dots. “Fascinating!”
Dr. Anderson then inspected the image, his face reflecting the same confusion Henry felt when he first saw it. While they continued to sort through the items, Henry explored the sheet further. The moment he tapped the screen, a holographic interface sprung into existence above it.
What he had initially thought was a simple hologram was something far more advanced, almost indistinguishable from reality itself. Almost instantly, they were surrounded by mountains and valleys, details springing up to form a realistic, three-dimensional map.
It was like a pocket holodeck. The only anchors the projection had were the various icons and pockets of text floating around – and the fact that the hologram was transparent enough for him to see his surroundings and his teammates.
Sera seemed to be the most shocked out of all of them. He couldn’t blame her. The sight was surprising enough for himself, who was even familiar with the concept through sci-fi; how much more alien would it seem to someone from – effectively – the past?
“I’ve not beheld such a spell… ever!” she exclaimed softly, pausing to gather her thoughts. “Hold on…” she continued, pointing to the distant peaks. “Why, yon mountain range! Does it not strike you as familiar?”
“Huh?” Ron squinted at it. “Does it?”
“No, yeah, it does!” Isaac said. “Shit, uh, is that the Ovinne Mountain Range?”
Henry brought up the file for the Ovinne Mountain Range on his visor, comparing it to the hologram. “Huh, yeah, it is. What’s a map of that doing in here, though?”
Dr. Anderson raised his hands in the air and spread them apart, mimicking a zoom. Lucky for them, the alien tech seemed to understand what they were going for. Now up close and in full detail, the Ovinne Mountain Range dominated the room. Somewhere in the mountains, an icon that looked like a pair of glasses sat right on top of a Gatebuilder tower, barely poking out of the mountainside.
Ryan crossed his arms as he scrutinized the hologram. “Is this what, Find My iPhone?”
“Hmm… rather likely,” Dr. Anderson agreed. “This device must be some sort of Locator.”
“Locator, huh?” Having this clue was an incredible breakthrough, but he noticed something else. “And right where the Ovinne Mountain Campaign’s supposedly taking place, at that.”
“Indeed, that you mention it, such alignment is surely noteworthy,” Kelmithus remarked. His voice took on a more excited note, “Be it fate, perhaps?”
Henry smirked. “Hah, you’re sounding a bit like Sera, now. Well, looks like fate’s telling us where to go next. Let’s pack this up and head back.”
They carefully stowed the various artifacts in their holding bags, Henry holding on to the Locator. They made their way back to the locker room where they first entered, everyone excited for the next step in their mission.
Henry stepped through the airlock first, emerging on the other side. As he did so, a faint sound caught his attention. It was distant, muffled, but definitely not a sound that belonged to this facility. He wanted to take off the envirosuit, but it seemed that had to wait.
Ron came through the airlock after him. “Bro, you think –”
Henry held up a hand, stopping him short. He raised his weapon, picking up on the ‘something’s not right’ vibe.
Activating his infrared vision and using the laser mounted on his M7, Henry searched for signs of thermal distortions, just like he’d done back at Duke Vancor’s mansion. Ron did the same. As the rest of the team emerged from the airlock, they quickly caught on to the situation. Without a word, they joined them in securing the room.
After clearing the locker room, Henry signaled to move on to the lab next door. It was just as empty as the locker room, but now the sounds were more audible, definitely coming from the hallway just outside. Instructing his team to hold still, he crept toward the doorway to investigate.
He peeked around the corner, and felt his stomach drop. There, in the main hallway, was a group of soldiers. They were decked out in distinctive black armor and cloaks. They had no identifiable markings or insignia on their armor, but it was obvious – these were Nobians.
Henry pulled back, returning to his team. “Contact outside. At least a dozen Nobians securing the hallway.”
Ron’s expression grew serious. “Shit. Any idea on their entry point?”
Henry positioned himself behind a desk, aiming his weapon at the doorway. “Probably the same way we came in.”
“Main corridor’s the only play, huh?” Ryan said.
The main hallway only had one line of sight, and it just happened to be the only way out. Well, the only one they could reasonably access. The facility probably had other exits or fancy teleporters, but they’d already scoured the area for the former and wouldn’t be able to figure out the latter.
“Dozen hostiles doesn’t seem like a lot,” Isaac pointed out, taking out another Black Hornet from his bag. “We’re still good on ammo, too.”
Ron shook his head. “Dozen? Yeah, a dozen that we can see.”
“Owens is right,” Henry agreed. “We can’t confirm their numbers outright. If I had to guess, it would probably be at least fifty. Manageable, but I’d prefer that to be our last resort.”
“How might we fare with a disturbance?” Sera offered.
Kelmithus gripped his staff. “I might conjure an echo of noise distant hence. It shan’t last, but it can afford us enough time for our escape.”
Kelmithus’ plan seemed like it could work, but only if the Nobians didn’t know they were here. “No,” Henry disagreed. “They’ve seen our MRAPs outside. We’d get surrounded.”
“How about negotiation?” Dr. Anderson suggested, a hopeful note in his voice.
“Negotiation? With the Nobians?” Kelmithus questioned.
They all knew what the Nobians were like. It really did come off as a ridiculous idea, but what if Dr. Anderson was right? The archaeologist defended himself, “I know, I know. However, we have yet to confirm their hostility, and it would not serve us well to initiate hostilities with the Nobians.”
Taking in the silence as contemplation, he continued, “If talks break down, we hold our ground here. It’s not ideal, but we’ll control the engagement area and prevent them from flanking us.”
Henry reviewed the situation again. 12 hostiles, but they should expect the worse, so at least 50 hostiles plus failed negotiations. Holding the only way out, they were likely spread out between the hallway, the cave system, and possibly even the forest outside. Dr. Anderson’s plan was solid, but he had a few minor qualms. In particular, holding the line meant possibly exhausting themselves in a battle of attrition.
“Alright. We’ll open with negotiations. I’m skeptical, but it's worth a shot. Should that fail, we can’t engage in a drawn-out conflict. We’ll disrupt their positions and quickly move to the cave outside.”
“Smoke grenades and flashbangs,” Ryan muttered.
“Affirmative,” Henry said, nodding in agreement. “If we can’t see them, we’ll level the playing field so they can’t see us.”
“Captain,” Kelmithus quickly interjected, “Bid me aid your efforts. I’ve insight enough to create fog. I’ve learned from our encounter with the Sentinel Lindwyrm.”
“You can replicate that heavy fog?” Ron asked.
Kelmithus held up his palm, producing an opaque puff of steam to prove his point. “Indeed so, Lieutenant. Adequately do these envirosuits shield us, that I might harness more extreme temperatures for more effective casting.”
Henry was impressed with how quickly the archmage grasped such a concept. “Good. Yen, get that drone into the cave. We’ll hold for updates.”
Yen nodded, carrying out Henry’s order silently. The drone’s feed directly streamed to their HUDs, and after a few minutes, Isaac looked up. “Done.”
Henry analyzed the data. They had visual confirmation of a dozen Nobians inside the facility itself and a staggering forty outside, both in the cave and around the cave entrance. It was an assumption, but there probably weren’t many cloaked soldiers past the hallway. He sighed; the worst-case scenario would have them facing a hundred men in total.
It was a challenge, but the drone’s intel granted them a critical tactical advantage. He analyzed his minimap, selecting and sharing a route with minimal enemy contact. “After clearing the facility’s entrance, we’ll proceed along the designated path. Upon exit, I’ll deploy a flare to signal our movement to the MRAPs for extraction. We will then rendezvous with Zulu-9 and coordinate with air support before re-engaging to secure the site.”
His team nodded, fully on board with the plan. He took a deep breath to steel himself before checking his watch – 16:24. “Alright, time to show ourselves.”
Letting his M7 sling over his chest, Henry prepared two flash grenades – one in each hand – before stepping out. With his team in tow, he moved to the center of the hallway, catching the attention of one of the Nobian patrols.
“Attention, Nobian forces! We request parley. I am Captain Donnager of Alpha Team, Tier 6 Adventurer. We are on an official quest sanctioned by the Adventurer’s Guild. We have no intention of hostilities and seek to discuss our presence and objectives to ensure mutual understanding.”
As Henry’s words echoed through the hallway, the Nobian soldiers snapped into action. He heard the sounds of bowstring being drawn taut and the rasp of metal as swords cleared their scabbards. His hands tightened around the flash grenades.
He kept his gaze steady, projecting a sense of calm; of confidence – enough to convince the Nobians that even outnumbered, he and his team were still no match for them. More soldiers joined the patrol, until all twelve of the previously identified Nobians were upon them. They kept their distance, but Henry could feel the tension boiling.
Just as the standoff seemed to reach a critical point, the air in front of them seemed to fold outward from itself, like watching the effects of gravitational lensing on light. A figure coalesced from the distortion – so this is what invisibility magic looked like.
The man was broad-shouldered and tall, seeing eye-to-eye with him, even despite the extra inches in height the envirosuit gave. As the last wisps of the cloaking magic faded away, Henry found himself staring into a pair of piercing gray eyes that seemed to bore into his very soul.
The newcomer had an angular face and was clad in black armor with a different sheen than the black armor of his comrades. Silver trimmings and an insignia emblazoned on his chestplate – a dagger through a swirl of mist – differentiated his status. A cloak of the same dark hue billowed behind him as he walked forward and drew his sword.
Keeping his sword to the side, he stopped a respectable ten meters away from Henry. “I am Carvus Alnect Virelius, Umber Vicearch of the Order of the Shadow.” He then pointed his sword at Henry, declaring, “Of desecrating sovereign Nobian territory, you stand accused.”
As Carvus spoke, more soldiers materialized alongside him, shimmering into existence as they dropped their cloaking spells. Henry had expected this to happen, but seeing it play out still sent a chill down his spine. How many more were still lying in wait?
The Vicearch kept his weapon on Henry, eyes narrowing. “Commander unto commander, I offer a choice: cede your Holding Bags, that secure passage may be granted unto you. Refuse, and you shall be declared as spies and enemies of the Nobian Empire, your lives forfeit to swift execution.”
READ 2 WEEKS AHEAD: Season Finale Chapter 17 is now available for Tier 2 Manifest Fantasy Patrons and higher!
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Next

This story starts with me being unemployed and having about $6-7,000 in savings while living with my parents, to getting employed, earning more than I ever had before, and yet being almost never so broke. Him requesting money is done through SMS unless otherwise stated. I don't think I'll be putting a TLDR in, it's sort of a lot regardless.
Why am I telling you this story? There's a strange phenomenon that concealing guilt or shame, or something, isn't good for you. That isn't necessarily what I'm feeling, I am only trying to move on as expediently as I can think of ways to do so. Rather than have my inner circle in the know, as I have had before, I have decided to post into the void.
*Not every transaction is detailed, some are recurring with the most noteworthy ones being bolded in chapter form. There are 82 transactions and this is sort of a long story, so I cut some fluff out by excluding a lot of them. *Note, for all the amounts borrowed and offered to pay back eventually, I repeatedly told them not to worry about it and that I didn't consider them my debtors, this is true to the end of the story, and I will not be seeking financial remuneration. After 4 months of working with nothing to show for it I am simply going to just enjoy knowing that I now get to keep the money I make.
The beginning:
It all started with picking up a tall young man walking by the side of the road in QLD (where I live). The man had been walking for hours in broad daylight and was all sweaty, trying to get to the nearest large rural town some 40 minutes away from where I live, which is also where I was going. We do the usual thing and try to make small talk to break the ice, sharing some personal information like if either of us is studying or working our age difference (which isn't that much, me being slightly older). he told me he was walking to see a mate in town about his car, if his friend had repaired it yet. Because he wasn't sure whether it would be fixed, we made an arrangement that I would also pick him up on my way out of town back home.
So, I do, and we do more small talk to the point of having an actual conversation, he also tells me he has a 2-year-old daughter. This is a significant detail because it is what drives a lot of the sympathy I had for his situation. There is also one thing about that conversation that stands out to me, and that was the impression that this guy was not very good with money because he said he frequently wants to buy something and then wants something else so he sells the first thing he bought to pay for the second, sort of like he couldn't help it or something. I couldn't relate. On the way home together I point out where my place was and drove past to drop him off at his. It was at this point or when I dropped him off in town that I gave him my phone number and said to text me if he needed a ride sometime.
Some days later he texts me asking me to lend him $50 for fuel because his place has no power (I would later learn that his property is not hooked up to the electrical grid and his family uses a generator for power). He wanted me to send it to his PayID number, which is something I had never used before. The next day he and his missus want a ride into town and back to check out a bus(?), he also wanted to borrow $100 which he said he would pay back in a couple of weeks. Before I left town, I got a call from a place I had sent my resume in to and they offered to start me on their employment process, to which I agreed. Yay! They stay in town overnight and made it to a pub, he called me later asking for something like $180+ for drinks and asked me to pick them up the next day, thanked me for funding their (apparently very fun) night out and informed me that the bus is very nice and will be getting delivered to their property in a few days (neither of them had the appropriate license to drive the bus, his father did except he did not come with us and I never met the man). He also asks for $200 to pay off a debt to his brother-in-law, would also pay that back to me as $300 in two weeks.
The next day, near dusk, he asks me for a lift into town to do some grocery shopping at a servo. I show up at his place and his mother wants to tag along, and she has an empty jerry can for fuel to use in the generator. So away we went, for a 90+ minute drive for the third day in a row, except near dark this time. I was beginning to get a little tired of the lack of forward thinking (why didn't you go shopping before I had to pick you up from town yesterday?), but there is so much more to come... I also gave him another $300 that night for some reason and $50 the next day to renew his Spotify subscription.
Two days later he asks me how much I'm actually willing to lend him, I said $500 but pleaded that he has to make it last a while, he agreed. He also informed me that he would now have to pay for the transportation of the bus to the property, and two days later told me that he was $300 short ($800) total to bring it 80kms. That's borrowing nearly $1,000 in two days, he also said this would be the last time he'd borrow.
It's at this point that he asks me what total he owes me, I was getting back to work at the time and told him to check his bank transactions, but I definitely took this as a sign of goodwill that he was keeping track to reimburse me even though I was telling him that he owes me nothing.
The worker's compensation claim:
A couple of days later he asks me for $170 to take his missus out for the night, winds up at the Gold Coast needing $500 for accommodation because he "didn't think things through". Good news is that his missus' car is now registered so I won't have to give them rides anymore, and more good news is that he's getting worker's comp in two weeks to the tune of $3,000 for his hand getting crushed on his last job (he stated this had left him unable to bend 2 or more fingers), he lastly states this money could pay back the $1,650 he owes me (his calculation). Next day $200 for fuel home, then $500, and he asks me to deny him any further transfer. He sends me a picture of the bus, a 1979 Albion Viking. I couldn't find the picture he sent me on Google, so I guess there really was a bus and I really did pay for the pricey transportation of a 55-year-old vehicle that had depreciated to nothing. He said he would send pics when he cleans up the inside, but they never came.
The very next day, he claims my very final $500 transfer did not go through (this may have actually been the case because I transferred the money between accounts for a faster transfer and then to him in less than a minute, so I suppose I just did it too fast or he was lying, but it was definitely gone from the account), to which I said give it a few days. Every day for the next 3 days he would tell me it still hasn't come through.
The nephew:
On day 4 of the final transfer, he stopped telling me it hadn't come through, however he stated that his missus had a nephew (14-15) who was going through some things and was about to be kicked out of his home, needed $200 for fuel to pick him up and bring him back to their place. Okay, well if I can prevent a minor (14-15) from being on the streets by lending a little more, so be it. I went over to physically hand him the money for fuel and he informed me in more detail what was going on, and it sounded believable. A couple days later and he's asking $150 for fuel to return the nephew to his parents, and his missus is requesting $200-$300 for accommodation to stay for a few days to resolve the situation. They stay a few more days down there for a total of about $1,410, spent on food, rent, and trying to calm the boy down.
He also got an update regarding his worker's comp, said it'd be payed out within 6 weeks for approximately $10k, then he asked me for a loan of $1,000 with an interest rate of 40% so I'd get $1,400 back. I, at this point, questioned why in the world would he need a loan of $1,000 after all I'd given him, and his response is... "car" - I asked him to elaborate further and he said there was a car he could buy down there for himself at that price. I informed him that money was actually getting very tight for me despite working now. He didn't get the car. I was also thinking that I would only have to go without having money while still working just until he got his worker's comp, my hope was that I could save and be content knowing his family would be looked after for a while.
I eventually called the bank to ask them if that final* $500 transfer had actually gone through on their end and they said it had, but to trace the transaction would incur a fee of $20, now knowing this and not really wanting to pay it I decided I would triple check if, after all these days, he had gotten that final* transaction: "Yeah, just came through today bro"
Considering this disregard for my time and neglecting to keep me updated on things to be just a quirk of my new friend, not wanting to claim he had been lying, I pressed on in good faith that this could just be water under the bridge.
His missus contacts me and says she needs $290 because she found accommodation for her nephew, and that he had forgot to pack anything including food. Another $100. Then fuel back while the nephew stays at this new place for a week. $70. I had concerns with leaving a minor renting alone so far away and his schooling, but they were met with it was "just for a week" until they could find some place to put him closer to them, their new primary caregivers, that apparently could not be at their house. I was, at this time, under the impression that the nephew was living alone, yet it would later be revealed that he was not.
The tyres:
3 days later after setting the nephew up somewhere close enough to his school, the missus went to visit him and got two tyres slashed, $190 to replace. She goes to the tyre place and is told that all of the tyres need to be replaced otherwise it is not legal, so it's actually $390 for all 4 (I was skeptical about this and was on a work break at the time, still have not looked into the validity of the claim). Some more time passes and general purpose transfers take place. I am informed that the nephew has sorted out an Aus Study payment from Centrelink, but that I would need to transfer $200 for the nephew's necessities until it's actually worked out, and I would no longer need to pay his rent. Cool. At this point in time, I was working but not keeping what I made. I paid board at home, but the rest minus my fuel between work and home is what I refer to as the 'x tax' ('x' being a stand-in for the name of the person who scammed me). The requests would mostly happen around the day I got paid, with a believable frequent expense of fuel for the generator being at least $160 a week, not to mention fuel for their car and the infrequent requests from his mother to "pay back her friends"
Sometime later, the missus got another flat tyre from driving over a piece of metal on the highway, $75 to replace and they managed to get towed to the tyre place (I did inform them that they would have a spare tyre in the back of the car, but they claimed it had already been used "the other day when we had another one slashed"). They got another spare but used that as well.
The funeral:
I get a text at work from the man saying that his grandfather was in palliative care with only one or two weeks left, and that his cousin was requesting he and his mother go down to see him, so he asks me if I can help. I decided I should be setting a weekly limit or something so this new friend doesn't drain my bank account each pay day, so I gave him $100 and let him know that it's a hard limit. 4 days later, he tells me that his grandfather had passed 2 days prior, needed $100 to get down to his funeral. I could only give him $85 and told him I would be unable to fund his return trip, to which he agreed would be fine. 2 days later, after the funeral, he tells me that he and his mother need $200+ to get home, get food & drinks on the way back and that the rest of their family would not help them and that they "have no other way back". Getting tired of the lack of forward thinking in this family's affairs, I reluctantly agreed to save them once again.
5 days later I ask him when he gets his worker's comp payout so I can begin to save up money from work knowing he and his family is taken care of for a while, he tells me "next week hopefully". This was in late March. Queue more travelling and fuel costs to now go and cremate the grandfather as his wishes were for him and his mother to be there when it happens. Now, I thought the funeral had already happened and that was the end of it, but it turns out that was just the funeral service, which is something I was not aware was a thing. Due to this misunderstanding, I was very suspicious at this point and exclaimed in a text "You already had the funeral!" while thinking "you can't bury someone twice, is this evidence you are scamming me?".
They also needed accommodation, except I was so suspicious of this man that I requested he find and tell me the name of the hotel they'll be staying at, just so I can verify that is the actual price per head. Also, his mum blew another tyre, but they happened to be right outside a tyre place... again. He claims to not be having very good luck anyway. A request is made for money to take his missus out for her Birthday. I tell him in a lengthy text I had been working for 2 months with nothing to show for it and that I am much more inclined to assist him only with essential spending like fuel or food, and he claimed to understand that, then stated he would use a bit of the money for a small cheap present anyway. The present turned out to be $200 on layby and he needed another $60 to fully acquire it. I was telling him to tone down his spending to emphasis that he needs to live at or below his own means and that he wouldn't need my help if he had just bought a much cheaper present.
It'd been about 9 weeks since he told me it would take 2 weeks for the worker's comp (which was later changed to 6 weeks) to be paid and I was wondering if he had heard back or followed up. He said he did and that they would "get back to him" about it. So, now that hope I had that this was just a temporary situation wasn't holding up so well. Despite all the money I was giving him he had bills "piling up" and one urgent one was for a storage unit where he claimed to have a shipping container's worth of stuff and the owner was threatening to throw it all out if they didn't pay his 6 weeks overdue fee. Apparently, if he had paid just most of the fee he would get to keep his stuff there, which is what happened.
There was a wedding for his brother-in-law and on the way back he asked me if I could help him buy phone data, except the amount he ended up paying wasn't an option for renewal, it was about $5-$10 off from the options available (this just fueled my suspicion even further that something just wasn't right). Thinking that a scammer wouldn't voluntarily give money back, I tested him by asking him for $40 back when I overpaid him and well, that's where it went to, that mobile plan. When they returned home from the wedding they found that their generator had not been fueled like he reminded his parents to do and so they lost all the food they had in the fridge. I questioned why his parents didn't notice the power had gone out and all of a sudden there was a second generator that was for them(?).
Their landlord had apparently stated he would be requiring $200 in rent a week early because he has bills and rates to pay. He informs me that he hasn't got a proper contract to even be on the property and could be kicked out at any moment and that he "needed to keep his landlord happy". I couldn't help him pay that much (nor did I really want to give in to his landlord's outrageous demand) so I sent him a link to QSTARS where he could learn his tenancy rights, except it was Saturday which means he wouldn't be able to call them. Then I suggested that he may be able to get a faster response over the weekend to his situation by making a Reddit account (he asked me what that was) and posting on the shitrentals sub.
A few days later he tells me he has been posting there and learning some things, meanwhile I had been intentionally avoiding the sub so as not to invade his personal privacy, however some days go by and I am suuuuper suspicious by this point I look around for some thread or comment relating to his situation in the timeframe it would have been possible for him to make one. I figured if the situation was so urgent that he would at least try to seek advice over the weekend, but I didn't see any evidence of that, he also never told me if he called the tenant's advisory and I never heard anything about his rental situation again.
6 Days from when he refreshed his mobile data, he had apparently used the 30GB limit. I was astounded at this and knew it was going to continue to be my problem if I didn't find this man a better subscription plan with his provider, so I did, for $10 more he could double his data. Only, I told him that he could have the 6-month plan for more money if he wasn't going to use so much data and because it would have been cheaper for me in the long run too, he agreed. I also thought that if he were really scamming me he would choose the option that makes me transfer more money, which is what happened. I guess that's test #2.
The ending:
Which brings me to today. The nephew was brought back into the story because he had apparently been kicked out of his mates place he was staying at(?) and they needed fuel to go and get him. Kicked out of 2 places? Okay. So I do the transfer and I decided that the only way I could subtly (that is, without compromising friendship or alerting this man that I don't trust him) find out the truth is to visit him face-to-face much further up his property. I wanted to confirm if A: the nephew was real or not B: if there was really a bus and C: if there was a second generator. The best way to do this, I thought, was to just show up and not ask if I could come over because if he was lying about the nephew's existence he would probably say a lot of things to make sure I'd not be able to visit him while the nephew is there. I bring a 6-pack to his gate and realise that he isn't home. Okay. I go home but there's a request in my phone for money for school uniforms and supplies for the nephew to transfer to a local school that I'm intentionally ignoring.
Queue the next day and I get prepared to go again, but I get a text saying that they're out again in town, still waiting for me to transfer money for these school supplies. I had done a bit of research and found that it was either unlikely or impossible for a student to transfer schools within one or two days, or to start in the middle of a term, so I felt pretty confident that this was a situation that didn't need addressing urgently. Also, remember when the nephew sorted something with Centrelink to get Aus Study payments, the one where I no longer had to pay some or all of his rent? Well, that was no longer the case. now he is too young to get them, casually forgotten about maybe? Oh yeah, and he had to start school that day. Anyway, I tell the man that it may be possible to get a uniform from the school's uniform storeroom as that is an option for families with financial difficulty, he says that due to Covid they are out of them and that they tried that already...
Right, so now I ask him how the nephew got kicked out (not important), I just wanted to know if it was planned or sudden, if there was enough time to start the process of transferring from his current school to the local one in town. There wasn't! SO, I called him out, told him what he was saying wasn't possible and that his story sounded like a scheme to get money out of me. I asked him for an easy proof, simply take a picture of yourself with the nephew in the car to prove he's real. He denied trying to scam me and said the nephew and the missus are in the school trying to resolve the situation and that he couldn't take the picture. Instead, he sent me a different picture on Facebook of him and his mates being pulled over for something by the police(?) which he claimed just happened before. I could barely identify anyone in that photo, but it looked like he was the one driving the car(?). I said that I've given him too many passes and the benefit of the doubt, but not this time and that whenever he wants to provide a picture with his nephew, like when he simply comes out of the school(?), to send it my way. Somewhat quickly they got out of the school and the excuse for not taking a picture became "We are driving in the car now"
He says that the picture before is the only one he's got, I said take another when you can, then he goes on about this being the last time he needs fuel money and to do it and then he'll send the picture. I told him no transfer would be happening and I would be blocking his number in a few hours if he doesn't do it (I really do like to give people the benefit of the doubt, it's almost certainly what has led to this going on for so long). He sends me another picture on Facebook except this time it's him upfront (passenger side), his missus behind him, and a child in the backseat.
This photo looked a lot more like what I was asking for, except neither him nor his missus looked the slightest bit worried about losing my charity and the child in the back didn't look 14-15 like the nephew is supposed to be aged. Rejecting this photo for these reasons and stating it was an old photo he had, he kept asking for fuel money just so he would be able to get home and so I told him that if he asks again, I would be blocking his number. I also told him his lack of forward thinking does not constitute an emergency for me and that there are at least 4 adults in his household and surely someone has thought that if they left to go to town, that they would be able to return home. He said that if I didn't provide the fuel money, they would be stuck. I said if his mum (the driver) had to pull over anyway, it would be a good time to take that picture (which I changed to him standing outside the car with his nephew).
He said providing another photo wouldn't do any good as he claims the two he sent were proof enough... the first one really isn't related to the second, it's strange he thought that would constitute the proof I was requesting, really it just raises further questions for me... and that's about when I block his number (after previously blocking him on Facebook).

Prev/On the Design of Human Ships/
"Just wait, how lon…" Zantol started to say as a firm click was heard as Pir-4 pressed the button. In the following moment the entire ship shuddered as all power was lost. Moments later a deep drone could be felt.
"That shouldn't have taken so long to start," Dave remarked as all the screens and consoles lit back up, as the drone to fade away. Looking around dozens of new indicator lights and alarms were screaming across the cockpit, "Well that might be it, uhh…" Dave looked to Zanthol who was shocked at what just happened, and Pir-4 now floating stilly above the radio consul, "Zanthol please tell me that this is normal and that Pir is alright"
Zanthol taking moments to understand what happened, what all the new lights are for, and moments wonder what just happened.
“Wha…, what was that."
"Well, uh, that, was the distress call," Pausing for a moment to point at Pir-4 and to mute the alarms, "will he be ok?"
"Probably, but it is impossible to know without looking in his head"
"Why aren't you concerned? I mean, he could have just died."
"Why would I, it's just a machine, and all the data can be recovered."
Taking a deep breath, Dave considered the words that he just heard, "Zanthol? How do you classify a being as sentient?"
"We have a system, how do you classify things as sentient? If I know what you would use, then it would be easier for me to explain."
"I don't necessarily see why this is important, but the way that we had done this is though test, like the Turing test, have a judge have a conversation with a known sentient being and the one being tested. Another is to test the being's creativity, or even just comparing how close to the human brain the being's brain is."
"Those are all good way to determine if a being is sentient, but the reason that Pir was created was to get one step closer to win a galactic history changing prize, and I shouldn't tell you this, but humanity will find out regardless. This prize is from an automated system from nearly a million years ago, it was to autonomously scout and lightly terraform planets for life as it knows, and through, probably a problem with the replication program, it became sapient and though many more years it came to where it is now. Just barely sentient, enough for it to want to be a part of the community, and so the machine tried, until it came to the conclusion that it wasn't sentient enough to fit in," Sighing Zanthol took a deep breath and pointed to Pir-4, "It stopped sharing the planets it has visited, demanding that we make it fully sentient, to the point of the average sentient being, like you and me. To do so it made a prize, bring it a artificial being of synthetic mind that it deems as sentient. it has been almost 43,323 years by your calendar since the start of the competition."
"So you don't consider Pir a sentient being because a machine doesn't. That doesn't make sense, just because it doesn't shouldn't mean that you don't. Humanity has had less time free to think of what makes you, you. Because I think and therefore I am, should suffice for treating other being as sentient…"
Dave was cut off by the radio cracking back to life, "YOU, we do░▓░k▒w what yo░▒id bu░ we will have your he▒▓!" Just as abruptly it started it cut back out.
"They sound mad, as much as I would like to continue to argue, there are more concerning matters at the moment," Dave said as he took hold of the control sticks, with a lurch the ship once again started to move, "Since I don't like the silence I'll explain some things to you, this left stick moves the ship in x,y,z movement, or front, back, up, down, left, and right. The right stick adjusts the rotation," Dave gives both of the sticks a wiggle, causing the whole ship to shudder.
Zanthol, pulled Pir-4's helmet off, he started to check what happened to Pir-4. Looking to Dave again he sees him reach out slips on large gloves over his atmo-suit's gloves, once these are properly around his already gloved hands they constrict around them to now sit tightly around his hands. Then with a simple his the compartment filled with a thin fog, curiously Zanthol asked, "Is something wrong, and what's with the fog?"
"Take a look out the view screen, were getting close to your ship, but its getting hard to tell the distance without looking at the readout. So to get around that this ship uses a suite of holograms that are constructed by little low power lasers, and theses holograms use the cameras and computers to make a three dimensional representation of the environment."
"So why the haze?"
"It's so the lasers can be seen." as Dave talked, holograms of Zanthol's ship the Prospector's Pick, Helum station, and the various pirate vessels, leaving all that can't be seen by the cameras are blank. Reaching out with his gloved hands Dave grabbed the holograms of the Prospector's Pick and Zanthol's ship, strangely his hands didn't just pass through the holograms. Already anticipating the coming question Dave said, "The gloves that I just put on have a pneumatic force feed back system, strong enough to resist my movements, but not so much it can hurt me. If I move my hand though any of them it will respond as if it were an object floating in space that I just smacked. The system will interpret how the I move the holograms and do its best to replicate it in real life," Dave said, as he pushed the Prospector's Pick closer to Zanthol's ship. Zanthol could feel the ship accelerate toward his ship, "So, this makes it more intuitive for a human to operate this ship."
"Ok, so what are you doing now, are you going to get us out of here?"
"Well you said that, one all of Pir's spare parts are on your ship and that you have very classified things on it. Wouldn't it be a good idea to get it all before running?"
*Beep*
Looking at the consul a gauge was flashing.
"What's that?"
"That would be a temperate gauge, and uh it says that the hull is heating up. That shouldn't be happening,"
Thinking back Zanthol remembered how the pirates breached the air-lock realized what was causing the heating, "Dave, I think it maybe the pirates, to cut open the station like that," he points at the air-lock, "to cut through it as quickly as they did, they would have to have a weapons grade laser. We probably have only a minute before it starts cutting through the hull if you can keep them from focusing on the same spot."
"Ok, that shouldn't be too hard to mitigate," with a simple twist of the wrist Dave put the ship into a gentle spin, "That should do for now. Where is a good spot for a tow cable to be put on your ship?"
"I can already feel the rising temperature rising, and it's only getting faster. If you can't do anything about it then we're probably dead."
The gauge, now entering the red, "I hear you, and I'll handle this," Dave replied turning his ship to face the pirates, "Do you know why Tungsten Carbide is such a good marital for machine tools?"
Starting to send the ship into the pirates, "It's because it harder then almost all other mettles, and do you know where the largest single piece of Tungsten Carbide is? Well, its on this ship, initially meant to skewer asteroids, but we'll see how good it is at skewering ships, and it better be, or else," sighing, Dave continued, "We're probably dead."
"That sounds insane, but probably the only thing that we can do, and even then, there are still three other in the fleet."
Suddenly, static filed the coms gradually coming clearer until a human voice could be heard, "Prospector's Pick, hold tight, help is on the way, this is the Barnard's star Battle group B3, ETA 3 minutes. just hold tight, help is on the way."
By this moment Dave's ship was careening toward the pirates, the temperature sky rocketing. The ship struggling to cool it self with the radiators turning a dull red with the heat their absorbing, struggling to dissipate the building heat.
With a, shearing, screeching, screaming, sound the spike tore into the pirate ship.
"Woooooooooooooowoh!! HELL YEAH! That will never get old no mater what the target is." Dave said with a brimming smile. "Now its getting hot in here, so I'll also show you how we cool our ships in emergencies." pressing a combination of buttons on the the consul, a hiss of cool air filled the cockpit. The hologram also showed the radiators unlatch and start floating away from the ship.
"Dave why are you jettisoning the radiators, they're needed to cool the ship."
"Yes, but that's part of the design that someone else made, and was much smarter then I am. Its going to be replaced with spares."
One of the rows of boxes moved to the place that the radiators once were, and proceeded to unfold and turn into new radiators, with this the temperature gauge visibly and quickly dropped back down to it's regular position, and the new radiators already starting to show their thermal saturation. Then the screens flashed a notification…
Incoming warp detected.
~
This started to become more disconnected and scattered toward the end, but I was just having a hard time finding a way to connect it all. I also wanted to make each chapter a bit longer, so that's why this took so long, and in all fairness I don't think I'll be writing them to be so long its just not what I'm good with.
It has almost been half a year since I randomly thought of the idea for this at a new years party, anyways here's a fun fact, I am horrible at coming up with names, so to mitigate this I have turned to use the Periotic table and names of chemicals (and/or overly common names). The most obvious of them are Dave's last name Coper most clearly a slight mis spelling of Copper, Helum Station is just a variation of Helium, (spoiler regarding Pir-4)and Pir is a mis spelled abbreviation of Periotic and 4 corresponds to Beryllium the main component in his computers and meant to reference how hard for the researchers to make a body compatible with a inorganic brain, and to my knowledge Beryllium is wildly deadly and destructive to carbon based organic chemistry.

This is long I’m sorry! I really need guidance
I have been with my Q for 3 years and friends for 7. When I met him he was a functioning alcoholic. I helped him to get sober and every 6 months he relapses and sometimes he gets better after a day and sometimes it lasts weeks or months. This last time he’s been really bad and he drank for 3 months straight hard liquor bottles every day and chased it with more alcohol. He has never gotten any professional help when he gets sober it’s just him detoxing at home and stopping. He tried AA but didn’t like it and refuses to go. Anyway, after this last relapse things got really bad at home. He gets very disrespectful and he quit his job. I just helped him get a car because he had none for about ten years because of multiple DUI. He finally got one back and got his license cleared and didn’t even last seven days before he was drinking and driving… also I put the car in my insurance for him to save money. So of course I came to the location he was at and took the keys out of the running car. I towed it home and drove him home. That caused him to resent me and spiral further and call me all kinds of names. We live in a studio apartment so we have no space from each other and it got to be really bad so I kicked him out. He has only gotten worse since I kicked him out because he’s at his parents house his siblings they all drink over there. Throughout this time period of 3 months I have begged him to get help and talk to me or someone I never wanted it to come to this and he refuses and says he’s not ready. I told him my apartment is not a bar or a halfway house and he has to leave.. on day 3 I found him drooling on himself on a park bench I thought he was dead. It took so long of me trying and crying and begging to get to this point and I finally broke up with him and said if you don’t want help I don’t want to be in your life I can’t stand by and watch the man I love kill himself anymore. He blames me for everything and screams at me constantly when he is drinking and hides it all over the place. When he is sober he is so apologetic and loving but by the night he’s drunk again.. After being kicked out his sister called me asking me for his insurance information because he had to be sedated by police for fighting his brother when they were both wasted. They took him overnight to the ER for monitoring. The next day he calls me saying he went in for a detox and they were wrestling and it wasn’t really fighting.. He still wasn’t wanting any help so I blocked him. I said I can’t do this any longer. It’s been about 3 days of no contact and his mother calls me and said please can you ask him to go to rehab. So I felt bad and I called him again and broke my no contact and I even offered to take him and he actually accepted. So this morning I took him and he was truly saying the right things he even cried saying he finally is ready and needs help. I sat in the ER for 7 hours with him waiting for him to get up to the detox. He is committed to doing a detox, 28 day program and then counseling after. My worries are that if he leaves there and goes to his parents home he will be back in the same place that triggers him with his siblings. I’m also worried to bring him back home and he starts all over but I want him back I just don’t want to keep living in this vicious cycle for the rest of my life I would rather cut ties now while I already am heartbroken and miserable rather than keep hurting over and over. My question is do I give him another shot? I do love him with all my heart and when he is sober I would marry him in a heartbeat but when he is drinking I don’t love or even like that person. I tell him imagine if we had a baby like I try and picture my future and it is so blurry. I am 31 and don’t want to keep down this path I just want to know if there is hope please

MAT246 (Concepts in Abstract Mathematics) is a proof-based course in number and set theory.
TLDR: The course is irrationally structured and poorly taught. Make extensive use of the textbook and chatGPT as they are better at explaining the material than the prof.
This is a very long review but I think it will prove useful to future students of this course.
Structure:
When I took the course, both sections followed the same syllabus, which was set out by Soheil. The structure of the course was terrible and bizarre. The course is out of 108% meaning it has 8% bonus marks, but according to the syllabus itself, more can be arbitrarily added without notice, at the prof’s whim. For example, after the low scores of the first test, a quiz was administered during the last twenty minutes of a tutorial (this quiz was never mentioned in the syllabus) and the quiz was counted as a bonus, with a 10% weight to the final test mark. Such a boon was not given after the second test. There is also an 800 word essay due at the end of the course worth 4%. It is does not have a rubric and can receive bonus marks for “thoughtful responses”. As the course progressed, weekly assignments had increasingly more bonus marks. In the problem sets, some questions were not worth any marks while others were bonus, and it was not known what questions counted for what prior to receiving the set back. In addition to bonuses, this course is known for curbing grades. These two features are mentioned in some reviews as positives: they in fact should be viewed as a tacit admission of the prof’s inability to create an objective, upfront grading scheme, where marks are not adjusted or added according to class performance, caprice or whatever else.
Some material was taught without ensuring the necessary background was covered or the material was outright irrelevant. Hilbert's hotel problem was brought up before discussing sets, the prof, after having this pointed out to him, replied that anyone lacking in knowledge of set notation or concepts of set infinite (which he would later teach any way and which had no relation to the concurrent material, zero had not yet be defined) should take their complains to their previous calculus prof. And in another strange turn, while he said Hilbert's hotel will be in tests or problem sets, it never was. Thus, it was mentioned, said that it would be tested on, but never covered nor tested. Soheil introduced puzzles, unrelated to the material, to train logical thinking. Can doing problems related to the course not do the same and improve your mark at the same time? His planning was utterly unintegrated.
He also tends to be evasive to questions. A student asked if RSA protocol would be on the test four or so days before the test. He responded the night before, casually mentioning he forgot to include it in the study package. At one point, many students complained on piazza (first time I have witnessed such a thing) on the difficultly of the course and lack of aid. The prof's response was nil.
Lectures:
In two words: confusing and useless. Soheil constantly made analogies with math concepts to real world things which were unnecessary and convoluted (he once compared the expansion of the rationales with field extensions to the fact that, after 9/11 it was discovered that the area underneath was once on water, thus the land was “expanded”). Mostly, the lectures consisted of him reading from the textbook, adding some contorted explanation or analogy. He was often ungrammatical and it was difficult to understand what exactly he meant by what he said. Also, he was sometimes passive aggressive in his Piazza responses.
After each lecture there is a quiz. For me, this was terribly inopportune as I had to do it at 8pm while rushing to catch the train. Similarly, other students had to commute, possibly without wifi. I found the timing of these quizzes to be very inconsiderate toward the students.
Soheil stated that the content in the earlier chapters will not follow that of the textbook and that the style of proofs demanded in this course are to be formal whereas the ones in the book are informal. Given this, I at first, avoided using the book which was a grave mistake as it is like the Rosetta stone compared to the lectures which are like Sumerian cuneiform.
And I feel that Soheil gave misleading advice on how to study and learn. He rarely took up problems or proofs in the lectures (and few were done in tutorials), which, as I came to learn, is a major failure give that this course is introductory and a major part of math is repeated problem solving. He emphasized rote memorization of many theorems and lemmas, saying that tests mostly require "passive knowledge" when in fact only two or three theorems were relevant and needed citing.
Advice:
With exception to the first part of the course which does not at all follow the textbook, use the latter for the rest of the course. Invest in chat GPT-4 (or whatever is the current version). It explains the concepts incomparably better than the prof and can help in understanding proofs (by giving it a screenshot/picture of the textbook). I suggest looking over the workbook slides and doing the problems. They do not explain the material well and are often ungrammatical but they will contain any material in the course which is not in the textbook. Use the time during lectures and tutorials to read the textbook and work on problems. It is a much better use of time than carefully listening to the prof. Perhaps check in time to time to make sure you are on the right drift. In learning a chapter, I suggest this approach: first taking note of all relevant definitions (this is bedrock of any future knowledge), then read through the lemmas and minor theorems (this helps in learning what a good proof consist of and they may reveal some techniques or tricks), commit to memorize and take note of a major theorem (it is much easier to establish the context of the theorem when you know how its derived than just committing it to memory) and finally, do many problems. It is impossible to over emphasis this. Your motto in mathematics must be: repetitio est mater studiorum. That is, repetition of problem solving. Rote repetition or memorization, is worth little outside of knowing the definitions and major theorems.

I wish you luck in this course. Writing proofs is an excellent way to develop logical thinking skills. This course could really be excellent if only the prof was not this awful (the worst I’ve ever had in fact).